music

A Pot of Message

By in foolosophy, music, the geist of the zeit, writing 3 Comments

I’ve never considered what it would look like if someone made a connect-the-dots sociology book, but suddenly I have a clear image of it.

I particularly enjoy the implied metaphysics of “confidence needed for rock.” Apparently rock requires some national reserve of psychic testosterone, and the towers falling depleted it. Green Day, the Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Mastodon, etc. must have been operating on the strategic confidence reserve.

The fact that the stakes are so low here is what allows you to see how easily confidently-stated bullshit can sound authoritative if you’re primed to take it seriously. You begin with an outcome: rock lost cultural centrality. You select a major historical event: 9/11. You invent a mushy intermediate variable: “confidence.” You attribute the outcome to the event through that variable. Then you narrate the sequence with enough certainty that the story feels like an explanation. Nothing in that procedure actually demonstrates causation, but it has the shape of analysis. That shape is what’s persuasive. A happened. Then B happened. Here is an abstract concept that connects A to B. Therefore I have explained B.

Again, it sounds hilarious when a bloviator on social media is trying to explain such a gaseous topic as “the death of rock.” Hell, any post or article about “the death of X” is like a porch light on a humid summer night: guaranteed to attract a cloud of the dumbest moths pontificating in circles. But move exactly the same method into geopolitics, sociology, macroeconomics, institutional decline, technological change, whatever, and suddenly the subject itself supplies prestige. The nouns get heavier: “legitimacy crisis,” “late-stage institutional decay,” “neoliberal subjectivity,” “civilizational exhaustion,” or “loss of social cohesion.” Now you may not know enough to say, “Wait, that doesn’t line up with what actually happened.” And because the speaker sounds fluent in the domain’s vocabulary, you mistake facility at constructing an explanatory narrative for evidence that the narrative is true. It’s sort of like Gell-Mann amnesia, but in relation to methods of inference. You recognize the bogus reasoning instantly when its inputs are familiar, but fail to recognize the same reasoning when it is dressed in unfamiliar facts and consequential abstractions. So just remember our friend Reuben Rodriguez the next time you see some blowhard posing like Spengler and portentously analyzing the deep structure of history, technology, populism, etc., and say, “Wait; is this another ‘9/11 killed rock music’ moment?”

In addition to warning against the dangers of rhetorical slickness, I want to reiterate what I said recently: this sort of thing is what happens when writers are trained to channel their thoughts away from personal reflection and toward cultural analysis and criticism. Rodriguez might not be embarrassing himself with this pretentious twaddle if only he had the confidence to talk about his own perspective instead. “Rock used to feel dangerous and exciting to me. Now most new rock sounds derivative.” That could lead somewhere interesting. When did it stop working for you? Did the music change, or did you? Does novelty in music depend partly on being seventeen? Does acquiring a huge library of antecedents make genuinely new music harder to hear as new? How much of the pleasure of rock was inseparable from youth, friends, cars, clubs, clothes, sex, rebellion, the whole surrounding context? How much of rock’s essence owes to its roots in baby-boomer hedonism and rebellion, and can it survive being transplanted into less-libertine soil?

The “I” forces you to acknowledge contingency. “I don’t hear much interesting new rock” leaves open the possibility that interesting rock exists somewhere you aren’t listening. Once you remove the I, however, your disappointment acquires the dignity of analysis. I suspect the grand sociological explanation exists precisely to protect the writer from the less-flattering autobiographical one. “The culture changed” feels much better than “I aged out of this.” “The medium became hollow” beats “people stopped reading me.” “The scene lost its vitality” is preferable to “I don’t know where the interesting people went.” “Audiences no longer have the attention span for serious work” sounds nobler than “my work isn’t attracting an audience.” It is a perverse exchange: abandon the one subject on which you possess unique authority in order to make an authoritative pronouncement about the subject on which you possess almost none.

Joseph Epstein once quipped about ideological hacks who have traded their literary birthright for “a pot of message.” The birthright is the one thing the essayist actually owns outright: his experience, his perception, his peculiar angle of vision, the embarrassing detail, the contradiction he can’t quite resolve. Then he gives it away for some portable conclusion about Society, Technology, The Culture, The Death of Rock, The Decline of Blogging. Esau gives up something uniquely his for a bowl of stew; the essayist gives up something uniquely his for a thesis anybody could have written. What a tragedy.

