Fountain displaces itself

[koganbot]

Posted this on Brad Nelson's Tumblr (in response to his saying that he's been thinking of dub as the center while being concurrently aware that there is no center and there never was):

I once argued that dub was central, or at least deserved pride of place as a fountain that watered a number of neighboring fields, while saying that sonically what it did was to take out its own center. Here's where I tried to turn this idea into sense (but I then never tried to follow up on the thought).

Someone ought to pick up the thought and carry it somewhere.

Comments

How many centers does it take to get to the lick?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think the idea of re-insertion of a center back into "centerless" music is a major development of the last decade that seems somewhat difficult to parse now. The most archetypical example I can think of is how Missy Elliott and Timbo could dramatically shift our expectations of what sounds constituted a hit song while kind of "selling" it by focusing it on Missy's own personality. It's only through Missy that one could see the through line between "Supa Dupa Fly," "Get UR Freak On," "Gossip Folks," "Work It," etc. In each one these songs, Missy's "center" actually isn't the most revolutionary thing going on (she's kind of "progressive" to the music's "revolution," though these words don't quite get at what I mean here), but it's our gateway into the sound.

Something else has happened that I've noticed, though, and I would call it "recombinant recombinance" -- it struck me in listening to both the new Dirty South Dance mix and the new Kelis album, the way that they're taking song forms that already have a host of complexities and mixing and matching contexts and centers for a somewhat more impressionistic effect. It's something like "utilitarian recombinance," where the mere fact of recombinance isn't the story, but rather the overall impact overshadows the source. So where Gore Gore Girls might find a way out of the retro fetishist trap, A-Trak and Kelis are denying that there is a trap; are merely appropriating what they want because they want to and asking you along for the ride.

(I can't think of an album with the kind of Guetta-lite techno on Flesh Tone that feels so centered and cohesive on a singer-author -- when I scan my own memory I mostly think of hotshot producers who use a mix of vocalists to draw attention to their backdrops. Kelis is the heart and soul of Flesh Tone, though, and she is both subservient to and commanding/centering the backdrop.)

Similarly, what I like about the new A-Trak album is that, even more so than the last one, he's not really interested in pointing out the fact of his sources so much as making the music its own point. Something similar happened between the first two Girl Talk albums -- he moved from making a series of "statement" clashes (mixing and matching tastes and sources with a kind of self-satisfied provocation) to just kind of letting his randomized iTunes playlist re-form in unexpected but, in the context of the album as a whole, unremarkable (or rather "unremarked on" -- not just about the fact of these things being played together) ways.

On the A-Trak album, the thesis, so to speak, is modern rap is a melodic medium. He's taking the subtle sea changes of the past five years -- off-key singing, melodic rap a la Krayzie Bone on "Ridin' Dirty" (in which the melody itself is not so much a crucial or centered feature, as it often is in Bone Thugs), Autotune experimentation -- and he's giving it music that really underlines just how musical it is. The original backing usually indicates the key, but A-Trak's productions hew much closer to the melodies themselves, and you start noticing how the (more overtly) melodic hooks get echoed in subtle ways in the raps, too.

Anyway, I guess the point is that A-Trak is repositioning a center -- hard to keep track of the spotlight rappers OR the hipster-friendlier productions, and instead he posits discrete centers that interact less like background/foreground (or context/center) and more like interacting nodes whose true context is the cultural, taste, and technical-musical (in the more technical sense -- almost baroque formal musical experimentation) networks in which they function.

Re: How many centers does it take to get to the lick?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"melodic genre," not "melodic medium." I typed this and posted quickly, so my thoughts are a little incoherent in places.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I feel like some of these thoughts came out in the Ke$ha Konvos, too -- the idea that Ke$ha is simultaneously the center of and backdrop of her music. When I think of (e.g.) "Mony Mony," I think mostly of the clatter and party -- its background was the foreground, with Tommy James himself not having any particular force as an individual actor. With Ke$ha, she's both the force and the stand-in. She's one center and the party is another, and they speak to one another in complicated (and in her case interesting) ways. Which is also what sets her apart from Katy Perry, who is the center despite a background that's upstaging her, or Lady GaGa who wants desperately to be the center but usually in her music shoves herself into a supporting role. One thing I like about the "Bad Romance" mash-up between GaGa and Raconteurs (here) is that it centers GaGa herself in a way that she has trouble doing in her own music. (I like a lot of Lady GaGa's music, but it's usually for cumulative effect.)

[koganbot]

Well, there are social centers (in the culture) and sonic centers (e.g., the center(s) of a particular song) and the interplay between the two: what people perceive as the central thing they care about in a song may change as they're influenced by the general conversation about that song or about music in general. But also in e.g. "Mony Mony" Tommy James is in the center (or at least in a center) taking care of the melody whether or not he's really what we care most about. Whereas dub takes out that center even if we were never quite attending to that center in the first place. (And taking it out may result in our attending to its absence.)

What was on my mind when writing the piece was that, in recombinant dub and related endeavors, once you take that center out, anything you refill it with - a rap or whatever - is now felt as a lot more contingent, its hold on this sort of sonic center not as taken for granted as it had been formerly.

