Alan Jacobs' against Ross Barkan on the idea that gatekeepers need to police art nostalgia, Berlioz 2.0 "Forget the classics, listen to MY stuff instead" for the 2020s

https://blog.ayjay.org/this-post-is-obviously-against-all-new-things/

May 1, 2026

this post is obviously against all new things

Ross Barkan:

The culture … does get stuck. We are too backward-facing already. The Metropolitan Review has run its fair share of retrospectives, but I’ve been in the mood, of late, to crack down on them. There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art. There is always another famous dead writer we can celebrate. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I begin work, for this Substack, on an essay celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pet Sounds. But I want new musical horizons, too. Imagine if the rock musicians of the 1960s spent much of their day fixating on the pop of the 1940s. As a culture, we need less mimesis and less retrogression. A lot of this is the fault of the algorithmic internet, which rewards copycat trends and wearying groupthink. Cultural nostalgia is nothing new, though it can feel especially repressive these days.

Responses:

1) There is no art without “mimesis,” in the sense that Barkan uses the term here: all art responds to prior art in a thousand ways. And the problem, according to him, is not people copying older art but rather being too interested in it. He seems to want, as an alternative to mimesis, amnesia. 

2) Interest in and knowledge of the past is neither “retrogression” nor “nostalgia” — not does it constitute “groupthink,” because a staggeringly wide range of opinions is possible (and indeed extant) about pre–21st-century cultural productions.

3) It’s noteworthy that Barkan, because he edits a Substack publication, thinks of himself as a cultural policeman who can “crack down” on those overly attentive to the past. (Remember this day the next time you want to write a piece about an old book, comrade!)

 

4) Writing an essay on Pet Sounds is not, in my judgment, something to feel “guilty” about. …

5) Indeed, “There is always going to be another anniversary of a great old work of art” — which makes for a great opportunity to write about it, alert readers to its existence and its excellences, and maybe even inspire young artists to try to match it. Bob Dylan wasn’t “fixating on the pop of the 1940s,” but he was compulsively fascinated by and profoundly knowledgable about the long great history of demotic American music, what he calls “historical-traditional music.” And his absorption in that vast old musical world was absolutely essential to his greatness. When we write about great things from the past, we’re helping to feed future Dylans. 

…

This is the point at which I interrupt Alan Jacobs’ rebuttal to point out that Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece Innervisions has now been around for more than half a century and literally nobody on the planet has attempted to publish a monograph analyzing every track in musical and lyrical terms; situating the album in the historical and cultural context of the United States in the early 1970s as a way to convey its cultural impact; and a handful of essays I have come across discuss Stevie Wonder as a disabled black musician without really seeming to discuss his brilliant songs.  Now I have a visual disability myself so it’s not like I can’t connect at all to discussions of how disabled musicians handle music in ways that maybe other able-bodied musicians don’t.  It’s just that it would be nice if the music itself got discussed. 

 

The fiftieth anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life is coming up this year, after all, so somebody has time between now and September 28, 2026 to write about “Sir Duke”. The only person I can think of who has tried to describe what goes on musical in actual tracks from that album is Ethan Hein (and I am grateful for the work he has done blogging about Stevie Wonder songs).

 

My counter to the Ross Barkan idea is to point out that nostalgic look-backs at classic works isn’t a problem in itself.  The way Bruce Campbell put it when asked about still getting questions about Evil Dead was he didn’t get tired of answer questions journalists asked about the films, he got tired of answering the same questions about the films from journalists who couldn’t be bothered to keep up with the questions other reporters had asked which he had already answered.

 

Sticking with music rather than novels I am half-way through a book by Bryan Proksch called Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century.

ISBN 9781580465120 (hardback)

ISBN 9781782045410 (ebook)

 

One of Proksch’s points was that Haydn was canonized in the early 19^th century as an inescapable and unavoidable precursor to Mozart and Beethoven. He was respectfully canonized … and then consigned to oblivion as the cute little baby compared to the child prodigy of Mozart and the manly man Beethoven.  In this account Berlioz is the figure who contemptuously sniffed that too many people were listening to all that old fusty Haydn music when they should be making room in concerts for new music, his music, of course and most obviously.

 

In other words, piggybacking on Alan Jacob’s point, Barkans can want arts media to cover the new and daring because it’s literally in their interest to have what little book coverage there is in Anglo-American arts journalism to plug their own books.  Jacobs’ counterpoint is that if Barkan got the kind of arts journalism and art scholarly culture he seems to want then Barkan’s own work would be consigned to oblivion (if I have to assume, for the sake of Jacobs’ illustration, that anything Barkan has published deserves to enter any kind of literary canon).