Come Back, Signal, Fill This Void

By in ai, art, foolosophy, music, writing

Me, I’ve been existentially depressed ever since people stopped making music purely by vocalizations and started using artificial “instruments” that don’t exist in nature. It’s all been downhill ever since clicks, hoots and whistles. An animal gut stretched across a resonating box?  Suspicious. Somewhere in the Upper Paleolithic a cultural critic looked at the first bone flute and thought, So this is it. We’re outsourcing the human larynx. That first flute was Big Tech’s war on hooting.

Seriously, though, he seems to feel that either humans “produce” culture or machines do. The actual situation is already spreading itself across a huge continuum. Someone can type “write me a song about heartbreak” and upload the first result. Someone else can write the melody and lyrics, use AI to generate an orchestration, reject half of it, rewrite the rest, sing the vocal himself, and mix the recording conventionally. Somewhere else a musician may improvise against an AI-generated part and discover a musical idea neither input contained straightforwardly beforehand. Which of these is “no longer produced by human beings”?

There is also something revealing about the nostalgia implicit in that phrase. Produced how? Apparently there exists some blessed technological moment at which human cultural production was sufficiently pure. Was electric amplification all right? Photography? Word processors? Photoshop? Sampling? MIDI? Spellcheck? Search engines? Dictionaries? Editors? Session musicians? Ghostwriters? At some point the natural human apparently fell from grace and began cheating with artifacts. AI may be an unusually powerful and strange extension, perhaps strange enough eventually to require new ideas about authorship. But “artificial means entered the creative process, therefore the result ceased to be human” would condemn an astonishing amount of civilization.

A musician may say, “I invented this chord progression,” but in one sense the progression was always latent in the combinatorial space of tonal music. What he really did was discover it as meaningful for this song. Likewise, an aphorist does not invent the English language or even all the conceptual relations inside a sentence; he notices that certain words, placed together under the pressure of a certain thought, suddenly become exact.

AI can widen the field of discovery enormously. But widening the field does not tell you what to notice. If ten people ask for “an unusual chord for the bridge,” they may receive overlapping suggestions. But they will not hear those suggestions identically. One person hears pretension. Another hears melancholy. Another hears the exact pivot the song needed. Another thinks, “Interesting, but if I lower the third and move the bass note…” The machine output becomes raw material the instant it encounters judgment.

The creative act often consists in selection under pressure from a particular project. The musician hears or encounters something and thinks: that. There. Which means the genealogy of the input is often secondary. He might find the chord in a theory book, steal it from Coltrane, stumble into it by mis-fingering, hear an HVAC unit hum a strange interval, or have an AI propose it. Those routes differ historically and perhaps ethically, but they don’t necessarily differ in the part that matters artistically: the musician perceives a fit between an external possibility and an internal intention. The refrigerator compressor making a weird noise is not “collaborating” in any ordinary sense. It has no conception of the song. Yet it can still trigger something decisive because the artist already has a receptivity shaped by the work in progress. A thousand other people hear the same noise and hear only an appliance. One person hears the missing texture in the bridge. That seems very close to what inspiration has always been. The world throws off material constantly; the artist’s mind is a selective field.

AI may be to intellectual and artistic work what the Industrial Revolution was to material production: not the abolition of human agency, but the mechanization of tasks that once consumed large amounts of it. A writer once had to search books, wait on memory, or labor through dozens of possibilities to find the right metaphor or rhetorical device; a musician might spend hours experimenting before stumbling onto the right chord or texture. AI industrializes that search. It can generate possibilities at machine speed and scale, just as machinery multiplied the output of physical labor. That does cheapen some forms of accomplishment and may displace particular skills, but it also shifts the scarce resource elsewhere — from producing possibilities to judging, selecting, combining, and directing them.

The deeper continuity is human temperament. Industrial machinery did not make craftsmanship, ambition, laziness, ingenuity, or mediocrity disappear; it gave them new conditions in which to operate. AI will likely do the same. Some people will use it to avoid effort and become little more than approval buttons. Others will use its abundance as cognitive leverage: more examples, more counterarguments, more metaphors, more experiments, more practice — and thereby enlarge their own capacities. The machine can make fifty suggestions; it still cannot decide which one belongs in this particular human project, or why the project should exist at all.

