I think we're all poseurs on this bus
Here's a well-written review of what sounds like a pretty interesting book by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor called Faking It.
I haven't read the book yet, but it seems like they're pointing to the inherent pointlessness of dividing musical acts into authentic and inauthentic. And it feels kind of liberating to think of all pop music as essentially contrived, and therefore it becomes a matter not of judging realness, but of examining all kinds of other aspects of the music. After all, authenticity has this monolithic quality based on the fact of its indefinability-- most often it's cited by people as something you "feel," or as something a performer either has or doesn't. Well, that's not very helpful, now is it?
It seems definitely true that certain bands are going to get at you in a way that feels profound and for which you have no explanation, but that doesn't mean they're any more authentic than a band that doesn't do that to you. We're all conglomerates of influence and experience, and it seems to be, by my own internal reckoning, that a band that strikes me in that peculiar way falls in a kind of sweet spot between so familiar to my taste that they don't challenge me, and so outside of my familiarity that they don't connect with the things that I've previously found meaning in.
One thing that always perplexes me a bit is when people say they like a band because it's not like anything they've ever heard before. I mean, I can appreciate the feeling of discovery, but in my experience, the things I've heard before (and heard a lot), I've heard because I liked them. That is, I've chosen to delve into and listen to things because they reverberated in some way with me, and things I haven't gotten into, well, they've left me cold. I can always appreciate it when a band does things differently enough that I begin to reconsider things I've previously ignored (viz. Jay-Z w/r/t mainstream hip-hop or Boris w/r/t metal), but those artists are gateway artists precisely because there are aspects to them which connect to what I know. Boris bring elements of experimental music into metal, which everyone acknowledges, but their recordings also have a garage-y quality which is quite different from most of the metal that I've heard in passing. The drums often sound more like the Meters in tonal quality-- they have a kind of boxy, woodiness to them that sounds more Motown than Motorhead. And then seeing them live totally sold me. There was very little of the posturing I associate with metal; the whole thing was very zen and calm, despite being overwhelmingly loud. Of course, I also appreciate a band like Zebulon Pike for embracing those very inauthenticities w/r/t their album art and stage presence.
Sigh. I guess we're back to discussing realness. But at least we're discussing it, rather than just haphazardly attributing it to stuff we like.
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3 comments:
It seems this sort of wonderings are puzzling a lot of folks lately. I wish you could read in spanish so you could visit my blog, anyway, I'll recommend yours.
cool runnings
This is certainly a discussion that is had frequently by musicians and I think those very musicians can learn a lot about the very music they debate by simply listening to the enthusiasts. I can't count the amount of times I've heard one of my music aficionado friends explain to my why they like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Mos Def, Jimmy Hendrix, King Crimson, Ornette Coleman, and numerous others who are known for purposefully bending the known limits to what constitutes a "style" or what have you. They like these pioneers of music because they take what was already accepted as good music and work their asses off to add their own element to it, even at the risk of alienating themselves from the accepted music lexicon. I mean, when Ornette Coleman recorded the landmark album "the Shape of Jazz to Come", purists wanted his head on a stake! Many still do. Recently, Ornette won a Pulizer Prize for music, something that only Wynton Marsalis had won previously. Wynton, for those of you who don't know, is a trumpet player who - very much unlike his brother Brandford (who played with Sting) - has dedicated his life to explaining jazz as a "music language" to be kept free of all other forms of music. He routinely dogs bands that merge jazz and hip hop, for example, two styles that share more similarities in their historical importance than any other two musics known to man, I would say.
Anyway, point is: The greatest, most widely loved and respected music in the world - the music that really goes down in the history books - is NEVER the music that is "traditional" in nature. To the contrary, it is music that is true to the tradition of exploration and honesty. Perhaps the person who most personifies this ideal is Duke Ellington. He took what was already well established and added in modern classical music, African roots rhythm and the improvisational vibe that was so prevalent in the early 20's, and made music that sounds just as modern and amazing today as it ever did. In his own words: "There are only two kinds of music: good and bad."
I dig on that.
Duke Ellington is definitely a great example of an artist who innovated via syncretic means. That is, an artist who recombined and brought together extant traditions in new ways. There are plenty of great examples of these kind of musicians, especially in the 20th century in American popular music: Duke, Robert Johnson, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and the list goes on. As you observed, these people were often misunderstood. The myth surrounding Johnson and his supposed deal with the Devil doesn't give him enough credit as an incredible master of blues style. He didn't invent blues, but he took all the disparate threads from all his influences (Son House, Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton) and knit them into a cohesive style which became the DNA for the countless blues artists that followed him. Davis took a chance on an unknown saxophonist whose tone turned a lot of people who were used to the smooth tones of Ben Webster and Lester Young off. That was John Coltrane, and then throughout Davis' career, he took chances again and again and each time broadened and enriched the jazz tradition. Hendrix fused psychedelic music with rhythm and blues. Seems ironic now that he's cited as authentic when in fact he was making a seriously weird bastard hybrid.
Point is, you make a good point. The only way to truly keep a musical tradition alive, Wynton, is to constantly question it and bring it into contact with other ideas. That's how you prevent inbreeding.
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