Dial "M" for Musicology

Now I know my ABCs

Among the dumber ideas I've heard lately: Obama will "elevate" the culture (how do you do that, anyway? floatation?) to the point that black people will see through hiphop and its "thuggish violence, misogyny, clownish behavior and crude materialism." When did we start thinking that politicians we like can get rid of music we don't? I can sympathize with Stanley Crouch for wanting someone who "will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines," but "those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances" sounds more like Bill Kristol than, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose defenses of hiphop have been so good that I have little to add. But Ta-Nehisi didn't post Blackalicious's "Alphabet Aerobics," so I guess I still have something to add.

Stanley Crouch and those who take his opinions on hiphop seriously always say that things like this aren't the rule, they're the exception. But that's always true. Exceptional art is rare. That's why it's exceptional. And when you start x-ing out all the exceptions, you really aren't talking about the art form anymore, you're just talking about sociological trends. Which isn't a bad thing in itself, but then don't pretend that you're doing aesthetic criticism.  

Taboo!

I was on vacation last week (hence my spotty posting to Dial M) but went back to school yesterday -- time to get my courses in order for the fall. I stopped by the mailroom and was greeted by our ebullient new mailroom person, Karen, who handed me a package I wasn't expecting. And . . . it's . . . my Representations article! Wheee! It's finally out! Look!

My name on it and everything! And in rather august company. (The Representations website has a comprehensive list of past issues and authors.) Sorry, it's probably unbecoming to show too much enthusiasm for your own journal articles, but I'm proud of this one. If you're wondering what my article ("Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica") is about, here is the abstract:

In the 1950s, exotica was a genre of pop music that specialized in depicting imaginary exotic paradises and conventionalized natives. By the late 1960s, exotica pop had disappeared, but its tropes of temporal and spatial disjuncture persisted, structuring the music, visual art, and social theory of the utopian counterculture. While 1950s and 1960s kinds of exotica differ in their preferred imaginary destinations, both raise the question of what intermediate shades between belief and disbelief are demanded by aestheticized representations of human life. This essay theorizes exotica as a mode of representation governed by a peculiar mode of reception—one of willed credulity enabled by submission to its spectacle. What exotica demands is what intellectuals are least likely to give, though, and the peculiar pleasures of exotica spectacle are denigrated or rendered invisible in the hermeneutic regime.

And here is the article itself, free for all who might want to read it.

There seems to be something of a boom in what might be called exoticism studies in music at the moment. Ralph Locke in particular has a book called Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections coming out from Cambridge University Press, and I am keenly looking forward to reading it. I read his Journal of Musicology article "A Broader View of Musical Exoticism" only when my own article was in final proofs, so it doesn't show up in the notes, but Ralph's way of thinking about musical exoticism is very congenial to mine. In his gentlemanly and unassuming way, he revises much of the conventional understanding of musical exoticism by showing that exoticism doesn't happen only when the music sounds weird, alien, non-western, etc. Against this "exotic style only" paradigm he posits an “all the music in full context” paradigm, in which an audience's understanding of exoticism takes place within the music's larger narrative frame. Which is a much more satisfying way of dealing with the matter. In one part of my article I write about "Blue Jungle," from the Les Baxter album Jungle Jazz. The theme of this album is South America, as the liner notes tell us in the usual bombastic exotica-album style :

Les here ventures forth . . . this time on a musical exploration into the wilds of South and Central America. Here are the spectacular results. Here the timeless meets the modern in a breathtaking, pulsating whirl of sound. This is music of high adventure with a beat—exotically presented in a Baxter blend of ‘Jungle Jazz.’

