ABSTRACT
If the complex of sentiments and beliefs that constitute “place,” and its merging with space, could help map the course of music under twenty-first century capitalism, as argued in Chapter 2, then music could perhaps in other ways act symptomatically, revealing to us a unique angle on the cultural workings of our totality. So far in this book, the discussion of those processes has focused exclusively on music—arguably appropriate, given the title of this book. But treating music in isolation from other media risks fetishizing it, attributing to it powers that it may hold only in combination with other media, from advertisements to radio and films. Perhaps rather randomly, the present chapter groups music with film, proposing the idea that it serve as exemplary of any number of pairings (or larger groupings) of “music with,” and that the results be taken as reflecting larger theoretical contentions, rather than as privileging disco as a genre or Boogie Nights as a film (as important as both may be). At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that grouping music with predominantly visual genres like film risks the rather facile use of visual cues to interpret music, all the more common because we have so much better-developed tools for assigning semantic values to visual media. In the present case, attempts have been made throughout to allow music not to be interpreted through visual cues, but rather in conjunction with them, and in all its own specificity.
