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I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
Since no one has defended jazz yet, I will. There is signalling in jazz and perhaps moreso than the average music genre, but structurally it tends to stay inside the lines, it just has high level of potential complexity that does take legitimate skill to navigate. But listening to those complex songs with the technical improvisation can be extremely viscerally pleasurable and spiritual. You may have to get stoned. I got stoned with a young friend I made and played him Coltraine's A Love Supreme and afterward he was excitedly exclaiming "I get jazz! I get jazz!" and became a permanent fan. There's a passage about getting stoned and listening to jazz in the beginning of "Invisible Man" as well that was one of the best parts of that book.
Anyway I think progressive rock is the genre more like post modernism, which plays with structure in more experimental ways.
I took a good amount of formal music lessons as a kid and young adult. Much of the syllabus of instruction back in the 80s/90s for this was classical, marches, and jazz. Acedemic Jazz is a thing, and when its all you have experienced you have to take other people's word for it that jazz is cool, or maybe that it used to be cool? Then one day when I was 18 I got hired by a friend of my father's to take over for their recently departed drummer, mostly jazz standards and Great American Songbook stuff. Still pretty 'square', but some of these guys played in other jazz groups too, who performed at bars, who had drug and alcohol problems. Real Musicians. Thats when I learned that Jazz is a conversation. It has a huge history with a smaller present day, but the conversation has never stopped. An improvisational jazz performance, if the musicians are good enough and know about the history of the conversation, about the muscial past and present of jazz, is itself a small new addition and a reflection on that shared past. There are inside jokes, touching tributes to passed away friends, challenges and submissions, all expressed entirely through their instrument, wordlessly. There's an entire other world in there, as wide as it is deep, if you can speak the language.
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I think jazz is one of those genres meant to be experienced live, especially given that improvisation is such a core part of it. Listening to recordings doesn't have nearly the same impact.
Counterpoint: You are right, but I think you undersell the value of recordings especially on the subject of jazz.
I got to experience a decent jazz scene in the 80’s and 90’s in Montreal. Montreal has always been a jazz city and the drop in/sit in random player thing was still happening at a club called Biddles. Way better than what NY clubs had become at the time in terms of the casual feel of working musicians meeting up.
Live jazz as it exists today is art music or nostalgia. The vanguard of live avant garde music is probably well past hip hop by now but jazz it is not.
When jazz WAS in its heyday the recording of music was also approaching its pinnacle. Jazz recordings of the 50’s and 60’s were a serious and intentional endeavor, and these recordings as of 2026 ARE the legacy of jazz (since no one wrote it down for one thing).
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