Lester Plays Vegas (April 30)

[koganbot]

On one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977

I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.

So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.

If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.

Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.

Comments

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

This is a (half-assed) response to both you and the convo pasted-in by Chuck, and to the Josh-Anthony conversation that Anthony emailed me.

What I wrote was quite opaque. I didn't really make a complaint, I merely announced one. Of course, this complaint of mine's been coming out in bits and pieces since 1989.

A brief not-much-less-opaque-than-I-was-before reply to Michael's question, "how [is] 'a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown'... supposed to square with something that's presumably, I dunno, *sustained*[?]," is that the discovery and joy comes along with and as a result of sustained intellectual effort (good convo often making the effort easier and better). E.g., to be excited by finding a previously unknown species of moth, you have to know something about moths. To be perplexed and stimulated because a moth is doing something that moths are supposed to be incapable of, you have to have a good idea of what the body of knowledge about moths tells you that moths are capable of; and then you and your colleagues have to exhaust all the reasonable explanations you can think of that would tell you that the moth's novel behavior isn't really so novel. After which, maybe the moth flips your world.

That Lester question about "why and what we're loving" in regard to Iggy's death trips is territory that I own, but I'm really bugged to be the only guy who's got ownership of it. Why hasn't the ground been tramped and trampled into dirt by now? Was I the only kid who actually listened to Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan as a teenager? (Yes, I'm still being cryptic.)

Maybe there have been good sustained conversations at the EMP bar. You can accomplish a lot in an afternoon. And conversely, if someone picks up something someone said twenty years ago and really takes it somewhere, that'd count as a sustained conversation.

I mean, I'm not claiming to have followed the breadth and depth of of all convos. But...

Someday I'll follow through on this post. But as I said, I'm not expecting that to help anyone (else).

I think Maura would be right to say that time is lacking, and to add that money is lacking (time is money), which is to say that the convo doesn't know how to finance itself. But I don't think time/money is really the problem; the "don't know how" is.

In any event, I've made my bed, and now I'll have to... er, make my bed (it's a futon that I have to unroll and put sheets on, the time being almost 3:00 AM).

Anthony E. writes:

maybe it's just me
but i think that one of the reasons pop music exists
is to help people fuck
and i think one of the rarest things you hear in music writing
is the sentence
this track makes me want to fuck

He should read my entry on Enigma in the Spin Alternative Record Guide.

My definition of "intellectual" is broader than almost anyone's I know of. Choosing a hairstyle is intellectual. Deciding what dance should go with "Lovey-Dovey" is intellectual. But my bar for "sustain" is higher than most people's. To sustain a journey you have to travel somewhere, rather than just keep pulling into the same driveway.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

1) then you and your colleagues have to exhaust all the reasonable explanations you can think of that would tell you that the moth's novel behavior isn't really so novel.

2) To sustain a journey you have to travel somewhere, rather than just keep pulling into the same driveway.

3) But I don't think time/money is really the problem; the "don't know how" is.

At least for me, how it goes is (not including my tendency to prefer to discuss identity/industry stuff over the music aspects) that in the process of going through the explanations,(1) we reach the inevitable wall of music theory, because more often than not a music theory analysis of the chords, structure, and how the melody fits into the two explains far more than what most music "analysis" blurbs do today, which is mostly based in arrangement and half-formed melody associations. There was this wonderful blog that was deleted a few years ago that not only featured piano/guitar rearrangements of Jpop bubblegum, but the arranger would write extensively about the influences on the original song and the arrangement. Brahms, Beethoven, or Chopin got brought up just about every time, showing how much good music techniques have already been discovered for centuries. One entry in particular taught me to really appreciate crafting of structure and arrangement over novelty in sound.