A chainsaw and a violin are both elaborate artificial extensions of the body, but their social and psychological effects are completely different. A typewriter, a search engine, and an LLM all intervene between thought and finished prose, but they intervene in different places and alter different capacities. So the useful questions become more local: What does this tool make easier? What does it make unnecessary? What skills does it cultivate or atrophy? What new possibilities does it create? What dependencies does it introduce? What kinds of people and institutions tend to form around it? That’s much more difficult than saying “technology went too far after X,” because you lose the clean moral geography. You can no longer live conceptually in the Good Village on one side of the river while the Satanic Mills smoke on the other.

The Gravity Well of Music

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, music

Art — the artist’s action consists in trying to enclose an infinity. A potential infinity within an actual finite.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

A piece of music is, obviously, finite. It has a duration. Three minutes, nine minutes, forty-two minutes. It begins, moves, repeats, departs, resolves, ends. We can divide it into measures, beats, phrases, motifs. We can time it with a stopwatch and locate any passage precisely. Nothing could be more bounded. And yet certain passages do not feel bounded. They feel larger inside than they appear from outside.

Augustine’s account of time is useful to think about. The past and future, he says, do not exist as independent regions somewhere “behind” and “ahead” of us. They exist in the present as memory and expectation. The present itself is attention. This makes the present less like a mathematical point and more like an act of gathering. What has vanished, what is now before us, and what has not yet arrived can all be present in different ways.

Music makes this structure audible. While listening, we don’t hear the present note by itself, as an isolated acoustic fact. We hear it in the context of what has just sounded and what may be about to sound. The earlier phrase is gone as sound, but still active as memory. The coming resolution does not exist yet, but it already exerts pressure as expectation. A melody is succession, but not mere succession. It is Augustine’s threefold present made sensuous: attention, memory, and expectation bound into one act of listening.

Imagine linear time as a flat grid, every second evenly spaced from the next. Music presses into that grid like a gravity well. A passage may occupy only thirty seconds by the clock, but those seconds are no longer flat. They bend downward into depth. What has just passed and what has not yet arrived are drawn toward the same present pressure. They are not simultaneous, exactly, but they become co-present. The listener does not merely move across the passage. He descends into it.

This is my clumsy attempt to describe how absorption in music can have such a peculiar aftereffect. A passage holds you, and then releases you. You return to yourself with a start: the room, the chair, the clock, the body sitting there after all. The music has not lasted longer than it lasted. Nothing supernatural has happened. But the interval was inhabited differently. It was deeper, not longer.

Sleep also makes time vanish, but by subtraction. You close your eyes, consciousness drops away, and an hour disappears. Music does something closer to the opposite. It saturates the interval rather than erasing it. In sleep, time passes without you. In music, a minute can be inhabited so completely that ordinary measurement becomes irrelevant.

This may be one way art encloses Valéry’s infinity. Music is not infinite in the sense of lasting forever. It is infinite in the sense that, while it lasts, duration acquires depth. The clock measures the surface distance from one edge of the passage to the other. Attention measures the descent.

I Know She Lets Me Down, But Just For a Short While, Then She Changes Her Mind

By in foolosophy, identity, music

Dreijer largely keeps their private life outside the headlines, but in 2017, they told The Guardian in an interview that they had been married and had dropped Andersson from their name following their divorce. In the same interview, they described themself as “definitely a queer person, but […] very gender-fluid.”[3] Dreijer previously used she/her pronouns, but beginning in 2019 uses the pronouns they/them in English and hen in Swedish.[28] They have two daughters.[3] On a radio interview in 2023, they shared that they are autistic.

From the Wiki on Karin Dreijer, singer/songwriter mainly known for her work in The Knife and Fever Ray. What strikes me is the irony: the person who made some of the strangest, most haunting pop music of the past twenty years turns out, in matters of self-description, to be almost comically trendy.

I’ve been listening to the new release from Fever Ray incessantly for several days. Dreijer fascinates me because she contains both the cure and the disease. On the surface, the familiar contemporary lexicon of boutique identities, pronouns, and self-descriptions; the sort of thing that presents itself as defiance while already congealing into convention. It’s a new conformity: fussy, performative, and, not least, syntactically irritating. Beneath that, or perhaps alongside it, the real thing: actual strangeness, the eerie and internally consistent musical imagination that produces melodies which cling to the mind like burrs. A society needs that kind of weirdo energy or it goes spiritually stale. But the irony of culture is that its sanctioned forms of “weirdness” predictably become just another stagnation. In Dreijer, both are alive at once: the codified experiment and the genuine one.

