Archives : all posts by Jordan

Baptist Disciple Singers - "Awurade Yesu"

If you're not partying like this then you're not partying in Ghana, though you may be partying in Ghana's opposite, Japan. To test, check to see whether you're partying like the following.

Nagisa Ni Te - "Yesterday's Story"

If neither, spraypaint "Killjoy was here" on the wall closest to you and come to terms with the statement's very veracity, for you are a killjoy and you are here, where, evidently, the properest parties are not.

[Buy Baptist Disciple Singers, Nagisa Ni Te]

This is the third in a series of three posts celebrating and responding to Carl Wilson’s book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

Carl’s installment in the 33 1/3 series of books on albums is, as Dan and Sean have both pointed out, a book about Celine Dion that is not about Celine Dion. Rather, it is a discursive work on, among other things, taste, identity, and the practice of music criticism. It’s also about the writer himself; in the middle of the book, as the personal begins to pervade its pages and its themes are reframed in this context, we discover that what at first appeared a worthy academic exercise is actually a stealthily affecting work. As Sean put it yesterday, it is “a treatise on aesthetics cut through (like a hot knife) with the deeply personal.”

In another way, however, Carl’s book actually really is about Celine Dion. Let’s Talk About Love is in fact a fine and compelling, if highly unusual, work of appreciation. Yes, it could have been about someone else, some other saccharine or schmaltzy artist, but it’s not. By the end of his year-long experiment, Carl can write earnestly, though somewhat tepidly, about a few merits of Dion’s music, and carefully – without patronizing and with sympathy – about her usefulness in the world, about what other people might like about her. And in so doing, I think he provides by example an answer to one of the central questions of his book: If there is no objectively good or bad taste, no hierarchy of low and high brows, what is the point of music criticism?

***

"The Letter" - Joe Cocker

My eighth year was an important one in my aesthetic development. In 1988 I was impacted in particular by two events: 1) Ben Johnson was stripped of his Olympic Gold Medal in the 100 metre dash; 2) I bought my first two cassettes: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume Two and Joe Cocker’s Greatest Hits. Johnson’s disgrace brought me infinite sadness, my new tunes uncountably infinite joy. Thus was my intended career path diverted from track and field to the arts.

My parents were fans of Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker (one of whose songs is also “their song”), and I took pleasure in liking the same things as them, especially when “our taste” diverged, as it always did, from the standard taste of my peers. My aesthetic was determined at that age by wanting to be one of the cool kids, and my role models just happened to be Alex and Frum Himelfarb, Ph.Ds. This is not to say that I didn’t derive real pleasure from listening to the music – my first musical loves were among my most intense – just that it was not in a vacuum that I arrived at those particular artists. (For more on my musical education as provided by Dad, read this.)

By high school I’d added indie rock, proto-punk, post-punk, new wave, prog, jazz (and several of its sub-genres) to my early musical diet of classic rock and folk. I was constantly in search of the new - new sounds, new names. I hosted a show at Ottawa U’s radio station that might best have been called Something to Alienate Everyone. When I moved to Montreal for university, I became an obscene consumer of records, buying up everything I could get my grubby little paws on. I discovered soul and old blues and John Fahey – whatever he is – classical musics and country and everything else. I was so open-minded that my brains fell out; a list of the many and diverse purchases made during my Great Consumption would act as a reductio ad absurdum, negating the validity of my critical work, if such a thing were possible. My motivations for behaving this way were myriad: Yes, the accumulation of cultural capital was part of it; but – and I imagine this is true of almost all music collectors - I was also genuinely curious, genuinely loving of these new and different musics, an addict looking for my next fix.

There is no doubt that I taught myself to like much of this stuff. I was not born into my taste; rather, my preferences are the product of a subtle, ineffable interaction between nature, socialization and cultivation. What difference does it make how I arrived at them; I am glad for the discovery of every piece of music I now enjoy, for without any one my life would be less rich.

