Playlist as music drama. Friedrich Kittler's archaeology of media reconsidered

The essay critically reconsiders Friedrich Kittler’s statement that pop and rock sound in the 60s and 70s was directly descending from the Wagnerian Musikdrama. Both genres have in common the fact that they focus less on the semantic value of music and texts, and more on the construction of a “semantics of breath”, which evokes the active and formative power of life, as operating beyond the agents’ actions and intentions. They offer so to the listener a new kind of aesthetic experience and a novel symbolic framework of reference, which have their further development, within the world of the interactive digital technologies, in the modern practice of the playlist.