There are scenes in Quentin Tarentino’s new film Inglourious Basterds sure to make your heart race. The film opens with a tour-de-force of tension, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa, superbly played by Christoph Waltz, interrogates a dairy farmer suspected of harboring a Jewish family. At first we admire the farmer, who shows remarkable calm in dealing with his unwelcome guest. But as Landa slowly tightens the screws, our confidence in the farmer lags. We feel for him, but begin searching for a way out of our initial identification. It is only a matter of time before he sells out the family hiding beneath his floorboards. By the end of the scene we have abandoned the farmer – he no longer matters to us – and transferred our emotional bond to the teenage girl who manages to flee the fate of her family members, stumbling through lush green meadows while Landa watches her with bemusement from a doorway.

Her escape, as well as the fact that Landa seems to have a reason for letting her go, prove significant later in the film. But despite that neatly articulated continuity the opening scene feels self-contained, as do many of the memorable passages in Inglourious Basterds. Because Tarantino’s talents shine brightest in the construction of sequences that could be excerpted on YouTube without losing their power, Inglourious Basterds is a film whose parts are somehow greater than their sum.

But that isn’t necessarily a drawback. Tarantino clearly aspires to produce memorable work. And the memories burned most deeply into our brain are usually the sort, as psychoanalysis teaches, that are too powerful to slot into a clearly defined chronology. They burst through whatever mental dams have been set up to hold them in place, flooding places with which they have no obvious connection. If Inglourious Basterds is a film that you can’t stop thinking about, even if it’s only in bits and pieces, Tarantino has achieved his artistic goals.

Whether those are the right artistic goals is another matter. His two-part opus Kill Bill is more fragmentary than Inglourious Basterds. But because Kill Bill is a tribute to Asian martial arts pictures famous for the skimpiness of their plots, lack of cohesion is excusable. In taking on World War II and, implicitly, the Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds invites a degree of moral scrutiny that Tarantino’s choice of genres previously helped him avoid. The fact that he continues to project the image of an insouciant amateur movie fan rather than a disciplined director, even when handling such historically delicate material, compounds the trouble.

Despite the obvious care with which Inglourious Basterds is put together – the period details in the mise-en-scene are fantastic – it still can feel cartoonish at times. The heightened sense of reality that makes the best scenes so memorable actually undermines the film’s realism as a whole. It’s the psychological equivalent of a 3-D movie, so visceral that it can seem fake. But the distance that our proximity to danger paradoxically affords us actually might be a boon. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone would want to see a Quentin Tarantino picture besotted by its own probity, the film’s volatile subject matter, which comes “pre-heightened” even before any artist seeks to heighten it, actually might be better served by his insistence on putting style before substance.

The Jewish Thing To Do?

Have his critics noticed? Tarantino has received his best reviews since Pulp Fiction, in addition to unexpectedly large box office numbers. His career, recently thought to be in trouble, is back on track. But Inglourious Basterds has still provoked the same misgivings as Tarantino’s previous directorial efforts. Some worry that its depiction of violence is excessive, others that the humor that leavens that violence might deaden viewers’ moral sensitivity. But because this is a story in which Jews take revenge on their oppressors, other concerns have come to the fore. The most heated objections to the film have come from those who worry that it makes viewers identify with characters in troubling ways. Interestingly, this charge has been levied from opposing ideological camps. Whether supporters of Israel or the sort of progressive intellectuals who relentlessly point out its failings, critics have argued that the film makes revenge too sweet.

There is nothing in the narrative to imply that the Germans in the film, most of them high-ranking Nazis, deserve sympathy for their plight. Nevertheless, the unorthodox practices of the primarily American commando unit known as the “Inglourious Basterds” – scalping their kills and carving a swastika on the foreheads of any survivors – have troubled those who believe that the distinction between “us” and “them” must encompass methodology as well as ideology.

In a fine piece for The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg expresses admiration for the film and its director, yet seems most insistent on arguing that it could never have been made by a Jew. “Given the chance, of course, I would still shoot Mengele in the face. That would be a moral necessity. But I wouldn’t carve a swastika into his forehead. That just doesn’t sound like the Jewish thing to do.” Goldberg is less bothered by the brutality of Tarantino’s “anti-Nazi excesses” in the abstract than his sense that they run the risk of inspiring sympathy for Germans who don’t deserve it. Presumably, the “Jewish thing to do” would involve preventing audiences from identifying with their persecutors’ suffering.

The Nazi Character

While it may seem silly, not to mention offensive, to complain that the film treats its antagonists too harshly, the charge illuminates a crucial dilemma facing those who depict the Third Reich. Stories in which only the good guys are fleshed out tend to fall flat. But attempts to correct this imbalance run the risk of imbuing perpetrators of the vilest imaginable acts with the very humanity they ruthlessly denied their victims. As Nazis have evolved from the stock villains of B-movies to a wider range of possible characters, understandable anxieties about normalizing German atrocities have surfaced.

To the extent that Nazi characters transcend the standardization of villainy that was once their postwar cinematic lot, in which most wearers of the Hakenkreuz were functionally interchangeable, and become distinct individuals, they elicit more complex forms of identification. Even if a character is identified as a worthy opponent, though one who must be vanquished at all costs, the reflexes of the battleground give way to more nuanced reflections on his personality. Once the goal is to outwit rather than outshoot the enemy, the dehumanization of modern warfare begins to lose its sway.

In theory, this may seem like a salutary goal. But its advocates face a conundrum. Is it better to kill people whose humanity goes unacknowledged or ones who remain in the crosshairs despite being recognized as individuals? Although legal precedent suggests that the former is preferable – soldiers are rarely prosecuted for taking the lives of other soldiers – the ethical folds of the question are not so easy to lay flat. Indeed, the popularity of fictional narratives in which a military opponent passes from anonymity to familiarity betrays deep-seated reservations about masses, even those comprised of one’s mortal enemies. 

If You’ve Seen One Stormtrooper, You’ve Seen Them All

But there are two major problems with perceiving your enemies as individuals. If you persist in trying to destroy them, success can feel too much like murder. There’s a scene in Inglourious Basterds in which a German officer, regular army rather than SS, refuses to tell the commandos, who have just slaughtered his the men under his command, where a sister unit is positioned on the map. In theory, such loyalty and courage are commendable, if misguided. But the Basterds have no interest in the honor of the battlefield. They delight in the officer’s refusal because it means that the “Bear Jew,” a hulking man played by horror film director Eli Roth, can beat him into a pulp with his trusty baseball bat, a grisly spectacle from which the camera does not cut away.

