One way to look at a hierarchy is in things becoming linked through the structure of the mind. This would correspond to Claude Levi-Strauss's structuralism. The 'good' is the highest level of interrelated elements, while the 'bad' is the opposite.
Put a bit less abstractly, technology tends to deal with separate elements, so could on some level appear somewhat meaningless. However, seeing as we live in a technological society, it would be less extreme to say one should be proportionate.
Coincidentally, KT Tunstall's next due album is Nut..
..things related to the architecture of the brain (following a sequence of Kin - spirit - and Wax - body.)
Rhythm controls development, and this is easier to see where the body acts in a psychic rapport with the 'instructions' of the brain, as in Black Horse and the Cherry Tree (PH3.)
Going into music technology a bit further, electronics can become pretty animated in processing sounds and samples, devices that are made for rap and hip-hop.
'Animated' is probably not a bad way to put it since it is something taking place in electronic space that is then translated into sound, texture. That's a long way from Tunstall's loop-pedal, but is there anything wrong with it?
Well, it's a case of proportion. Tunstall is herself keen on studio-technology, but is also keen on low-fi acoustics. The bottom line is that sound is airwaves and not electronics. Buffy was a pioneer in Apple Mac technology on Illumination, her album Coincidence was digitally engineered using MIDI files sent to London from her studio synthesisers (biography, page 200.)
Electronics copies very precisely. The only trouble occurs if everything is a copy! The bottom line is that the body itself and its mechanisms is a living rhythm that instruments generate.
The pioneering British turntable Linn Sondek, launched 1972, has a suspended chassis that isolates the playter from vibration, creating a crystal clarity of purity. Without that realism, one is in an electronic universe of copies and copies of copies (vinyl is simply mechanical movement of stylus.)
So, an electronic universe can achieve a good approximation to realism, but the insoucience of pure sound is the baseline for comparison. One can envisage a reaction against hip-hop of the raw rockers a la Tunstall.
Realism is raw and has meaning and is not simply sound-effects. Effects that are animated sort of leave behind the simplicity of the body as a rhythmic instrument. The body that is in rapport with the brain (Nut) has a level of meaning that is raw and can't be copied.
You could sample it, and let the processes reduce the impact. So, rawness and meaning are body-defined related to psychic rapport. The reaction against hip-hop is basically that the genre just goes further and further into electronics; an animation of copying that represents the sun (pure technology, logic, ones and zeros.)
So the rapport with the psyche is fundamental, and the brain has a contrary structure that Levi-Strauss and others relate to tribal social levels, spaces in longhouse, etc.
The brain in terms of meaning has a left side (reason) and a right (feeling.) It has a hindbrain (cerebellum) for movement, and a forebrain (cerebrum) for thought. It has a primitive spine derived from reptilian ancestors.
So, the 'good' from that point of view will be interrelations between the contrary aspects of the brain (structure.)
An electronic future is 'bad' in that it goes away from these interrelations, and into the logic of the sun (ego.) That future will animate fairly realistically, through expressive algorithms and motion-capture (prev.) However, a good copy is still a copy and nor the original structure, rhythm.
The question is how does the brain (and body) develop this structure from what is just information on genes? Well, it can't since the process is to do with meaning and rhythm. There have to be two disparate levels of evolution: one is meaningless mutation (genes); the other is hierarchical, rhythmical and has meaning.
Perhaps we need to stop defining rock by its past. Coldplay are what rock looks like when it has evolved to meet the needs of a new musical era, adapting to technological and stylistic change and emotional and sociological shifts, creating rock that is empathic, inclusive and in tune with the social constructs of post-millennial youth culture. They make Oasis look like dinosaurs. (Neil McCormick, DT)
In your fucking dreams.
