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Originally Posted by Cardinal Rob
Here's one for you chaps and chapesses: give me the difference between what is "experimental" and what is "avant-garde" music.
I anticipate your replies.
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Perhaps "experimental" has become the common euphemism for "avant-garde" now that postmodernist philosophy holds that there is no such thing as avant-garde, and that everything has been done before, nothing is new under the sun, and nothing's shocking, so to speak. To me, it's a bleak cop-out to hold that (according to postmodernism) that there is no longer an avant-garde. It's like saying that there will never be another visionary artist, which is poppycock.
Besides, postmodernism was already in full swing when, for one example, Sonic Youth came around in the early '80s and made actual songs out of what was previously only recognized as noise. Is their work merely a collage of other elements or is there anything "new" about Sonic Youth? I think there is plenty that is "new" with Sonic Youth, that their art is quite valid, and that they are obviously an
avant-garde group of musicians who make music largely within the rock 'n' roll idiom and have made some significant contribution to said music to push it
forward. If one prefers the term "experimental" to "avant-garde," then so be it.
wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
; these developments (reevaluation of the entire Western value system (
love,
marriage,
popular culture, shift from
industrial to
service economy)
So, in a nutshell, postmodernism also signifies the time from which everything started officially haha going to hell in a handbasket (the switch from industrial to service economy). Wiki says the term originated as a description for architecture in 1949, but didn't take hold really until the '60s; one could argue, I suppose, that postmodernism was officially ushered in during the atomic age and its absurdism has pervaded more minds throughout the space and computer ages. Of course, there are a million instances to consider, but perhaps postmodernism as we define it was ushered in when Time published their "Is God Dead?" issue on April 8, 1966.