January 1, 2025Open Access

What makes possible the collective existence of the subjects of mass music

Key Points

Mass music reflects the principles of existentialism, merging self-knowledge and collective identity, and expanding the definition of human experience.
Existentialist ideas from philosophers like J.P. Sartre and A. Camus encourage rebellion and the search for authentic existence through mass music.
Through rock music, artistic objectification of existential values illustrates collective human activity and social relations in a modern context.
The concept of 'mutual gravitation' among individuals emphasizes communal experiences while redefining the creator's role in mass music.

Abstract

The explosive development of mass music in the second half of the 20th century is usually associated with the growing popularity of existentialist philosophers (first of all, J.P. Sartre and A. Camus), who introduced into the mass consciousness the ideas of rebellion, genuine existence, free choice with subsequent responsibility for its results, and the construction of the essence of man as a result of his existence. The assertion of the principles of genuine human existence as the basis of mass musical art turns into a paradox of combining existence as self-knowledge of a particular subject and the mass character of musical art, which forces us to consider hypotheses of the fundamental possibility of the existence of the masses. These hypotheses proceed from 1) the universal need for existential experiences, 2) the launch of a mass existential search as an excessive response to historical and sociocultural processes, 3) the socializing nature of existential experience, 4) existential experience as a property of a certain social-psychological type of personality, 5) the involvement of existences of various specific subjects, which asserts the existence of a kind of «mutual gravitation» of individuals who have discovered the principles of authentic existence. The paper shows that the last of the considered hypotheses contains the least number of assumptions and provokes the least paradoxical conclusions. As regards the modern situation of mass music, considered through the example of rock music, it allows us to present the processes of artistic objectification of existential values by means of rock music as a task and result of individual and collective human activity. This, first, makes it possible to expand the concept of the subject of production and reproduction of rock music and move away from the traditional glorification of an individual subject, opposed to an unfriendly world, toward the identification of human relations to the world based on rational principles; second, substantiates modern dialogical meaningful forms of mass music designed to capture the situations of subjective experiencing of the external and internal world.

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