Sadly, all that's left of that blogger's analysis is one post dealing in the music theory on his new blog. (It's here, but there's also a lot of prologue that non-fans may find off-putting, as well as lots of bikini pics. To get to the good stuff, ctrl+f "The cryptic ending" ) I mean, look at that! Would completely blow over my head without him having read that, and adding also a throwaway line he wrote worshipping how this is a genius moment seamlessly modulating from Cmaj to Emaj, and since then I've begun to notice other instances of ridiculous progressions and key changes in Jpop, and analyzing to myself how they may or may not work. How many other genius moments have I missed out on because I wasn't aware of exactly what's going on, that music theory would point out? Which I also kind of waxed on about in my "Play it fun, make it good" post about only hearing the brilliance of some pieces because the conductor singled it out in rehearsal, or from how I learned to sync my own sheet music with that of the rest of the orchestra. (All of this came together when just three weeks ago I was given an orchestral score for which I had to cobble together a timpani part and fix a horribly written percussion part because the "composer" was just a choir member who had transcribed some songs into a medley by ear and orchestrated in low-quality synth MIDI. The whole orchestra held him in disdain, and the strings especially complained about how obviously he had no idea how to write for strings. But I digress.)

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

In addition, there's timbre to consider. Areia is a Kpop remixer notable not just for his work, but in how many of the information sections in his videos, (like so) he describes in great detail how he's created some of his sound timbres. Thanks to the stuff I've learned from areia and an introductory electronic music course, I've learned to further listen for things in synths, coming to realize how some other remixes, while much more beat heavy and initially more fun to listen to, are really quite noisy and lack some of the techniques Areia is utilizing. (Also, the difference between mixing and mastering.)

So. In order to achieve (2), I should be either hunting down sheet music. which is often simplified to fit piano/guitar arrangement, so it'll only get me chord progression, and then figuring out music theory stuff on my own. And then hoping that maybe someone will point out genius moments in the synth construction, because I sure as hell won't be able to figure those out, further muddled by file quality that may obscure master, mix, and/or synth quality. At least not without getting down and dirty with synth creation myself, which brings us to (3), because that would require time and money I am not willing to spend. I've already promised myself to learn the music theory stuff, as there are some bubblegum songs I can't write worship posts for without figuring out the progression of myself, and that has already been delayed for years by non-fandom priorities. But synth software, much less hardware, is very expensive, and even if I got my hands on some, there are tricks I still would never learn unless some DJ was kind enough to share them. Which, them sharing tricks with a non-DJ? Fat chance.

So really, at that point, I'm continually stuck at (1) when it comes to analysis, because I'm always aware of explanations that music theory/digital signal processing hold, which means that I rarely ever manage to pull out of the driveway because time/money controls the "don't know how" after all.
At least, where music itself is concerned. There's a reason I prefer to talk about the industry and identities instead. Much easier to read a book on philosophy/psychology to broaden my horizons on that front than to learn music theory.

On that note, tangent:
If 33 1/3 did Kpop, what album would you want to read about/write about, and if the latter, what sort of book would it be? History of composition? Analysis of artist's career in the context of the industry? Fandom meta?

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

I love these two comments of yours. What I want to say first, though, is that the judgment I was making in my post — about rockwrite/musicwrite people not knowing how to sustain an intellectual conversation — wasn't about people being ignorant or untrained and therefore not able to talk knowledgeably on a subject. That's not the sort of problem I had in mind.

I mean, I don't even know Korean, or much about Korea, yet I'm presuming to talk about Korean music.

Of course I didn't explain what I had in mind. But I when I said, "don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation," I was thinking about people, starting with whatever knowledge they had, whether it was a lot or a little, not knowing how to learn from each other, or how to recover when they misunderstood each other, or how to use each other's ideas. So if you and I, say, embarked on an effort to teach ourselves and each other music theory, even though we were starting off hopelessly ignorant, and even if we ended up almost as hopelessly ignorant as we'd been at the start, that doesn't mean that we'd failed to sustain an intellectual conversation. As long as we paid honest attention to each other, and when we misunderstood each other we said what the misunderstanding was, and when one had questions the other would try to answer, and so forth, then I'd say that we were sustaining an intellectual conversation, even if it turned out we weren't the ones to make any contribution to music theory, or to put music theory to much use.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

I feel my own ignorance of music theory, and I wonder how much I miss because of it. But my sense of myself is that, even if I knew a lot of music theory, I might not know how to put it to interesting use, at least in writing about music (rather than, say, composing it). I mean, I know what I ninth chord is, and what an eleventh chord is, and so forth, but I don't have any interesting story to tell about those chords, about their appearance in a particular song or composition.