And Jungle Jazz is adorned with a particularly, uh, problematic album cover:

But the music itself -- particular "Blue Jungle" --  doesn't sound "South American." It sounds like cop show music, or what I call "jazz exotica." I have an article on jazz exotica just out in the Journal of Musicological Research (this has been an exotic year for me) where I define jazz exotica as "music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde perennially associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it." Which is a highfalutin' way of saying that jazz exotica is not so much jazz as music whose topic is jazz. But what does that have to do with the guy on the album cover? In the "exotic style only" paradigm we wouldn't look at the album cover or liner notes, but would insist that whatever the album means is to be found in its musical style only. But popular music just doesn't work that way. You never pay attention to the music exclusively-- otherwise it wouldn't matter if KISS performed in business suits or full kabuki drag. Likewise here: as I say in "Taboo," an exotica album "is a system of representations in which music plays the main but not exclusive role in creating an ethnographic fiction." And that "system of representations" is the music plus liner notes, cover art, and what academical types like to call the "discourse" (i.e., talk and hype) surrounding the album. And from that point of view, why yes, this is the music of the mysterious South American native folk! At least it pleases us to think so while we're listening to it. Or, as Heather Hadlock put it to me once, the audience is a participant in its own delusion. (Thanks Heather!)

Which reminds me: thank you, Ralph, for stepping in and writing for Dial M this summer. Those of you who aren't in the biz, this was a little like having Dr. J come and play a little one-on-one on your neighborhood blacktop.

Friday happy song

My graduate students are handing in their seminar papers today, and are no doubt suffering. And it's the last week of class for a lot of schools (Indiana ends a little early), so there's a whole lot of end-of-term suffering to go around. It's a good time to spread a little cheer, in the form of a song.

I defy you not to love this. (Via American Elf)

Also: check out the cartoonist's homepage, which has a lot of her artwork. She's really good!

Imagine there's no countries

In my seminar we talked about hiphop. One of my students asked, what's B-Boying? This, people, is B-Boying:

This from the documentary Planet B-Boy, which I read about in Reason. Why do libertarians like hiphop? Because they don't like tribal thinking and all that implies: nations, armies, the Dept. of Homeland Security, and whatnot. Hiphop is the ultimate transnational pop art form. "Our flag is hiphop": politics overcome by culture, a utopian vision, and as such a laughable, unrealistic one. We've seen it all before. But still, beautiful.
 

Really . . . haunting, man

Brent Reidy, whose blog I linked yesterday, did a few of his own random indie rock album covers. This one is so good I almost can't believe he didn't cheat:

First of all, The Manchester Center for New Writing is an awesome name for an indie band. Second, The Nine-Millimeter Bullet is an awesome name for an album. Third, the oh-so-ironic juxtaposition of dessert treats (monumentalized in a low-angle close-up that exaggerates perspective and on a stark black-and-white background) to the sinister-sounding title is friggin' cop show. This kind of absurdist heavy/light imagery has been around since Iron Butterfly. (To say nothing of Led Zeppelin.) I'm going to form a band just to play the kind of music that ought to go with that album cover.

And, showing the kind of diligence and application that one expects from one's graduate students, Brent went on to create his own counter-meme, which I am duly propagating here. Here is the random lyric generator: 

1. your song is going to have a title, a chorus, and two versus . . . is that too conformist for you? too bad. deal.

2. song title is the first random wikipedia article you pull up.

3. the first verse is the mash up of the first four words of the first four quotes and the last four words of the last four quotes from here. pair the first quotes first words with the last quotes last words, and so on.

4. the second verse is a mash up like the first, but refresh for a new page o' quotes.

5. the chorus you ask? the title of your song, four times, of course!

6. if you are feeling grammariffic, add prepositions and make verbs make sense (if possible). or don't let the grammar-man tell you what to do and skip it.

7. post the lyrics or--if you are feeling rather adventurous--record the thing.

And here are Brent's results:

100 people who are screwing up america

we are so accustomed to watching tv by candlelight
curiosity killed the cat i never saw before.
those who speak most the more it will contract.
the only way to have no fear from death.

100 people who are screwing up america [x4]

famous remarks are very seldom quoted wisely and well.
a child of five for a few dollars.
he can make me from the ears up.
the covers of this think you cannot do.

