Tag: pop music

(Don’t) Leave it to Bieber

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - Columns

concert crowd

Ezra Koenig in particular immersed himself in courses [at Columbia] which examined inequalities in the global fashion and music industries. He took two courses, “Imperialism and the Cryptographic Imagination,” and “Plagiarism, Parody, and Postcolonialism,” where, in his words, he learned how “relationships between imperial powers and colonized peoples could involve lots of codes.” Koenig transferred these interests into a broader awareness of how western clothes reflected the histories of their colonial others….He infused his interests in music, fashion, and colonialism into his senior writing project, a collection of short stories written around the same time Vampire Weekend formed. This collection he titled “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”
—David Blake, “Bildung Culture: Elite Popular Music and the American University, 1960–2010” (Ph.D. Thesis, Stony Brook University, 2014)

Some incautious words in my second posting have caused consternation from readers; I didn’t mean to put up a sign post back there saying, “Hey, you’re a racist.” Let me begin this final dispatch by clarifying (but in no way retracting) my claim that those who frame the history of the musical present by categorically denigrating contemporary commercial popular music in favor of art music are holding on to a crude cultural distinction that mimics structural racism in America. I did not choose my verb lightly (“denigrate, v. ‘to blacken, defame,’ from de- ‘completely’ (see de-) + nigr-, stem of niger ‘black’ (see Negro)”); whatever the race of the artist writing or performing this music, its difference from the classical and avant-garde art music of the West is rooted in the influence of the African diaspora. To trash that difference, even though far too much easy money has been made off it by bland Caucasian exponents, is to rubbish an entire cultural patrimony; it’s about as ham-fisted as claiming that because you last heard Pachelbel’s “Canon” while on the massage table, all European art music is designed to put you to sleep.

I’m not saying you can’t hate some pop music; I’m just saying you can’t, in the presence of a practicing postmusicologist, hate on all pop music just because it is popular, disguising elitism as self-pitying pride in new music’s marginalized market position. When I have articulated the above in public, I have been dismissed with another dreaded “N-word”—neoliberal—and accused of market fundamentalism, which, in this context, seems like a rather high-pitched way of claiming I don’t understand that music ought to be judged according to what Karl Marx would call its use value, not as an object whose prime justification is to be exchanged for currency.

Elite Popular Music and the Culture of Self-Fashioning

Never mind that socialist analyses of use value are both badly out of date and not simple to pin down when the commodities in question are cultural, like music; the underlying question—what is music for?—actually has little to do with the market as arbiter of value. Most debates over the “value” of new music take place within a scholastic ambit defined by the values of the university; the great virtue of David Blake’s work, which I’ll be glossing for the rest of this post, is that it considers the university not just as the kindly employer that cut Milton Babbitt’s monthly paychecks, but as a key incubator and determinant of 21st-century America’s omnivorous elite music culture.

Linking the Germanic ideal of education as self-fashioning (Bildung), a characteristic of the liberal arts university since the 19th-century, to the explosion of musical youth culture since the 1960s, Blake identifies, with oxymoronic élan, a new cultural field he calls elite popular music. This is music that uses the sounds and forms of entertainment music, but is both made and consumed as part of a general project of self-fashioning through art that the great expansion of college education made available, in principle at least, to the entire American middle-class. Accepting the centrality of an elite-yet-popular music centered around the values of both rebellious youth and traditional higher education resolves so many awkward class- and race-based anomalies in the study of contemporary musical taste that it amazes me nobody else seems to have thought of it before.

The early chapters of Blake’s thesis are archival and historical, focusing on the records left by ’50s and ’60s university students and their professors as they brought American music from outside the literate tradition onto campus. The musical practices in question (folk revivalism; Aboriginal song) were “popular”—i.e., vernacular, of the people—but resolutely non-commercial; in retrospect it is not hard to see how encounters with this kind of musicking could be incorporated into a high-minded ideal of liberal arts study as a path to self-realization.

Moving into the ’70s and ’80s, Blake shifts methodological gears, analyzing the distinctive urban geography of the “college town” and the socio-economic opportunities it offers denizens during, after, or entirely aside from undergraduate life on campus. As he notes, most histories of the “college rock” scene in Athens, Georgia (birthplace of Pylon, the B-52s, and R.E.M.), go along with post-punk mythology and simply ignore the influence of the college itself as tastemaker; evidently all that the University of Georgia provided to these D.I.Y pioneers was a non-profit radio station to listen to and a steady supply of frat house gigs to play at. Blake, on the other hand, puts the university and its “liberal arts disposition” at the center: inside the town-gown matrix of the college town, the elite ideal of music as a vehicle for artistic self-expression and the populist drive for commercial success fuse, giving rise to a distinctive, if depoliticized model for an “alternative” mass culture:

The liberal arts disposition encourages musicians to pursue rock as a form of self-expression, valuing its critical purpose over its commercial worth. Yet the tension between disinterested study and career requirements manifests itself in the complex negotiation over rock music’s purpose as self-development or as a career. Success in college rock scenes like Athens stemmed not from actualized alternativeness or political resistance, but through pursuing self-development while maintaining enough commercial success to sustain the endeavor.

