Better over the top under the top

" I don't write music, I invent it"

- Stravinsky

"A man climbs a mountain because it is there

"A man makes a work of art because it is not there"

- Carl Andre

bonus Andre-ism 

"Twenty years ago [Clement] Greenberg was listening to painters; now he's talking to them. The result is a formula for what painting should look like"

 That’s funny, I don’t like The Shining either. I’ve never watched it all the way through. Find a lot of Kubrick rather ponderous actually. But that’s the classic thing, though isn’t it, when a writer is so good, the way their mind works so compelling, it’s not really relevant whether you actually like the thing they’re enthused about, they’ve created this sort of surplus value - not quite the right term - but (from your point of view as still unconvinced or unmoved by the spur to the writing you’re reading), they’ve created something out of nothing. 

Same, actually, when they attack something dear to you - the critique is so well done, so provocative, that it creates a supplementary value - you don’t resent it, it’s a challenge to argue the defence.

 One thought for you - what values does the deconstruction of a dance music form add to it? The original deconstruction (ie Derrida, et al) was critical  - it involved very close work on philosophical texts, intended to unsettle and undermine its precepts, expose the hidden assumptions, the cognitive blindspots - showing how, for instance, one term in a binary was in complicity with the other term and dependent on it. Essentially the goal was to reveal the shaky foundations on which a philosophical or ethical or political argument was made. How does that transpose to the practice of making a "sort of" house track or a not fully functional jungle tune? Wouldn't it be more valuable - literally more constructive - to actually build a new form of dance music, rather than create this off-kilter, defective version of an existing dance form, which if nothing else does the job it was designed for? 

 

Peel is an odd one because he was absolutely vital for me during a short period of my life, when I had hardly any money and you could hear all this stuff every weekday night for free. But soon as I had a student grant and/or dole I could afford more records and started to make my own way with music, or rather, I was finding certain music press figures more reliable guides than Peel. And then when I became a music journalist, I didn’t need a filter / curator figure - I was doing that myself, for myself. So from about 1985 onwards I hardly ever listened to Peel - and I confess started to find him, increasingly, somewhat of a de-intensifier or de-libidiniser, to use the terms Mark would probably have applied, as a cultural presence. His flat, dour presentation had a deflating effect on what he was presenting. Okay, sure, on Top of the Pops, that unimpressed manner was a tonic, in contrast to the bubbly blandness of the other presenters. But a whole two hours of it on the radio... 

He was also fairly erratic as a filter/curator - if you go back to the old Peel shows, including those done during the absolute white heat of postpunk, there’s the well known great things he championed like the Fall and all kinds of bizarre oddities that had no other home on the radio, but it’s striking how much subpar generic stuff and outright rubbish  he played. And by the mid-Eighties the show was just too eclectic to have a coherent vibe - shambling shite next to African music next to electro next to hardcore punk next to something folky next to…  Mark would probably have found Peel’s approach to have not been sufficiently nihilatory - the ragbag eclecticism with an non ideological slant towards the DIY and regional added up to a sort of unpop version of poptimism, in fact.

 “Don't ask me why I obsessively look to rock 'n' roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it's just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since”

-  Lester Bangs

 "Of greater interest and importance... is the kind of innovation which is a true cultural innovation in that it introduces into a culture a behavior which is unknown not only to that culture but to any culture. I shall call it emergent innovation, or cultural transcendence. It is always negational or anticultural and depends upon the randomly assembled package of the interests of some individual. It also depends upon an over-determination of aggressive competence (an "interest in" aggressiveness). We may begin by considering one minor manifestation of such aggressiveness, the behavioral phenomenon of adolescent vandalism. Even while I have been writing this chapter, a group of five unusually enterprising adolescents from my city stole from construction and demolition companies large amounts of explosives, together with the equipment needed to set them off. There were several mysterious minor explosions and then came a really quite spectacular one, the destruction of the concrete ticket-office at one of the high school stadiums. Fortunately or unfortunately (it is difficult to decide), the boys were detected and captured within a few days. Such acts take place in situations of impunity. There are consequences, but not, the vandals hope, to themselves. Vandalizing empty houses is particularly popular, especially if the residents of the house are at a higher economic level than that of the vandals. More than once in this book we have encountered the behavioral phenomenon of rehearsal, and adolescent vandalism is the rehearsal of aggressive competence—in situations of impunity. Nevertheless it is designed to destroy or damage property valuable to others. Sometimes the value of the property is quite small; twice in seven years I have had my mail box destroyed, both times very late at night, and obviously with bricks or stones thrown from moving automobiles. On the other hand, a few years ago a nearby expensive house burned to the ground. The point is that the property destroyed is valuable to somebody; otherwise there would be no point to the vandalism. But property is a sign, at least minimally a sign, of value. The vandals themselves respond to that sign either with little intensity or a great deal. The sign destroyed may elicit from them a powerful response (it may engage an interest), or it may elicit a very weak response. But it can be successfully predicted that it will elicit a powerful response in the vandalized. I am furious when my mailbox is destroyed, although it is worth only a few dollars. Nevertheless, since it is my property, the mailbox is an interest which sustains my persona and also my self-ascription of value, particularly since it has my name on it. I am likewise irritated when children cross my property or play in my pond, but I am ashamed of being irritated, and I let them. Children have to play someplace besides home. The man next door, however, has put up a hurricane fence specifically to keep children from treading on his sacred ground. It may not be sacred to them, but it is sacred to him. It sustains his personality. His fence is an act of aggressiveness, masked as defense."

-- Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power

 

Seen on the back of a bus, while I was walking Eli to school

No rant, no slant

An ad for a radio station, appealing to people who don't like talk radio, who

I had to chuckle

That could be the slogan for music writing today

But what' s good in news isn't so

Calm, collected, tempered, temperate.

Mild-mannered, unassuming

Two styles seem to dominate

There is the closely reasoned, dispassionate, second-guessing, very interested  in the "optics" of how a record is being received, very much similar to that style of political blogging parsing

As though the writer is levitating above the fray, it is every ne else is trapped within their worldview, everyone else is an interest group, everyone is

The critic though is dis-interested and post-ideological

I've done this sort of thing myself of course, it is a mode that has something to offer, I suppose ... it doesn't get the blood pulsing though does it

I think great music writing comes about through the pressure of the irrational (which is how music works, ultimately) on the intellect.

Ego-less

A kind of culinary mode

A record becomes its ingredients

The vocal is a little too this, there's a bit too much

I like the balance of X amount of this and X amount of that is just what my palate likes

Records assessed in the way a dish on Top Chef would be assessed.

This isn't ego-less writing, but the ego doesn't amount to much

Here the writer falls back upon a ego that has really nothing to substantiate it, an impoverished self, without swagger or will-to-power, without fanaticism or the desire to impose

It never reaches out for principles

It refuses to dictate or legislate

It's all a matter of taste (this pleases me, this displeases me)

It's painstakingly honest, would never exaggerate or weave a naughty fiction

But it never aspires to truth

It's a kind of post-truth writing

Writing without belief

But critical writing without truth is what then?

 

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” – C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Saint Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

“I cannot help but regret that I did not live 50 or 100 years sooner. Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, . . . too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them.” 

-  George F. Kennan, diaries, 1927

 

To counter the pessimistic question of where music is heading, I would aver that it goes nowhere: it resides right there in the dimensional warp between your hands and your head, between the act of consuming and the act of listening. I can testify to how my deeper understanding of music has come from two types of moments. The first is an unpredictable encounter with a song whose materiality — its texture, its configuring, its apparition — overwhelms my attempt to dissect its contents. The second is when someone else turns me on to a song, not by intimidation, oneupmanship or neurotic insistence, but because they somehow manage to point out something they experienced deep within the song which I then attempt to register. In this latter case, I try to not listen for myself, but through an alternative self which can navigate the music better than I. In film scoring, one’s personal taste is a deadly liability. Film scoring entails dealing with psychological sensations and effects which go well past any sense of ethical stability and well-being. Film scores thus enable a promiscuous listening which I find liberating: I feel I’ve gone beyond myself into something more interesting than my pithy sense of taste.

 

Philip brophy in the wire on listening and role of turning people on through alternative selves

 "The future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like." - Fredric Jameson, 2015

 

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
-- Quote by Winston Churchill

 “What most of us have to fear for the future is not that something terrible is going to happen, but rather that nothing is going to happen. That we may live in a boring world, in an eventless world where nothing happens.”

- JG Ballard

 "Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember."

Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche 

 It's an odd thing getting old, cos on the one hand you think "I want to make every day count" but you equally feel "I can't be arsed".  Or, "I'm so knackered". I do feel a strong impulse  - although that's not the right word, cos it sounds dynamic, it's more like a sort of a kind of prolapse of the will, this spreading swamp of apathy  -  to never do another book. Yet I also have about six or seven ideas that itch quite strongly. I suppose the point is the process of doing them, rather than some kind of time-defeating achievement.  More about being energised in the now. 

 "The return to history everywhere remarked today… is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the 'raw material' of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation"

-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991