As a brief sequel to the last post on Bloom, I'll offer up what I believe is another face of what he describes as the "dark forces"—the Rousseauian conception of music as essential, primodrial and potentially destructive (Nietzsche's "Nihiline"):

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain
     ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Charles Hamilton is a rapper from Cleveland who has only recently put out his first commercial album, having gained a big fanbase through mixtapes produced in his teenage years (somewhere along the line he totally bitched out and put up a Facebook page). Unlike most of his peers Hamilton does very little posturing and instead makes constant reference to his insecurities, hopelessness and suicidal impulses. Last I read he was on the lam, having escaped from jail and avoided hospitalization, which gives me the idea that the abandon he writes about in his music should be taken at face value.




In the intro track to his first digital release Hamilton declares his loyalty to Rousseau and Nietzsche's project. As soon as the drums and bass drop in he's parodying and then rejecting the convention of spinning a gangsta narrative. Instead he unveils the truth about his empty life:

I got no real family, no real friends / No real escape, no real end / So I'm gonna die with my music by my side, and that's true shit.

These are all the things that matter to the classicists. Friendship, consumated through word and deed; one's final cause or purpose, achieved through obedience to reason. Hamilton flips the Greeks the bird and concedes that his passion, in both the artistic and Platonic sense, rules him and probably keeps him from filling those voids. He phrases it as though music has saved him, but I'm not sure Bloom is entirely wrong when he claims that the freedom music gives guys like Hamilton includes and perhaps guarantees the freedom to self-destruct. Meanwhile, Nietzsche is plenty happy with CH's access to, and apparent relish of, the irrational and the barbaric.

This whole world makes me crazy / but not music, music just makes me / I don't make music. Music makes me...

And Bloom says that for guys like CH, everything in the song's chorus is an illusion, while "the meaningful inner life is in the music." 

Finally, from radically different directions, both choose to emphatically remind us:

Music is not just an expression. It's not just an art form.

On Hamilton's part, this is more than simply a testament to what Bloom calls the "cathartic" quality of music—anyone knows it provides comfort in the darkness. No, this is one of many letters from the underground, where music has allowed the passions to overwhelm and obliterate rationality. This is proof that music brings on the darkness.