I selfishly wish she could resolve that tension to my liking. But then the songs begin, and my objections lose altitude. There is nobody else quite like that voice or with that sensibility. So I end up taking the tolerant stance: fine, have the indulgences. Anyone who gave me “Heartbeats,” “Dry and Dusty,” “Concrete Walls,” “Rock Classics,” “Marble House,” “Got 2 Let U,” “When I Grow Up,” and “The Lake” has earned a generous exemption.

The Brightness of a New Page Where Everything Yet Can Happen

By in battling personal entropy, music, technology

I was dabbling in music long before I dabbled in writing. About this time twenty-five years ago, I graduated from the classic old Fostex cassette 4-track to one of those early digital tabletop multitrackers. Big, heavy, and promising; a whole studio squatting on a desk. I recorded a dozen or so songs on it and still never really learned it.

A few months earlier, I’d been to the doctor with the first symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis three years later. Before long, my hands were increasingly incapable of playing guitar or drums. Most of my equipment gathered dust before regretfully being sold. My body recovered with the help of medication, but I never worked up the enthusiasm to tackle the learning curve of the quickly-evolving digital technology. Besides, I’d discovered that even if I couldn’t easily hold chords anymore, I could still peck away at a keyboard. Writing became the creative hobby, and the guitars sat in a corner, biding their time.

Time doesn’t only take; it also stores. It sets things aside like tools on a pegboard: not useful now, but not thrown away either. I didn’t keep the guitars because I believed I’d “return” someday; I kept them because I wasn’t ready to declare that part of me dead. That turned out to be enough. Sometimes hope is too dramatic a word. Sometimes you just keep something within reach, and let the years do what they do.

From a heavy box that needed a tabletop to a slab of glass that fits in my hands. It’s amazing what happens when you wait long enough: the body returns, the tools get smaller, and the page brightens again — new, blank, and full of everything that still might happen.

I Can’t Believe It’s Here Again

By in music, seasonal

Last year I heard this song by Sean Keller: “Holy Fucking Shit, It’s Christmas.” It’s a guitar-driven rock song, very amenable to being shouted by a raucous crowd in a pub. I have to admit my first thought was irritation — my normal holiday fare is choral/classical Christmas music, along with mid-20th-century standards, so I heard the chorus and assumed this was just another cheap example of subversion: Haha, let’s write a Christmas song, but with profanity. But as I listened, I realized it was actually a pretty sweet sentiment. At first he’s almost annoyed that it’s Christmas again, shopping for gifts he can’t afford and that no one needs. Then he admits he has fond memories of December, and he wishes Santa would bring that feeling back. Then he accepts he’ll “never be a kid again,” he’ll “never be brand new,” but his reason for the season now is “Christmasing with you.” It ends up a love song — to another person, and to the time of year. A clever twist on holiday music after all.

Deep Earth Brings Forth Rebirth

By in books, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, music

99 percent of all “creating” is imitation, in sounds or thoughts. Theft, more or less consciously.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

Fellows, I know I just got done telling you why it’s sacrilegious to produce new “Wodehouse-y” books. Unfortunately, I am human, and that means I’m a hypocrite. You see, I discovered a band called October Noir last year — an eerily pitch-perfect copy of Type O Negative — and I’m delighted. If you told me their tracks were a long-lost Type O album, I’d believe it. It’s as if a tribute band became sentient like Frankenstein’s monster and started writing its own songs. So why do I happily accept the musical doppelgänger while recoiling from ersatz Wodehouse?

For starters, Wodehouse is not merely a collection of turns of phrase; he’s a self-contained climate. The cadence, yes, but also the moral weather: the way fools are rescued, the exact timing of luck, the clockwork of farce that never draws blood, the happy endings. A new Jeeves novel doesn’t just borrow a voice; it asserts authority over a finished world. It’s not homage so much as annexation. Books are kingdoms; putting new chapters in a closed chronicle feels like revising a fresco after the painter is gone.

Wodehouse’s references — Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings, and that specific world of the inter-war idle rich —are non-portable. Borrow them, and you’re body-snatching. But his resemblance-features — light, benevolent comedy; clockwork farce; whimsical sentences that pirouette before landing on the joke — are portable, if only by a talented few. Theoretically, a skillful writer could pay homage to the style with new characters in a new setting, and the influence would be clear without being parasitical. Think Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes: you can see the family likeness (talking animals, language play, sealed imaginative habitats), yet Watterson found a way to reimagine it — childhood’s imagination instead of Kelly’s swamp politics. Hence my lack of interest in new Jeeves-and-Wooster stories. Like a surly adolescent, I don’t want to make nice with my new step-author.

Music can be more forgiving (or perhaps “slutty” is the word I want). The Beatles are the Genghis Khan of pop music: some of their DNA is in almost everyone since. Or consider how many members there are in the “blues-rock” family tree. Imagine the paucity if the musician’s guild refused to let anyone else work with the “three chords and a 4/4 beat” template. Still, though, a band like Type O was sui generis. There are obvious debts to the Beatles, Black Sabbath and the Doors, but there are too many unique signifiers: the deep baritone alternating with anguished howls, the funereal BPM, the cathedral reverb and pipe-organ pads, the bass thickened with chorus, the drums trudging like pallbearers, the morbid, self-depreciating humor mixed with Gothic/Romantic aesthetics. October Noir skillfully mimics all of this, even down to the guitar feedback and the drawn-out sound of the pick sliding down the strings. Why am I thrilled instead of outraged? Is it simply because they’re that good? If they only managed to capture, say, 90% of the Type O sound, wouldn’t the remaining 10% be, again, like the pea to the princess? But if so, does that imply I would be open to a pitch-perfect Wodehouse imitation? I hope not, but…

Rock already blesses imitation: covers, tribute bands, subgenre orthodoxy. The medium’s unit is the song, not the character or canon. If you write a new song inside Type O’s sonic idiom, you add repertoire without altering history. Peter Steele is dead; the supply of that exact vibe ended in 2010. A faithful successor fills a scarcity vacuum. No metaphysics of authorship is violated; no royalties are misdirected. The only “sin” is against “originality,” a contrivance that owes more to legal definitions of copyright than metaphysical essence. I wouldn’t want to hear AI versions of Type O, or see a Peter Steele hologram onstage while the other members play the catalogue, but I can live with this.

There’s also a ritual fans need before they can enjoy any continuation: a symbolic reset. After Mark Sandman died, Morphine’s other members didn’t insist that Morphine march on with a new frontman. They formed Bourbon Princess, Twinemen, and — closest to the original — Vapors of Morphine, each of which was recognizably “low rock,” but with just enough different elements to make them their own thing. The names mattered. They admitted, out loud, that the old band was no more, but they still had more songs to write. We could meet the music as additions to a lineage rather than counterfeit chapters in a finished book. Similarly, Kenny, Johnny and Josh didn’t go out and recruit a Peter Steele look-and-soundalike in order to keep producing new albums as Type O Negative, which would have felt wrong somehow. When I first heard October Noir, I was stunned at the fidelity. Then, I was just happy to hear new songs in that style, which I never thought I would again. Perhaps I had already done my mourning, and was ready to love once more.

Song In the Tooth

By in books, music

When I imagine a piece of music, something I do every day and often, I — always I think — rhythmically grind my upper and lower front teeth together. I have noticed it before but usually it takes place quite unconsciously. Moreover, it’s as if the notes in my imagination were produced by this movement. I think this way of hearing music in the imagination may be very common. I can of course also imagine music without moving my teeth, but then the notes are much more blurred, much less clear, less pronounced.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

This surprised me, because while I don’t grind my teeth, I do lightly tap or click them together along to music in my head. I don’t do it while listening to music; only when imagining it. I’ve been aware of it, but I never thought of it as significant enough to focus on, let alone wonder if anyone else did a similar thing. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it seems that current research calls it covert articulation: tiny, often unconscious activations of the speech-/singing-related muscles when we imagine sounds. “Imagining music recruits not just auditory cortex but motor regions (SMA/premotor, basal ganglia). Disrupting or down-regulating parts of this motor network can impair rhythm/beat perception; conversely, engaging it tends to help timing. So light, rhythmic jaw clicks would be one more way your motor system ‘locks in’ the beat of inner music.” The things you learn by accident…

That’s All He Can Stands, He Can’t Stands No More

By in jests japes jokes jollies, music

“This is why Trump won! I mean, this is our culture now!”

Ben Shapiro? Hugh Hewitt? No, this was a friend of mine, a guy in his fifties who has a weekly late-night radio show on a local station, where he plays punk, alternative, post-punk, and weird music in general. To the extent that he’s political, it’s a typical Gen-X sort of liberalism, formed in the days when “alternative music” actually meant being a non-lucrative subculture in opposition to the mainstream. For many of my fellow Gen-Xers, their worldview was solidified by the early 1990s: Republicans as the racist, sexist Tartuffes, and Democrats as the easy-going, open-minded cool people who aren’t religiously opposed to having fun. So what could have inspired this Psalm 22ish lament?

Well, as I said, he’s a DJ, he plays in a band, and he’s constantly listening to all sorts of music. With the end of the year approaching, it’s almost time for his “Best of 2024” episode, his favorite of the year. This year, for some reason, he thought he’d listen to some of the year’s mainstream hits and see if his punk-rock snobbery had led him to miss any gems. It was then that the streaming algorithm produced Ice Spice’s “Think U The Shit” (Fart),” with its poetic refrain:

Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts, like
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

“I love hip-hop! I consider myself a scholar! But this…” he sputtered. This is a guy who quit a ska band because he thought a couple of the other members were racist, as evidenced by the fact that they booed the mention of Barack Obama’s name from the stage at one show. I laughed and laughed, partially at the sub-moronic drivel coming from the bluetooth speaker, but mostly at his surprise. I feel like I’ve heard plenty of comparable garbage. Why was this the bridge too far?

Dressed Me Up In Women’s Clothes, Messed Around With Gender Roles

By in gender, music

As he says in his next tweet, it’s a rhetorical question, of course. Grunge music was counter-cultural in ways that haven’t changed much in the last 30 years. It was “against” all the right things. As Justin Quirk wrote in his history of glam metal, Nothin’ But a Good Time:

The line that was drawn in the sand by grunge wasn’t between the artificial and the real. While Nirvana’s delivery may have appeared simpler and more straightforward — and visually, it was — what it marked was the point where mainstream American rock music moved definitively from the modern to the postmodern. While glam metal had its layers of artifice and construction — especially in its sound and fashion — it functioned in a relatively one-dimensional way. Grunge looked at the world with a roll of the eyes and put things in quotation marks — glam metal was led by far simpler urges. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” appropriated its title from a wholesome TV deodorant commercial, and interpolated the riff from “More Than a Feeling” into live versions of the track because there’s something inherently funny about independently-minded punk-inspired misfits feasting on the carcass of one of the biggest mainstream rock hits of their parents’ era. By contrast, Blackie Lawless shot fireworks from his codpiece because it just looked incredibly cool and made the crowd scream. Grunge fashion recycled the lumberjack shirts of manual workers as an ironic kick at macho norms. Even the title of the genre’s lodestar album, Nevermind, came freighted with a kind of weary sigh, as though everything was just so much effort. Glam metal did exactly what it said on the label and traded in very obvious signs and signifiers, whereas grunge embodied a culture where everything worked on two levels. The music was heavy, but sensitive; it was popular, but didn’t want to be; it was noisy, but it didn’t rock; it was successful, but didn’t want to look like it. What glam metal was and what it stood for was glaringly obvious. Suddenly, with grunge, the whole business of what was real and what wasn’t, what was permissible and what was now beyond the pale, became extremely slippery.

Glam metal stars dressed like flamboyant drag queens with a wink and a smile. There were no pretensions of subversion and transgression, let alone social consciousness. They became rich and famous and attracted tons of groupies while having the audacity to love every minute of it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people were trying to retroactively claim Kurt Cobain for transgenderism. His self-loathing angst, his reverse-snobbery, his political correctness wouldn’t seem outdated at all if he were still alive today. Glam metal bands will never be useful in that way. They took something like gender-bending, which was supposed to be transgressive and threatening to mainstream norms, and made it into a superficial costume. Worst of all, they were accepted and rewarded for it. Not only was the mainstream not threatened by the spectacle of dudes wearing makeup, hairspray, and tight leather pants, they embraced it in the same spirit of superficial fun and got down to the perennial business of partying and getting laid. Those bands, and those fans, will never be forgiven for enjoying themselves.

