More on the high art/low art distinction

A couple quick hits following up on yesterday's post:

1. TKB says:

I still disagree with your country music thing. I'm obsessive about my music and always look up the lyrics, interpret them, create elaborate scenarios with them, etc. — the vast, vast majority of people don't (even fellow musicians).

Most people are content with knowing most of the words to the chorus, which usually outlines a simple, relatable sentiment ("Hate is a strong word, but I really really really don't like you").

My exposure to country is incredibly limited, but I do like folk music, which is somewhat similar — I do think these genres attach greater significance to lyrics than others — they tell stories, not summaries — but the extent to which the average listener really pays attention? I dno.

I should clarify that the kind of ear for adultery that I think country music gives you doesn't depend on thinking critically about any given set of lyrics. I may only take a vague impression from each song — something as simple as "Adulterous love is the purest kind because it's based on love rather than duty, but that doesn't make it any less bittersweet" ("Borrowed Angel"), "It's a sin and we know it, but man is a slave to the flesh" ("Dark End of the Street"), or "The willingness of adulterous couples to make sacrifices for their love indicates a certain noble stoicism" ("In Some Room Above the Street") — but get enough of these vague impressions and they'll start to coalesce into a feeling for the genre that in practice looks pretty sophisticated. Contact with any given adulterous situation isn't going to trigger one, simplistic reaction planted by a honky-tonk song; it's going to trigger a hundred of them.

2. From Octavio Paz's Labyrinths of Solitude, quoted in Claudio Lomnitz's "Times of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice, and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City":

In a world that lacks transcendence, that is closed in on itself, death in Mexico neither gives nor receives; it consumes itself and satisfies only itself. Thus our relationship to death is intimate, more intimate, perhaps, than that of any other nation, but it is devoid of significance and lacking in eroticism. Death in Mexico is sterile, it does not fertilize or engender, the way that the Aztec or the Christian death did.

The argument that a tradition that lacks eroticism will become sterile is interesting, though weirdly literal.