Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 11

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peoples of the world, see music, rather that hear it. Time’s coverstory, in December of 1983, put the paradox thus: "Sing a Song of
Seeing." From MTV to rock-videos to star-spangled and strobe-lit
disco-floors, to the recent movie. Flash Dance itself, the American
youth wants to experience music visually—wants, as one hitch-hiker
told me, to ”see Willie Nelson sing in Dallas." In the last century,
Emerson knew this hypervisualized music quite well; and he notes of
his experience at a concert of Handel's Messiah in 1843 that:
I walked in the bright paths of sound, and liked it
best when the long continuances of a chorus had made
the ear insensible to the music, made it as if there
were none . . . . I could play tricks with my eyes,
darken the whole house and brighten and transfigure
the central singer, and enjoy the enchantment.
(Emerson 319)
Or, more succinctly, in his journals he simply notes, "That which
others hear, I see" (7:152). Time’s assertion that "it is no longer
enough to hear rock; only seeing is believing" or that "people dance
and drink and date, all while seeing music" (Cocks 54, emphasis
added) may well vindicate the "idiosyncrasy" of the self-reliant
American scholar and his "tricks of the eyes." In fact, American
youths may turn up their home and car stereos so loud because they
are somehow trying to force the vibrations into visible reality—the
importance of seeing the car's windows shake in time with the blasts
form the gigantically mounted woofers and tweeters.
Another possibility, not necessarily exclusive of those stated
previously, is that the American youth is attempting to escape
his/her hypervisual m ilieu and the A ll-Seeing Eye of
God/Authority by turning to the ear. For African-Americans, this is
especially probable in that their cultural predisposition is toward
the aural or rhythm/"rap." James Baldwin, for example, knew that
"it is only in his music . . . that the Negro in America has been able to
tell his story" (310); and W.E.B. DuBois recognized instinctively that
the so-called "Sorrow Songs" held his identity and "roots" (2:1762).
The black youth found on the streets of any of the great metropolitan
areas, carrying his "ghetto blaster" and wearing "shades" day or
night, may be desperately trying to stop the assault of his "cultured