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Music Appreciation 101 What does it all mean? There are motives for all that we do. Lately a growing appreciation for bad experiences has grown in my life with the help of several clichés, mainly “when you get lemons make lemonade.” Recently
I attended a show for the sake of wanting to see live music, regardless
of whether or not the local bars had anything good to offer. I found myself
sitting on the beach at sunset waiting to hear the opening band go on-stage
and plug-in prior to even entering the venue. After some time, I finally
heard drums pounding louder than the surf in front of me yet not as crisp
as the wind hitting my face. The Josephine Wiggs Experience, an awful
band I would later surmise, introduced themselves to the audience with
a boring song hammock-ed somewhere amidst a poor attempt at emulating
Stereolab, Yo La Tengo and Lucious Jackson. As the evening wore on around
me, my feet fell asleep as I nearly did several times during this unprecedented
display of lackadaisical performance. Poorly crafted attempts at saying
“Alright San Diego” amidst other even poorer jokes without
punchlines hit dead, as I wished they and their stuffed animal stage mascot
would have. All the players stood there as if even they couldn’t
believe they were actually supposed to be entertaining us. Disaffected
they stared at us, disbelief glared back at them. More talk from the singer
about the Breeders (her former employer), the Ko- Stars and Lucious Jackson
(apparently the singer is in a relationship with a member) and their label
Grand Royal. Grand Royal! I had no idea Mike D. and crew had slumped to
a new low. Oh well. A concert review this is not. What happened as I walked to my car that night came close to an epiphany. Close only because I had pre-meditated my next move - to be so unimpressed by someone calling themselves a musician that I could be moved enough to discuss on paper what it meant to love music one loathes. How to turn musical lemons into a high-octane lemon cocktail. After several years of receiving one bad demo tape after another (the number has skyrocketed since the Silver Girl website became a reality), it became obvious to me why finding a band that delighted me was so rare and special. For every Holiday Flyer, T*Shirt or Gapeseed, there must be 800+ awful bands that have shared their music with us in some fashion. None of the latter have released two albums on our label (as have Holiday Flyer and Gapeseed). It is no longer so special merely getting demo tapes in the mail (though mail is always a welcome part of the day!). Now it is that rare occasion something arrives that isn’t completely useless other than to record over making a mix tape for someone. Some of us give new music the 10-second test: if the first couple of bars of a song don’t turn us on, we hit the eject button. Some subscribe to the critical theory “it either rocks or it doesn’t.” I find getting fully immersed in an understanding why and how the music sucks is a much more important academic and intellectual exercise that only benefits the records and bands we do like. Religion has its good vs. evil debate, one that cannot be argued in the absence of the other. So without shitty songs we cannot have a benchmark to measure the value and validity of good music. When we conduct research we must decide on a method of measurement by which we will describe our observations. Measurements have varying degrees of reliability and validity. The former parallels the notion if you like the Beach Boys, you will like nearly all of their music, while the latter is concerned with how each song reaches the individual. If the song works once it should continue to work with that respondent. As the twentieth century comes to a close, the artifacts of music have become much more of a commodity than ever before. Wax cylinders, phonograph records, 8-track tapes, cassettes and CDs have become a piece of property - an item to be owned. Prior to the manufacturing and subsequent exploitation of these recorded moments-in-time, people had to be present to experience the bad and the good performances. Back in the day, to hear music one had to get dressed up in their finest clothing and travel to where a performance was being staged. It took a lot more time and energy to engage in listening to music. Expending much energy to enjoy music is unheard of today; music retailers’ listening stations now allow us to weed through the crap for sale, friends share mix tapes of which we really like one or two songs, bands tour constantly, never being more than 6 or 8 weeks from your town, and the internet availability of .wav files is growing. With these developments we have forgotten how important the songs we do like really are, and even more so how to talk about it. One of the obvious problems with discussing music is the intensely subjective nature of its effect. Thus keeping the subjective critiques of individual artists, genres and their artifacts away from the general discussion is important. This discussion resides along one major axis. Music fans love innovation, yet depend on established conventions to understand it. Unexpected new directions, experiments that pan out, only work when the familiar is at the root of the song’s formula. Fans of a specific genre love convention, they eat it up, they depend on it. According
