Ruth Snapper on the Noosphere, Cyberspace and Steely Dan

As such, Steely Dan�s subversive music has the resonance to reach deep into our emotional psyche and carry us into the noosphere.Their Apollonian perfection of musical arrangements translate into a thriving community on the internet, comprised of a fandom that has been able to keep the fires lit since 1980, which was until February 29, 2000 the last time Steely Dan released an album.
As Euan Ferguson writes in the Guardian (2000), to Steely Dan, time doesn�t matter;

�What the band has always set out to do......is simple: they wanted to combine the best of the 20th century�s music into one fine, ever-listenable,intellectually snobbish slice. It could have been horrendous, but it is glorious. To take the finesse of jazz without the pseudo meanderings; to take the drive of soul without the posturing; to take the beauty of classical changes, without the wittering French longueurs; to take the snap of pop without its zit busting immaturity...the recipe then and now, is close to perfect. Perfection is their aim and they are unforgiving in its pursuit...Uncompromising in their conversation, which is as fiercely clever as their lyrics. It ranges from literary influences (Burroughs, Gibson, Vonnegut) to political credo, a lengthy discourse on Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School and the dangers of repressive tolerance, all of which is fascinating . Their lyrics are both poetic and savagely tongue in cheek, as they explore the American male psyche and the late 20th century landscape, satirizing capitalism, trying to reflect their own sense of dislocation in America during those years, trying to do musically what Don DeLillio has done in print�(A5).

What Steely Dan does well is craft both music and lyrics in a way that allows the listener to become part of the song. Every sound, every word is chiseled out of a cerebral marble block. They provide us with a slice of sociology communicated through their own form of fiction. There music is witty, subtle and expansive. Paul Zollo writes in Performing Songwriter Magazine (2000) of an interview with WalterBecker and Donald Fagen concerning the specifics of their song crafting mechanism:

�The section about West of Hollywood begins with the chorus:
I'm way deep into nothing special
Riding the crest of a wave breaking
just west of Hollywood

It's a single sentence that evolved through a profusion of lyrical permutations before the ideal form was discovered. "One trick of writing is to use the mechanics of typing things over and over again as a way of exercising and developing an idea," Becker said. To illustrate this technique, he shared some of the variations that he and Fagen generated for this line:

I'm way deep into nothing special...
...coming from a place of power just west of Hollywood.
or
...with a base of support located just west of Hollywood.
or
...in a matrix with its nexus just west of Hollywood.
or
...in a cluster franchise just west of Hollywood.

All of the songs on the new album went through this lengthy process of thought and revision, each the result of many pages of notes, character development, and explorations into the best ways to compel and conclude narratives." In regards to West of Hollywood, Walter says "We have notes which define the idea of certain songs. In West of Hollywood we had, 'Ideal flatness of field, leveling, nulling out, zero potential, the tyranny of the disallowed� (27).

By careful consideration of each variation in the lyric and how it blends in with the music, Steely Dan is able to craft a song with a number of subliminal meanings to be explored. The music is a vehicle for thought and expansion of the mind. Things truly resonate and reach into people�s souls when there is a message that is subtle, when the message is multilayered.
Steely Dan seems closer to the ideals of the global heart and mind than any other musical entity to date; with their own website, an interactive fandom and thriving community on the net , Steely Dan is situated for evolution into popular culture via the internet and maybe reaching towards the noospheric ideal of Teilhard de Chardin. Ironically, their latest offering, the album titled Two Against Nature, derives its title from a nineteenth century novel about a wealthy French aristocrat who decides to retire from the world and live in the realm of the senses, an ultimate aesthetic life, not that much different than the noospheric ideal.(Wilkinson 2000).
The Apollonian nature of Steely Dan and the Dionysian nature of Devo are an example of the duality of the musical aesthetic. One is not possible without the other. Like a sphere, which is the perfection of form, each side is part of the other, and needs the other to bring musical dimensions to their whole. As an evolutionary process, we can envision Devo as the big bang at the dawn of evolution, a bright light, a supernova that is packed with energy and ideas; then Steely Dan allowing for a slow cooling off, a quiet expansion of the galaxies; of enlightened thinking and emotion, and refinement of ideas. Then the cycle begins anew, each time developing a bit further until the greater global heart, Teilhard�s Omega Point, is reached. This evolutionary process may take thousands of years. According to Thomas A. Goudge, in his work The Ascent of Life :

One feature of man�s evolution is that it is certainly incomplete. Throughout history, anywhere from half a million to a million years has been needed to produce a true species. Homo sapiens is only about 100,000 years old. Man of today is a primitive type of moral being. Much of his personal and social behavior exhibits traces of his animal ancestry just as his physical body does. Yet occasionally he exhibits the power to make his actions conform to the highest moral ideals. For the most part he is indifferent to beauty, yet he can catch fleeting glimpses of it and embody them in artistic form. Because of all this the verdict must surely be that man is still in the making.Biologically, he is an adolescent being and does not have a fully developed set of human traits (61).