A Bildungsroman from an Omnivore
As Blake arrives at the 21st century, he turns directly to sociology, identifying Brooklyn hipster bands like Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors as exemplars of what Richard Peterson influentially dubbed the “omnivorous” style of cultural consumption. Sociologists of taste generally agree that this omnivore stance (“I like all kinds of music”) has replaced the older model of distinctive taste as a marker of dominant class attitudes toward art. (The one exception they usually note is older, still univorous devotees of Western art music and jazz.) Recent studies have refined the omnivore hypothesis, parsing the field of musical taste into multiple orientations and levels of voracity; but I am not aware of any persuasive theories about why elite class taste has shifted so dramatically. (Of course, technology and media have made it much easier to be an omnivore; but that does not explain why liking “all types of music” is a sign of status now, to the point that most upper middle-class people under 50 claim to, even when they don’t, really.)

Blake points out that, while Brooklyn is hardly a college town, both Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors count as baccalaureate projects on the part of their founders: Ezra Koenig developed his Afro-pop meets Baroque aesthetic while working on a senior paper at Columbia; David Longstreth dropped out of his music degree at Yale and then dropped back in again while Dirty Projectors evolved from dorm-room tinkering to a twenty-five person rock operatic ensemble. The university connection has usually been featured in a story of déclassement: that Ivy League education was wasted on a budding countercultural rock star, right? Longstreth, at least, has played into this trope, claiming to be an “autodidact” and rejecting Yale’s music programs as primarily interested in “preserving old things, establishing canons.” Underneath the studied pose of the amateur, though, Blake can still see the effects of university training: despite his “distaste for academia,” Longstreth’s omnivorous musical tastes, and the inner-directed intellectual scaffolding he tends to erect around them, epitomize the academy’s “liberal arts mission of self-discovery through musical engagement.” Vampire Weekend is a less strenuously intellectual band; still, in a 2013 interview quote that Blake grabbed for his chapter’s epigraph, Ezra Koenig told critic Jon Pareles that “if people could look at our…albums as a Bildungsroman, I’d be O.K. with that.”

Koenig and Longstreth are, technically, commercial popular musicians. But, as David Blake has done us the real service of arguing, their kind of popular music was nurtured, at least in part, by the university and its values. Those within the university who care about new music can no longer ignore the world of commercial pop by assuming that no one in it takes music seriously as a liberal art. Studying Dirty Projectors or Vampire Weekend can, if done right, advance the liberal arts project of self-formation just as effectively as research on Mahler or Messaien might have done for previous generations.

Envoi: Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head

So don’t just leave it to Bieber. Blake doesn’t make this point, but I will: it is the hunger to account for Koenig and Longstreth, not the fear of having to swallow too much Britney and Justin, that should determine the menu when we sit down to the postmusicological banquet. Orthorexia can be a debilitating scholarly disorder.

Let’s Get Critical

Posted on April 4, 2014 by - Columns

Popcorn
Unless you’ve been hiding from the internet lately while you completed that commission or struggled to get that project grant application in on time, you’ve probably crossed paths with the great debate going down between the defenders of current pop music criticism and the champions of more rigorous analysis. In all truth, this is not a new discussion but, like many perennial debates, it is still hard to look away when a fresh volley is lobbed.
For as much as it stirs the pot when a “serious music” review mentions the soloist’s hem line, it turns out things get even more heated when pop goes under the cold lens of the theoretical magnifying glass. In this Twilight Zone, considering suspensions in the construction of a Miley Cyrus hit is perhaps more controversial than viewing and commenting upon Miley Cyrus’s naked breast.

For as entertaining as I’ve found Owen Pallett’s Slate contributions playing the “what do we talk about when we talk about pop music using Western music theory,” what I believe it was meant to ultimately drive home is that, as with much in life, there is a serious benefit to moderation. Swing too far one way and get mired in the vacuous TMZ gossip mill, yet swing too far the other and end up lost in a realm of IKEA instructions feeling like you’re short two screws and a hex wrench. But while there is plenty of room on all sides of published musical discourse for improvement and that’s important to explore, this is largely a false drama. In my experience, music writers across genres rarely live firmly affixed to either pole. They publish anthologies of the Best in Music Writing (well, they did) that demonstrate such things if you’re short on research time. There is plenty of bad music writing out there, just as there is plenty of bad music. Yet your definitions will probably vary from mine to whatever degree, so I value the diversity of that continuum. As music fans, we’re all hunting the good stuff, no?

