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-- Walter "Red" Smith
Just like any other musician or any music lover, I've spent hours in discussion with "audiophiles" dissecting the sonic merits of every album that's made any reputable (see: acceptably hip) "Top 100 Albums of All Time" list. Over the last several years almost all modern references have fallen out of these discussions, with any recently released album being replaced by another "vintage gem", perhaps even one that no one bought and listened to in it's own day and that's only found on the shelves of the most discriminating indie shops today (shops that have been all but replaced by iPods).
I'm not attempting to defend either the vinyl or iTunes cultures or to illustrate how any grander cultural or economic force has changed what we listen to. The reason I'm not is because I don't believe it has, at least not to any important extent. In fact, we are now living in an age in which even if you are dead broke you can, at any given moment, download any band's complete discography with the click of a mouse (if you own a computer, of course). If you have even the slightest interest in hearing something you've never before heard you can go to a myriad of websites for free, read what Pitchfork or PopMatters has to say, and download the next newest thing all free of risk (hey! it's free, right?). So why, then, in this brilliant age of constant communication, during the height of the satiation of the generation of entitlement's reign, are we talking less and less seriously about anything being released today and more and more about things we've been discussing since 1990? Because we are confused? We no longer know what we like?
No. Now that it can all be had instantly we have too much and we know that not as many people have the same albums as we do (ya know? it's a product-to-people ratio kinda thingy.). In the studio when we search our lobes for references for the music we want to create, our tiny little primate brains stutter. We don't have the nerve to say things like, "Something kinda like the intro to that LAST Dylan record". Instead, we start talking about "Blonde on Blonde" (or "Tonight's The Night" or "Hunky Dory") or any number of records made before 1980.
Man, we talk about Dylan ALOT. And rightfully so, but never about anything after "Blood On The Tracks", lest we receive a slap on the wrist for breaking this grand and unspoken rule. Rarely are lyrics even mentioned. My personal least favorites that have weasled their way in most recently are Joni Mitchell's "Blue" and Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks". Now don't get me wrong, both have their value and are "masterpieces", whatever the hell that means (though I'm not a fan of Joni Mitchell at all, really), but they weren't being mentioned ten years ago AT ALL. And yes, I have one dear friend who sees "Blue" as the very gateway into his own music making (and he makes it quite well). Of course they were talked about in music circles but, in my experience, they were never mentioned as reference points in studios and have seemingly, by something akin to divine intervention, been referenced over and over (and over and over) more recently.
And yet those two albums and a myriad of others discussed ad infinitum have had little effect on the records I've seen made (and little to none on those I've heard at all). In the 80's people wanted to sound like someone on SST and in the 90's it was SubPop and if they were "talented" (if they had something, anything) they ended up sounding a bit like those bands but ultimately sounded like themselves. When Sam Philips recorded Elvis I seriously doubt he said, "Mr. Presley, what I'm hearing here is a kinda (insert something here) crossed with a bit of, you know, (insert something else here). Berry Gordy went looking for teenagers to sign (who certainly weren't studying Mom and Dad's records at home in preparation).
In his book "How The Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll" Elijah Wald blames it on the over-synthesizing of disparate musical forms and on there not being enough of the intangible(the "it feels good!" stuff) in all things after the Brit invaders washed ashore for good. I think Mr. Wald is right in his assertions, for the most part. But I think the scourge of modern music (or indie rock, anyway, cause hip hop hasn't lost it yet) is the endless meta-analyses that float around in discussions and the disuse of the body. As rock star neurologist Oliver Sacks has said, "Certainly it's not just a mathematical experience, it's an emotional one". Rock and roll (the name itself) is a bawdy old reference to gettin' it on (literally).
My thesis, my manifesto (here, today, right now anyway), is that we are analyzing and referencing and counter-referencing the heart and soul straight out of rock and roll. We are taking up so much oxygen running our mouths that we are choking out the intangible and the magical. We are, by talking too much about what moves us musically, not moving ourselves at all. We are too afraid to tap our feet, too afraid to shake our collective ass, too thoroughly post-modern to let anyone know we love something (I mean REALLY love it). Musicians are becoming scientists. And strangely scientists (like Dr. Sacks) are becoming musicians. Like sportswriter Red Smith (the Michael Lewis of his day) says above, to create art you have to do much more than synthesize or imitate. Ya gotta bleed. You have to inject yourself into it (awesome pun intended).
