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NancyLebovitz comments on Is masochism necessary? - Less Wrong
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You're reading way too much into that comment about rock and roll. The timeline isn't even right for it to be a serious model. But pop music is the cultural successor to orchestral music in this way: The energy and money that used to go into orchestral music, string quartets, piano recitals, etc., now go into pop music. It's seized that share of the public's attention.
I thought the connections would be obvious. I don't like Berg's music, at all, and I blame him and people who promoted the 2nd Viennese School for the death of great music. But it is not a list of things I don't like.
I say fiction is masochistic because we like to read about characters whom we like and identify with suffering. If a book's hero doesn't suffer, we don't like it. There's a larger story there, that usually has to do with overcoming obstacles. But then, maybe that's a part of the masochism story as well.
There's a larger topic there-- fiction composed entirely of events which are pleasant for the characters simply doesn't work for human beings, even though logically, such fiction should be possible.
I've asked around, and while there's a wide range of experimental fiction, no one seems to do the experiment of writing a "story" which consists entirely of friends getting together for a good meal and pleasant conversation, with nothing at all going wrong and not the faintest threat on even the most remote horizon. No tension, no nasty gossip, no discussion of scary world events.
This is apparently farther outside what we normally call fiction than "Waiting for Godot" is.
A different angle about the history of music-- I've got two examples, and I don't know whether I've got a worthwhile pattern.
When harmony was getting more dissonant in classical music, it was at least getting more complex in popular music. If my sample of civil war music is accurate, harmony was very sweet and simple-- ragtime had much more complex chords.
My other example is that melody has become much less important in both popular and classical music.
Well, there is a certain fictional genre of which a large component comprises vignettes involving people getting together for mutually enjoyable social interaction, with no threats and indeed not much reference to anything outside of that interaction.
It is, admittedly, an extremely low-status genre... but it enjoys a certain robust-though-discreet popularity nonetheless, both in text and video. (Albeit I suspect more the latter than the former.)
Not sure what, if anything, follows from this.