My feeling about music theory — and I'm so ignorant in the subject that this could be all wrong — is that it's fundamentally about how the music is made rather than about what it does. Not that how it's made and what it does are unrelated. But still, you can drive a car very successfully, go on many fascinating journeys, without knowing anything about car design and only knowing the minimum about car maintenance that allows you to talk to a guy at the garage.* This doesn't mean that someone who does know about car design and car maintenance might not be able to take interesting journeys that you couldn't, or, during whatever journey, have an interesting story to tell about what's going on with the car, how it's riding as opposed to how some other care might ride, and so forth.

I don't want to overstretch that analogy. Knowing theory can help you identify what's being played and remember it afterwards, if you've got the language in your head of notes and progressions and the like. And with that knowledge, you can do what you described that guy on the music blog doing, identifying not only what the songwriter was doing but what the songwriter had probably listened to.

A book I like very much, even though I doubt that I comprehended even half of it, is Peter Van Der Merwe's Origins Of The Popular Style, which gives what in effect is a prehistory of 20th century popular music, so it's about where blues comes from (there are European as well as African sources), but also about 19th century parlor music and the like. And he goes into detail about what notes are played and what rhythms are used. I wish I owned it, so that I could quote from it. I remember that near the start he discusses "Pop Goes The Weasel," pointing out that for a kid to feel, when we get to the word "pop" in the second bar, that the song needs to return home, as it were, back to the tonic, the kid would have had to have absorbed "Western" expectations about melodies and chords, even though the kid wouldn't have a language to describe melodies and chords or know that the feeling is based on knowledge. For some reason, I found that analysis, or assertion, very exciting. Van Der Merwe also says, in regard to the difference between music at about 1800 in Europe and Europe-influenced America, and at about 1900, that by 1900 we'd come to the liberation of melody from harmony. I don't understand his argument, though I wish I did. Has something to do with the melody no longer being expected or required to lead us from one chord to the next. Seemed pretty interesting, though of course I was totally unable to evaluate the argument. If I'm remembering right, he used the second section of the "The Washington Post March" as an example. I wonder if the repeating riff in the first 14 seconds of David Bowie's "Man Who Sold The World" (and then later in the song, too) is an example of what he meant, or if I'm misunderstanding.

*But the people who design the car will need to have a good idea about how it's likely to be used.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think your comparison to "Man Who Sold the World" is a pretty good one -- it wavers just before returning to the root (actually the major third, signifying "returning home"). Also important is the IV-I or iv-I "returning home" of "Amen" in many hymns.

When I explored the music theory behind "I Luv Your Girl," it was important to note how Dream sustains the tension musically, never really giving us a home to return to -- instead using a series of suspended chords to ramp up our expectations but (somehow) never really making us aware of what we're missing.

It would be a mistake, though, to say something like "The-Dream uses suspended chords to ramp up our anticipation; so if you use lots of suspended chords, you will ramp up anticipation." That's the "know about the car but can't drive it well" analogy, I think, that following theory to the letter doesn't predictably ensure results. Theory can, after the fact, clarify things about what it is that's moving you, but it can't necessarily tell you about whether a similar thing will move you in the future. Like a journey, there's too much other stuff aside from the car and its mechanics that determine the success or failure. You can drive an amazing car to pick up the dry cleaning, too (the function of suspended chords in smooth jazz, maybe?). (Writing is the same way.)