The piece of this argument that I’m hung up on is the idea that pop writing is too “lifestyle” oriented, implying to me this unstated idea that the heavy theory crowd is above all that silly nonsense. You can fetishize anything, whether that’s an artist’s row or an artist’s body. Mixing up lifestyle with artistry is not just a pop phenomenon, though it’s easier to dismiss, I suppose, when the words are smaller and the pages glossier.

So we’ve each made music lifestyle choices for better and for worse, and we might all be improved if those choices felt less like fences. Perhaps I would be a better critic if I took the time to consider the output of Justin Bieber on the critical scoring points that matter to me, independent of the mainstream media through which I disregard him, but you won’t convince me of that. Talking about music by talking about that slick industry 1% is just a neat distraction in these critical conversations. To my mind, what’s important is that I try and understand work—any and all work—that says something remarkable to my ear and to share that with others on whatever terms I might best rest it.

So let’s talk about love and let’s talk about chord structure. But don’t make me talk about network reality shows involving music performance. Because dear god, that’s just not okay.

History Of The World

Posted on January 30, 2014 by - Columns

The internet is full of articles that deal with contemporary composition in a very broad and abstract way. My articles for NewMusicBox are no exception: while I’ve talked about some specific works, it’s always been in service of more general points about borrowed material, relevance, and the politics of cross-cultural influence. So for the last article in this series, I’d like to zoom in and talk about how these issues played out in one of my own pieces.

I wrote World about a year and a half ago for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players. I’d heard great things about Stony Brook’s piano and percussion studios, so I took the opportunity to write for the now fairly standard instrumentation of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. I knew I wanted to focus on the marimba—an instrument that has always struck me as somehow ancient and futuristic at the same time. And since almost everything I write has to do with cultural symbolism in one way or another, I started by asking: What does the marimba signify in American culture?

If you’re the kind of person who likes listening to a piece before you read about it, now would be a good time:

The first associations that came to mind were minimalism and TV news themes. I’ve thought for a while that there was a secret connection between the two. In particular, there’s one passage in Music for 18 Musicians that sounds remarkably like news music.

There’s also the 1991 theme for WABC 7 Eyewitness News, the opening of which wouldn’t sound out of place in a minimalist piece from the late 70s or early 80s.

(I assume that this connection is partially the result of Steve Reich’s widespread influence outside the new-music world—but I also have a theory that the presence of syncopated repeated-note figures in news themes originated as an imitation of a telegraph machine transmitting Morse code.) So World starts off with a passage that’s meant to sound like the ten o’clock news if it had been written by Reich circa Tehillim, with a little help from Bartók:

In TV news themes, the mallet percussion is often synthesized, which gave me the idea of splitting the ensemble into “real” and “artificial” sides: marimba and piano vs. electronic mallet percussion and synth keyboard. But the next association that came to mind landed me right in the political quagmire I talked about in my last article: both wooden percussion instruments and electronic imitations of them are associated with 1980s pop exoticism. The most iconic example is probably “Africa” by Toto—but you see the same thing in “It’s Nearly Africa” by XTC, “The Sheltering Sky” by King Crimson, “Listening Wind” by Talking Heads, “Mulu the Rain Forest” by Thomas Dolby, and “The Dreaming” by Kate Bush. These songs depict a variety of different cultures, and their attitudes range from Talking Heads’ anti-colonialist provocation to XTC’s blunt primitivism, but they all involve American or British musicians using a particular set of timbres as a symbol of far-off lands.

The thing is, I actually find some of these songs quite evocative. “Africa” in particular has been growing on me steadily over the years, for reasons I can’t quite explain (though it might have something to do with the prominent iii chord in the opening riff). Of course, that’s easy for me to say: it’s not my continent being exoticized. But I think it’s more complicated than that, because there’s quite a bit of art that I like even though it treats people like me pretty badly. I loved Infinite Jest, for example, despite a handful of passages that use just about every transphobic trope around as a comedic device. And I’m a fan of horror director Dario Argento despite the undercurrent of misogyny running through his work. In fact, what I like about the “world music” trope in 80s pop music is very similar to what I like about Argento’s movies: it’s all about the lush, enveloping atmosphere. (In the former case, it’s probably also because these sounds were constantly in the background during my early childhood. In fact, one of my first musical memories is an ad for Whatchamacallit candy bars that draws on a similar sound palette.)

