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By Root 406 0

death. If Miles seemed to be losing his capacity to feel, he only predicted what would soon begin to happen to all of us. Ever feel emotionally impacted? That's what On the Corner and almost all Miles’ subsequent (pre-Man) music is all about. Take the most expansive heart in the world and subject it to unknown force with almost unimaginable pressure, compress and crush it relentlessly until it is one small cold hard ball of anthracite black hate. Then watch it begin to turn in the void, spitting occasional needles of light. That's what I hear in this music, that and the perception of being constantly surrounded by alien entities, insectival and reptilian, swarming all around you On the Corner. In later works the sense of menace grows—“Rated X” on Get Up with It is so relentlessly malevolent it's like being eaten alive by giant insects—as does the sense of claustrophobia and depression (“He Loved Him Madly” might well be the most depressed piece of music of the Seventies, which is saying something), till finally it all explodes on the first side of Pangaea into a tangled scream for freedom (which tried only semisuccessfully to tear itself loose from depression and blind-alley, closed-circuit rage in Agharta).

Now, allowing for the facts that all the material on these albums (On the Corner, Miles Davis in Concert, Big Fun, Get Up with It, Agharta, Pangaea) was not released in the exact order it was recorded—things get especially dodgy in Big Fun and Get Up with It—and that some of it was “assembled” from tapes by Teo Macero, it still cannot be denied that there is a perception of society, or say one's place in the scheme of things and how one feels about it, at work here. Some alienated critics and fans have written this music off as failed experiments that should have been left in the can, or even sweepings from the recording studio floor that are revelatory only of the creator's failing chops, but that's only because most of them can’t hear it, and to the extent they can, do not like what they hear. After all, who wants to be told YOU ARE DEAD for 30 minutes or an hour at a time? Nobody, so of course it gets translated down into things like the jazz drummer who once told me, “Even most of the musicians who say they like Miles’ On the Corner stuff are really just trying to be hip.”

Which may be true too, but still doesn’t (cannot) negate the truth, more manifest every day I’d say, that this music is about something, and what it is about is what we are becoming: post-human and, con-comitantly, technology-obsessed. This is the poison whirring through the wiring of a supersociety which has become a cage, what Max Weber prophesied when he wrote before the First World War of a populace “embracing … mechanized petrifaction, embellishing a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of that stage of this cultural development it might truly be said, ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”

By now you probably think I’ve stretched a subjective impression way too far. Okay then, look around you. Do those look like people? Hell, they ain’t even good enough to be animals. Androids is more like it, mutants at best. They have become the machines they worship, successfully post-human. Now go look in the mirror. Like what you see? Think you’re pretty cool, eh? Well, reflect on the fact that they all think the same thing when they look in their mirrors. And you look just as grotesque to them as they do to you. Now go put on, say, Side Two of On the Corner. Feel more at home now?

Look, I don’t expect Miles Davis to stand up and say, “Yes, all my mid-Seventies music was intended to reflect a society in which narcissism is giving way to solipsism,” or even, “You say I stopped playing with soul, but it's you that’ve lost your souls.” And I may well be wrong about all this, but I do think I hear him saying, musically in pieces like “Rated X” and “Mtume,” “You think this is oppressive? Well, this is what you look like to me.” And I do know