Because we have noted the steely determination in the German officer's face, a face that literally disappears under the force of Bear Jew’s blows, the impact of the scene is especially brutal. Even if the violence feels satisfying to viewers who identify with the assassin’s vengeful glee, pangs of conscience are hard to suppress. But the Basterds’ mission doesn’t allow for second thoughts. If recognizing opponents’ humanity makes you hesitate, they might well kill you first. For those who lack the resolve of those commandos, however, the best survival mechanism may be to pretend that the faces of the enemy have already disappeared. There is safety in reducing one’s opponents to components of an impersonal mass.

One of the best cinematic examples of this pragmatic approach to war can be found in the Star Wars films, in which the identical white suits of the Imperial stormtroopers – a term George Lucas chose with a keen sense of his tale’s cinematic ancestry – so hard and glossy that they hide all traces of humanity, remain inviolate even when their occupants go down in battle. Since viewers never get to see the fallen warriors inside – or even perceive a change of state through damage to the suits themselves – it is impossible to identify them as individuals and, as a consequence, to identify with them.

Although the first Star Wars film – subsequently reclassified as the fourth episode in a sextet – was released in the 1970s, a decade that saw representations of the Third Reich become less monolithic, it represents a throwback to the clear-cut moral universe of those postwar B-movies in which Germans were barely even characters, automatons who were either to be evaded or destroyed, period. While comforting for children, who prefer their badness without ambiguity, this failure to differentiate among enemies had disturbing implications for those grown-ups who welcomed the opportunity to enjoy war narratives without a guilty conscience. At a time when films like Coming Home, The Deerhunter, and Apocalypse Now were winning acclaim for their depressing depiction of the Viet Nam War’s psychological legacy, Star Wars took viewers back to a simpler time when dispatching enemy soldiers was a cause for celebration rather than a crisis of confidence.

The Reach of Reagan

Regardless of George Lucas’s politics, presumed to be of the wishy-washy liberal sort associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, his franchise laid the cultural groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s cinematically savvy reactionary program. Not only did Reagan reject the legacy of the 1960s at the level of policy, he also rejected the way that crucial decade was being represented in film.

His political genius was most evident in his capacity to recognize that most Americans, even those opposed to his conservative ideology, were starving for villains they could root against with a clear conscience. His declarations about the “Evil Empire” and regular invocation of World War II films went hand in hand, crucial components of a project to replace the disenchanted relativism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era with the high-contrast moral code found in traditional war movies and Westerns.

Ultimately, though, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s map of the world obsolete before younger generations had fully absorbed its implications. Ever since, politicians in the West have been struggling, with only limited success, to fit dictators and terrorists from the developing world into SS uniforms. Ordinary citizens of the United States, Britain or Japan may recognize the danger these global outcasts pose to world peace. They may even agree with the notion that these men are the embodiment of evil. But the notion that they are somehow Nazis returned from the dead has not really stuck.

The recent Norwegian zombie film Dead Snow cleverly makes light of this failure by suggesting that even frozen, undead Nazis come much closer to the ideal than current pretenders to the throne of evil. Their flesh may be coming off in chunks. Their plan of attack may be lacking in subtlety. But their uniforms still fit the way the tailor intended. Compared to the military discipline these zombines exhibit, evident in a steadfast refusal to take death lying down, the schemes of impoverished Muslim college students in Oslo, Paris or Amsterdam seem hopelessly inept.

Perhaps it’s not that the term “Nazi” has failed to stick, but rather that it has become temporarily affixed to so many different places that most of its historical significance has evaporated. Once politicians have suggested that turbaned religious zealots, perverted oligarchs and drug-trafficking tribesmen are all current-day “Nazis,” despite the fact they neither look nor act like the stereotype, it doesn’t take much of a push to get ideologues to label anyone they oppose fascists.

The radical Left was fond of doing this during the heyday of the counterculture, one of its most shameful legacies. The difference back then was that World War II was still close enough for such exaggerations to be countered by personal testimony of those who had lived through the Third Reich. These days, when those who were adults during the 1940s are already well into their eighth decade, such witnessing is becoming increasingly rare. Both the war and the Holocaust are passing into a netherland where historical evidence blurs with cinematic reconstruction to such a degree that young people find it difficult to make contact with the reality behind the representations. 

This may be why Tarantino chose to turn his latest genre exercise into a project with much higher stakes.  Or perhaps he’s simply young enough himself to intuitively demonstrate what others struggle to pin down. Either way, Inglourious Basterds is a perfect example of how the injunction to always remember is being transformed by the diminishment of living memory. Hitler remains the archetype of the greatest cinematic villainy, as readily identifiable as Mickey Mouse or Marilyn Monroe. But, like those products of the Hollywood dream factory, he inhabits a realm where the facts of history are a secondary concern.

Birth of a Nation

That Tarantino is a true scholar of cinema should be apparent to anyone who notices the way his films pay homage to their predecessors. Reservoir Dogs references a wide range of heist films. Jackie Brown reprises so many highlights of blaxploitation flicks from the 1970s that you can forget it was made in the 1990s. And Kill Bill at times seems more like a catalogue of cool martial arts films than a coherent narrative. Because Tarantino is so attentive to the nuances of genre, paying as much attention to obscure B-movies as he does to canonical favorites, it's easy to forget that this narrow-spectrum expertise, the province of fan boys and girls, is complemented by a broad engagement with film as a medium. Just because he worked in a video store doesn't mean that his knowledge can be reduced to trivia. Like Martin Scorcese, his passion for cinema can seem indiscriminate, quick to find something to love in pictures that aren't easy to like. But that doesn't mean that his postmodern aesthetic is shallow.

Inglourious Basterds certainly follows in the footsteps of Tarantino's previous work in paying loving tribute to classic war films and “Spaghetti” spins on Hollywood formula. But because it's also the story of how lovers of film – French and German, Jew and Nazi – are brought together before the silver screen, Tarantino invites us to reflect on cinematic history as a whole. In one sense, he has simply made another film about films. Because of the subject matter, however, and the fact that he opts to bring his narrative to a climax inside a movie theater, the self-reflexivity that always lurks just beneath the surface of his work has become both more obvious and more profound.

