peter coviello on music as history.
Songs, as everyone knows, are the very greatest of archives. They are the containers, the modes of aesthetic technology, in which many of us store away those passages of bygone time that are most precious to us and also most resistant to preservation in any other form. They carry inside them not only places and persons, dates and names, but entire scenes, atmospheres, drifts of mood and spirit insusceptible to signification in any other register. And so we keep them there, many of us, in these flimsy pop products, as if for safekeeping, like seeds in an underground vault, guarded against deterioration, loss, apocalypse. Again, everybody knows this, or at least everybody who has ever fallen in love with a three- or four-minute jolt of pop intoxication. Only one consequence of this is that among the many things you might hear in songs—old joys restored to the present tense, the cruel passage of time, your own heart’s history—is the flourishing of what we might call counterpossibilities: all the desires and aspirations and inflections of political will, all the reaches of the thinkable, that have since become mute, inaccessible, inoperative. (Or, at least, that seem to have done so, since history, as we are forever finding and forgetting, is significantly weirder than most of our models suggest.)