 

Haydn’s canonization process in the early 19^th century and the prejudicial treatment his music got at the hands of cult of Beethoven men is a reminder that canons and canonizers change. It’s possible for someone who was celebrated as a musical genius without peer in his own lifetime to be regarded as an adorable infantile musically precocious baby based on changing trends.  One of the paradoxes of the series of Haydn revivals was Heinrich Schenker, of all people, got just tired enough of Germanophiles only talking about Mozart and Beethoven he decided Haydn wasn’t getting enough love and appreciation and groused that Germans were unable to properly appreciate Haydn’s contribution to music.  Another figure who felt Haydn was slighted by adherents to the cult of Beethoven was Fetis, yes, that super white supremacist Fetis.  The irony of music history can be that sometimes a composer whose music really is worth studying has their reputation revived by people with ideas that it’s very easy to consider terrible on other issues (ahem, like race). 

 

But then the question of whether or not music can be considered a kind of racial property has been haunting Western musicology for a couple of centuries.  I stand by my reticence about Wesley Morris’ contribution to the 1619 Project claiming everybody’s stealing Black music. One of the reasons we can benefit from studying the past is the past can be full of ideas we want to reject and move beyond.  Sometimes the idea can be white supremacism, other times the idea could be a photo negative in the form of ontological blackness and there is literally a book out there by Victor Anderson called Beyond Ontological Blackness I still need to get around to writing about.  I take Anderson’s point that Black Power movements and Black Theology projects that merely flip scripts are still beholden to them.  Rejecting those scripts of authenticity and racial property that evolved across the long 18^th and 19^th centuries are one of many reasons why I dissent from Ted Gioia’s dubious claim that we need a new Romanticism. All of the worst ideas in trans-Atlantic Euro-American Art Religion I can think of have tended to come from ideas about music as an expression of or distillation of racial essence, whether that essence be white or black.

 

Discovering how to describe blues, ragtime and jazz as musical styles pioneered by and perfected by Black musicians in the United States without recourse to racial essentialist scripts may be one of the continuing challenges of the 21^st century.  How do we describe this musical history in a way that doesn’t ignore the persistence of jazz in Iran, China, Poland, Hungary, Japan and elsewhere?  One of the aporias of objecting to Schenkerianism and its white supremacist element was indirectly articulated by Kofi Agawu in his essay “Against Ethno-Theory” wherein he pointed out that in being so obsessively Germanophile Schenker and Riemann could be thought of as advocating ethno-theory, it just happened to be the whitest of white German forms of ethno-theory. 

 

When a racist interpretation of Noah cursing Canaan sticks around for at least a thousand years then knowing the past and knowing the way a canonical work has been used and misused is part of being well-read.  Leszek Kolakowski wrote in a forward to Main Currents of Marxism that the reason it remains important to study the history of philosophy is because stupid ideas don’t die, they keep coming back in newly repackaged forms. 

 

Sometimes compelling and disastrous ideas coexist in the same author.  John Gray claimed that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s criticism of liberalism and relativism has remained salient but his pan-Slavic mysticism isn’t worth discussing.  It’s not?  Does Gray really think that pan-Slavic Christendom aspirations couldn’t be relevant in, say, Trump’s second term as President with Paula White as a spiritual advisor?  As Aku told Samurai Jack “I disagree.” Knowing the history of ideas can let us parse whether or not what the current administration might do with Augustine’s just war theory is the same as what any previous generation of political leaders would have done with it. 

 

Ted Gioia might try to say that you can’t keep the best stuff down for long, but as I’m still going through Reviving Haydn I am seeing a music historian charting how the music of Haydn, who Mozart regarded as a great composer, was sidelined for the better part of a century by Beethoven fans. John McWhorter suggested in a review of Edward Berlin’s reissued biography of Scott Joplin that as the Jazz Age emerged Joplin’s music must have seemed like juice and cookies compared to the new sounds—it’s worth noting that Edward Berlin and other ragtime historians pointed out that the big ragtime revival of the 1960s through the 1970s happened among classical musicians and not within the jazz community, where jazz critics and musicians often regarded ragtime as antiquated; perhaps we could say that by the 1950s Scott Joplin was regarded as a Haydn to all of the jazz luminaries, probably worth studying but staid and stale.  It’s fairly common for the best of the best in a style to get sidelined into temporary oblivion by gatekeepers and this is, I think, what Alan Jacobs’ counterpoint to Barkan gets at.  Barkan could be the kind of person who sidelines still-worthy creative figures in favor of whatever comes next and could be doing so for understandable but still Berlioz reasons.