Tarantino’s script plays so fast and loose with history, imagining an end to the Third Reich more dramatically satisfying than what actually happened, that it begs comparison to another historical film that was praised for its stylistic panache: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 feature Birth of a Nation. Although protested by the NAACP and sympathetic white intellectuals for its egregious bias against African-Americans, the film was a tremendous success. Audiences eager to heal the wounds of the Civil War thrilled at the opportunity to identify with both Union and Confederate protagonists, even if that symbolic reconciliation depended on the intesification of white supremacy. That this reconciliation also required the distortion of historical fact didn’t seem to bother most viewers either.

Because of the shorter average lifespan in the early twentieth century, Birth of a Nation shares with Inglourious Basterds the status of being a film about historical events that are no longer remembered by most of the population. Although President Woodrow Wilson, for whom Birth of a Nation was screened in the White House, probably did not make the famous declaration that it was “history written with lightning”, the statement does a beautiful job of capturing film’s power to promote revisionist history. As Thomas Dixon, the author of the unabashedly racist novel on which Birth of a Nation was based, explained, “I didn’t dare allow the President to know the real big purpose back of my film – which was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat! . . . What I told the President was that I would show him the birth of a new art – the launching of the mightiest engine for moulding public opinion in the history of the world.”

To follow through on the analogy, Tarantino wants us to think about how nations are born through narrative, the sort of storytelling that film is peculiarly suited to perform. Repeated references to the film career of Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will and Olympia, reinforce the point that the Third Reich was fashioned, to a surprisingly large extent, from film. But that isn’t the only nation that Inglourious Basterds has in mind. Even though the story ends in 1944, it is abundantly clear, both from the film itself and from Tarantino’s comments about it in the media, that he is interested in telling the story of Israel’s birth or, to be more precise, retelling it.

Perpetual Revenge

That’s what critics who complain that Inglourious Basterds is pro-Israeli are picking up on. Even if they are willing to concede Goldberg’s point that the excessive violence in the film may not be a “Jewish thing to do,” they insist that it's most definitely a Zionist thing to do. From their perspective, fantasies of revenge have played a crucial role in postwar Jewish politics. The pride taken in the IDF’s battlefield triumphs; the reluctance to make concessions to the Palestinians, despite intense international pressure; the doggedness with which both surviving Nazis and the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre were hunted down: all can be regarded as evidence of precisely the we’re-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mindset that defines the renegades who comprise the Inglourious Basterds.

There’s a difference, of course, between revenging yourself directly on an oppressor and the pursuit of compensatory satisfaction in another setting. The latter is rather unseemly, like the actions of a boy who, humiliated by a schoolyard bully, takes his frustrations out on smaller children he can safely dominate. Critics of Israel’s foreign and domestic policy have charged that many of its most impressive military achievements – taking out Iraqi nuclear facilities, destroying Hamas hideouts with precision bombing – are the result of an overwhelming technological and financial superiority that significantly tarnishes their luster.

From this perspective, Inglourious Basterds seems dangerous because it uses a World War II narrative to fortify fantasies with disturbing present-day consequences. Goldberg explains the film’s visceral appeal for Jewish audiences – or at least Jewish male audiences – by emphasizing the transgressive pleasure it elicits. He quotes Eli Roth: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling.” Tarantino’s longtime producer Lawrence Bender reinforces this troubling conflation of sex and revenge by recounting a conversation he had with the director. “‘As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.’”

While such dreams may prove harmless enough when confined to the bedroom or shower, there’s always the chance that they will bolster the impetus for taking action in the real world, where true Nazis are in relatively short supply but plenty of convenient surrogates are waiting to take their psychic place. At least that’s the conclusion reached by those who fret that Inglorious Basterds reinforces the ideology of the pre-emptive strike, offense as the only defense worth having. It’s vital, they insist, to distinguish between revenge that looks to the past, seeking redress for an injury, and the sort of pre-meditated violence that looks to the future, securing advance compensation for an injury that has yet to occur. Once people are no longer able to tell the difference, they are at the mercy of demagogues.

Identifying the Bodies

What these opposing concerns about Tarantino’s approach underscore is the extent to which Inglourious Basterds exposes new wrinkles in the problem of identification. A staple of the abstract film theory that swept scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, this topic has taken a back seat in recent years to work of narrower conceptual scope. Histories are in, while sweeping claims about the ahistorical cinematic apparatus are out. The irony in this development, however, is that it is precisely in self-consciously historical films and, more specifically, those that tackle the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust, that the structural workings of film are easiest to discern.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht’s insight that the dominant experience of drama in the West revolves around identification with characters is never more apparent than when watching a conventional war film, in which viewers are given the tools to discern distinct individuals within the masses of people on screen and then get to follow those individuals through a sequence of events that repeatedly threatens to return them to anonymity. Indeed, it’s no accident that such films often linger on dead bodies waiting to be identified. The inhumanity of modern warfare inheres in its capacity to render not only soldiers, but also civilians functionally equivalent.

But this specter of becoming “mass” men and women, deprived of character, is more insidious than that, for it goes hand in hand with tremendous advances in the capacity to identify people negatively, as members of a category being discriminated against. Again and again World War II films have presented characters living in Occupied Europe or trapped behind enemy lines who desperately hope that their disguise, their forged papers, their accent don’t give them away. Even as their plight reduces them to mere shadows, barely able to sustain their humanity, they live in fear of being singled out. And moviegoers, themselves part of an anonymous mass, identify with that fear. They want to disappear into the crowd, even as they long to shore up their selfhood by bonding with protagonists on the screen.

It’s no accident that the climactic scene of Inglourious Basterds takes place in a cinema where some members of the audience fear being detected as imposters and others luxuriate in the false confidence that fills moviegoers when the lights go down. This is the rare film that manages to be ruthlessly self-reflexive without ever making you feel the presence of the mirror. Even a seasoned cinephile, primed to make careful note of every scene in which characters are making a movie or watching a film, will have a hard time wriggling free of the identification that subordinates mind to body. The film’s key scenes, including the remarkable climax, are simply too thrilling, too viscerally realized to appraise with detachment during a first screening.

The Roller Coaster of History Is a Moebius Strip

That’s part of what makes the film what the hippies liked to call a “head trip.” By the time the viewer reaches the end of that climactic scene, the sense of being strapped into an amusement park thrill ride is so overwhelming that the film’s blatant rewriting of history feels like a higher order of truth. Some commentators on Inglourious Basterds have wryly noted that Americans learn so little history in school that Tarantino’s reckless gambit might go unnoticed. Perhaps that’s the case. But it’s also not hard to understand how moviegoers who know perfectly well how World War II ended might still find themselves transported, if only temporarily, to a twilight zone where Hitler never made it to his bunker. Just as many otherwise progressive Americans in 1915 were temporarily won over by the storytelling brilliance of Birth of a Nation,  contemporary viewers can be persuaded to suspend their disbelief in exchange for narrative bliss.

In writing his screenplay Tarantino surely had the long-delayed Valkyrie  project in mind, which tells the story of a nearly successful attempt to assassinate the Führer in the summer of 1944. The difference is that his “alternate ending” is pure fiction, as deliberately skewed as the Thomas Dixon story told in Birth of a Nation. But whereas Dixon sought to influence public opinion to advance an odious political agenda, Tarantino’s purpose is more complex. As the director has repeatedly noted in interviews, he thought it was high time for Jews to escape the role of victim meted out to them in one Holocaust narrative after another. But it’s doubful that his primary goal was to create a kind of political Viagra to bolster Israeli militarism. More likely, he wanted both to show how Israel became the state that it is today and deftly suggest, by telling a story in which a few stalwart Jews practically get to defeat the Nazis all by themselves, that it’s time for the nation to adopt a new narrative.

Hitler Just Isn’t What He Used To Be

There’s a reason why the scene in which the Bear Jew empties round after round into Hitler’s corpse is so disturbing. Even as viewers share in his rapture, it’s hard not get the sense that this climax – his climax, to build on Eli Roth’s metaphor – is one that can only be repeated with diminishing returns. While the increasing frequency with which terms like “national socialism” and “fascism” have been invoked in recent years indicate that World War II is very much on people’s minds, the sheer variety and frequency of the references attest to a precipitous decline in their historical relevance.

Perhaps the best example of this development, as exhilarating as it is disturbing, is in the curious afterlife of the 2006 German film Downfall about Hitler’s last days in the bunker. The product of painstaking research, full of spot-on period details, the film was both praised and maligned for its attempts to be historically accurate. In particular, many critics criticized the film for making Hitler and his associates too human.

By confining the narrative to the final days of a lost cause, Downfall’s creators constructed the perfect breeding ground for melodrama. Even though Hitler is clearly mad and his associates mostly venal and inept, their dire predicament and the time viewers spend with them in the claustrophobically close quarters of the bunker elicit a kind of structural identification, a sympathy in spite of itself à la the famous “Stockholm Syndrome”, that threatens to conceal the magnitude of their crimes. At least, that’s what Downfall’s critics have charged.

The most interesting thing about the film, though, is that it has given rise to one of the most persistent and inventive memes on the internet. The scene in which Hitler finally realizes that his forces have been utterly defeated, first in a fit of rage and then a mood of bitter resignation, has been posted many times to YouTube with new subtitles added for humorous effect. In these guerrilla clips, the actor Bruno Ganz’s over-the-top performance is appropriated for rants of all stripes, from a Republican’s lament that Sarah Palin is leaving the governorship in Alaska to a tirade about Michael Jackson's untimely death to froth-mouthed fury about a professional football player's decision to come out of retirement.

Whether this rebranding of Hitler’s image as the stand-in for any authority figure losing his grip constitutes a new example of the banality of evil or merely a sign that history isn’t what it used to be, we have clearly entered an era in which people surfing the internet can find themselves amusingly diverted by identifying with the figure of the Führer for a few minutes. From that perspective, Inglourious Basterds’ insistence that we remember to keep the Nazis in our sights and take pleasure in their destruction can seem downright moral.

But what makes Tarantino’s film, as its final lines imply, his “masterpiece” is not its morality so much as the way it invites us to think about morality. By making us feel the power of identification that the medium of film makes possible, as well as the consequences to which that spectatorial bondage can lead, Inglourious Basterds demonstrates how cinema makes history. The challenge it sets us is to become producers of that history, like that teenage girl who flees through the meadow at the end of the film’s opening scene, only to become first the owner of a cinema and then the principal agent of the Third Reich’s destruction.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same position at Tikkun. He was also a longtime contributor to Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He is working on several book projects, as both a writer and an editor. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail. 

Projects like Open Strings are difficult to review. I have been listening to this double album, the latest release from Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn’s Honest Jon’s label, for twelve hours a day since it arrived in the mail last week. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the remarkable first disc, which presents some of the remarkable music captured for posterity in the years following World War I, when major record labels made a concerted effort to reach markets outside the United States and Europe. And the second disc, which offers new material by contemporary artists inspired by those archival recordings, won my heart just as quickly. Simply put, this is the sort of release that becomes a cornerstone of my music library.

But the speed with which I reached this conclusion gives me pause. As great as my pleasure in listening to Open Strings has been, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that it was enabled by something less wholesome. When I first slid the discs out of their lovely cardboard sleeves, emblazoned with Katharina Immekus’s clever black-and-white update on the sort of intricate patterns that cover mosques, I felt myself getting turned on by the prospect of entering another world. And that sensation, exciting though it may have been, underscores the challenges that face this kind of endeavor.

As Edward Said convincingly demonstrates in his landmark book Orientalism, the interest of Western intellectuals in places like Egypt, Palestine and Persia almost always involves more self­-interest than they are willing or able to acknowledge. No matter how hard they try to be open-minded, fantasies of the East, the residue of centuries of oversimplification and exaggeration, still color their perception of the region to a significant extent.

It’s as if the Middle East can only be discerned through a translucent screen onto which those fantasies are involuntarily projected. Lovers of the exotic Orient often note the overwhelming richness of their experiences there, the mass of details that can only be absorbed as an impressionistic blur. But what such descriptions usually fail to account for is that this excess of sensory information derives as much from seeing what isn’t there, the deep-rooted stereotypes that Westerners bring to the region, as from seeing what is.

Or hearing it. The tracks on the first disc of Open Strings tend to be spare, often deploying a single instrument like the oud. If anything, they should inspire rigorous concentration rather than the feeling that there is too much content to handle. In the slower passages of Nechat Bey’s work, prominently featured on the album, there are moments when convention, the expectation that one phrase should naturally follow another, nearly loses its hold. Yet this insight only came to me after several listens, so eager was my mind to fill in the rests with my own sense of what must come next. The extra-textual associations bound up with this music are so deeply engrained within occidental culture that I struggled to approach it with a clear head.

While some degree of synaesthesia is inevitable in any cross-cultural situation, it tends to be more pronounced when amplified by a substantial difference in privilege. For much of the modern era, Westerners could afford to confuse their fantasies of the East with the reality those fantasies obscured because negative consequences were minimized by the powers of empire.

The history of East-West relations since the 1960s has, in a sense, been the history of this privilege’s gradual erosion. Rather than being anomalous, the events of September 11th, 2001were a logical outcome of this trend. And the vast outpouring of content about the Middle East and other predominantly Islamic lands in that tragic day’s wake testifies to the realization that responding to the threat of terrorism is not a matter of the West regaining its footing so much as finding a new place to stand. 

While historical analyses have dominated mainstream discussion, there have plenty of cultural attempts to help this cause along. From well-meaning but ultimately shallow gestures like Bruce Springsteen’s decision to include stereotypically Eastern instruments on his post-9/11 album The Rising to more sustained engagement with the region, such as the work of graffiti artist Banksy, the past decade has witnessed a significant rise in attempts to find aesthetic remedies for political problems.

Laudable though such efforts may be, however, their tendentiousness has usually come at the expense of art. Perhaps the most troubling insight gleaned from careful scrutiny of aesthetic Orientalism is that there has never been much correlation between the knowledge that Western creators bring to their engagement with the Middle East and the quality of the work they produce. Indeed, it often seems that ignorance and carelessness have served art better than the cautious, enlightened approach to foreign cultures.

Does making effective use of content from another society demand disregard for the context in which it was originally produced? Perhaps the antiquarian approach and its “politically correct” offspring fail to inspire much successful art because they worry too much about respecting their source materials. To give one obvious example, there must be a reason why the misplayed sitar in many psychedelic rock songs has more power to move the listener than the more reverential treatment that instrument received from Western world music aficionados.

But as much aesthetic sense as this realization makes, its political implications are too disturbing to ignore. The expropriation of cultural resources from a different society may not have the same human impact as the expropriation of its natural resources – the prime motivation for imperialism in the modern era – but it follows the same logic. The person who thinks it justifiable to pick and choose from a distant land’s cultural heritage is a lot more likely to reason that it also makes sense to loot its mineral and agricultural wealth.

This brings us back to the problem of desire, the programming that led me to fall in love with Open Strings before I’d even finished my first date with the album. Long before my mental map of the Middle East achieved passable accuracy, I was drawn ineluctably to the sounds of the stringed instruments popular there and in adjoining parts of the globe. I couldn’t tell you where a particular song was from or what significance, religious or secular, it had in its place of origin. I only knew that the music touched something deep within me.

At the same time, even though I simply liked the way the music sounded, it inevitably conjured visions of the Orient, often wildly inaccurate, that had been instilled in me, against my knowledge and will, since I was a pre-schooler. I might not have been able to point out Baghdad on the globe, but I could tell you all about the palaces, minarets and colorful open-air markets I saw there on my musical peregrinations. By way of comparison, the opening sequence in Disney’s animated film Aladdin was a model of cultural sensitivity.

Even as my understanding of geography deepened, these visions persisted, reinforced as they were by everything from movies to the décor in Middle Eastern restaurants keen on giving American customers what they wanted. Although I learned to immerse myself in music intently enough to limit these reveries, they still worked their magic behind the scenes, fueling my conviction that the sounds I associated with the Orient had special power to transport me from my native boredom to a world of mind-blowing excess.

While Open Strings comes with no mission statement, no explanation of what the compilation is meant to achieve, its two-disc format strongly suggests that the project’s creators had people like me in mind. The first disc, with its sometimes crackly – though admirably spruced up – archival recordings is imbued with the aura of a world that is far away in both time and space, precisely the sort of psychogeography suited to Western fantasies about liberation from the tedium of everyday life in the era of Starbucks and Eat-a-Pita.

Considered in isolation, together with Open Strings’ eye-catching but minimally informative packaging, this disc might seem like an invitation to the sort of insouciant cultural imperialism that my own childhood affection for Middle Eastern sounds betrayed. But because it is paired with that second disc full of contemporary responses to the archival material, the album’s effect is far more complicated.

On the one hand, many of those new tracks play fast and loose with the musical heritage they reference. Paul Metzger’s lengthy “Emel” sounds like the sort of New Age music they used to play at Nature Company stores, only with the RPMs turned up to an anxiety-inducing pace. Michael Blue Smaldone’s “Martissa” slips fluidly from Assyria to Appalachia and back. And Bruce Licher’s menacingly propulsive “Mesopotamia” sounds like a demo from the goth band Sisters of Mercy before the vocals were dropped in.

In fact, none of the tracks on Open String’s second disc come close to reproducing the feel of the recordings from the 1920s that comprise the first one. The term “responses” is apt, since these new compositions answer the call of that classic sound, not with an echo, but with music that pays its respects less slavishly. It’s not hard to hear the old in the new. But because the artists on the second disc avoid mere imitation, the work they produced also helps us hear the new emerging from otherwise hidden folds of the old.

The same might be said for the remarkable collection of field recordings put out by the Sublime Frequencies label, which refuse to distinguish between authentic folk culture and the mish-mash of local and global sounds that floods the airwaves in the developing world. But whereas those compilations go out of their way to avoid any attempt to sort the material they contain, refusing even to provide names, Open Strings is careful to present the exchange between East and West, old and new, as a relationship of musical equals.

While it would be nice if Open Strings came with an explanatory apparatus of the sort found on Honest Jon’s superb Give Me Love complilation, the most important thing is that the album showcase the archival recordings on the first disc as the work of individual artists rather than an anonymous treasure trove of inspirational sounds. The knowledge that Kanoni Artaki’s “Soultanigiah” anticipates the multi-octave runs of the surf guitar style popularized by Lebanese-American Dick Dale or that Sami Chawa’s “Eerabi Fil Sahra” stops in midstream for what sounds like the acoustic equivalent of the flanging effect on The Cure’s song “Primary” encourages listeners to give credit where credit is due.

Rather than persisting in the imperialist presumption that the sounds of the Orient were simply there for the taking, like so many seashells washed up on the shore, Western listeners like myself can learn from Open Strings how to discern within that music the same traces of personal style that have long been ascribed to blues and country musicians of the same era.

That sort of attentive, historically minded listening will not dispel the fantasies that this material conjures. After all, it’s not as if the knowledge that a particular song was recorded by Dock Boggs or Blind Lemon Jefferson stops us from projecting a wealth of associations, some sweet and some unsavory, onto the music. But it sure beats treating the recordings as documentary evidence of a tradition impervious to the stamp of individuality.

Each time I’ve listened to Open Strings in its entirety, I’ve felt the hold of my childhood visions of the Orient diminish. Where once I saw architecture and smelled spices, I now see people working hard to realize their own visions. But my love for the music has also grown in the process. Although I still feel pangs of conscience for the desire the album stirs inside me, I have come to realize that it wasn’t the desire itself that was a problem, so much as the degree to which it was ignorant. There’s a crucial difference between lusting after a person one barely knows and lusting after a partner of many years.

That’s not to say that educated desire is necessarily better. After all, many long-term relationships are abusive. In the end, though, the path to enlightenment must pass through the doorway of knowledge. I’d rather respond consciously to someone I respect than remain in the thrall of reflexes programmed during childhood. This is the lesson I take from one of my favorite tracks on the album, “Surfin’ UAE,”  Rick Tomlinson’s wry take on rock’s debt to the Orient.

Invoking all the clichés of the surf rock subgenre, the song nevertheless manages to break with precedent just enough to keep us thinking through our pleasure, rather than in spite of it. That remarkable achievement is a perfect example of what makes Open Strings such a resounding success.

Charlie Bertsch is Zeek's Music Editor. Prior to joining Zeek, he held the same editorial title at Tikkun. Bertsch was also a longtime contributor to the late, great Punk Planet, and was one of the founders of the pioneering  electronic publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life. He welcomes your feedback whether in comments posted here or by e-mail.  

It’s getting harder and harder to discuss any aspect of contemporary culture without explicitly considering its means of distribution. Whether your topic is film, literature or music, the massive changes brought about by over a century's worth of technological innovations have progressively undermined our sense of the boundary between the being of a work, its existence in space and time, and the work that multiplies that being.

Does a record produced from bits and pieces of many studio sessions and other sound effects, like such groundbreaking albums as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds or The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, possess a different reality than one recorded live in one take? Does a news segment that makes use of stock footage always demonstrate a higher order of deceit than one that arranges material shot that very day? Should the day arrive, perhaps even in the next five years, when a deceased film actor like Marilyn Monroe is reanimated with computer technology to star in a brand-new movie, like a more sophisticated version of the process that turned Andy Serkis into Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, could the resulting performance still be classified as hers?

Questions like these, urgent even when they remain hypothetical, shadow our experience of contemporary media to such a degree that debates about the use of intellectual property can never be reduced to a merely legal matter. Even if the person who rips a Blockbuster DVD or downloads the entire oeuvre of Paul Abdul using BitTorrent has pangs of conscience, she or he still recognizes that the easy availability of such cultural content has radically transformed our sense of what constitutes a belonging.

The saying that “possession is nine tenths of the law” may not hold up in a courtroom, but it certainly holds true for how those guilty of so-called piracy feel about the material they have managed to collect without paying for it. Property isn’t what it used to be. And neither is ownership.

That’s the message ably delivered by two recent films that consider the state of contemporary music and, by implication, other forms of cultural expression. Rip It: A Remix Manifesto, directed by Brett Gaylor, and Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport, put together by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, both use the legal battles over the sampling of pre-existing content as the starting point for insightful examinations of the stakes involved, showing us how to perceive these battles as significant moments in a world war that involves us all whether we like it or not.

As its subtitle suggests, Gaylor’s Rip It is the more polemical of the two films, shamelessly promoting the virtues of what it terms the “CopyLeft” against the corporate interests bent on preserving the financial value of the copyrights they own. Because the film is constructed in the style of a personal essay, with the director confessing that he wants it to validate his favorite muscial act, the brilliant mash-up artist Girl Talk, it wears its tendentiousness lightly, like summerweight linen. Gaylor’s enthusiasm for remix culture is infectious and presented with enough flare to sway viewers who know that matters are not as cut-and-dried as the film implies.

Copyright Criminals takes a more balanced approach. Although the form of the documentary, which repeatedly overlays multiple video and audio clips into rich collages, attest to the filmmakers’ affection for remix culture, Franzen and McLeod go out of their way to show that the defense of copyright is not always as indefensible as Rip It would have us believe. To be sure, corporate interests were behind most of the major legal actions concerning sampling. But that doesn’t mean that the actual artists being sampled should be deprived of compensation for their work.

The most powerful sequences in Copyright Criminals concern the fate of drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who was a crucial component of James Brown’s rhythm section in the late 1960s. As the film demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt, Stubblefield’s beats found their way into an astonishing number of hip-hop classics during the genre’s late 1980s’ heyday, when major artists were not afraid to sample indiscriminately. From Public Enemy to The Beastie Boys, the legacy of his brilliantly tight drumming is clear. But it as also gone uncompensated and, to a large extent, unacknowledged.

Considering how little Stubblefield got paid for his work, both by James Brown and the artists who repurposed him later, he seems like a remarkably amiable fellow, proud of his musical achievements and free of the bitterness that could easily afflict someone in his position. And that makes the case for a defense of his copyright all the more compelling. Freedom to remix, the filmmakers show us, may be aesthetically necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it should come at the expense of other artists.

The contrast with Girl Talk, née biomedical engineer Greg Gillis, is telling. Although Rip It underscores the musical brilliance of his mash-ups, which have the power to move audiences into sweaty euphoria, it also presents us with the picture of an artist who, in contrast to Stubblefield, came to his cultural achievements from a background of relative privilege.

That’s not to criticize Gillis, who serves as a sagely amiable tour guide into the labyrinthine passageways of remix culture.

Nor is it to suggest that he is some scion of the super rich. As the interviews Gaylor conducts with his parents make clear, Girl Talk was the product of a middle-class home, though one with a bit more happiness, perhaps, not to mention Hall and Oates, than is the norm. Still, it would be wise to take the arguments that Rip It makes with a few grains of Clyde Stubblefield’s salty presence.

In the end, Rip It and Copyright Criminals complement each other so well that it’s tempting to advise that the films always be seen in tandem. Despite the struggles they delineate and the often dire consequences that legal action has had on the output of remix artists, both are rather hopeful productions. Reminding us that what we now call “sampling” or “repurposing” was going on long before the notion of copyright was established and that human beings have as much natural inclination to mix as they do to separate, these documentaries make us long for a future in which people would spend more energy trying to spread knowledge – and wealth – than they now waste trying to limit access to them.

The “Remixer’s Manifesto” that Gaylor presents near the beginning of his film efficiently distills the mindset necessary bring about that salutory change:

1. CULTURE ALWAYS BUILDS ON THE PAST
2. THE PAST ALWAYS TRIES TO CONTROL THE FUTURE
3. OUR FUTURE IS BECOMING LESS FREE
4. TO BUILD FREE SOCIETIES YOU MUST LIMIT CONTROL OF THE PAST

Even for someone eager to ensure that her or his work in the past does not become wholly expropriated by others in the present, these are words that can be lived by. The danger with guidelines composed in such abstract and absolute terms, however, is that they seem to call for an existential, all-or-nothing decision along the lines of former President George W. Bush’s notoroious claim that those nations unwilling to endorse American military operations in the Middle East were by definition “against us.”

One way out of this bind might be to supplement Rip It’s manifesto with some counterveiling precepts:

5. THE FUTURE ALWAYS TRIES TO CONTROL THE PAST
6. OUR PAST IS ALSO BECOMING LESS FREE
7. TO BUILD FREE SOCIETIES YOU MUST LIMIT CONTROL OF THE FUTURE, TOO

Walter Benjamin, whose landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”  presciently anticipated many of our current-day debates about the distribution of content, would most certainly approve of this expanded list. In the end,  the best remix aesthetic is one that seeks to redeem the past, in the manner of Copyright Criminals’ treatment of Clyde Stubblefield, even as it refuses to let it become a burden on the future. For redemptive critique of that sort, which discerns the people concealed by abstractions like “the past” and “the future,” provides a powerful corrective to the pursuit of freedom at all costs.

When word that Brooklyn indie-rock stalwarts Oneida were planning to release a triple album as the second installment in a triptych of LPs, members of their devoted fan base rejoiced. But the announcement also excited interest in circles where the band’s peripatetic songs would otherwise have fallen on deaf ears. The scope of the band’s plan was enough to inspire closer scrutiny.

The sheer quantity of popular music available these days, in forms that break the spell of the traditional commodity, inspires a search for alternative pathways to enchantment. An outwardly simple idea, like Sufjan Stevens’ absurdly ambitious plant to make an album centered on each of the fifty states, or Radiohead’s decision to make its most recent album available for whatever price consumers wished to pay, can do the trick far better than a conventional marketing campaign. To be sure, Oneida’s deviation from standard practice was more modest. But by implicitly invoking an era when sprawling, high-concept projects were the norm – and when the music industry was at a commercial peak – they activated a nostalgia for excess poorly suited for shuffle-mode playlists.

Although I’m old enough to remember the era when 8-track tapes were all the rage, I have been living under the velvet-gloved tyranny of my iPod for years. A record that will compel me to listen to it as a whole, despite my impulse to sample and scroll, is a real treat. In this sense Rated O, which is finally available for purchase, really delivers the goods. It’s the sort of album that rewards those who are willing to listen to it in sequence, not once, but over and over. Indeed, the relationship between its three discs is so interesting to contemplate that I find myself overcome with waves of guilt if I listen to a few tracks in isolation.

What makes Rated O’s cohesiveness all the more impressive is that each of the discs has its own distinctive character. The first, beat-heavy disc, with its nods to reggae and electronica, turns the dance floor into a mental exercise room. The second swaps the intricate compositions for which Oneida is known best for shorter, more immediate bursts of heady passion that rock with a slack-armed discipline. And the spaced-out third disc meanders like a Phish record that has been turned inside out to reveal every loose thread of its stitching.

All three would be worthy offerings in their own right, though gravitating to markedly different pleasure receptors. Taken together, they constitute a powerful commentary on the mental prisons fashioned by the fragmentation of contemporary music. We are so eager to sort our unruly music collections that we have forgotten the appeal of bands that deliberately defy all categorization.  Oneida reminds us that thinking big can still free us from the tyranny of feeling small.

This helps to explain why Rated O keeps reminding me of the progressive rock popular in the early 1970s. The major bands of that movement, such as King Crimson,  Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Yes, fell out of favor with most critics when punk came on the scene and have never quite managed, despite their impressive musicianship and symphonic approach to songwriting, to wriggle free of the stigma of preteniousness. In fact, it’s difficult for someone who wants to seem “with-it” to confess affection for their work, even though guilty pleasures like bubblegum pop and hair metal can be embraced without fear of being branded a person of bad taste.

What’s strange about the netherland in which “prog rock” has long been mired, though, is that its most able practitioners forcefully invited listeners to expand their musical horizons. In a sense, those bands are still being punished for wanting rock to make room for the kinds of music, such as folk, jazz and classical, that it had initially been pitted against. While that negative judgment might make sense for devotees of rockabilly or three-chord punk, who are invested in the notion that complexity is the enemy of passion, it is poorly suited to the world of artists like Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens, who are praised for transgressing the same boundaries that bands like Yes were crossing four decades ago.

Last month, one of my Facebook friends posted the news that she would soon be attending a concert featuring Asia and Yes. Because she is a part-time DJ on the local college radio station here in Tucson and noted for her discerning taste in new music, this revelation took me by surprise. Although I was sure the show would be too expensive to attend for purely ironic purposes, I wondered how sincere her appreciation for these bands was. And I also wondered how sincere mine could be.

When I expressed interest in the show, commenting back to her that my first rock concert, back in 1986, had been to see Rush, I got a chance to find out. She and her husband had an extra ticket and graciously invited me to use it.  Still, I wasn’t sure whether I should accept. Leaving aside the fact that the bands were performing in Phoenix, a 100-mile drive from my house, and in the Dodge Theater, purveyor of the corporate rock experience, I worried that seeing them now could do more harm than good.

Back in high school, when I first developed an interest in the history of rock, I frequently lamented the fact that I would never get to see bands like Yes live. By comparison, the synthesizer-drenched sugar highs of the mainstream 80s charts seemed absurdly shallow. I wanted popular music that stood for something more than instant – and therefore illusory – gratification. But then I discovered alternative rock, right as it was about to commence its commercial heyday, and suppressed my dreams of being magically transported back to some rustic greensward, bathed in a sweet haze of smoke.

Over time, I came to feel mildly ashamed of my affection for bands like Rush and Genesis, though I never went so far as to prune them from my collection. Sometimes, when one of the prog rock epics I liked came on the radio, I’d find myself turning up the volume, temporarily able to lose myself in the music as I had in my teens. For the most part, though, hearing those classics made me reflect on the ways in which my taste had changed, as if I were starting at the photo of a high-school sweetheart that now seemed like an obviously poor match for me.

