" Spasms of wonder, of discovery"

Virginia Woolf, on James Joyce's Ulysses

Style is to genius what genre is to scenius

Style is a relative inflexibility, a patterning, a degree of predictability – the habits of a mind, a unconscious (or willed) decrease in variety and freedom

Style is invariance, self-conformity

When you read a new piece by a writer whose style is familiar to you and who you enjoy

your pleasure is basically saying “that’s exactly what X would think, exactly how X would say it - and they did”

The naturalness of style is an illusion that occurs when the will involved in writing doesn’t make itself felt, otherwise style becomes “mannered”, tries too hard – 

Style feels effortless

Arriving at style is the onset of the ability to be parodied

Any artist or performer who has achieved distinction is one who becomes amenable to parody

Same applies to genre – the sign that a genre has achieved definition is when it is capable of being parodied or pastiched

Versatility and eclecticism are the enemies of style

Equally, the problem for any artist or performer is to achieve style but not become penned in by it - -a style that retains the capacity for growth, for being stretched, while still being itself

Same goes for genres

Truth is that most artists, and most genres, only have so much room in them before they must repeat themselves –

Either that or it starts doing other things - and ceases to be itself. 

Style is to genius, what genre is to scenius – it is identity, personality,  a set of characteristics

Like a person, a style or a genre can only be X, Y, and Z, if it precludes for itself A,B, and C

It can’t be all values, all attributes, to all people

Indeed the more it takes on and encompasses, the more it risks falling into indistinctness, lack of a defining essence, a core

The more varied, eclectic, adaptable, flexible, versatile – the more you merge into the  undifferentiated array of other stuff around – jack of all trades, master of none – you are providing services that others provide, rather than the unique function

The more rule-bound the genre, the more it establishes itself – it also thereby sets up a pathway, a trajectory of evolution

The pathway is to slough away residues of earlier or other styles,  it's a process of becoming ever more like itself, intensifying its own strictures

Eventually this collapses into exhaustion

(Possible example to counter this argument - David Bowie. Who kept restlessly changing, absorbing, greedily eating up new influences and ideas... But always remained "David Bowie". Then again, the face, and the voice... this becomes the thread of consistency. You can push the voice quite far - the ugliness of the vocals on much of the Scary Monsters album - but it's still one person's voice, their signature) 

"In our youthful years we respect and despise without that art of nuance which constitutes the best thing we gain from life, and, as is only fair, we have to pay dearly for having assailed men, and things which Yes and No in such a fashion. Everything is so regulated that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings and even to venture trying the artificial: as genuine artists do. The anger and reverence characteristic of youth seem to allow themselves no peace until they have falsified men and things in such a way that they can vent themselves on them --- youth as such is something that falsifies and deceives. 

"Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how it impatiently rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one's feelings; one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one's subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against 'youth'.

 --- A decade later: and one grasps that all this too --- was still youth! "

Friedrich Nietszche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Critics might spoil your breakfast but they should not spoil your lunch" - Kingsley Amis on getting a bad review

 Over time, I seem to have settled into a fairly moronic metric when it comes to music: if I can remember anything about it after playing it, and if I have any desire to hear it again, then it must be good. All the other stuff - interpreting, contextualizing, speculating, poeticizing etc - that goes into writing about music is a separate stage from that crude initial assessment, and as much as all of that enriches and expands the enjoyment, it can never override the basic thoughtless reaction. You can't argue yourself into ecstasy.  This playlist is a bunch of pieces I have played over and over and over, whether it's a recent discovery (as with the Morricone theme, encountered a few months ago when watching A Fistful of Dynamite)  or something beloved from the past that somehow got mislaid along the way, you and it fell out of touch for decades, but then suddenly it's back in your life (as with "My Old Man" and Ian Dury generally). Most of these songs and tracks are things I've never had the opportunity to write about - except maybe a few tossed-off thoughts on a blog accompanying a YouTube clip. There's no real through-line to this motley selection, except that they are all bits of music I became totally fixated on - music that demanded, that still demands, to be played again and again. It's a wondrous sensation, and you can't count on a regular supply of it, so when that happens I've learned to go with it.

Herb Sunday mix here

 Why then should one insist on forcing dreams, texts, words,

and actions to signify? Keep the dream-bursts apart;

let them resound together without filling the intervals

that allow them to coexist in all their richness within

dissonance … Forget meaning and with it the subject.

Repression cannot resist the folly of winds. Beauty will

be amnesiac or it will not be at all."

~ Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"