By Carlos A. Inada
From São Paulo
There seems to be a controversy in the world of silence. We’ve already published 2 posts on John Cage and silence (here and here), and the connections between Cage’s silence and meditative and creative issues may raise interesting questions.
Recently 2 initiatives apparently give silence a “purpose”, in some senses pushing it to a fashionable mainstream. The first initiative is “CAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE” (in capital letters), and initially it was mainly a joke. Its author started a Facebook group “as something to amuse myself. I’ve got a bit of a history of creating ridiculous social networking things, and Facebook is a great platform for this sort of thing. […] But, for whatever reason, people responded to the idea of a ‘silent song’ in the top spot at Christmas, and the thing has grown and grown, to it’s current level of over 30000 members” (45000 members when I wrote this).
So now “CAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE” is campaigning for having John Cage’s 4’33” as the number 1 in Christimas chart, as a kind of a follow-up of a similar campaign for having Rage Against the Machine as the number 1 in 2009. All revenues will go to charities.
Some weeks ago another initiative was announced, of a silent charity record for Royal British Legion, with Thom Yorke, Bryan Ferry, Bob Hoskins and British Prime Minister David Cameron, among others. This “2 Minute Silence” track raised protests, in spite of the good intentions of the project:
Personally I was slightly sickened to hear of the 2 minute ‘celeb’ silent track. Conspiracy and hypocrisy aside it’s ironically a ludicrous idea to attempt to lend some kind of genuine validity to an inherently absurd concept (a silent xmas number 1).