***

Now I’m an old hermit, it’s true. Whereas until recently my taste biography was one of constant addition, for the first time my musical preferences have narrowed and hardened. You might say that I now know what I like, or you might say that I’ve become lazy, less willing to learn to like. Either way, I can’t properly serve the traditional role of music critic. I’m not interested enough to sift through every new release, I don’t have the energy to write negatively about music that never had a chance with me or the conviction to convince someone that something they like isn’t good.

Several years ago, I wrote an article about the 33 1/3 series in which I talked about the “tremendous potential of music writing to go beyond the role of guide, of simple yay- or naysayer, to serve as a broadener of taste, an enricher of appreciation, and a window into the author’s own experience of music.” I argued that the most profound thing a critic can do is “point to something in a musical work - a harmony, a melody, a lyrical theme, a fact about its creation or creator, or even the critic’s own subjective experience of it - that makes the listener experience its beauty anew or with new depth.” None of this depends upon objective detachment or an acknowledgement of high and low, just a belief in the possibility of the intersubjective appreciation of art. I hope that is what we do here at Said the Gramophone. Certainly Carl’s book does it in spades; by calling out our flimsy aesthetic prejudices, he encourages a more generous approach to art as well as to people with taste different from our own.

[Buy Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, and please buy Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love]

"Can I Change My Mind," in which a rhythm section betrays a singer's subconscious:

Tyrone Davis is an incorrigible Lothario, a player and a cheat - not even he will deny it. Faced for the first time with pangs of regret, thoughts of what might have been with the latest in a long line of ousted lovers, he sings plaintively over an incongruous instrumental. The guitar: Uncontained joy manifested in too many notes in too little time, bars overflowing with slides and runs and syncopated strums. The drums, bass: Jackson 5 at their most elated. From where is this joy derived? Is it from a memory of past happiness or the anticipation of future reconciliation? Perhaps from a realization that Davis's romantic wandering was not in vain, that there's more to feel than flesh, that under certain circumstances this guitar line can be played with conviction.

[Buy]

St. Thomas - "Take a Dance With Me"

There’s not much room up there, above the tremulous falsetto of St. Thomas. An uncertain violin occasionally rises above, as do a few high plucked notes on an acoustic guitar, but the saint’s own voice tends toward the heavens most consistently. And the heavens tend toward it: I think I speak for the strange man sleeping beatifically in the Greyhound seat next to mine when I say that, muffled by headphones or not, the song’s softness – strummed old guitar strings almost indistinguishable from brushes on snare, reverberating chains – is complemented by the bath of sunlight in which we now sit. My initial lede for this post was “Aquinas does it again!” but then I heard sympathy and gentleness in the music and couldn’t find the severity and scholastic rigour one might expect from a St. T.A. composition. This music is more toned-down Tiny Tim than St. Thomas, or if it must be a saint’s, then why not St. Francis, who talked to and serenaded the animals and probably tiptoed through the tulips, too. [Buy]

***

The Anomoanon - "Sixteen Ways"

Also on the bus: text messagers and cell phone talkers, magazine readers and perfume wearers, silent sleepers and very loud ones, heads on strangers’ shoulders and faces turned out toward the receding landscape. Most are going home, where, among family, love will mix with security and booze and their opposites. In his ode to the domestic, Will Oldham’s brother Ned sings of the complex emotional climate of the home, where things are at once “coming together at the seams” and coming apart, where a cry is both an indication of sadness and a proof of life. He does this in the wobbly drawl of his brother, while letting his lead guitars wander untethered over a backdrop of square-wave dynamics. Thus does he mirror the reassuring untidiness of home with this blessed mess of song. [Buy]

Johnnie Taylor - "Rome (Wasn't Built In a Day)"

Miami was hot even in winter. So we dressed like it was summer underneath our coats and mittens and scarves, denuding once inside. What an appropriately named bar!

Inside - this was the last time I saw her before I first spoke to her - she was dressing to leave. A white tuque and a red pea coat. Her young cheeks were flushed from drink and she sang along to "Crazy," which played on the jukebox. From what I could hear, her approach was more Janis Joplin than Patsy Cline, and it didn't suit the song at all.

Later, when I first approached her, she ignored me. "Hi," but she walked right past me. So I went back to my g and t and tried to cool down. This happened three more times.