100 people who are screwing up america [x4]

This just made me realize that jamming a bunch of random stuff into the notional space of a catch-phrase (like "100 people who are screwing up America") results in the kind of lyrics that rock critics like to call "haunting." (Or "pretentious," if they're in a bad mood.) What does it say about indie rock (which is really another way of saying "serious and aesthetically ambitious rock") that it's so easy to make this stuff up randomly? Probably that there is a significant dollop of randomness in the rock sensibility, or even more generally the modern pop-culture sensibility. Back when I used to teach courses with a lot of undergrads from UT's American Studies dept., I noticed how often they would say that something or other in a piece of music was "random." This bothered me, because I figured that it reflects a lapse in critical imagination: you say that something is "random" when you weren't expecting it and can't be bothered to come up with an interpretation for it. But perhaps they were simply seeing the world through indie glasses. A lot of the beautiful things in their world really are random. Just because something is random doesn't mean it can't be beautiful.

Final Fantasy

I wrote a post about what books people got for the holidays, and got some interesting responses. But what about music?

Curiously, my wife and I don't usually get one another a lot of music. For some reason, books are easier. But I did get her one disc, He Poos Clouds, by a Toronto violinist and composer named Owen Pallett, a.k.a. Final Fantasy. Helen and I first heard it when driving between Toronto and my Mom's house out in the county on New Year's Eve. We were listening to CBC 3 (CBC's indie rock station -- my god, there's something so Canadian about founding a bureaucratic state institution to handle indie rock*) and they had a year-in-review of the Canadian rock scene, which ended up being great, because for whatever reason Canada is just bristling with rock talent right now. And my favorite track was this thing called "This Lamb Sells Condos" by Final Fantasy (from the aforementioned He Poos Clouds) which has this off-kilter Mikrokosmos-type piano lick that got stuck in my mind. So, anyway, got the album for Helen, and it's just awesome. Pallett has said that he thinks most string arrangements in post-rock albums kind of suck, so I suppose that his own string arrangements for He Poos Clouds (the songs are mostly strings) are meant to show how it should be done. Well, they do show how it should be done. I like post-rock albums with strings, and I'm probably not as discriminating about the arrangements as Pallett is, but I've never heard strings on a pop/rock record that sound like this.

Like Andrew Bird, Pallett performs live with an array of pedals and samplers that let him make self-accompanied songs out of layers of loops.  It's kind of commonplace now, actually (Robert Fripp was doing stuff like it in the 1970s), but like anything else, it's not the gimmick that matters, it's the execution. This clip put a smile on my face.

*Is this awesome, or is it everything you've fought against for all these years? Discuss.

Pleasures of grading

OK, after all that bellyaching, I should add that every now and then you get something that makes the year-end stack of grading a little less burdensome. Enjoyable, even. In fact, damn funny. In response to a question about whether and to what degree Milton Babbitt and Harry Partch's philosophies have anything in common, one student wrote this:

Had they been locked in a house together, Milton Babbitt and Harry Partch would have made a great reality TV show. While the drama over Babbitt's tape reels getting in the way of Partch's lightbulb marimba ensued, their monologues in the confessional would surprise viewers hoping for more disagreements. For while Babbitt would fight for more private time, free from Partch's constant percussion, their ultimate frustration would be shared: the fear of stagnation in modern music, and the importance of radical reform. What follows are some thoughts on how the episodes might go. (Although, it should be said: who cares if you watch?) 

Awesome.

Daring to be stupid

Item 1: Scott Spiegelberg's daughter wrote an awesome Halloween story.

Item 2: Scraps is right: Weird Al's parody of Devo, "Dare to be Stupid," bears the bell away.

I love this because it not only makes fun of Devo (see here and here and here for points of comparison), it's also a great song that scratches the exact same itch that Devo does. It's the best Devo song that Devo never wrote. Maybe musical parodies are doing their job when they remind you of what you love about some kind of music.

I loved -- LOVED -- Devo when I was a teenager. If you had told me at age 15 that it would some day be my pleasure to write about Devo for an audience of . . . well, however many read this blog post, I'd have wet the ill-fitting brown corduroy pants my Mom bought from By-Way. Sometimes it's worth taking a moment to realize what blogging allows you to do . . . and how incredible it would have seemed not so long ago.

Which brings me to Item 3: Alex Ross's New Yorker article on how classical music is doing really well in the internet age, and how blogging in particular has profited classical music in surprising ways:

Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms.

