web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
I’ve been thinking about this particular piece, written as a strict fugue, for the past couple of weeks. I’m just finished with a fugue unit in my advanced music theory class, and I’m happy to put it behind me.
A couple of thoughts on this NPR article on the disappearance of the audiophile:
1. a confession
I don’t listen to lyrics.
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 gearsWell, 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 doSo 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.
A couple thoughts that I couldn’t work into the earlier post:
–You may think I’m being melodramatic, but look at the face of Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad and The Queen) when he talks about Glee:
–I don’t buy for a second that music being featured on Glee is good for musicians because it exposes people to their music (at least when talking about Glee covers released commercially. If the music stayed on the show, I probably wouldn’t have anything to say). I’m not saying that the original song artists are being exploited financially (although some of them probably are, as I would imagine that only the credited songwriters are paid), I’m saying that its dirty money.
–Interestingly, that same conversation happened about the legitimacy of samples in hip-hop. I think a continuum from good sampling and bad sampling has emerged: Kanye West (just as an example) sampling “21st Century Schizoid Man” in “POWER” is brilliant, while Kanye West lifting “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” wholesale in “Stronger” is lazy. Of course, that was a hit too, so maybe we’re just fucked.
–If anyone wanted to know why could never in any way get on board with Greg Sandow’s idea that the classical music should look to Glee to see how can it can become culturally relevant again, that was it.
–It’s really strange to me that we have a force on the music charts that is such a cipher. Look at the other top 10 artists I mentioned in the first section, all of which have their own flavor completely different from each other. And all of them were tremendously influential–you could probably find a direct musical descendant of each of them on the top 100 list I liked to. How could Glee possibly be influential? The sound of their music seems to have no connection to the popularity of their music, it’s simply an expression of a marketing machine. In other words, no musician would ever want to copy their sound (they don’t have one) or their song strategies (they don’t have one), and if they did, there’s no way they would succeed anyway. It’s like a weird backwards culture where Kidz Bop was the number 1 recording artist of all time.
–I spontaneously made the Kidz Bop/Glee comparison, but a quick Google search shows me that I’m not the first. It should be a bigger part of the conversation. As much as I hate the use of music to signal social status and identity, if I could shame people into not buying Glee music, I would.
-I’ve written way too much about this.
In the category of computer-aided statistics micronews*, the Official Charts Company (which sounds like a fake name) has stated that the Glee cast has broken Elvis Presley’s record for fastest act to score 20 top 40 hits. That particular “record” may or may not mean anything to you, but it’s undeniable that Glee singles are, to use Joe Biden’s charming turn of phrase, a big fucking deal. After all, look who (with the Glee cast and Elvis) rounds out the top 10 list of most entries in the top 40 charts: James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles, Fats Domino, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and FRANK MOTHERFUCKIN’ SINATRA**.
I think Glee is pretty mediocre as a television show, but that it’s popular doesn’t make me depressed about the future of television. In fact, it even works for me on occasion, like when it nods to the past by recreating a famous TV moment, or when it tweaks conventional gender roles, or when the combination of music and choreography is so well executed you can’t help but be entertained. But Glee‘s supremacy on the pop charts deeply depresses me, and to understand why, we have to take a detour through some pop music theory.
*It’s kind of like sports: if you have enough statistics kept over a long enough period of time, you’re likely to find two or three “records” being broken in any given game, which is why it’s sometimes hard not to laugh at the bullshit the commentators are slinging.
**Although the piano is usually peripheral to pop music, it’s interesting to see how many keyboardists are on this list. Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Elton John and Stevie Wonder often use piano as their primary instruments, everybody knows that Paul McCartney loves his ebony and ivory, and not as many people know that Aretha Franklin is a wonderful gospel pianist.
In 1979, Brian Eno gave a lecture titled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at a conference sponsored by the New Music America Festival, which was subsequently published in Downbeat. In it, he addresses the musical implications of multitrack recording, a technology that was relatively new (Earlier music studios were limited to 4- or 8-track recording. Eno is talking about 32 & 64 track machines; the virtually unlimited tracks that come with today’s computer technology was a couple decades in the future.) Eno:
The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something’s on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren’t. It’s hard to do anything very interesting with a disc – all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can’t actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.
…
In a compositional sense this takes the making of music away from any traditional way that composers worked, as far as I’m concerned, and one becomes empirical in a way that the classical composer never was. You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound – you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter – he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.
Eno makes many points in this lecture, but what I want to focus on is the idea that pop music has a specificity that’s different from classical music, or from folk music. Every musical tradition has a loose set of values that define what music is*. For classical music, you might say that the music is defined by the written score, or the composers intention. The defining characteristic for a folk song might be anything from a set of chords to the words of a refrain.
One of the strengths of recorded pop music** is that it is so sonically specific–the sounds that make it on the record define the song. Minute adjustments to the tone of individual instruments, carefully tailored studio effects, all of these details make up the identity of the song.
*Keep in mind that I definitely don’t want to say that these values are universally accepted, or that there aren’t exceptions.
**To distinguish from live music, which is a whole different beast. If it weren’t then there would never be any bands who are great live but have shitty albums, or vice versa.
The very first time I remember becoming completely enchanted with a detail in a pop song was listening to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover.”
Many of my early music memories consist of listening to KRTH 101.1, the oldies station, in my mother’s car. There’s a moment—right after a climax of guitar, backing vocals, and noise—where the music simplifies to a guitar arpeggio over a relaxed percussion groove, and this voice, this voice, enters (4:28 in the video above*). The story I’ve heard is that Tommy James was just fucking around in the studio and wanted to hear what it sounded like if he plugged his mic into a guitar amp with the tremolo effect on. That effect blew my mind.
This song has been covered many times before, and it was probably played many different times live, but that effect is inseparable from the song’s identity. Any music fan can point out those things that, taken together, make up the music that they love.
*The best comment on that video: “I remember riding in the car and listening to this song on the radio and asking my dad why the singers voice gets all weird. He replied, “That’s for people who are fucked up on drugs and listening to the song”, then he turned it up.”
4. bringing it all together
Which is why Glee‘s dominance of the music charts deeply depresses me. The show’s production strategy is always to dull any edges, to plane any uneven surface. Just listen to that Jason Mraz song at the top of the post, a song that’s insipid to begin with. It doesn’t just change the details I was talking about–it obliterates them. Glee never met a guitar solo it couldn’t castrate. All the Glee voices are competent and pleasant but processed beyond belief, as far away from real singing as Oscar Meyer wieners are from beef. Somehow every song manages to sound like a commercial jingle (from back when, you know, they made those).
I think it encourages listeners not to care. There are many forces, from the increase in ambient music in public places to the sheer amount of music available in the internet, that discourage real listening. And I cannot accept that if people are really listening, and caring about what they’re listening to, they will choose the Glee version of a song, rather than the real thing.
hammer & jack 