koganbot | Single Ladies (Put A Riff On It)

Something I posted on a comment thread here, about the Turnage-Beyoncé thing:

Just a point in regard to whether one "got" the reference to "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" [not an issue for me, 'cause I discovered the Turnage piece through one of the mashups, and wouldn't bet on my having recognized the tune otherwise, though probably would have been saying to myself, "this reminds me of something; what the hell is it?"]: loads of melodies sound like other melodies, some deliberately, some from the songwriters' unconscious, some coincidentally, etc. I often miss the obvious references and then hear connections that aren't there, or when I do hear I have no idea what's intended and what isn't. And just to give an example, I've probably heard Hole's "Celebrity Skin" and Ashlee Simpson's "Surrender" over a hundred times each, and I know that Ashlee has covered "Celebrity Skin" in concert, and I saw the episode of Ashlee's reality show where she and her label president, Jordan Schur, are discussing "Surrender" and Schur says that it makes him think of Hole's "Celebrity Skin," my assumption being that he's correctly inferring from the sound that Courtney Love is a huge inspiration for Ashlee, yet I didn't realize, until just a few days ago when I ran into a YouTube mashup that showed it, that "Surrender" uses the riff from "Celebrity Skin." So... well it's not a contest, to see who gets it. No one gets it all.

[Worth clicking the link to see my comment on someone's odd assumptions concerning the authorship of "Single Ladies."]

[Also, though I love "Celebrity Skin," "Surrender" is one of my least favorite Ashlee tracks, Ashlee's most triumphant Hole-style song being "I Am Me."]

[EDIT: I'm speaking loosely when I say "uses the riff," since I don't mean "plays the riff" but "plays something similar to the riff that was almost certainly based on the riff," the rhythm and the style of power-chording being identical but the notes not. I talk a little more about this in the comment thread.]

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In my review of GN'R Lies I wrote, "Guns N' Roses evoke Zeppelin and Aerosmith, but there's more effort and, maybe because of that, more humanity or soul or beauty or reach or desperation." During the line edit, Doug Simmons praised this by telling me that by embedding the word "soul" in a long list I'd found a way to use it without its being the impossibly weighty thing it is in most writing. I hadn't even noticed this when I was creating the piece! But that doesn't mean that what I did wasn't characteristic. But also, you can't say, "Whenever someone writes a list, that person is evening out the emotional impact of the items on it. Whenever Frank Kogan writes a list, he's evening out the emotional impact of the items on it." No, sometimes I'm just trying not to leave things out. But - I'm at my third consecutive "but" - how I wrote that line does tell you something about me, though to know this you have to have read a bunch of things by me. In that sentence I do even out the items on it, therefore not making such a big thing of "soul." But this isn't due to any leveling impulse on my part, isn't an attempt to make things equal and drag soul to earth. Just the opposite, it's an attempt to counter a culture-wide leveling and destruction of, e.g., the word "soul" and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's the overweight that the culture puts on the word "soul" that led to the word's being grasped by many hands and pulled under and drowned. By putting it in a list I was bringing it back up to the surface, giving it life and impact in a sentence that it had lost over the years of ballooning up ridiculously and then plummeting. And I was doing all this unconsciously. But again, this rhetorical device - the list of attributes - only meant a lot here (beyond my finding a way to use a dead word effectively) because in my ideas at that time I was wrestling with the fact that People Like Me (the quasi-intelligentsia of writers, musicians, and artists on the cultural so-called left) were destroying whatever we were exalting, rock and then punk and then... Take the line out of that context, and it's just a nice sentence.

So the difference, the gulf, isn't always one of vocabulary, but of how to relate individual musical choices to broader events in a particular song, in a bunch of songs, and in the world, though certainly a better and more accessible vocabulary would help us to do so. But it's never easy to connect individual events (e.g., Frank's use of the word "but" in this sentence) to whole metropolis-sized conversations full of "buts" and "thoughs" and "whereases" and "howevers" or to the broader constellation of cultural chopping and counterchopping in general.

The Kuhnian "incommensurability" is of people playing different games in which different moves and tokens meaning different things, hence can't be mapped one onto the other. There's a mapping problem here, too, but it isn't a vocabulary gap per se; the gulf here is one of size, between the small and the not-so-small.

I have a better grasp of Kuhn than I did when this originally came up on ilx: so now I think what I find interesting is why doesn't the kuhnian map really apply to the arts -- despite the apparent possible similarities, if they are even that -- and why is it good that the arts aren't like the sciences? In other words: what are the different things we want them to do?

Yes! Arts do undergo revolutions in ways at least superficially similar to scientific revolutions, whereas few other cultural endeavors seem to. But arts will have related but competing movements, opposing schools, and the like, and productive intermixing between genres, with the past generally remaining accessible to the present (at least apparently so).

The Kuhnian "incommensurability" is of people playing different games in which different moves and tokens mean~~ing~~ different things

Single Ladies (Put A Riff On It)

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