Transfixion

I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with “popular music”—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start.  The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial…