Music for the masses.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: B.J. Coman's piece on "doof doof music" (January-February 2005) is a very strange piece of elitist, anti-democratic prejudice.

Years ago I did ethnomusicological research on a Melanesian tribe in Santo, in the former New Hebrides, and recorded music where the performers used fat two-metre-long bamboo pipes that they hit on the ground in unison from sunset to sunrise for three whole nights. It was the ultimate "doof doof' music, let me tell you. But describing it as such tells us nothing about the meaning, importance, complex subtlety and significance of the music to those who performed it.

So it is not certain exactly to what Coman is referring when he says "doof doof" music. If he is referring to "House", he clearly lacks the musicological skill or knowledge to distinguish it as Acid, Ambient, Chicago, Deep, Epic, Freestyle, French, Garage, Ghetto, Hi-Nrg, New York, Pop, Progressive, Tech, Tribal, Ultra or Electro. That's just a start, but whatever the style, his dismissive contempt and distaste remind me of those who claim that all Asian music sounds like noise, or those who say that opera music is all tuneless and screechy.

That he quotes the Marxist snob Theodore Adorno at length only reveals his inadequate musical analysis and contempt for ordinary people. Adorno patronisingly claims without a shred of evidence that in popular music "complications have no consequence". This leads to unmitigated piffling nonsense: "rhythmically obedient music ... expressing their desire to obey ... unabating jazz beats ... a renunciation of one's own human feelings". Surely this wipes out almost all world music that in the main has been used for dancing in one form or another. And that involves our bodies.

Maybe Coman sees dancing as vertical fornication, and therefore thinks it should be banned. It is notable that a physiological, rhythmical dance quality is almost entirely absent in the introspective and contemplate "classical" music of the West, predicated as it was, first on spiritual worship, then ...