Question as to whether you're complicit in the sensibility of the song

[koganbot]

I scribbled a response to this statement (from this post) by Sabina, then lost the envelope I'd scribbled upon, but now the envelope has been FOUND.

Sabina: ...what I've always found difficult about the Strand-2 approach, which I see around me a lot - it posits that the so what, the meaning of the music, is to be looked for first in the performer-artist, and that's not my typical approach. I locate the meaning of the music in me, and how (well) it soundtracks my life. I don't have a basic assumption that there is something external that I and others can argue over (if not prove); the best I want to do is recommend and hope.

Me: The various approaches are hardly exclusive: E.g., you can look at a vacant lot, see tell-tale signs, say, "This is the result of arson" (meaning of vacant lot is in the performer-artist); or you can look at the vacant lot and say, "We could have a swell baseball game here; I'll round up some of the gang and we'll do it" (meaning of vacant lot is how well it soundtracks your life). No reason you can't look at the lot and discern both.

But anyway, here's what I found on the envelope, in regard to whether you can ever really escape the "external": Question as to whether you're complicit in the sensibility of the song, whether you identify with or are complicit in the world of the song. You can sidestep this by saying, "Oh, I'm using it for my own purposes - I hear it in my world, and use it along the lines of my own sensibility." And to some extent this must be true - there's no way not to hear it in my world, and whatever sensibility seems to emanate from me will be identified as mine, even if I think it's but a set of clothes I've temporarily put on for fun. But there's still the question of why the sound was so adaptable for my use, what the affinity was in the first place. Can I just disclaim any resemblance between me and the world that produces the sound - the sensibility that produces the sound - that I found so useful?

[OK, what about my vacant lot? I wouldn't say the ballplayers would remotely feel complicit in the arson that created the vacant lot, but there might be, later on, years and miles away from that burnt-out part of the city, a recognition that unauthorized and unstructured baseball space for kids (which one remembers fondly) was a product of a world that produced arson. Or something.]

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you reposted cos I'd wanted to respond but the Disqus thing is too awful to work with. XD; More later.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

To start with where Tumblr had left it - I'd recognized while writing that what I was talking about was orthogonal to what Tom was positing (and Dave's real point, although I was directly answering his question). But I wanted to get it out first and think about it more second. XD; Because this is the source of a low-level sense of alienation for me, but that alienation arises mostly from unavoidable shorthand and prioritization in daily discussion - if, when talking about the music, everyone always came at it from all these non-exclusive approaches, talked about what instruments were used to make it and in what context they prefer to hear it and what they thought was going on in the head of the artist and producer and why they personally relate to that and why it all matters, then... this is a non-issue. But if you only give yourself (or were given) a paragraph, what would you say about the music? I would talk about the context first - the context of genre/influences/references, then the context of when I heard it live or when I choose to listen to it and why. I think my assumption is that the reader can then ask hirself whether this is a context they relate to, whether they too need somewhere they can play baseball, and this vacant lot may do (but they won't know unless they tried to play there). Or maybe that given their own experience of such things, any vacant lot where kids can play ball is also good for doing open-air improv theatre, which is what they want to do. Whereas you (for instance you) start off by saying "Beyonce is aggressive but confused," "the chorus plods and never takes off," because that's the most important thing to you, and you treat and make these statements as if they're objective. I mean, that's a stylistic choice, but it's a stylistic choice that frames the discussion. I can respond by saying "I think Beyonce sounds more afraid than confused," but we are both now talking about what Beyonce thinks she's doing. Which I don't think I know. It's not that I'm disclaiming the resemblance between my sensibility and the one that produced the sound - I tend to assume, Occam's Razor, that there is one - but at the very core, I have no idea if I'm using a flower vase as a pickling jar. Just because it works fine as a pickling jar?

But maybe that's because I've blogged about these things for nearly a decade with a marketing approach, the point being to get my friends to listen to my music, and what I'm really saying is that I'm not a critic. XD; I do suspect that the throes-of-massive-Fandom stuff makes for better writing, although when I'm writing it it feels scattered and downright delusional. You're right that the follow-up question (both approaches!) ought to be "Why does this work in my context, and why do I hear this stuff in it." I'm surprised, now, to realize how little I think about this and how much I don't have an answer in most cases.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(But prolly the best way to sort of see the difference here is to do it practically, like next time I will ask myself if I am complicit in the sensibility of Skream's dubstep remixes of kwaito or Depeche Mode, why it is working for me, and how I would describe that/my sensibility, anyway. XD;)

[koganbot]

One thing to remember is that, until the rise of the blogosphere in the last few years, music criticism was encased in journalism, which tends to be dominated by hard news guys who never grasped what criticism is about. In journalism you're not supposed to make yourself the story, ever. Fortunately, rock criticism often found spaces where the personal was permitted, but audience demand still pushed the other way, be against the first person. The readers wanted a consumer guide, and didn't care about the writer's context even if it told them something about their own. The personality they wanted was the stars', not the writer's. There were times in the early '00s at the V0ice where Chuck and I were taking care that the first-person singular didn't appear in the first two paragraphs of my reviews so that it wouldn't come to the attention of editor-in-chief D0n4ld F0rst. (My impression from Chuck was that F0rst was against the first person in principle but not necessarily in practice.) Chris Weingarten, whom I wrote for at Paper Thin Walls, and who's someone who does understand criticism, nonetheless wanted to keep us away from the first person because he hated how poorly it had been used at early Pitchfork and didn't want PTW, which was Web only, to come across as just more Internet spew. He wanted it taken seriously. But this is still a particular definition of "serious." Not incidentally, I'm sure all this - the denigration of the personal - is one reason why over the years it's been so hard to get women interested in being professional rock critics. (The places I wrote for were always looking for women music critics.) Another might have been that the great rock-critic models for personal writing were he-men like Meltzer and Bangs, and so stepping into the convo could (and can) feel like stepping into a boys' war.

The issue isn't "personal journalism" or "the first person singular" so much as it is social interaction, which is what context is. But to do context and interaction well, you need space, either need more than a paragraph or many different voices, different people chiming in with their different paragraphs.

[koganbot]

Fwiw, my writing used to be way more first-person wildman than it is now, and I'm not sure of all the reasons for the change - one for sure in regard to my lj is that I've decided that writing about what is interesting in my offline life would entail too much violation of people's privacy. But also, in my writing, there's a never-ending struggle for a writer's "voice" that sounds true (so everything I write is part of this personal struggle), and for the moment I'm finding my voice more when I'm losing myself in the subject matter than when I'm at the center of the story. And where I do want to intrude myself it seems to come from the ghosts of Frank's past - e.g., in talking about the Beatles 1964 I want to jump in and say, "Look, I was there, and the Beatles were not just lovable moptops, they were a dangerous, threatening lot who tore up my world." When you're ten your world is more prone to be torn up by a song than it is when you're fifty-five. But the Beatles tore up the world for a lot of fifty-five-year-olds too, I'll wager.