Her first words to me were slurred only ambiguously in my direction. "Guess my middle name!" This had something to do with a separate conversation, not involving me, and on which I'd been conspicuously eavesdropping.

"Elizabeth," I proffered and immediately regretted it. An old woman's name.

"Starts with an 'm'"

"Oh. Mandy!"

She didn't speak to me again for three weeks. We were outside; though I'm not sure how we got there. My roommate, Joel, was talking to some acquaintance of hers and then whispering and then we were out in the cold, standing in a circle composed of Joel, me, her and four of her friends (douches). They were passing around a joint. I'd never smoked before, though I wasn't about to let anyone know that. Once the smoke hit my lungs, it wasn't long before I was talking too much and calling her Mandy again, which didn't get the reaction I was hoping for.

It's true that we never exchanged another word - if you define 'word' in the traditional sense. It's also the case that, from that point on, she always eyeballed me in a way that most people reserve for weirdos who may pose a threat of some kind. And then, at some point, she was gone from the city, then I was gone from the city. But I wouldn't say, as you probably would, that I blew it. I prefer to think of it as having planted a slow-germinating seed of love.

Persistence, I understood even then, is paramount. "Where there's life, there's hope," I always say, and then study the faces of my audience to see how quixotic/creepy I am coming across. After all, it occurred to me one day, years after I first smoked pot just outside of Miami, that Rome wasn't built in a day. It took many days to build Rome. And ever since, I have been deeply heartened by this analogy, for if our love is Rome then yes, it will take time to build and no, neither of us can escape it. No matter where we stray or what our (her) instincts or preferences or circumstances might dictate, inevitably, all roads, etc.

Pere Ubu - "SAD.TXT"

[buy Johnnie, Pere]

Stella Chiweshe - "Njuzu"

Stella Chiweshe, the Queen of the Mbira, sings in Shona, a language I don’t understand, so I can’t say for sure that her lyrics ask the question that her music begs, i.e. Who plays video games in the middle of a construction site? but I can say for sure that her song is as sad as a manatee is mammalian, a ‘mom’ palindromic. Ancient sounds are thrown against an electric fence, while, in fugue, the vocalist debates herself, takes losses in direct proportion to victories. [Buy]

***

El Perro Del Mar - "I Can't Talk About It"

Usually, the purpose of speech is to communicate a message, so it is therefore generally undesirable to say the opposite of what you mean (irony excluded). It’s somewhat perverse then that in “I Can’t Talk About It,” that salty sea dog El Perro Del Mar sounds like she’s singing, “I can really talk about it,” as if she were a western European medievalist preparing to answer a question on the Bayeux Tapestry. Though the intention is somewhat more depressive and dispossessed, the woman sounds like a braggart, a braggadocio, full of bravura, if not like a bravo, some bracken, a broadside. For fans of modern-day Motown, latter-day Christmas, Xanax, Zoloft, etc. [Buy]

Metallic Falcons - "Airships"

Somewhere there’s a woman who carries a hand-held cassette recorder wherever she goes. She records ideas for songs as they come to her, fragments of melody with her voice. When I first met her, I thought this was an affectation and I didn’t like it; I wished that she’d stop. Later, I realized that she was more unselfconscious than I’d given her credit for, just her unembarrassed embarrassing self. And then I was glad for the tapes, for they document the seeds of a brilliant body of work - a million songs wide and as many good ideas deep. She called herself The Fresh Young Breath, maybe still does. Though, given that she never performed, and barely ever shared her work, a name was unnecessary.

There’s something of the disconcerting otherwoldliness of The Fresh Young Breath in the work of Metallic Falcons, something of the trudge and swamp and loneliness. “Airships” is isolation made musically manifest. “Come with me,” the singer beckons, “where rainbows die.” And she invites us to other liminal places, too, and paints them with the distorted, falling-apart notes of an electric guitar. How have we come to hear this, I wonder? This impossible summons. It calls to mind a girl singing tantalizing thoughts into a recording machine, the fruit of which will never reach our ears.

[Buy]