From In Praise of Bad Music
Detest bad music but do not despise it. As it is played, and especially sung, much more passionately than good music, it has much more than the latter been impregnated, little by little, with man’s tears. Hold it therefore in veneration. It’s place, nonexistent in the history of art, is immense in the sentimental history of nations. The respect – I do not say love – for bad music is not only a form of what might be called the charity of good taste, or its skepticism; it is also the consciousness of the importance of music’s social role. How many tunes, worthless in the eyes of an artist, are numbered among the chosen confidants of a multitude of romantic young men and girls in love. How many “bague d’or,” how many “Ah! reste longtemps endormi,” whose pages are turned tremblingly every evening by hands justly famous, drenched with the tears of the most beautiful eyes in the world, whose melancholy and voluptuous tribute would be the envy of the purest musicians – ingenious and inspired confidants that ennoble sorrow ad exalt dreams and, in exchange for the ardent secret confided to them, give the intoxicating illusion of beauty. The people, the bourgeoisie, the army, the nobility, all of them, just as they have the same mail carriers, purveyors of afflicting sorrow or of crowning joy, have the same invisible messengers of love, the same cherished confessors. Bad musicians, certainly. Some miserable ritournelle that every well-born and well-trained ear instantly refuses to listen to receives the tribute of millions of souls, guards the secret of millions of lives for whom it has been the living inspiration, the ever ready consolation always open on the piano-rack, the dreamy charm and the ideal. Certain arpeggios, a certain “rentreee” have made the soul of many a lover vibrate with the harmonies of Paradise of the voice of the beloved herself. A collection of bad Romances worn with constant use should touch us as a cemetery touches us, or a village. What does it matter if the houses have no style, if the tombstones are hidden by inscriptions and ornaments in execrable taste? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to silence for a moment its aesthetic scorn, from this dust that flock of souls may rise holding in their beaks the still verdant dream which has given them a foretastes of the other world, and made them rejoice or weep in this one.
The above handily illustrates why I’ve never warmed to Proust, but also goes some way towards explaining why we got a second dose of the Spice Girls.