In the past decade, however, as hipster-minded internet sites like Pitchfork have promoted artists who clearly have ambitions to transcend the confines of rock and pop orthodoxy, I have found myself startled to be experiencing the sort of musical pleasure I thought I’d outgrown. Listening to groups such as The Fiery Furnaces, who foreground the height of their concepts even when it means hiding the depths of their passion, I almost get more enjoyment out of their work’s audacity, the rules it insouciantly flouts, as I do from the music itself. The room these artists make for forms of listening inimical to rock convention can leave me with an empty feeling, but one which has the same appeal as a newly remodeled home. In other words, it’s the negative space their records delimit that holds me in thrall.

The idea that popular music doesn’t have to be reduced to a three-chord essence or function as the soundtrack to the booze-soaked pursuit of “satisfaction,” that it can be about something other than the sweaty rocking and rolling that gave the genre its name: this sense of possibilities gave me hope even when my body longed for baser forms of sonic stimulation. But when that idea is fleshed out with less cerebral forms of bliss, as is surely the case with Oneida’s Rated O, its force is powerfully magnified. Realizing that rocking out can free us from the bondage of matter is one thing; realizing that it can rock our minds back into harmony with our bodies is another.

In the end, I decided that I should take the risk of sullying my teenage fantasies and go see Asia and Yes. And I’m glad I did. Despite the Dodge Theater’s complete lack of the ambience I now seek in concert halls, with its video screens, ushers and twelve-dollar beers; despite the fact that my companions and I were surrounded by intoxicated Baby Boomers who were intent on securing the pleasure they sought, even if it came at their fellow concert-goers’ expense; despite the decrepitude of Asia and Yes’s members, who looked like they were giving their all just to stand in one place, I had a great time.

Yes, there were moments when my inner ironist took over. Seeing Asia’s ridiculously overblown videos from the early years of MTV made me laugh to think that anyone ever took them seriously. Even though the replacement for Yes’s co-founder and lead singer Jon Anderson camped his way through the set like the second coming of Liberace, the rest of the band plodded obliviously along, a model of earnestness. And when either band turned to the subject of heterosexual love, the pubescent sentiments of the lyrics clashed blatantly with the music’s sophistication.

But even though part of me struggled to avoid the vortex of unreflective bliss, I still ended up getting sucked in. At one point, I was standing in line at the men’s room, hearing the bleached-out throb of the show through the walls, when I detected the beginning of Yes’s  “Heart of the Sunrise.” Realizing I didn’t want to miss it, I ran out the door, mission not accomplished, and rushed back to stand in front of my seat. If I can forget, for a minute, the ideological function classic rock has been made to perform in our society, a song like that can still pluck strings deep in my soul. By turns propulsive and delicate, brash and shimmering, it provides a stern test for listeners intent on getting the volume just right.

And, when heard with an open mind, it sounds like the musical thrift store in which Oneida rummaged to find the not-so-raw materials for making Rated O. The problem with a song as famous as "Heart of the Sunrise" or with other classic Yes songs like “Roundabout” or “I’ve Seen All Good People,” is that people of my generation have heard them so often that access to their subtleties is closed off. Even if we admit affection for them, we have a hard time noticing anything new.

In the case of prog rock, though, the length of the average composition has helped to limit such excessive familiarity. Aside from Yes’s limited number of AOR hits, most of their songs are obscure enough these days to approach with fresh ears. In order to be fair to the band, I tracked down their 1974 album Relayer shortly after the concert, figuring that I owed them more careful attention. Because that LP originally consisted of only three songs – the CD re-release adds extra tracks – and marked the band’s shift towards a more synthesizer-driven approach to rock, inimical to the band's more musically conservative aficionados, it is now one of the least familiar releases from the their peak years. But it is also one of their best, refracting everything from Chick Corea to Kraftwerk through their path-breaking musical prism.

The more I listened to Relayer, the more I found myself rethinking the distinction between prog rock and the work of artists like Oneida. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Yes were somehow able to come along today, releasing the same albums it put out in the early 1970s, they would be the darlings of Pitchfork. The stigma still affixed to prog rock does not derive, despite what its perpetuators may think, from any failing in the music itself, but from the fact that it achieved a degree of popularity that seems like sheer fantasy today.

One of the revelations I had seeing Asia and Yes in concert is that their loyal fan base encompasses both bookish white-collar types and a rougher-edged element that would be just as comfortable at a Black Sabbath reunion. For all of the disappointments that the early 1970s brought, they also witnessed a temporary destabilization of the relationship between taste and class. Working-class youth whose parents and grandparents had been given little exposure to high-cultural goods suddenly found themselves being encouraged to expand their horizons. Instead of spurring ressentiment for being a means of sorting the haves from the have-nots, symphonies became a source of inspiration: something anyone, regardless of wealth or training, could not only experience with pleasure but perhaps even produce for the pleasure of others.

While this change was more dramatic in Europe, where class was – and is – more likely to be consciously scrutinized, it affected the entire developed world. In the United States, too, musical forms that would usually have been dismissed as pretentious or elitist were embraced, for a time, as appropriate affair for the common people. That’s why a band like Yes, whose records were ill-suited for an industry in which radio was the primary means of disseminating information, could still develop enough of a following that staging another reunion tour at major venues like the Dodge Theater, over forty years after the band’s founding, made financial sense.

Needless to say, the likelihood of Oneida playing arenas of that size several decades from now is remote. Indeed, the likelihood of any contemporary band achieving that sort of sustained career is not great. Although the reasons for that state of affairs have more to do with advances in the electronic distribution of content than they do with any fundamental shift in musical taste, the end result is still the same: complex rock music of the sort popularized by Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Rush and other bearers of the “prog rock” standard has ceased to be truly popular, in a quantitative sense, except as a commodity for the nostalgia industry.

This surely isn’t Oneida’s fault. Given the band’s openness to musical exploration, incorporating a vast array of influences, I’m sure they would be delighted to attain even the diminished popularity that Yes enjoys today. But the fact that they cannot help but inhabit a narrow cultural niche, one in which the vast majority of consumers are from privileged backgrounds, is still depressing to contemplate. That’s why, as much fun as I had seeing Asia and Yes perform, my memories of the experience are suffused with melancholy. I kept thinking how great it was to see so many people so excited to relive songs that require long periods of sustained concentration. But I also realized that the sort of in-depth engagement to which the audience’s involvement attested has itself become an endangered species, much less in a context where class divisions temporarily melt away in a heady collective ecstasy.

Rated O is a great record, one that could do wonders for the capacity of music lovers to imagine a future that’s brighter and less boxed-in. Unfortunately, even the interest it has excited as a triple album in a planned triptych will do little to liberate it from the box to which socio-economic factors have consigned it.