So go home, illegally download GNR's "November Rain", and wait for Slash's solo to kick in. And then, without any hint of irony, play the shit out of your air guitar and give your girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife/friend/pet that knowing nod (you know what I'm talking about). Because yes, people: deep down we all know it just feels right. And any song or album that doesn't ain't worth shit.
--John Murry
--John Murry
I'm not going to get all crusty and say it was better in the old days. There's just so much stuff fighting for your attention nowadays...and it does take time to find the good stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt all seemed easier back when. I miss really good radio most of all. I liked hearing all the different kinds of music mixed in with commercials for Beauty College and Mag Wheels all pulsing through the air and into your room or car.
One day you'll recant about Joni Mitchell, John Murry. You don't have to tell me when you do, either. Someday you'll hear something like "Jericho" or "That Song About the Midway" and you'll go, "Oh shit." It may take a rare alignment of the stars, but I have faith.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if people much younger than me go into the studio and say, "I want it to be loose like like Joanna Newsom's second record." I can see why somebody would do that, completely. The problem with being somewhat older is that I'll go straight for the things that Joanna Newsom is referencing, inadvertantly or on purpose. I'll say, I want it to be unhinged like a Melanie song or The Incredible String Band. In other words, referencing records that were made before 1980. Similarly, I would never say, "Cool! It sounds like Interpol." I would say, "Cool! Joy Division!"
Meanwhile, I DON'T believe that rock'n'roll music is endlessly recycling itself, except when it's bad. You can't recycle records like Neil Young's "On the Beach," you can only make records that have just as much life to them, if you're on your game. You could say that The Ramones recycled The Ronettes, it's just that they sounded nothing like them. Similarly, the way to be the next John Lennon is not to sound like him, but to be a genius. As Joan Crawford said memorably in a late movie, "Throw the ball, Trog." All us trogs can do is to try.
Michael, I think that's the problem and that's really exactly what I was writing about. I'm not talking about people your age specifically, though leaving anyone out would be wrong-you don't get a pass after 35 or something. If Bob Dylan can write, "I was thinking 'bout Alicia Keys..." then no one has any excuse. What I'm talking about is 20-and-30-something year olds referencing the same records you would be remembering from, perhaps sometimes, when they came out. Of course, I would never reference Interpol either, but only because they suck. And you, sir, don't fit into the problem category I'm talking about at all, mainly because you are absolutely a person who listens to what moves them and bases taste on personal love of songs/albums. So to answer your question (whether it wanted an answer or not): everyone is referencing old shit because it's too dangerous (might damage that hipster cred) to reference newer things. Rock and roll doesn't recycle itself when it's good, but it's rarely good anymore. And when it is good no one talks too much about it, at least not too loudly and not with too much emotion. Age is no excuse, sir, as I know you to immediately like anything that feels right to you. Before I ramble on I gotta say that you, Michael, are almost the perfect example of a person who would represent the opposite of what I'm ranting about, so.... Percentage wise I can scientifically guarantee that fewer records sucked in previous years than they do now (though I can't, for unspecified reasons, disclose the proof), but this is not why people my age are running on endlessly about Patti Smith. Or Neil Young. Or Whomever. Every reference that would be meaningful has become ironic because irony is the new emotional breastplate and shield (and sarcasm is the new sword and pike). They are no longer verbal "tools", so to speak, but are the norm. Post-modernism isn't showing us how we are distanced from one another (and from our own emotions) by a soulless system, it is allowing us to build a soulless system to keep ourselves from having to get too close to each other (and to keep our emotions at bay). We are alone without it. Why then build more walls between us when the walls in front of us are already there naturally? Yes, "hell is other people". But there are many things worse things than hell. Meaningless ironic ramblings being one....
ReplyDeleteReno? Is that you, 'ol pal? Pre-spawn is starting up, gonna be a good year out there....
