KNOWING YOUR PLACE

“When you add up the radio stations, the dingy used-record stores, the $1.3 billion market for rap and the $1.9 billion spent on revivified country and western, music ranks among the largest industries ever to exist. In the midst of this fantastic investment in an all-enveloping cloud of sound, hardly anyone seems to remember that music stands fairly low on the scale of devices by which we try to understand human experience. A people that takes music as its highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory – the explanatory arts that could put to use the emotions that their music represents.” – New Statesman