to John Cawelti’s The Six Gun Mystique: For the purpose of this discussion, free jazz in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, krautrock like Can, noise releases by Total, or pop releases like Allen Clapp’s “100% Chance of Rain” could be positioned at the “invention” end of the spectrum while huge hit records by Kenny G, Janet Jackson, Bob Marley and Diana Ross reside on the other end. Formulas are what we expect when we buy a new release within a known genre, we buy a reggae record with certain expectations, we buy Adrian Sherwood-produced On-U-Sound releases expecting certain structures to be in place. Conventions in music buying are the same as buying food products, the taste must meet or exceed our expectations to feel our money was well spent. But what about the industrialization/capitalization of the music industry? How does this effect our consumer choices? Robert C. Allen’s Channels of Discourse lends some insight into this discussion. “In this way, the concept of genre stems from a conception of...(music)...as an industrial product. That is, the particular economic organization of the...(music)...industry led to a kind of product standardization antithetical to the literary concept of an authored work. Thus,...(music)...genre study has always referred back to the capitalist mode of production; it is potentially more materialist than other ways of categorizing the products of mass culture.” By separating our discussions of music into how certain songs, bands, albums, concerts, etc. fit within their genre, how they uphold genre conventions, seeks to reinforce their belonging to a body of work rather than working to stretch the boundaries of said genre. Music enthusiasts look for inventive artists, critics applaud when artists stretch, tug and pull at the corners of genre classification. Music fans (consumers) rely on the limitations and definitions of the genre to help make purchasing (listening, appreciation) decisions. Those of us that gather our life-force energy from constant music listening spend our free time away from music mocking those blind consumer masses that buy records by This Year’s Model. Robert Allen’s discussion of television has its obvious parallels to music. Whether we are talking about “Seinfeld” or a Make Up album, it’s brain food. “From the television industry’s point of view, unlimited originality of programming would be a disaster because it could not assure the delivery of the weekly audience, as to the episodic series and continuing serial. In this sense, television takes to an extreme the film industry’s reliance upon formulas in order to predict audience popularity. For the audience - as members of various interpretive communities for American mass culture - genre assures the interpretability of the text.” If we accept this idea that our consumer choices are limited in part to corporations giving us what we already expect, but with slight modifications, than the music the masses appreciate is manufactured for them based on their past or recent purchasing decisions. If Janet Jackson is a hot seller, they do two things: put our more Janet Jackson records, or find others that sound like Janet Jackson to exploit. But what of quality. What about those of us that understand the reasons behind the music decisions we make. What about those of us that intellectualize why music is bad, good, or referring to it with indifference with comments like “It has its place.” Many of us sit next to the hi-fi longing to be challenged, our expectations to be surpassed, to be surprised. Most music artifacts lack these abilities. According to The Open Door by Peter Brook: “In order for something of quality to take place, an empty space needs to be created. An empty space makes it possible for a new phenomenon to come to life, for anything that touches on content, meaning, expression, language and music can exist only if the experience is fresh and new.” This is not to say we should remove all the furniture from our hi-fi listening space, but instead we should approach each new listen with a clear head, a clear mind, a clean slate. Our expectations are likely to be the problem, not the body of work we are criticizing. With each new listen, music should be critiqued within an empty space created by us. And as Peter Brook continues; “The
greater the work, the greater the dreariness if the execution and interpretation
is not of the same level.” But why didn’t
I like the Josephine Wiggs Experience? Peter Brooks remarked: Live music has this problem. Live rock music especially. Live rock music is theatre. Why should we go on and on about music? Maybe we shouldn’t. Peter Brooks hits home as his book The Open Door closes: “Children are far better and more precise than most friends and...(music)...critics, they have no prejudices, no theories, no fixed ideas, they come wanting to be fully involved in what they experience but if they are not interested, they have no reason to hide their lack of attention - we see it at once and can read it truly as a failure on our part.” Other than on your driver’s license, your age is not posted to the public. Hold on to the important critical open-mindedness that children possess. Kids know shit when it happens, they don’t presuppose shit is going to be performed. |