scooters, holiday, autumn

Evening gents, got a bit I wrote a few days ago here that is probably better posted than deleted:

First up I don't read music reviews or much published writing like that because I tend not to get as much out of it as I do from plain, everyday discourse, mostly online. People who write pretty decent reviews often write much better fighting their corner in a crowded room. Obviously I know there are some fucking incredible reviews and bits of writing out there and it'll always be good to see someone working something out in words, but the balance of power (i.e. 90% of the writing I read about music) is with the informal. That's not necessarily me-narrative, you-narrative, we-narrative or any of the other tools in the box but often containing moments of each, including some analytical they-narrative. I'm thinking here we can have some slightly more intense, detailed discourse, gradually getting to grips with these tools but we'll see.

Twoly, Robert Christgau might think he's come out of himself somehow, but he still writes like a sassy, aging guy with blindspots, favourites, prejudices and limited patience. He's listened to an unbelievable amount of stuff, and has developed his own super language of punning and self-reference but I don't believe he's doing anything extra, anything noble or philosophically exciting. I also don't believe Richard Meltzer is a good writer. Or maybe I don't understand what Christgau means when he says that.

Similarly, and to pick on Christgau further, I think you can turn what he said around and accuse him or never properly getting inside himself, or anyone else. He listens, very professionally to huge stacks of records, eight hours everyday, assessing the lay of the land, noting anything that jumps out at him and reports back to us in his neat writerly code. He can unpack anything he hears and place it in the grand scheme or pop music truth he has laid out all these years, he is THE DEAN after all. But where's the value in any of what he or anyone similar does? Who needs an encyclopedia? Who hears Kate Nash and wants a quasi-objective unpacking of the whole deal and what use is that to anyone who isn't already up to the same thing?

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Anyway more importantly: Arthur Russell's tuned in brain. It's very cool you got that record Alun, I've got an intention to get that and see the film that's come out (somehow), which I've heard is decent, even if it skips over his disco period pretty fast. Each Arthur Russell record I hear seems to sound peculiar at first while I get used to whichever styles and techniques he was playing around with at the time. What I consider more interesting than the breadth of his interests and listening though, are the constants that run through all the different styles. I'm thinking of loose, floating structures, and adding to that sense of lightness, his sing-song fragments of melody that drift in and out.

The thing I find most interesting is the way he treats his songs not as static, finished entities, but as processes that can have many possible incarnations and reimaginings. To hear the disco "See My Brother, He's Stepping Out (Let's Go Swimming #1)" after loving the World Of Echo version of "Let's Go Swimming" was uncanny and amazing. On World Of Echo it's like he's singing to you in the womb, everything delicately brought in close, it has that particular, intensely personal quality you get with some indie (I've thought before that the close-miced sound of World Of Echo reminds me of The Microphones). That he could and would choose to rehear the vocals and cello over a disco beat and blocky 80s basslines makes me think his relationship to his pieces was closer than a lot of people. Hearing "See My Brother" as part of a move from introverted, quiet, uneasy to this fun&light party tune makes it really affecting, I end up with this sort of "good for you!" feeling towards the song, like I want to high-five Arthur Russell. In the liner notes to World Of Echo he talks about wanting to "liquefy" (what the fuck is that spelling?) elements to create something new, and that seems like the way he interacts with what he heard, whether it was what was on the radio, at the club, from his childhood, or his own music.

So I got a promo of the new Arthur Russell record...

...to review (by way of a lucky toin coss - although I choose to interpret it as providence). It's called Love Is Overtaking Me, and it's a collection of 21 variegated demos from across his career; from solo, voice-and-guitar country ballads to shiny 60s/70s folk rock (a la James Taylor) to more disco-oriented fare with dinky electronic loops.

It's very pretty it is, although it feels more like a (chronological?) jaunt through his responses to various influences than any kind of definitive artistic 'statement'. The label (Audika/Rough Trade) is promoting the record as a look at Russell's singer-songwriter persona, so I guess this effect is partially intentional.

Anyway, hearing Russell playing around with various pop forms has me thinking about the unusual quality of his musical career; ie synthesising cello lessons, Indian classical music, folk rock, disco & c (grammatical figure in memory of David Foster Wallace) into a versatile but highly personal musical language/methodology/episteme (ahem). Like how this compares to the classical/romantic image of the Artist and His relationship to the things that feed His work.

Hmm...hold that though.

Okfairenough

but I worry that the response to the reductive, academic, uninspired/ing way music generally gets written about is too often to plunge into quasi-poetic Me-Narratives...or at least I'm afraid that that's what I'd do. Maybe that sort of approach is fine, as long as the person writing has The Knack.

This is all getting very B&W though; obviously it's possible to write intimately and emotively without subordinating your object, or just using it as a mirror. Well, not so sure about that last bit.

In the Christgau response to that Meltzer article (the one by Meltzer?) he counterattacks by saying that Meltzer, while a great writer, is not really a 'journalist' (I think that's the word he uses), and that the point of journalism is to bring writers out of themselves. That seems like an appealing notion, to an extent, although I've never read any Meltzer, so I have no first-hand evidence. At the same time, I sympathise with Tom's criticisms of Christgau: he does seem to have this heavy Kantian perspective where all music is part of some rational absolute and comparable and graspable, which ends up just enervating everything.

Which reminds me of something Camus said about Rousseau: his grandiose ideas about loving humanity in general derived from his inability to love any human beings in particular.

Anyway, that's enough philosophical name-dropping.

The screaming cock fiends been thinking bout the way you do it good.

Alun's talking about the Peep Showification of his experience at concerts, an intellect pulling his awareness out of immediate experience and to a mediated 3rd person platform watching himself in the world, being a bit of a wanker. I found this sentiment deeply depressing and somewhat alien, but not surprising as such. Given this submital of experience before the intellect, combined with a little guilt maybe, Alun's account of mastubatory narcissism makes sense to me.

An examination like Alun refers to individuates the self; the thinker is distinct and alone. The majority of experience and human culture lies within the limits of what the thinker can know, but there are things outside of these limits. There are, to quote something I heard today, things that can only be "known through the body", things that "could never emerge from words". The gulf between my understanding of experience and feelings as expressed in language and thought and the immediate reality of the existence of the world has always struck me. The force of music, its very real transformative and revelatory power, lie in its existence outside of the realm of language and the sort of indirect thought Alun refers to.

What Alun expresses is the difficulty in trying to account for this immediacy after the fact. The process of pulling something into the realm of this reflective, analytic, language robs it of its haecceity and leaves it superficial, inane, "lovely". This inherent contradiction in writing about music in this way (the way I'm writing now) put me off writing about music altogether, until I came to see that it was possible to use language in other ways to write about music, and that those ways might have value and power. To develop these methods was my ambition in starting this. I am finding that the naturality of this sort of writing belies how difficult it is, and how easy it is to slip into this. So:

"The first step in learning how to play rock guitar is to unlearn how not to play rock guitar."

I think Ro's move in his thinking is similar and analagous to this. In the kingdom of the blind, everyone had perfect pitch and free telephone.