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As I write this, I'm now thinking I need to write an essay that compares "Luv Your Girl" to "Blame It" based on use of suspension and root. "Blame It" is similarly structured and (more obviously) references "I Luv Your Girl." I honestly hadn't noticed the similarities until I just tried to think of another song that uses a similar strategy.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

I think your comparison to "Man Who Sold the World" is a pretty good one -- it wavers just before returning to the root (actually the major third, signifying "returning home"). Also important is the IV-I or iv-I "returning home" of "Amen" in many hymns.

Just to make sure we're on the same page. I'm guessing that "Man Who Sold The World" might be an example of Van Der Merwe's contention that melody became free from harmony, since the repeating riff in "Man Who Sold The World" doesn't itself lead us to the next chord, and the one that follows, and the one that follows etc. (since the riff is repeating, not leading). So, is that what you think makes my comparison good, that it's a good example of melody not being tied to the needs of the chord progression?

Btw, without the chord progression moving under the riff, so to speak, a whole lot of the excitement of the riff would be lost. And you can't have just any chords. So the chords and the riff are still interdependent; but the melody was able to give up its role in leading the way to the chord changes — if I'm understanding Van Der Merwe right and if this is a good example of what he meant.

The reason I ask if we're on the same page is that the returning home of "Amen" doesn't seem to have anything to do with that particular point, about "Man Who Sold The World" being an example of melody being liberated from harmony. Or does it? I don't understand. "Amen" seems to be an example of returning home, which the "Man Who Sold The World" riff isn't. Or is your "Amen" comment related to something else, "Pop Goes The Weasel," for instance, and it happens to be stuck right next to your "Man Who Sold The World" comment but isn't meant as a continuation of it?

I've long thought that your "I Luv Your Girl" analysis is one of the best things you've written; maybe in the top two, along with "Kill Me, Kill Me, Kill Me: 001/964," an Ashlee screed of yours.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I may have conflated two different points in those two sentences. "Amen" is related directly to Pop Goes the Weasel. But "Man Who Sold the World" does resolve to the minor at the end of the riff (before Verse 1 starts). But the pleasure in it is related to the tension before it resolves -- in our expectations of where the melody should go (given the harmony) is what makes the riff work.

Listening to "Man Who Sold the World Again," actually what it reminds me of is what makes a lot of Aly and AJ choruses and some other teen confessional tick/kick -- the use of the major third (if we're thinking in a major key) also doubling as the fifth in the minor key. "Rush" is a good example. The melody line is similar to the riff in "Man Who Sold the World" when Aly and AJ sing, "Don't let nobody tell you your life is over," starting minor (vi), then IV, then landing on I. But the tension is in that major third/perfect fifth (in the minor key). That tension happens all over teenpop, is in fact a hallmark of the confessional rock sound.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

The group of people I usually have "intellectual conversations" in addition to general fandom sentiments (which is what I do on other fan forums) is the group that hangs out around snsd_ffa, and before that snsd_metacrack, and before that greywing's livejournal. If you read through the comment threads in this "community," the actual conversations worth anything tend to be about the industry, and the discussion of music in it usually relegated to music objectified as a mechanism of popularity. Threads about the music itself usually never get further than the initial statements of like or dislike, except for the few threads that begin discussing songwriting/arrangement credits, but by then conversation has shifted to the writers/arrangers as the subject, and again, off of the music itself. Perhaps no conversation results because no questions are asked, but at least for me, the songs that have evoked the most visceral reactions, the ones that drive me to write, produce questions that usually I can answer myself until I reach the wall of theory. Particularly, that one chord turnover thing that I absolutely cannot resist in bubblegum. I think it's a relative key modulation or something. So, at least for me, music theory is primarily a way to concretely describe an observation I have about the music, which in turn makes it easier for me to find it in other songs. It also standardizes description, so that others may be able to know exactly what part of a song has the most effect on me and easily identify it for themselves. (Take for example that Purchina link I made above. Without music theory, I'd have to describe it as "that one upward moving part in the prechorus, the way it moves upwards is cool" does not have the same connotations as "the pre-chorus modulates from Cmaj to Emaj, which is cool." The way the latter description codifies the technique better highlights why exactly it's so cool, something that may not be so apparent on first listen. Third time I'm using Bach's "Canon a 2 per Tonus" as an example of genius, but I don't think I would have picked up on the changing keys without the sheet music accompanying the audio because of how seamless it's written.