I’ve also noticed that a lot of people dismiss this kind of faux world music not on the grounds that it stereotypes or exoticizes people, but on the grounds that it’s “cheesy.” In my experience, that judgment is almost never backed up with any kind of rational critique; usually it means “it’s considered uncool to admit to liking this.” So when I hear something dismissed in that way, I’m immediately drawn to it, both because I don’t like aesthetic prejudice, and also because things that are deemed “cheesy” can easily take on a surreal, alarming or even frightening quality. You can see this phenomenon—which I’ve sometimes referred to by saying that “cheesiness is the new dissonance”—at work in a lot of David Lynch’s films.

So here was this “cheesy” music that was conceptually related to my plan for the piece. I wanted to put it into a new context that would allows its merits, including its potential for strangeness, to be heard more clearly. (Some people might see this as trying to “improve” pop-cultural materials by putting them in a so-called “high-art” context, but I actually think of it more as trying to “improve” contemporary classical music, which could use a corrective to its often overbearing seriousness and self-importance.) The question was: could I create that lush world-music atmosphere without drawing on any actual non-Western cultures? Could I throw out the stereotypical bathwater while keeping the evocative baby?

In some ways it was easy; I could use the sounds of birds and water, long sustained synth pads, quartal harmonies, and minor triads in a major-mode context. If that sounds like it’s in bad taste, great! And how to frame the passage so that it might seduce people who would normally be skeptical of these kinds of sounds? Save it for later in the piece, and introduce its motivic material and aspects of its sound-world first, so that when it arrives, it seems like a revelation of something that was just under the surface the whole time: a door opening into the middle of a rainforest.

But something was still missing.

Now, a brief digression. Around the same time that I was writing World, I was thinking about how often I’d been hearing cut-up and pitch-shifted vocal samples in contemporary pop, rock, and electronica. The most striking example is the one that Skrillex gradually builds over the course of his song “Summit”—an entire pop melody constructed out of individually sampled vowels.

Others include Tune-Yards’ “Bizness”, Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)”, and Gotye’s “State of the Art”. As I’ve said, I’m intrigued when a single idea shows up in a variety of different contexts. But wasn’t obvious, at least at first, that this had anything to do with my plans for World.
What put all the pieces together was Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby.”

If you’re not familiar with them, Deep Forest are a French “ethnic electronica” duo, and their work is especially problematic: they’ve been accused of extensively sampling traditional music from around the world without permission and sometimes without even crediting the original performers, and they’ve made quite a bit of money in the process. They also have a habit of talking about people in developing countries in a patronizing way: “Somewhere, deep in the jungle, are living some little men and women. They are our past. And maybe—maybe they are our future.” “Sweet Lullaby” doesn’t include that kind of commentary, but it is based on a recording of a traditional Baegu song from the Solomon Islands, which they used without the permission of either the woman who sang it or the ethnomusicologist who recorded it.

And yet here too, I find the music strangely haunting. And while I was trying to figure out why, I suddenly realized that listening to electronically cut-up syllables is a lot like listening to a song in a language you don’t speak—which meant that I could create my imaginary foreign culture by taking a page from Skrillex and building a melody out of pitch-shifted vocal samples in the climactic section of World. Not only that, but the artificiality of the cut-up technique would enhance the surreal quality already latently present in the “cheesiness” of the style.

And then I realized something else: several of the songs that had gotten me thinking about cut-up vocals were related to the ideas that I had associated with marimbas in the first place. “Summit” relates to minimalism through its repetition-based syntax, and, less directly, through the long history of connections between Steve Reich and electronic dance music, including the Reich Remixed album and the sample of Electric Counterpoint in The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds”. And Tune-Yards is another politically complicated case of a white American musician being heavily influenced by African music—in this case, Congolese pop music. In other words, everything is connected:
World Chart
When I talked about complex tangles of interconnections between different artistic streams, this was the kind of thing I had in mind. So what does my attempt to translate that tangle into an actual piece of music sound like? Hear for yourself:

Polystylism in Pop

Posted on June 13, 2013 by - Columns

Something interesting is happening in pop music right now. But to talk about it, I first have to talk about academic music—yes, academic music—for just a moment. But feel free to skip to the bit about Janelle Monae and Daft Punk if you like.

