Thursday, October 10, 2024

One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability.  The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degrees of repetition (absolute blanket radio coverage causing you to get temporarily get sick of a song).   A great song is that seemingly contradictory thing: the repeatable surprise. The classic pop single as a radio drama that never wears out.

This degree of repeatability is not unheard of in other forms, but is much rarer. There are a few films that can be watched over and over; a few books, likewise. But wherever plot as such is involved, the ability to repeat-view or repeat-read is severely diminished. Whereas the pop song is plotless, it offers drama without narrative. 

(Okay there are some story-songs but most pop songs do not involve a punchline or pay-off or resolution; they don't "go" anywhere; they capture a state or a moment; or there is a movement back and forth between two states, two modes of action / feeling - verse to chorus, tension and release, buildup to climax).  Rather than narratives, pop songs are dramas of energy. 


Thursday, October 3, 2024

 





















Charles Baudelaire 


There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line

"It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will."

That's a much more interesting headswerve  - the idea that you could get intoxicated with virtue

Perhaps it's even possible to be intoxicated with sobriety, or the idea of sobriety as society-salvation, a cause, the single solution to everything wrong  (the fanatical anti-drink campaigners of the temperance movement)

Born again former drug users, addicted to AA meetings, clutching little positivist mantras to one's bosom

(R. Meltzer quite scathing on how a cleaned-up Lester Bangs got into this whole humanist trip, 'bring back emotions, they are threatened in this society', reeling out maxims and homilies of the kind he would once have mercilessly scorned and mocked)








Saturday, September 28, 2024

 [fragments from a prototype book review much different from what made it into print...]


Few would claim that we’re living through a golden age for music. But there does seem to be an emerging consensus that this is something of a golden age for music books. Early in 2011, U.K. magazine The Wire staged Off The Page, a two-day festival dedicated to music writing that was so well-received it’s now set to be an annual event, while American alternative-music webzine Pitchfork recently launched Paper Trail, a series of interviews with music authors. As remarkable as the quality of the work that’s been coming out is the diversity of subject and approach, ranging from sweeping historical overviews (Rob Young’s British folk opus Electric Eden) to zoom-lens studies (David Browne’s Fire and Rain documents the single year 1970), and from associative drifts such as David Toop’s Sinister Resonance to monographs focused on individual artists (Owen Hatherley’s Pulp micro-tome Uncommon People) or specific albums (Continuum’s often superb 33 1/3 series). These highpoints stand out amid a constant torrent of less distinguished biographies, oral histories, and lavishly designed and largely pictorial retrospectives.

It seems significant that virtually none of these books, major or minor, deal with contemporary music or artists who rose to prominence in the 21st Century. The past, and usually the relatively remote past—the Sixties and Seventies above all—appears to offer more for authors to chew on than post-Internet music. Partly that’s because music back then felt more connected to social and political currents, and thus seems more consequential. So much of the really thought-provoking and enjoyable music of the last decade has been meta-music that plays witty games with esoteric sources drawn from pop’s ever-accumulating archive. Yet it’s precisely because the popcult past inundates us with its instant-access availability and materiality (reissues and fileshares, YouTube’s TV clips and live footage, reunion tours and memorabilia exhibitions) that book-length analysis feels more essential than ever. Longform writing supplies a crucial element of abstraction, cutting through retro culture’s bombardment of senseless sense-impressions and allowing the clear signal of truth to emerge from the welter of fact.

What could be truer than a photograph? In Bob Gruen’s Rock Seen (Abrams Books), there are many iconic images from across his four-decade career as a legendary lensman: John Lennon posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, Yoko Ono deplaning into a pit of paparazzi, Bob Dylan’s wizened strangeness, and shot after classic shot from punk’s early days, when Gruen first made his name photographing bands like The New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, and Blondie. But ultimately what Rock Seen reveals is that even the most compelling rockpic is a mute witness. I don’t just mean that the dimension of sound is necessarily absent (one exception here is a short exposure shot of Tina Turner onstage under strobe light, an erotic-kinetic whirl of light-smeared multiple images you can almost hear as paroxysmic rhythm). Ultimately these pictures don’t really tell you anything. I’m biased, naturally, being a text-worker, but I think that pictures are rarely worth a thousand words. The best rock writers, operating at full-strength, can catch more of the music’s essence in a couple of sentences than all the carefully posed or fly-on-the-wall shots in deluxe photobooks. Rock photography requires an eye but not a point of view. Its raison d’etre is radically different to criticism. The photographer’s job is to make the musicians look good, or at least “cool” (which can mean inelegant or grotesque by conventional standards). They don’t have to ask difficult questions or judge the artist’s latest work. The flat inanity of Gruen’s captions--“David Bowie is the ultimate performer”, “the New York Dolls shocked people with their androgynous look”, “[the Pistols]had a reputation for being very shocking, but they offered me a cup of tea and seemed normal enough”—show that he chose shrewdly when he picked up an Olympus rather than an Olivetti.

An increasingly popular mode for presenting the rock past, oral history has the exact opposite liability to the photo-book: it makes nearly everyone look bad, invariably de-heroicizing the protagonists until they seem smaller than life. Oral historians seem particularly drawn to punk rock: there’s been a raft of books documenting city-based scenes for Seventies punk or Eighties hardcore, a trend that can be traced back to Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s 1997 book Please Kill Me, which billed itself as about punk as a whole but was almost entirely focused on New York....and which unfolds as one long litany of baseness, egomania, and drug squalor (history as junk, just one sordid thing after another).... unputdownable on a certain level but leaves the reader feeling vaguely degraded, like you’ve been mindlessly bingeing on reality TV.

The graft and craft involved in oral history is actually similar to reality TV’s production process: copious documentation followed by judicious editing and sequencing... What keeps the genre from rising to the level of full-blown rock literature is the absence of a synthesizing authorial voice.

Real rock history navigates a path between the unpretty facts and the instant myths that spring up around the music....

One way to recover a sense of how music was received in its original moment is through the rock journalism collection. There’s been a bumper crop this season, with volumes by Ellen Willis, Neil Strauss, Byron Coley, Chuck Eddy, and Paul Nelson....

The problem is that which music is going to matter, to become a meaningful phenomenon through mass or cult popularity, is rarely apparent at the time of a record’s release

Monday, September 23, 2024

disagreeing with Jameson (RIP old chap)

 “Rather, a genuine political literature would aim at the politicization of everything hitherto considered to be nonpolitical, of private life and psychology, perception and the emotions; it would imply an expansion of form and a refinement of the artistic fluoroscope such that the political character of the most remote and specialized areas of the experience stands revealed to the naked eye.  Works like those of Brecht, or, more recently, of Godard, yield a glimpse of what such a fully political and fully conscious literature might be.” – Fredric Jameson

(via Jim Dooley)

I don't actually agree with this, for two reasons:

1/ I don't believe that every single aspect of existence is political. It can be politicized - anything can be. But it's not the case that every single aspect of an individual's existence, or indeed Existence with a capital E - E for Everything - is inherently political. Many things - conceivably most things - are apolitical, unpolitical, prepolitical, infrapolitical...  

2/ Second disagreement is a question of strategy, the allocation of mental resources.  What would be the political efficacy of exploring the micro-politics of this or that or the other? Does it really count as a political contribution? Well, you can see it play out all across the academy -  critique as a displacement activity. 





Monday, September 2, 2024


love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern"

and I think there is something to understand, usually, because these are generally Proper Composers, steeped in the tradition, inheritors of Beethoven or whoever - and most of them feel like they are contributing to that tradition - even if the recital hall middlebrow public doesn't agree with them - there's a lot of lofty themes and references to classical literature and so forth - or the nature of time... philosophical, spiritual, religious notions.... 


it might sounds psychedelic to us but I don't think many of these dudes were thinking "I'm going to make some good noises to get stoned to or trip to". They went about it with a sobriety and seriousness. 


feel like I can tell when it's done really well, and tell when it's done really badly, but there's a LOT in between that is kind of "well that was pretty cool, but why listen to that one again, and not this other one out of 1000s of other examples"


a lot of the best stuff feels like you are entering a non-naturalistic space, or perhaps a space that is part of the natural world but is very different in its acoustics and perspectives to the plane on which we normally exist

so there's one particular piece by Parmegiani that always makes me think of a speleological expedition - like you're going into a disorienting cavern system


the writing about it in serious books, or the liner notes of records is fairly useless  - tells you a lot about the technical ways in which the sounds were achieved, or the lofty intent behind the project, what it's official themes and meanings are - but it is pretty dry stuff - the books especially are almost entirely about the technology side and nothing about how it feels as sensations or as a moodscape or whatever

one thing that has struck me that is analogous with the musique concrete tape-snip stuff is animation as technique in the analogue era - like an arrangement of heterogenous audio objects brought into the same space and given eerie life - dreams built by ear and hand, as opposed to dreams built by eye and hand

this one always make me think of The Clangers 


even though it doesn't sound much like the actual (and delightful) music in The Clangers by Vernon Elliott





One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability.  The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degree...