ReplyDeleteYeah that's me John. You're not back in California are you? I'm on a fishing Safari later this week. It is looking good this year. Lots of water everywhere.
ReplyDeleteAlways good to hear from you.
I agree on several points. Here's the thing, though; if we buy into liking what feels right as a justifiable end in itself, we're gonna have to remember that old cliche "there's no accounting for taste". Whether you walk in on your brother in law head banging to Creed or Interpol or Red Hip And The Boys you're gonna have to give him that same nod. Either that's enough, or it isn't. And it might be hard for us not to judge. It's just about impossible for me to think about the average MTV fodder in terms of art, yet the purity of his enjoyment in that moment is pretty hard to deny. I think that's part of our dilemma. While we resent pretentious and anesthetizing expatiation on the art that we love on a raw emotional level, we equally detest a knee jerk low brow response that swallows each generic rebranding whole. I'm not sure we've found an inbetween yet, or whether we really want one. It would certainly make our social distinctions a lot hazier.
ReplyDeleteI'm a child of my age, and for every album I own that's more than 2 decades old I probably own 10 from 2000 on. I like a lot of "derivative" music, whose predecessors either bore me to tears or have been so overplayed that I'm now numb to them. Musicians overly concerned with being traditional or paying homage to their forebears by working within the same constraints(i.e. many neo- folk, country, punk acts) do very little for me. Some of them make entire careers out of recording with nothing but vintage instruments and studio equipment. This is all for the sake of being authentic I guess, but it seems to me tremendously unauthentic. To put out a record now with the idea that it sound like it truly could have been made in 1961 is just seeing how convincing of a transvestite you can be. I have no interest in hearing another group do (old)Dylan or the Velvet Underground or Joy Division in as faithful a manner possible. Perhaps I should think of them as period pieces or something, like when a new Jane Austen adaptation comes out of hollywood. I would, but they take themselves too seriously for that. Every touchstone that gets mined to death was invariably an artist or group that was doing something genuinely groundbreaking in their hayday. Playing it safe like this is a great way to ensure that a record will shortly be irrelevant, even if it isn't for lousy musicianship.
Good blog. How often are you going to put these up? I'm looking forward to more.
Daniel, I think that's kinda the key. Music is a battlefield, a bloodbath, a fever dream... None of it has any objective bearing on anything, yet it means so much to so many on a purely subjective level. Freud said that "neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity" and he defined all "normal" people as neurotics. Because it's intolerable to us to not make music grounds for moralism we do it. And I believe we should. If everything is meaningless (unless we attach our own meaning to it) then what could become more naturally and easily meaningful than music? I believe we ought not pretend we can avoid the battlefield and just join in the fight. Denounce the meatheads, the hipsters, the new punks, and on and on. Give rise to moralism where there is no grounds for it. Then feel guilty for doing so and try for a day or two not to do it. Then rinse and repeat. If there is no God, as every graduate student post-Nietzsche has told me there isn't, then we necessarily create our own gods. And something as primal as rock and roll is a perfect cathedral, so to speak... As for derivative bands and musicians, I totally agree. Nothing is new under the sun, right? I think Oscar Wilde said "Good artists borrow but great artists steal". There's much to find in simple choices (and in those petty thefts). Dylan's record Love and Theft not only lifted great blues lines verbatim but he stole the very title for the record from a Japanese history of American music that translated to "Love and Theft". What a coup! Everything is dependent on something else. To even play an instrument (nevermind to create something derivative or to create something avant garde) you have to have the instrument itself. For instance, the guitar came to the Mississippi Delta via Mexican migrant workers in the late 1800's.There was no guitar as far as Charley Patton or the mysterious Henry Sloan was concerned. To make noise ya gotta have something to make it with. To create a riff or a chord or whatever you need notes, etc. and on and on. My point being that quite literally nothing is or can be new under the sun. So I agree. Many of my favorite records come directly from somewhere else. Many are of a musical "movement" or "style" or whatever. But that's not why they move me, that's just shit to talk about. They move me because they move me. For different reasons, some I don't get at all. And if the 'roid-slamming jock likes rocking that old Pearl Jam TEN record then let him dig it (or judge him for it), it's all preference, it's all "to each his own". But personally I vote for judgement and scorn. It's far more entertaining. Hazy social distinctions, as you mentioned, equal boredom. Racism, classism, sexism, etc., aren't functions of evolution as some claim. We separate ourselves because our fragile egos demand it. The racist and the classist and the sexist truly being the weakest among us. But when it comes to the extracurricular I think we separate ourselves because we have no other way to define what and who we are. So define away we must (and will) regardless of how "highly evolved" we might want to pretend to be. Claiming to be "highly evolved" is akin, in my mind, to claiming godliness. It's absurd. The "enlightened" are the biggest crooks among us. Pseudo-humility and all that shit... Moralism and music should mix, in my mind, simply because it's more entertaining that way (I hope this position doesn't rouse some backlash, but... ). And because sometimes in mixing them we create something out of nothing. And sometimes, just sometimes, that "something" created is great. Really great.
ReplyDeleteAs for the blog, I'm gonna keep up with it. Lori's got me committed to doing the thing, so a promise is a promise. Don't give up on Red Hip and The Boys just yet, though. That was both before and ahead of it's time. Count yourself among the lucky to have witnessed it.
@Reno Hell yeah I'm back, buddy. Three weeks fresh. Ready for y'alls Delta stripers this year, bud!
ReplyDeleteJohn, have to say I agree that moralism and music should mix, simply because I'm not able to separate them easily.. When I was growng up, we used the term "righteous" to describe music, and you didn't apply it to Tony Orlando and Dawn. I've never lost the habit of thinking this way.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, we're all made liars, because the kind of music we love celebrates stupidity of various stripes. I had a fantasy recently of doing a show where I only play Herman's Hermits songs. I was never a fan of Herman's Hermit's, but come on: "I'm Henry the Eighth, I am..." And you could play "Dandy" by The Kinks and "There's a Kind of Hush" by the Buckinghams, because Herman's Hermits had hits with them. I'm convinced it would be a good show.
Lou Reed spent 6 minutes in 1979 repeating the words, "Disco, disco mystic." Neil Young's most famous guitar solo has one repeated note in it. We can get on our high horse, but the thing we love will kick us off again. I'm writing a new song, and in the car today I discovered that the second verse should have backing vocals going, "ba ba ba-bap!" That's just stupid, but there it is.
Regarding postmodernism, I think it's a pretty capacious term. You could argue, for example, that the Drive-By Trucker's "Southern Rock Opera" is postmodern. The title suggests it's a pop art take on a whole genre (like Erich Segal's "Love Story"), and the splintered points of view -- circling around to describe the same scene from different perspectives (like they did later with the Buford Pusser songs) -- is conceptually not that far from a Julian Barnes novel. To the extent that post-modernism is just modernism without moral gravity, I agree with you. But I think there is a certain kind of cultural pillaging and narrative complication, typical of postmodernism, that can be quite rewarding.
And blah blah blah.
I like to fondly remember the Red Hip and The Boys days. Some good Murry tunes were contained therein, though the better part of the decade has faded my memory of them. One was "There May Come A Time" or something close. I remember it pretty well, and I always liked that one.
ReplyDeleteWell, having an antagonistic nature myself, your ideas about moralism in music certainly have their appeal. Plus, it can be very awkward and annoying talking with someone who, to my mind, has a very quarantined perspective about it, yet still has big opinions. Of course, this is all probably just me taking things to seriously. Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to be moralizing and detached at the same time. Being detached, it's fun to listen to other people infuriate each other discussing this stuff. But when I'm involved I always feel like an asshole, or I'm having to deal with one. While spurning the tasteless or the obstinate may be personally satisfying, my habits tend to inform my beliefs, which then shortly come to eerily resemble the elitism I hated so much when I was younger and still developing my own tastes and preferences. I might shake hands with my aunt's new husband after debating politics over dinner, but I'm still gonna drive home pissed at him. Perhaps I'll be able to contend vicariously through your blog : )