Scientist Mark Pesce discounts the idea of humans evolving to a higher, more complicated being. He supports this argument in an interview for the book the Soul Of Cyberspace (1997) by Jeff Zaleski; Contrary to popular belief that evolution progresses from simplicity toward complexity, orthodox science recognizes no direction to evolution, no end...or purpose to its movements. Steven Jay Gould argues forcefully in his book Full House: the Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, that evolution is a matter of variation of individuals within populations, and evinces no evidence of favoring increasing complexity. As an example, Gould points to bacteria, which he declares to be the most successful adaptation in the history of life. Future species are as likely to be simple, like bacteria, as they are to be complex,like us. If Gould ....is right, then the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin which have inspired much of the more speculative thinking about cyberspace and its effect on humanity are wrong (268).

This statement proposes that Teilhard de Chardin ideas are a function of carbon- chemical evolution. But earlier in Zaleski�s book Tom Ray states that:

�The process of evolution is neither limited to occurring on the earth, nor in carbon chemistry. Just as it may occur on other planets, it may also operate in other media, such as the medium of digital computation. And just as evolution on other planets is not a model of life on earth, nor is natural evolution in the digital medium� (Zaleski, 1997, p. 91).

Teilhard de Chardin�s vision is one of the far distant future of evolution, a vision that may include ideas that heretofore are unknowable as human beings trying to envision computers only a century ago. �We tend to project future technological impossibilities on the basis of current fallible knowledge� (Levinson, 1995,p.99). The failure of scientists being able to envision the mechanism for Teilhard de Chardin�s noosphere may just be a function of the current knowledge of evolution, �a case of putting Descartes before the horse, attempting to create thinking material without a necessary living substrate� (Levinson, 1995, p. 115)

�Thus, we are motivated to develop yet additional technologies that both extend communication across biological boundaries and retrieve elements of process and form of pyre technological communication lost in...primitive technologies. I call this stage- and thus evolution in general-anthropotropic, or evolving toward human function�(Levinson,1995,p.153).

The movement toward, and evolution of, communication through music is not just a technological one. Homo sapiens appears to be designed as a hearing machine. We have eyelids but no ear lids. Sounds are always entering our minds even when we are asleep; our eyes our closed, but we can not close off the outer world of sound.
The popularity of radio continues despite the internet and television. The integration of sound, specifically music, into television shows and movies shows that music is a necessary component of the human experience. Therefore the integration of music as a language of the future noosphere can not be discounted. The evolution may combine the forces of biological evolution and technological evolution, again pointing to a Dionysian/Apollonian model. The energy, drive,and emotion of humanity coupled with the perfection and logic of technology could provide the world with a utopian noosphere. But some call this idea of an evolving utopian humanity too idealistic. As David Shenk writes;

The misguided utopian faith in technology is as much a part of our American history as are manifest destiny and African -Americans� long struggle for civil rights, and it highlights another great paradox of the information age: Our American democratic culture has dramatically elevated technology, but technology has not elevated humanity...[we have] been plagued with technological utopianism: Ever on the horizon sits a wondrous technology promising to deliver a truly equitable, educated, civil democratic society...and it never quite works out that way [but] hope springs eternal (61).

Even Teilhard admits that the utopia of the noosphere may have �evil ...growing alongside the good, and it may too attain its paroxysm at the end in some specifically new form�(1955). Yet the language that could be the future software of the noosphere, the language of music, can offer a way to connect all of us with empathy, and with emotion, enabling the long ago religious ideal of �do unto others as you would yourself� to finally be realized in the future evolution of man. Thomas A. Goudge, writes in The Ascent of Life :

The uniqueness of Human evolution, then consists inter alia in the fact that it has been subject to a new life of inventiveness, a new type of heredity, and a new type of speciation.....During the millennia between the Pleistocene period and the present, there took place a gradual evolution of morality which has culminated in the dawn of conscience. Man�s moral sense began to operate more and more...Homo sapiens [is moving to] Homo moralis. If [man] is ever effectively to control his own evolution, moral ideals or values will have to play a central part in determining its direction. (61)

Music can call us to a greater morality by circumventing the world of spoken language and objects, and doing this outside the body, free of negative forces (Chanan 1999). As Schopenhauer writes: The unutterable depth of all music by virtue of which it floats through our consciousness as the vision of a paradise firmly believed in, yet ever distant from us, and by which also it is also fully understood and yet so inexplicable, rests on the the fact that that it restores to us all the emotions of our innermost nature, but entirely without the reality and far removed from the pain (Tillman,1969, p. 288).

Susanne Langer in her work Feeling and Form points to music as a way to learn feeling, noting that the tonal structures of music bear a close similarity to the form of human feeling; running through excitement and calm, and conflict and resolution; �music is a tonal analog of emotive life�(1953).
For the internet to touch each one of us, individually and collectively, the mechanism of music must evolve to span the internet, perhaps via morphic resonance, perhaps through cultural memes; the music can then evolve and able to reach into our hearts, to point us to a new humanity,homo moralis. This moral being will be able to experience through this evolved form of music, a language of the heart that will communicate across cultural, race, and language barriers, emoting feeling. Music will inform us. It will answer the questions: What does it feel like to be hungry, right now, in Ethiopia? What does it feel like to be homeless, today, wandering the streets with no way out?