OK, I'm not mad that he didn't  mention academic music bloggers, just a little . . . disappointed. Hurt. But that's OK, Alex! You just go ahead and have fun with your cool friends. We'll just stay here and blog in the cold and the dark.

This is a great article, and it needed to be written. A lot of people in the music world (especially the academic music world) don't really understand what blogging is and fear it. ("Incivility blah blah blah superficiality blah  blah blah blah self-indulgence blah blah porno blah." That's pretty much the argument.) I'm going to be covering some of the same ground in my upcoming AMS talk on the subject, and will use the opportunity to MENTION ALEX ROSS A BUNCH OF TIMES. Because I'm big like that.

People Listen To It and Dial M got a nice shout-out at Freaky Trigger, a heavyweight UK pop music blog. Tom wrote that we're "Representative of blogging music academics - I’m not always especially interested in what they’re talking about (music-wise) but there’s an enthusiasm in this microsphere which reminds me of days long gone by." We're the Ramones of the music blogosphere! Daring to be stupid pays off in more than one way.

Zen Friday

I got nothing. And now I embrace the nothingness and discover the nothing that nothings eternally.

Hey, that sounds a little like Ken Nordine! Man, I love Nordine. He is, with the possible exception of Fred Astaire, the illest motherf*&^er in human history. 

So what happens when you put Fred Astaire and Ken Nordine together?

TEH COP SHOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"My Baby" was a number from Nordine's 1957 Word Jazz, which has been rereleased, along with the other original "word jazz" albums, in a reissue anthology called You're Getting Better: The Complete Word Jazz Dot Masters. One of my favorite tracks on it is a number called "Charlie Zen," which is Nordine's outer-space prose-poetry accompanied only by a gong of unearthly resonance. It's a bonus cut for the anthology, apparently recorded for one of the original albums but left unreleased until now. Here's a taste.

Yes, I know, very Dharma Bums, very 1950s-hipster/1990s-New-Age, this thing for Zen. But still. Someone somewhere should write a cultural history of Zen in America; a lot of interesting Zen-influenced art has been made here in the last fifty years. And Zen notions are interesting, and, even to my rather religion-averse self, satisfying to contemplate, though I admit I know very little beyond Alan Watts' book The Way of Zen. Watts is probably single-handedly responsible for much of the enthusiasm for Zen in the West. Watts was a wonderful writer and talker, very good at making abstract things concrete, which has earned him a certain amount of suspicion from those who like their mysticism mystical. Among other things, he wrote a very sharp-eyed piece on the hip embrace of Zen in the 1950s, titled "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" -- one of the best things written on the Beats in the 1950s.

Jonathan and I had a little punch-up over American popular culture this week, with me digging the Usbybay Urkleybay and Jonathan hatin' (or at least dissentin'). I wrote a comment to Jonathan's post where I came up with what I think is a new hypothesis in American popular culture: we might call it Theory of Pop Culture Complementarity. You can't have just the smart without the dumb, the tasteful without the vulgar, Jon Stewart without Paula Abdul. They are necessary to one another: what pop giveth, pop taketh away, and vice versa. Dumb pop culture gives you the hermeneutic tools to take it apart, which transforms it into smart pop culture. And vice versa. For years we've been hearing tirades against South Park—it's vicious, crude, foul, and wrong, etc. (You say that like it's a bad thing!) And guess what the South Park guys are doing now? Making gentle, intelligent cartoons to the Zen teachings of Alan Watts. Here are a couple, the first of which is called "Life and Music," the second "Prickles and Goo."

There are more at Soul Jerky, where I found these clips. Watts loved music, and I like how he so often resorted to musical metaphors in talking about Zen. Have a good weekend.

"My Humps": The Definitive Remix

Galen Brown, in addition to being a Dial M regular, is a composer and blogger at Sequenza 21, a superb music blog I haven't mentioned often enough. Anyway, in response to my swipe at Dvorak, he pointed out his own remix of the "New World" symphony with the Black Eyed Peas' horrible "My Humps." This is too good to let languish below the line: