About Wild Pop Discipline

How music is marketed and how it is taught overwhelmingly and emphatically prioritise the composed, the repeated* and the edited over the spontaneous, the intuitive and the improvised. That is not some arbitrary condition that has just evolved through circumstance. Authority has always favoured one thing over another because it suits the terms of its ruling agenda. Corporate entertainment will never promote music that undermines its economic advantage and cultural dominance; institutional education will never teach people to think for themselves, to think on their feet, to the extent that they are able to evaluate any situation instantaneously in order to determine courses of action with a sharpness of wit that enhances their autonomy.

* - ‘repeated’ here is chosen in place of ‘rehearsed’ because it’s possible to rehearse anything without necessarily repeating content. Rehearsal translates to French as répétition. That is quite telling. Could it be partly why Jazz, and especially Free Jazz, was so much more readily accepted and welcomed in France than in Britain, or the United States for that matter? I also quite like the German, Probe (proben) but I don’t know whether that has any link with the English ‘to probe’.