When I was a composition student at the University of Michigan about ten years ago, I was very excited about polystylism and eclecticism. Within that department, there was a very explicit and rather self-conscious effort to bring together “high” and “low” forms of music, and to try and put them on more of an equal footing. The result was a kind of scattershot invocation of a variety of musical influences and references, careening unpredictably from style to style like a bumper car in a centrifuge. This kind of music could be incredibly exhilarating or extremely frustrating, sometimes both at the same time, but at the time I loved it. William Bolcom was the composer on faculty most engaged with this kind of thing, but it was definitely on everyone’s mind.
Now, polystylism seems almost like a historical footnote. Even some of the composers most commonly associated with the movement, like Alfred Schnittke, turned away from it in their late careers. In fact I’m not sure it even qualifies as a “movement” so much as a set of disconnected impulses that happened to roughly coincide in time—a case of convergent evolution that is now on the brink of extinction.

To be sure, eclecticism is alive and well, but in different forms. In new music now, you’re more likely to see a more specific kind of eclecticism, where influences and references are carefully selected rather than sprayed with a machine gun. In general, this seems like a smarter and more successful tactic, one that makes it far easier for a composer to develop a distinctive voice (that ever-valuable commodity).

But I think there are also deeper, thornier issues behind the near-disappearance of polystylism. For one thing, I don’t think it was ever very effective at doing the cultural work it purported to accomplish. Rather than erasing or blurring distinctions between “high” and “low” art, instead the jarring juxtaposition of styles often seemed to reinforce these boundaries. In theory, it was a well-meaning attempt to move away from the idea of the composer as a figure who stands outside of pop culture. But in practice, the facile and entitled way composers often invoked pop culture cemented this outsider status. In other words, all styles (regardless of cultural origin) were seen as fair game for the (usually white, male, highly educated) composer to make use of, comment on, modify, and/or judge. (For better or worse, the finale of Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience has always been the quintessential example of this for me. Sure, ending your magnum opus with a reggae song is a brilliantly gutsy move, in a way. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the end, it’s not a very good reggae song.)

Okay, I’m going to talk about pop music now!

I want to contrast this academic, problematic kind of polystylism with the kind of polystylism that is happening in pop music today (though I don’t think anyone is really calling it that). One of the common complaints about current pop music is that it’s all hopelessly retro, and that we haven’t seen anything genuinely new in about 20 years. Pop music is eating its own tail. The irony is that this kind of self-aware self-referentiality is exactly what was prized and heralded as a savior of concert music a few years ago. Additionally, by commenting on pop culture from within, pop music polystylism may be capable of expressing certain things that concert music polystylism can’t.

Certainly pop music is concerned with a narrower range of styles than concert music—styles that more naturally harmonically and rhythmically connect to one another. Pop music production has also evolved to a point where it’s possible for a mix to feature an almost overwhelming number of independent sonic layers. Janelle Monae’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” is a great example of this, seamlessly transitioning from a guitar riff that recalls “Beat It”-era Michael Jackson, to slinky synths that wouldn’t be out of place in a vintage Prince song, to a laid-back ’90s R&B beat that features Erykah Badu, etc. This is all undercurrent—subtext, maybe—until the final minute of the song, when Monae “flips it” and makes it clear that this was what she was trying to do all along. “Categorize me, I defy every label,” she sermonizes over Motown strings. Lyrically referencing Marvin Gaye, she recasts Gaye’s social commentary as something current, ongoing, and more broad, encompassing gender as well as race and class. She’s able to do this because this is her musical heritage—she’s not an outsider looking in.

The situation with Daft Punk’s already ubiquitous new album, Random Access Memories, is a little more complicated. The album evokes a huge swath of music from the ’70s and early ’80s, and at first listen this seems to be the goal—to create a convincing simulacrum of the light-hearted, fun, danceable music of that era. In the pursuit of this goal, Daft Punk were also in a unique position to enlist the aid of contemporaries from that period, figures like Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, and Paul Williams.
But there’s also a palpable strain of melancholy that runs through the album, something that suggests that this kind of nostalgia may be more sinister than it first appears. On the bizarre and mesmerizing “Touch,” featuring lyrics and vocals by Williams, styles are nested within styles, linked by a series of sonic reveals that are at first captivating but are almost exhausting by the end. Williams sounds drained by it too: “A door behind a door / Touch, where do you lead? / I want something more.” It’s almost Gnostic in its perpetual search for a “more real” reality, suggesting that this quest for true authenticity might be doomed from the start.

Although authenticity might be out of reach, accuracy is not, and I wish that more concert music composers would adopt Daft Punk’s meticulousness when exploring other styles, rather than the casual, slapdash referentiality that comes so easily. Granted, not everyone has access to the finest studio musicians in the land, but we are privileged in other ways, and we ought to use that privilege responsibly.