Many problems of humanity can be traced to an inability for people to understand �the other�. Communication and negotiation through language and media are ways of connecting each of us but they fall short of providing true insight into what �the other� is feeling. The perception of feeling is so evident in music; it can been seen demonstrated already on the internet within the various musical communities online. Enthusiasm to share feelings about the music, and connections with each other to experience real time sharing of ideas while listening to music, floods the chat room of the Steely Dan website, and probably others music sites as well.
The only way humans can hope to understand each other is through empathy of feeling, not empathy of ideas, of words. Real time empathy, not empathy of �I went through this too, way back when�. We need to be connected through spirit, and through the heart, yet retaining our individual identities and creative impulses. Music may be the vehicle for bringing the heart and the spirit to each of us, and enhancing the human powers of inventiveness and creativity. As Langer writes (1942); �not communication but insight is the gift of music...a knowledge of how feelings go...the real power in music lies in the fact that it can be true to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot� (207).
Teilhard de Chardin�s idea of the noosphere was perhaps an intangible notion of a spiritual dimension. To create his noosphere we will have to aspire to a utopian ideal, an Agora perched above the normal human day to day dealings, ruled by Dionysus and Apollo, reaching for empathy in humanity; combining the forces of the tangible , the technical, the musical, and the spiritual to bring about an evolution of morality and feeling in humanity. Agora was the place in ancient Greece where Athenian citizens met to discuss ideas for the common good. It is an ideal that even 21st century humanity can aspire to.

Perhaps we can begin the process of reaching towards Agora by having more direction and feeling in our music. For example, Steely Dan needs to be more Dionysian, looking for spontaneous inspiration in their music as well as deliberate perfection. They have often spoken with envy of the music of early Jazz composers who were mostly inprovisational and free form in the way that they composed music. Steely Dan could do well to incorporate these improvisational methods into their style of composition. Steely Dan could take more risks with their lyrics to try and craft songs describing not just fictional accounts of drug dealers and wonder waifs hanging out in Gramercy Park, but rather morality tales espousing idealistic notions of the greater good, subtilely cloaked in fictional accounts of drug dealers and wonder waifs hanging out in Gramercy park.
If Devo should ever perform again, they could aspire to the perfection of the Apollonian model, with a higher technical form attracting converts to their cause with lyrics crafted in a subtle nuance, performed with the great gusto and enthusiasm that is the hallmark of a Devo performance . Devo�s messages are always inspired and insightful; they have the creative impulses to craft that mass hysteria they desire if they so choose, but they have to do it in a positive way. The idea of positive music does not mean singing �Oh happy day, everything is grand�, more that it is a difficult incorporation of dark sarcasm blended with a message that gives us hope, again (as with Steely Dan ) subtilely cloaked in a fictional tale of interest to the masses. This is a prescription that can translate to folk, country, rap, classical, and all music genres.

In fact, this type of musical craftsmanship is already evident in popular music. French economist Jacques Attali describes in his book call Noise (1985) of seeing in figures like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker , Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa the...emergence of not so much a new music but a way of making music, the advent of a radically new form of insertion of music into communication (Chanan, 1999, p.314).

Attali discusses a view of musical history that divides it into four stages. The first stage he calls sacrifice, where musical codes simulate the social order, through which the hearts of people are united. The second stage, called representation, is where the music is tied to the bourgeois society and the rise of capitalism. The third stage appears at the end of the nineteenth century, called repetition, meaning the advent of recording and mass production of music. The fourth stage would develop in the 21st Century, and would call into play what he describes as the �figure of a semidivine being...delivering forth ineffable delphic utterances�. (Chanan 1999) Attali appears to be speaking of improvisation; � inventing the message at the same time as the language...creating the conditions for new communication� (Chanan 1999).
Interestingly many of these ideas for the 21st century can be seen in the performance of The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969 by Jimi Hendrix and reported by Samuel Floyd originally in the Jimi Hendrix Companion:

The consecutive descending third that open the introduction, followed by Hendrix�s unaccompanied talking guitar passage, immediately identify this performance as ring based. As the performance progresses, Hendrix inserts �calls� at the rockets red glare and �comments� appropriately at the bombs bursting in air and other telling points. Here, Hendrix is a musical teller of the narrative, using his instrument in a manner similar to that of both African callers and the tone painters of European classical tradition� (Chanan 1999).

So the precedent has thus been established for musical communication. The grand ideas of Teilhard de Chardin can then have seed in the creative soil of musicians and MP3 technology across the internet. A grand utopian idea to be sure, a field of idealized dreams and metaphoric roses, but as David Shenk would say, hope springs eternal.


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