Music Writing and the Problem of Values

The impetus for this post really came from considering my process for writing about music. I've been considering metaphor, simile and something approaching but not exactly a sense of dialectic. I suppose what I refer to is background and choice of assumptions. There are some obvious examples of this, like popularity--you can write about artists as waves: charting their bearing in the public conciousness through time until they crest and break, lost in the undertow. My colloquialism for this is "what's up, what's down?" This is chart or more recently 'buzz' or 'viral' based writing. That said, one mustn't discount the artist's need for good press, particularly when it comes from influential outlets.

Thoughts on the background and assumptions behind "what's up, what's down" and other modes of music writing after the jump. Also, the thing that brought on this blog post: the second edition of The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music (2002) by Nick Kent.

Today I checked out The Dark Stuff. What I've read so far has been poignant and have evoked a sense of truth that outstrips their basic recitation of facts (though I may have spotted a factual error in one or two places). Iggy Pop's foreword, originally written for the first edition, is in itself a great piece of writing; it is true to his gregarious interview manner and I would agree with Iggy that the book is 'nasty' and even 'creepy.'

While Iggy writes of his desire to 'relisten to the music of the subject/artist,' Kent's treatment of Sid Vicious is all subject and no artist. At times rendering him subhuman, Kent lays out his version of the nasty truth about Vicious. In Kent's music writing, just as in his (sub)human interest stories, truth is of paramount importance. Writing something that's true is always a good goal to start with. Truth being both convincing legitimization and justification. Of course it is hard to argue for absolute truth when it comes to music quality but many of the artists Kent discusses are people commonly held as geniuses: Miles Davis, Neil Young, Brian Wilson...

Here is what Kent has to say about his apprenticeship in music journalistic values under the famous Lester Bangs:

With Lester it was all about penetration, breaking on through to the other side. He was always questioning everything: "So you like this music? Why? What do you mean, it's got a nice middle-eight and the cow-bell sounds cute on the finale? That's not good enough. What are these guys trying to sell us here? What does this music say to your soul? Do these guys sound like they even have souls to you? What does this music say to your soul? Do these guys even sound like they have souls to you? What's really going on here? What's going on behind the masks?"

Without explicating this little passage, it is plain to see that Kent's and Bangs's emphasis lies in the pursuit of the truth from the perspective of the listening music writer. It is obvious that the background and assumptions on display here are markedly different from those found in "what's up, what's down?" It is not enough simply to be very good for Kent, either. Virtuosity is subordinated to the power of artistic ideas.

In his preface, Kent has very interesting ideas about the pitfalls of chart based writing and he gives the example of the NME in the 1960s, describing it thus: 'Instead of Perry Como, now there was Tom Jones or Englebert Humperdinck, always talking exclusively about his new record, his new stage clothes, his new car. There'd be exclusive chat sessions with the Beatles, most of them in fact written by the group's publicists.' There is definitely a danger of what we refer to today as "churnalism."

That said, Kent's approach in this book seems somewhat situated in a glass house--every chapter I've read  uses the salacious and the traumatic to draw the reader's interest. There's a danger that this book (and it's by no means all of Kent's oeuvre) simply has its own celebrity pantheon composed of men exclusively, often contending with the difficulties engendered by their destructive urges. I find myself wondering whether there's a compulsive form of masculinism in operation here. I can't begin to talk about gender and music writing method--that's a huge topic, but could there be a macho mode of music writing with formalistic distinctions from "what's up, what's down?" Something like a game of "who's the greatest?" I think so.

I don't mean to be down on Kent, he does write about the music too and music writers should write about musicians because music is a social phenomenon as well as an intellectual and sensual one.

Whilst the internet represents at once a triumph of memory (huge libraries like youtube and spotify) and narrowcasting over broadcasting, it does not eliminate the celebrity mode of music writing. Stars we call viral sensations, like Lady GaGa, Beyoncé, Rihanna and Lana Del Ray, are caught up in a sticky tar ball of adulation and aggregation. Though I respect their talents and presentation, I do not really listen to these artists in much more than an incidental way.

I can, however, play the "what's up, what's down" game because it's formally dependent upon conventional wisdom. Check this out, I could say: "Lady GaGa is still an artist to watch despite a lack of musical development in her second album," or "Rihanna's 'We Found Love' is indicative of how the controversy she stokes up generally with regard to her appearance and sexuality seems matched or met by a bold Rihanna musical formula that is difficult for other artists to successfully appropriate." This would be to parrot or ventriloquise conventional wisdom or something resembling it. Maybe it would be a fraud in my case.

I like this song, maybe it's a bit old now:



And that video? Semiotics.