Leonard Benardo interviews Marc Ribot in The Ideas Letter:
Marc Ribot has spent more than four decades moving fluidly across the boundaries that ordinarily organize musical life: between downtown experiment and popular song, between sideman and bandleader, between art as formal inquiry and art as political intervention. But what makes his work so compelling is not simply its range. Again and again, Ribot has returned to larger questions about music’s social consequences: what it means for sound to carry political force, how genre can function as both resource and constraint, and what artistic freedom looks like under the economic pressures of the contemporary music industry.
Leonard Benardo: To get things going, allow me to ask an initial broad question, and we will narrow as we go along. I wonder how you understand and grapple with the relation between music and politics. There are those who claim that music is a sphere wholly outside politics and that to introduce the political into it would unnecessarily sully the art. Others view music and politics as inextricably linked, arguing that separating the two can only be a fool’s errand. Where do you come down? Is all music political? What does music require for it to be political? Is it a question of content? Is it expressed in the sounds themselves irrespective of “content”? How to understand?
Marc Ribot: If it’s OK, I’ll respond aphoristically.
“Politics,” Wikipedia tells us, “is about making agreements between people so that they can live together in groups.”
You say that “There are those who claim that music is a sphere wholly outside politics and that to introduce the political into it would unnecessarily sully the art.” I agree that introducing politics into music sullies it. But I would challenge the belief that this is unnecessary. In fact, being “sullied” is exactly what I need from art.
Composer, pianist, and bon vivant Anthony Coleman likes to describe his favorite part of both cuisine and music as “the filth”—that undefinable goo between the objects you can identify that actually makes it great. I share this aesthetic. I guess “we got da funk.”
More here.
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