Spiritual Postmodernism

 

On the recent book about David Bowie's spiritual life, David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God.

My biggest takeaway is more of a reflection of my own life, right around the Outside-Earthling period (1995-1996), when I started to prefer more of an edgy approach over melodic pop songwriting. I didn't have any spiritual interests then and was more of a postmodernist atheist artist. I was in my late-30s, just when the "oyster" period ends for most people. Bowie was already in his 50s. It's still my theory that 28 is probably the final burn-in year, when your life gets the final "sealer" yet is still "wet" and can go beyond that--perhaps until your mid-50s. A spiritual life will become almost necessary beyond that point. I was lucky to have had exposure to various spiritual teachings in the mid-80s. 

My postmodernist period continued on until around 2022, when I realized I had gone neoclassical or metamodern and wanted to go back to scoring music, having abandoned any kind of through-composed music in 1999. If Bowie were still alive, I think he'd be a metamodernist. 

As an artist, he was purely postmodern. I knew he was interested in Gnosticism, as he touched on it in interviews, but apparently it wasn't just a fling. It's the "fling" part that makes an interest in spirituality seem phony. It has to evolve over decades and has to have roots.

There's a natural youthfulness in postmodernism; it's clever and fun, and driven by ideas, not spirituality. But why can't it be? Why can't you like Stelarc and Marina Abramovic and still go to lectures by spiritualists? That's the beauty of secularism and postmodernism: You don't have to make binary judgments about what is sacred and profane. You have a "quiet faith"--you can be "Postmodernist But Not Religious", which is, in retrospect, what the Outside album was.

I don't think creativity should have any "shoulds" or require compartmentalization; It gets in the way of it. I'd be more inclined to run my creative life like a David Lynch, who used meditation as a way to optimize creativity. That said, he was also a master at compartmentalization, but so was Bowie. That's why I didn't realize how spiritual he was. It wasn't something he talked about at any length. Most of us simply knew him as a highly creative artist, but that's perhaps a manifestation of the Fundamental Attribution Error, where we package people based on the situations we've always seen them in, when there could be many over time. If you listened to the Outside album for the first time you wouldn't think he was religious. But it's rather the ritualization of religion that he was interested in, and he was essentially into mysticism.All musicians potentially could be.

It will be interesting to see how AI artists cultivate spiritual and mystical interests. I don't find it spiritual at all beyond what the lyrics convey. There's something about the hands-off nature of it that can't create an interface with spirituality--as opposed to jazz, for example, which can be almost all spiritual because of the free will (or lack of) element.

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Excerpt Library: Music II: "Discuss spirituality and rock 'n' roll culture"

From my Dynaxiom LLM:

Music is described in the sources as essentially a mystical art form. It serves as an expression of the sacred, even when the musical style itself might be considered profane. This sacred quality is deeply tied to the human experience; while some may fear that using AI could "kill" the sacred nature of art, it is also argued that nothing truly diminishes the sacred quality of anything. In fact, if a listener is moved by AI music or inspired to create their own music in response to it, that experience and reaction can be considered sacred.

The mystical nature of music (specifically human-made music) involves a suppression of left-hemisphere dominance in the brain. This suppression creates a state of uncertainty because the creator cannot flee to the "illusion of safety" provided by the left hemisphere. Additionally, in human music, the individual is interwoven into sound as frequency, a state that correlates with light frequencies. This contrasts sharply with AI music, which the sources claim will never be mystical in nature because its forms are artificial and arise from language rather than the "cosmic" nature of human randomness and creativity.

Key distinctions between human and artificial spirituality in music include:

• Spiritual Rewards: AI is incapable of experiencing spiritual rewards.
• The Concept of Soul: There are those who understand "soul" and those who do not, but AI-generated music—like all recordings—is ultimately disembodied, regardless of whether it possesses "soul".
• Mystery: Even when music theory is fully understood and the mystery of composition is explained by a score, music remains as mysterious as it was when first discovered.

On a broader level, the sources define religion as a "starter spirituality". Once an individual has embraced spirituality, returning to organized religion can be difficult due to potential feelings of guilt. Spirituality itself is characterized as a "painful comfort". While it may not "fix" reality or make one more capable of coping with suffering, it transforms the seeker into a philosopher who asks questions that are essentially prayers. In the creative process, playing music is viewed as a primary way to be genuine, whereas AI music is seen as an inversion of this, where the "producer" does not truly "own" or have creative agency over the output.