There was one line in that article by Judith Thurman on Diane Arbus (mentioned below) that leapt out at me yesterday. In writing about the cultural milieu of the 1960s and how Arbus' photography spoke to that maturing counter-cultural generation, she says "[t]he sixties was a neo-romantic era that equated intensity of sensation with authenticity of feeling..."

I was reminded of a conversation I had three years ago with a dear friend in which we were talking about the problems with drum and bass. My position then was that the music had slipped into a dangerously closed system of parody, built largely around one main aesthetic attribute: darkness. "Dark" was the defining characteristic of seemingly every tune made, and it was what seemingly everyone aspired to create and promote. I felt that the music had ceased to be genuinely dark, or authentically disturbing. It merely collected worn tropes and cliches and represented them in crushingly huge, loud, bombastic tunes, so many indistinguishable from any other. Anything not crushingly dark or brutally hard was dismissed by fans as something inauthentic; as not right, or, at best, as chillout music for going to sleep to, or having tea to on Sunday morning. My friend observed that in drum and bass, and possibly in other music too, the physical excitement of something very loud, hard, and aggressive, with evisceratingly heavy, low bass was easily processed as authentic simply because it was so much more felt on a purely sensory level; not felt emotionally. Music that dared to inhabit a lighter or more pensive or ambivalent space didn't stand a chance, as it failed to excite the nerve endings in so complete a way as the "dark" stuff; it was, in effect, Thurman's substitution of intensity of sensation for authenticity of feeling.

I wonder how far out into other music this model could be applied. Would it hold up as a useful critical apparatus for trying to figure out why certain forms of arguably shallow music continue to seduce people?