by Fraser Hibbitt for this Carl Kruse Blog
Whenever I read anything about contemporary bands, I’m too often hit with some non-sense that is often shamefully, or shamelessly, attached to music. Bands are too often ‘subtle soundscapes weaving…’, ‘a lovechild of Byrne and Devo’, ‘like the cosmos was brought into a room for an hour…’ etc. etc. It would be bad form, and everyone would agree, if when you heard a band, you frankly said: “well, I don’t know what it is, but I hate it!”. Then comes, by degrees, all the worthless and meaningless things one has to say to back up an intuition. In the end, everyone loses by it because nobody knows how to talk about it; the language is all jargon and nothing to do with the aesthetic experience, or if it is, only obliquely, indirectly. Even worse, many bands get lumped together out of the laziness of the writer.
This is, to my mind, why there is hardly anything in the larger news media about all the gigs that are constantly going on and all the talented musicians bustling around the city to play low-paid, expensive-for-them, gigs. Apart from perhaps that last point: the hardships of being a musician, about venues closing down, get a mention. Not the fun of these makeshift pub stages and smaller venues. It might just be an historic principle that it’s near impossible to see what is in front of your eyes. There are all kinds of research papers, books, articles written on Tin Pan alley, Swingin’ London, and 80’s New York, but you’ll only read of what is Now in hyperbole, or in terms of the great past bands – if they need to be categorized at all. It was probably something similar for when these now famous hubs were in fashion, at least as far as history is concerned; they were not ‘booked’. Anything that gets a book to its name winds up in another strange imaginary field, and one not without gravity.
Music shouldn’t be a dartboard for all these cheap metaphysical terms or flowery synonyms for noise, but can you blame them for doing so? Music is difficult to write honestly about and, at the same time, easily sends writers into rhapsodies – and they may be right to do so for music is the strangest aesthetic experience. Those two eminent writers of the 19th century, coming out of Germany, Schopenhauer, and following his thoughts on music, Nietzsche, were disgusted when composers and critics tried to make music ‘stand in’ for some concept. Music as a description for phenomena was at best a joke and was only disrespecting what is the purest art form. For what music really is, they say: the closest aesthetic experience of the ‘Universal Will’; the one-ness which pervades everything, ourselves included; not the manifestation of the Will, i.e. all things under the sun which are as ‘variations on a theme’, but the ‘movement’ of this life-will which causes all this striving variation.
The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, of ‘the man who mistook his wife for a hat’ fame, amongst his many other books, one of them being Musicophilia in which he relates how attending a concert one night, a flood of tears came over him. Now this is well known experience for any music lover; not to be confused with someone who makes a habit of forcing some tears out after every performance: “well look at my body’s reaction to this art – I must be an aesthete of some quality”; no, no – the tears are from some harmonic progression, some melody that seems to express what it is exactly you do not know how to express. Why should this be? It is unknown. Oliver Sacks says of his tears that they emanated from his grief. His mother had passed away a few months prior and he had not emotionally registered what it meant for him. And, suddenly, the music unblocked something in him.
Music relieves words of a burden that they are hardly strong enough to bear. ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’, Walter Pater says; so, too, perhaps do our expressions of selfhood that have the humility not to be considered art. Now – coming back to what this essay is about – what do we say about it? I wonder if to honestly write about it, a critic would be talking in almost mathematical terms about what they experience aesthetically. i.e. what a musicologist might say. Now this is further nonsense, or at least doesn’t get any closer to the experience. The venue will take up some words, too; the crowd; the food and drink; all these are the scene. That is why it is sad when you hear about old venues that held now-legendary bands being closed; or any number of smaller venues being closed… the potentials of the scenes are being ruined. Stadium concerts and the hundreds-of-pounds, near-impossible-to-get tickets are not a scene – you can’t hang out there and feel a part of it in the same way.
It is difficult to make out any lyrics at smaller venues, and you really have to listen to pick out the nuances of musicianship. Sound systems can often malfunction; only a fool would complain about these things, or someone who has paid hundreds of pounds to be packed in somewhere. It’s fine here because you can talk to someone or just be there as you might a pub; you can leave just as easy. The scene elevates the drama of music, elevates the band so it takes some period of re-adjustment when you see them after the show. Mick Jagger once relayed a story in an interview about someone coming up to him in the pub and saying something like: “I don’t like your way of life”. Jagger replied: “you don’t know anything about my life”. And you don’t. The same way that you don’t know what it is about the music that captures something of emotion, of the stirrings of the world, that encapsulates all this better than you can word it. Having said all that: take a music critic with a grain of salt and forgive them their ostentation; they are drawing attention with a broken pencil.
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This Carl Kruse Blog Homepage is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT at
Other articles by Fraser include Magical Thinking and Retro Advertising
Also find Carl Kruse at his old blog on https://carlkruseofficial.wordpress.com/ and on Buzzfeed (Carl Kruse Account on Buzzfeed).
