Heft 04 / Oktober 2015

Zusammenfassung:

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Summary:

Reflexive Sorrow. Element of Crime: In the End I Just Keep Thinking of You – This article begins with reflections on the relationship between »serious« and »light« music (I-IV). Starting from Benjamin’s text The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, the antagonism between the work as a final object and as a »rhizomatic« context is considered. This results in an inversion of the usual direction of interpretation, in that a work of »serious« music requires increased attention to phenomena of reception, while a work of »light« music demands a deeper investigation of how it is made, of its facture (V). The theme of the song Am Ende denk ich immer nur an dich [In the End I Just Keep Thinking of You] by the band Element of Crime is a sorrow that manifests itself as a loss of world. This loss is expressed less in what is described than in the consistency with which everything describes crumbles. It is precisely the simplicity of facture, the triteness of some passages, that expresses the logic of a world’s disintegration with a clarity that complexity, which must be oriented towards context, never could (VI-X). At the same time, the meaning of this sorrow is more than private. A quotation from Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind that perhaps does not transport a faith in the possibility of social change itself, but was grasped in this way by the time of its inception, decodes the sad idyll of alternative bourgeois society, which is described here as a resigned posthistory (XI-XV).

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