So I'm thinking of several centers here:

--a sonic center that is assumed without our necessarily always centering our attention on it - usually a vocalist taking care of the main melody, or a lead chanter, or a soloist.

--the sonics (e.g. in a pop song) that we are consciously focusing on.

--what we center our conversation on when talking about e.g. a particular song (or its singer, or something in the neighborhood of the song).

--music-related cultural centers (e.g., what music we tend to pay attention to and, of the music we attend to, how we distribute our attention, e.g., how much we talk about this favorite as opposed to that other favorite [the one we tend to keep to ourselves]).

--etc. (e.g., whether songs or TV shows or online games etc. get to be cultural centers, and for whom, and for which culture or subculture).

Not-necessarily-irrelevant aside: A folk singer at the arts fair across the street is strumming her guitar and singing "Umbrella"; also, it's raining; also, she's not very good. She now just finished it and got a big cheer.

[koganbot]

Oh help! Now she's singing "Hallelujah."

[talrose.livejournal.com]

One thing I took from the dub essay when reading it was that it perfectly tapped into the exact definition of "recombinant," which is to "exhibit the characteristics of genetic recombination," and "recombination," according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is "the formation by the processes of crossing-over and independent assortment of new combinations of genes in progeny that did not occur in the parents." And this ties perfectly into dub because it uses early elements of rudeboy and ska and reggae but the assortments of these characteristics are both independent of one another yet coexisting within the same song. In a sense, randomness is a part of it, though I'm skeptical of to what degree Perry and his crew were actually "random" (for instance, in The Congos' "Children Crying," the deep, slashing lion roar is both placed off-center yet feels very deliberate, thereby eliminating its randomness. Or, in Keith Hudson's Playing It Cool, Playing It Right how a song's "centerless" dub version actually feels oddly more centered than its original version.

What I'm trying to get at is that I don't see Dave's theory of a center being inserted back into "centerless" music as particularly accurate here because it seems to me that Missy and Timbo went from being more centered to being increasingly less so. (The most obvious progression beginning at Ginuwine's "Pony" and ending at Missy's "Lick Shots," which has a center that's arguably the most difficult to identify of all their collaborations, since the beat and Missy's rapping dance over the center.) I think the better progression is that we're constantly moving in a sort of hilly motion in and out of "centerless" music. If I wanted to stretch this idea out ever further, I would argue that a human need for gravity and centrality requires the pop landscape to constantly reposition itself at a center, one we were in five years ago and are now pulling ourselves out of (Ke$ha, Rick Ross, or even look at how "Beamer, Benz or Bentley" hollows out the center of the music even though that center still remains).

[talrose.livejournal.com]

To clarify, the music is a gateway in itself, and Missy is a gateway in herself, and there are two gateways coexisting with one another, but the center of the two is difficult to place.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think we're actually on a similar page here -- and maybe what I'm describing is really the same perpetual cycle that Frank is describing in the intro of his piece, of a sort of flux between focal points. So far the story of this year is how much authority multiple centers can hold without compromising the integrity of another center -- it would be like if, in the swing era, the focus were on the band AND the singer-as-personality (or melody conduit or whatever else). I haven't quite been able to articulate what's so fascinating to me about Ke$ha, say, and her ability to be everywhere and nowhere on her tracks at the same time. I'm not sure this is "different" from something else, per se, but it does seem to break from a more recent pop norm. And I think that somehow it connects to some of the ideas in the recombinant piece, but haven't been able to pinpoint how yet. (My bringing in extra-musical centers like taste and social context was a little outside my main point, which is more about the impact of the sonics.)

[talrose.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing about Missy is that--even though there are instances where she'll drop beatless asides ("I told you mother-UH," numerous spots on This Is Not a Test!)--for the most part, she's rapping along with the rhythm of the beat. For example, her rapping mimics the movement of the ektara on "Get Ur Freak On," or flows fluidly through the handclaps like the weird, warped keyboard on "Work It." But Ke$ha seems more often than not to rap counter to the beat, doubling the syncopation or stretching out a word in contrast to the beat itself. This seems to shift a bit on the chorus, where I get the impression that she's singing or rapping with the beat.

So perhaps for Ke$ha there is a center, like there is for Missy, but Ke$ha's rapping is breaking the rules of the center more often than Missy is, even though the music in Ke$ha's songs is grounded more explicitly in a center than it is on a Timbo beat...

[koganbot]

Well, the two contrary impulses I was describing in the piece's intro were, first, to make something the apparent focus, the main story, and second, to put a bunch of elements in conversation or competition with each other (not that one impulse ever shuts out the other completely). Of course, another impulse - or strategy - exemplified in some of the music I discussed wasn't quite either of those; it was where you'd have instruments occupying the same acoustic and temporal space but with each instrument having permission to go its own way, at least partially - so in addition to conversation and competition you get sounds wandering around halfway on their own, not altogether guided by the rest of the music or by an overall form (such as provided by chords or rhythms).