Cloud Burst

By in music, technology

Ted Gioia:

I’d love to think I was wrong on this, but there’s simply too much evidence to support Theory #2. If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music to subscribers it wouldn’t buy a label that records so many works in the public domain. This is the first warning sign.

My favorite offerings on the BIS label are the Bach cantatas recorded by Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki. (I recommended them last year in my article about the cantatas.)

The BIS label has also released the full Beethoven symphony cycle—performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as well as lots of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and other core contributors to the classical repertoires. However, unlike the cantatas, these other BIS albums are seldom the most esteemed versions on the market.

But how many music fans searching for Beethoven or Mozart on streaming are picky about conductors and orchestras? If the first search results are the Minnesota Orchestra are they really going to dig deeper to find the Berlin Philharmonic?

Of course, some unique offerings can be found on BIS—especially of obscure Nordic composers. But do you really believe that Apple made this acquisition in order to corner the market on Kalevi Aho or Geirr Tveitt?

The very idea is ridiculous.

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company refused to comment on the deal, when CNBC tried to get more details, is revealing. If they really were proud of their sexy new classical label, they would take the opportunity to boast.

In my opinion, Apple Music is the least worst option for streaming music in the background while doing something else. That’s not saying much, of course. I’ve hated everything about the streaming age since it began. For me, the last straw was going to one of my playlists and seeing that one of the songs had been greyed-out and couldn’t be played. OK, fine, that’s always been the condition of using their service. You don’t own any of the music you download through their app. You pay ten bucks a month for the privilege of listening to whatever they have to offer. But if they decide to stop carrying a certain artist, album, or track, you’re out of luck. In this case, I just went to Amazon, bought the mp3 for a dollar, downloaded it to my hard drive, and uploaded it back into my iTunes library. Ah, but you see, iTunes and Apple Music are not the same thing. When I tried to add the song back to the playlist, I got a pop-up telling me that if I persisted in adding this foreign element, the entire playlist would be removed from Apple Music and I would only be able to listen to it on this computer.

So, I finally took Charles Cooke’s advice and set up my Plex library:

Over time, I have ripped all my music, my movies, and my TV shows and put them into Plex. It doesn’t matter where the files originally came from — be it DVDs, downloads, or even my iPhone (for home movies) — Plex is agnostic as to the source of the material, and it’s capable of playing pretty much any filetype you throw at it. Once it’s up and running, adding new material is as simple as putting it into the relevant folder on your computer, and then entering the metadata so that it shows up nicely in your apps (this is largely automated, but occasionally you need to intervene and correct its guess).

Why do this? Well, because while Netflix, Hulu, Disney + and so on are terrific — and I subscribe to all three — I have no control over what they keep in their library, and how. There’s something nice about having a large collection of media that can’t be removed at some else’s whim, especially given that the scolds have started to scour old material and remove anything from the canon that they consider offensive. In effect, Plex gives me the best of both worlds: I don’t have 5,000 DVDs and CDs cluttering up my house, but I’m also not reliant upon mega-corporations for access to my entertainment. If you have the interest and a little technical know-how, I’d highly recommend setting it up.

By which I mean, I pitched the idea to the Lady of the House as the sort of fun technical project that she loves, and she set it up while I sat there looking pretty and offering moral support. The important thing is, though, that now I have all my music library in one location, backed up on a detachable hard drive, and synced up so that any track I purchase from any source goes straight into my library. I highly recommend it for any other music-preppers who rightly distrust the reigning corporate dictum of, “You will own nothing and like it.”

 

Wallowing Without Thought

By in books, music

The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering — wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion — is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

I feel seen, and not in a good way!

I’ve always been aware that I don’t “get” classical music on its own terms, and that’s my loss. I’m aware that there are all sorts of subtle nuances that my coarse understanding is incapable of detecting. Like many simpletons, I just know what I like, even if I have no idea what the composer was trying to communicate, or how a composition would have been understood in context. I imagine it’s like trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language, having to rely entirely on tone and body language to have the slightest sense of what’s going on. Well, life is full of trade-offs and opportunity costs, and that just happens to be one of mine.

