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By Root 629 0

to be genuinely new, Kant explained, it must be related to what has come before it in a special way. A new work must have some foundation, some context in order to be understood. There are certain rules of composition, for instance. A song may be made of verse and chorus, comprised of melodies and harmonies, structured according to the key signature. While the rules for art-making change radically over the next two centuries of music history since the time of Kant, the requirement always remains. In other words, while the rules themselves are changing and historical, the need for something to guide and regulate art is written into art making. Kant sees this as the “foundation by means of which a product that is to be called artistic is first represented as possible.” The noise that comes from tuning a guitar, for instance, we would not call a song because it isn’t being made with any of the rules of composition in mind. Its material, its notes, might be identical with the material of a song, but it is not properly a song since it was not meant to be understood against a context of song-making. A musical composition, then, relies on some fixed standard established by tradition, by previous endeavors of songwriters. That doesn’t mean it has to submit wholly to those patterns, only that it must be understood in reference to them.

An artwork that follows the rules too well is no good. This is especially true in rock’n’roll. Think of the innumerable covers of “Bouncing Ball,” of the lackluster bands Keith was thinking of when he imagined those pathetic boys standing on stage in their “shitty little suits.” Sure, they may have varied the song to fit the demands of the occasion, whether it was a night club or a debutante ball, but it would be a mistake to call these variations constitutive of a new thing. Nor does the work of the studio musicians, who might be able to execute a song perfectly and add their own little charm to it, deserve to be called new. We’re looking for a more robust meaning of newness, and so was Kant, one that is something other than the “predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule.”

To solve his problem, Kant calls “genius” to the stage. Now in contemporary usage, this word is vague and over-used. It’s sometimes meant as a term of praise. Other times it refers to a person who has achieved some high score on an intelligence test. In Kant’s day, too, the word had all kinds of connotations that he didn’t care about. He invoked the term ‘genius’ for the specific reason of explaining how a meaningful artwork can come into being.

For his theory to be coherent, two conditions must be upheld. The first is that the new work of art must be made according to some rule. The second is that the work must not be determined simply in accordance with some rule. Kant’s solution is that, in the person of the genius, the rule comes from nature and is given to art. “Nature,” as Kant means it here, is what I have been calling “the past” that determines what sort of thing rock’n’roll is. Nature, then, can be understood as the raw material there at the start, before anyone adds anything to it. Kant believes that the artist has an “inborn productive faculty” that itself “belongs to nature.” So when the artist uses this faculty to make a work of art, the rule that makes the work of art intelligible has come from nature.

Many artists would agree (even if they’ve never read Kant). We often hear artists, in describing their creative process, speak of some point in the process at which the work starts to make its own demands, starts to direct the hand of the painter, for instance, or starts to tell the songwriter what the middle-eight needs to be, or can only be. This is what artists mean when they say, “and then the thing just wrote itself.”

For Kant, it amounts to saying that there is some talent that the artist can summon but can’t fully explain or control. The source of this talent lies beyond the reach of the artist’s intellect. This talent “cannot itself describe or indicate scientifically