A couple of thoughts on this NPR article on the disappearance of the audiophile:
I’m not sure that I believe in a “golden age” of high-end audio. Music reproduction technology has always trended toward the more convenient and the more personal. Records presented a more convenient and personal way to listen to music than going to hear live music. If iPods were available in the 50’s, they’d have loved them too.
For that matter, any record is worse sound quality than live music.
iPod is to stereo as transistor radio is to gigantic handheld radio.
You can’t discount improvements in recording technology. Regardless of the method of reproduction, recording technology is much more sophisticated and sensitive than in the past. It’s like video: digital is not as good as film (yet), but it’s much better than tape.
Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter,” 4th Movement. Jeffrey Tate conducting the English Chamber Orchestra.
Why would you do this, Mozart? You know that I find your music boring; your perfectly harmonized tunes, your transparently constructed forms. And then you go and compose something that’s so self-evidently good that it makes me angry.
“[I became increasingly interested in] the physical properties of music. That sounds silly, it’s like saying, ‘During my career as a chef, I became increasingly interested in how food tastes.’ But there we go. It shows you what kind of hole music had dug itself into at that point. It’s a profoundly different starting point because ideological composing is like serving a medicine that might taste bad, but it’s very good for you. And I thought that this was actually a little mean position to be in permanently: I don’t see myself as a fascist family doctor who knows what is best for everyone.”
It sounds awful, boorish even. And I wish I could tell you that it’s just because I have a much better ear for melodies and harmonies than words. That’s true, by the way. There’s no song that I can’t pick out on the piano, and I can’t look at a song title without the hook filling my head. But the real reason that I don’t pay attention to lyrics is that I am cynical.
It’s a paradox: if the lyrics are about something–in support of some message or political cause–or express some sincere emotion I usually can’t believe the singer. If the lyrics aren’t about anything (like, say, the lyrics of the entire Radiohead oeuvre) then there’s no weight to the song. These flaws don’t prevent me from appreciating good songs, but it does mean that those rare songs that manage to be sincere, artful, and weighty distinguish themselves as being in a class of themselves.
“Outfit” from Drive-By Truckers’ album Decoration Day is one of those songs.
2. outfit
You want to grow up to paint houses like me, a trailer in my yard till you’re 23.
You want to be old after 42 years, keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears
Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing so I figured you already know,
but in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow:
Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.
Six months in a St. Florian foundry, they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama, and I got to missing you too.
And I went back to painting for my old man and I guess that’s what I’ll always do
So don’t let ’em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy man’s paint.
Don’t call what your wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent. Don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, Don’t give it away.
Don’t give it away
3. american assimilation
I’m not from the South, and the culture that Jason Isbell evokes in his song is not my culture, but every time I listen to this song a wave of homesickness rushes over me. This is because the song is really about assimilating into a wider, wealthier American culture–something that I identify with strongly.
It’s an incredibly nuanced song: half father guiding his son away from the direction that his life has taken; half affirmation for the man that his son will become, a very different man than his father. There’s this dead end, feedback loop aspect to the generations of men that stay in their hometown. The father knows that if his son moves into a trailer on his land, he’s not leaving. One of the most heartbreaking parts of this song is the father’s description of “Tech School.” That was the father’s chance to get out, that was further education: rote memorization of appliance parts. And that’s why the thing that will most disappoint him is to find his son working as a wage-slave, not in control of his own destiny and subsisting on the work that the wealthy consider themselves too important to do.
And yet the father has the foresight to see that–if he makes it out–his son will never be quite like him, and the wisdom to affirm his son anyway. The list in the chorus is sometimes preemptively supportive (“Don’t worry about losing your accent, a Southern Man tells better jokes.”), sometimes practical (“Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday.”), and sometimes a reminder that–even though he might be creating a completely new life for himself–he owes it to his family and the people that he grew up with to be respectful of their values even as he operates in a culture that doesn’t share those values.
Like I said, I’m not Southern, but I suspect that one of the reasons the song speaks so directly to me is that the trajectory that this man’s son is on is common to many subgroups within American culture. Every generation that assimilates further worries about losing their accents, they worry that their children don’t take family seriously. The South-specific details, and even the biographical details shared by the narrator of the song are window-dressing to what is actually a very sweet song.
After such a long silence, I feel like I should have some profound thoughts, but instead I offer a simple bit of musical discovery.
Last week I had a hankering for Bill Evans. When I first started listening to music in high school, he was one of the jazz musicians that I connected with right away. I loved his spare, impressionistic lines and his amazing sense of harmony. One of the songs that I remember strongly was Evans’ “Waltz for Debby,” as I had a friend that liked to play it repeatedly.
So I started listening to the 1961 album. I was doing schoolwork, so I wasn’t actively listening, then this tune hit me in the ear:
2. flamenco sketches
Hearing that opening sequence of bass notes and chords startled me because it was identical to the opening of one of my favorite pieces of music ever, “Flamenco Sketches” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (actually, my favorite is the alternate take included in the special anniversary re-release of the album, but that sounds absurdly music douchey).
This is one of those pieces that I feel like I could talk about forever and yet have no words at all. There’s a crazy, cosmological balance in the relationship between the bass and the piano. Miles’ entrance is like a cry, with so much sadness and vulnerability. Cannonball Adderly’s solo is like a sermon. And John Coltrane is so fucking charming.
Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece notes that the track is called “Flamenco Sketches” because nothing was planned out in advance except the introduction–the thing that keeps capturing my ear–and the modal harmonic regions. I was floored to learn that the introduction predates Waltz for Debby and Kind of Blue.
3. “piece piece” and “some other time”
According to Kahn’s book, the first time that Evan’s recorded this chord progression was in a song called “Piece Piece:”
Which was itself a cover of Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” written for the musical On The Town. Below, I’ve embedded a truly bizarre version of that song (sorry for the bad audio quality):
Lenny’s voice could scare Leonard Cohen. He makes Tom Waits sound like a boy soprano.
A couple of thoughts on this NPR article on the disappearance of the audiophile:
hammer & jack 