atonal pop

The majority of popular music today is atonal…a fact lost on those who universalize tonality and consider atonality an historical aberration of the west. Tonality involved (so we are told) a heightening of tension by delaying harmonic closure and this went some way in explaining the emotional investment in the temporal unfolding. In the dominant musics today, closure is known in advance to be laid out on the grid in binary fashion: 2 units, 4 units, 8 units, 16 units, etc. Harmonic movement has gone from the traditional 3-chord pattern, to the 2-chord alternation, to the 1-chord mono-harmony, often the implication of a modal scalar pattern of a few pitches. The recent flowering of complex accompanimental vocal harmonies is not a refutation of this as they are the product of predominantly machinic subjectivities and accord with traditional tonality only in the most tenuously mediated way. In fact it is possible that the tonal and the machinic are in some way deeply incompatible.