He’s the One Who Likes All Our Pretty Songs

By in media/propaganda, music

Casey Chalk:

But who would accuse the favored bands of the last quarter-century of being truly innovative, of carving out new, uncharted territory? Most of them seem as artificial and intentionally mainstream as The Monkees. Does Maroon 5 even play their own instruments? And as much as I adore the Black Keys, a band that in its early years perfectly represented the frustrated, post-industrial tenor of Rust Belt Ohio, they are at their best when retreading, or modifying and improving, paths made by earlier blues rock musicians many years before. And they are self-aware and self-deprecating enough to make light of their wealth and mainstream fame.

But Creed, like many of the other post-grunge poser bands of the late 1990s—Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Staind—were simply jejune copycats of perhaps the last legitimately novel rock movement, the authentically counter-cultural grunge bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of whom hailed from the Pacific Northwest.

If I were feeling like an ornery li’l cuss, I might argue that “the last legitimately novel rock movement” was actually the rap-metal hybrid generally known as nü-metal. In the late-80s and early-90s, there were a few cross-genre collaborations, like Run-DMC and Aerosmith, Anthrax and Public Enemy, and the Judgment Night soundtrack. Rage Against the Machine was probably the first band to make it big by combining elements of rap and rock, and given that they were basically Noam Chomsky’s politics set to music, they were widely acclaimed by music journalists. The same could not be said, to put it mildly, for those who followed in their wake around the turn of the century. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Hed PE were seen as the worst of both worlds. I have my theories about why this was so, but regardless, allowing that the whole debate over “originality” in such a mongrel beast as popular music is a fool’s errand to begin with, I think it’s still fair to say that the nü-metal bands were, if not original, certainly no less derivative than the punk/metal/alternative hybrid that we call grunge music. The fact that one style is glorified while the other is vilified tells you more about the agenda of the music journalists themselves, who often seem to suffer from sociology-envy, much to the detriment of their craft.

Which brings me to my real point, which is that Chalk is doing the same thing. He feels nostalgic for grunge music, and he wants to arrange a shotgun wedding between it and his national conservative/populist politics somehow. Grunge is vital because he sees it as a musical expression of the abandoned white working-class. If only they hadn’t been so hostile to organized religion, he sighs. Well, yes, that, combined with their predictable left-wing politics, is what makes this an exercise in fantastical narrative-crafting. Grunge was inextricably part of that first wave of political correctness in the early-90s and music journalism was right there with it. Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were just as insufferably snobbish and full of themselves as their descendants are today.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Only aspiring commissars want or expect their favorite artists to reflect their own opinions back to them. Most of us have long since made our peace with the fact that the majority of the people whom we pay to entertain us are abject morons. (I made the mistake years ago of reading Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, and my respect for the artists still hasn’t entirely recovered.) We wince when they share their vapid opinions on world events, and then get back to the important business of enjoying their acting, athleticism, or songwriting. It’s only when journalists in search of a narrative show up that we get these exercises in Procrustean plastic surgery. It’s fine, even laudatory, that Chalk loves grunge despite its inherent antipathy to his political ideology. The heart wants what it wants, and all that. That’s where it should end, though. Don’t try to reconcile the two and diminish them both in the process.

Superficial From Profundity

By in foolosophy, music

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Occasionally, I meet people who are unimpressed by Mozart. They insist that his music is “light” and “simple.” They are irritated by the myth-making around him. They’re so used to hearing about him that they’ve relegated him to being part of the wallpaper. I must confess that I’ve never understood this. In my view, Mozart isn’t a composer; he’s the composer. He’s the Shakespeare of the genre. He’s The One.

The writer Douglas Adams has an oft-repeated line that “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” I agree with Adams’s characterization of Beethoven, and I agree with his characterization of Bach. But he’s wrong about Mozart. Mozart doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be human, because Mozart barely was human. I forget who said that they didn’t believe in God but that Mozart made them wonder, but whomever it was, I understand it. The scale of Mozart’s talent is such that it’s almost impossible to accept at face value without wondering whether he was merely transcribing from somewhere else.

Cooke seems to have an Epicurean sensibility of his own, as evidenced by this and his previous appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse. I love Mozart and Wodehouse for the same reason: it’s a delight to watch virtuosos at play, especially when they’re so obviously enjoying themselves.

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