I am of a generation bombarded by marketing and packaging. All commercial goods have been reduced to bubblegum. My poor generation came into the world upon a sharp incline at the bottom of which lay Zappa’s valley girl dungeon. Madison Avenue marionettes all, we stumble awkwardly around a treacherous landscape where winged Barbie Dolls hang about the stalactites. We are armed only with a pocket full of unearned cash.

When I’m done digging in the record store, I make a final stop before the register. I peruse the dollar section and select a disc based purely on its cover art. I feel guilty every time I do it. And I feel even guiltier when I listen to the orphans I’ve saved. The visuals never justify the din. But, as a child of a world where commerce contextualizes all significant events, and where the art of selling goods has progressed further than we care to admit, I cannot help but confront and follow the effects of imagery and presentation on the purely sonic medium of music.

I define “imagery and presentation” very broadly. To me, these concepts involve everything from press kits to Jagger struts. It seems to me, that it is very hard to separate music (especially the popular variety) from its visual, verbal, and at times physical trappings. Who cares about splitting atoms? I say we harness the power of musical fission. We could go to Neptune and back if we could listen to Charlie Parker without picturing a drug-addled, soulful genius manning the axe. We could power New York City for a hundred years if we could slice David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young from a mud-coated Life magazine pictorial essay on Woodstock. I’m sure Kim Jong Il would love to play with the destructive capabilities of a Black Sabbath record not fronted by a bat-biting Oz.

But in seriousness, would we want to perform such surgeries? Yes, the music- the sound and tonality of it- is what we love. But music without context is sterile, born in a lab. The true value in musical composition and performance is its capacity to reflect and comment upon personal and public life. And in order to present a complete, quality representation of an artist’s life, or the lives an artist witnesses around him or herself, then imagery and presentation, the visual and verbal trappings attached to sonic art, must be included in the experience.

It is not extraordinary to assume that music cannot be regarded as an art concerned purely with sound. For the brain is complex beyond our furthest imagination. Sensory associations are pieced together by the mind in a process of infinitesimal variation. Why is it that Miles Davis’ lackadaisical cadence on Sketches of Spain inspires a reaction so different to that of the urgent horns in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s ninth? And how do we separate a sensory memory bank stocked with a lifetime of input, from a unit of musical notes strung together? We have no comprehension of what our brains, synaptic butchers, can do to our music. Our associations take us so far down the rabbit hole that even if we pack a pair of headphones our criticism and experience is the furthest from objective. We can build audio systems that promote the highest level of fidelity attainable, but in the end our experience will never be pure. Big bad brain crashes the party.

So we can never achieve the perfect musical appreciation. Who cares? Music still provides us with nourishment, entertainment, stimulation, and solace. If people the world over can find faith in that which they cannot taste, smell, or hear, why can’t we believe in the thoroughly subjective musical experience?

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