liberation of melody from harmony
The best guess I can make of this is that traditionally in classical music, the piece consists of themes and developments on that theme based on chords and structure, melody in most sections deriving from the structure developed from the original themes. "Modern" music skips development and just plays themes as is front and center. Especially in pop songs, there's a clear division between melody and arrangement, arrangement usually treated like the audio equivalent of a backup dancer. The fact that mashups are so easily done today simply by playing the backing track of one song with the vocal track of another shows how little the melody and its harmony depend on each other. You couldn't do the same with some classical music because the melody is not such a clear thing to pull, and playing the theme alone would miss the point of the piece. (How the hell you would do such a thing for sometime like this is beyond me, and why sometimes I find the reappropriation of famous classical music into pop songs falls flat. Like so, AAAHHH KILL IT WITH FIRE.)

I definitely want to check out that book, if only but to figure out what he said about "The Washington Post March." I couldn't figure out what he was pointing out just from listening.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

If I'm recalling correctly, and I may not be, Van Der Merwe believes that the same shift was happening in classical music. So in 1900 classical music, the melody is less responsible to the harmonic progression than it would have been a hundred years earlier. I'm just typing words now, not claiming to know what I'm saying.

My guess regarding the Sousa thing is that starting 36 seconds in we've got about six bars of what's essentially melodic repetition (and then again at 0:51) but with chord changes behind it. See especially that D C A C D riff that plays twice from 0:39 to 0:42. I've got my guitar out and I'm trying to figure out the chord change that's going on there, and I can't do so. Shows how bad I am at melody and harmony, I guess.

Especially in pop songs, there's a clear division between melody and arrangement, arrangement usually treated like the audio equivalent of a backup dancer.

Except the exact opposite is true in James Brown's funk. E.g., change the "arrangement" of "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose," especially the guitar and bass, and you've in essence gotten rid of the song. So the idea of, say, a reggae version of "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose" would be unintelligible; giving it a reggae bass would mean you've jettisoned the song in place of something else.* And the interesting dilemma of a lot of modern music is that you've got James Brown's invention, modern funk, as the supposed motor of the music, but you seemingly have to compromise that if you want melodies on top, or real outfront independent raps, or jazz soloing, since in funk the background isn't background. Of course, in any dance music, if you're dancing, the background isn't background, especially if you're a good dancer.

(If you're ever going to read one published piece by me, make it "Death Rock 2000," where I talk about James Brown having created a never-ending, irresolvable tension in modern music. And then I ask the Lester question, and try to relate the two. [But the piece is long, so do it when you can, don't sweat it, except I do think it contains ideas people need to know.])

By coincidence, by chance, it was James Brown, sort of, who got me into K-pop, which was a total accident. I read a brief UPI piece about some Korean group opening for the Jonas Brothers. Out of idle curiosity I went to YouTube to hear songs by the group. I wasn't taken so much by the music but by the video, which I posted. And I wasn't posting it because I thought, "Here's a new-to-me genre we've got to explore," but because, "Here's a clever video that allows me to use the headline 'Background Becomes Foreground,' which relates to my James Brown theories and my ideas about ongoing tension in modern music and modern life; and look, the comic singer dude at the start is doing a take-off on James Brown's mannerisms." So I posted, and lo and behold, a person named anhh, who'd shown up here previously to comment about "theory," appeared on the thread bearing knowledge of K-pop, and an embed. And petronia noticed and dropped by to tell us that "K-pop has the most insane and deeply frightening fanclub culture ever" (speaking of background becoming foreground), which of course pulled me in. And there we were!

*But I notice that on YouTube there are remixes of "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose," which I'll have to explore.