Broadly put, there are two basic ways to listen to music: critically and naively. A critical perspective, the one I’ve adopted on this blog for example, attempts to connect the music in question to other topics or examples. This can range from analyses of cultural and historical background to simple comparisons of the discussed music to other artists or genres. In other words, a critical perspective is anything that attempts to make explanations of a musical piece.
The other way to discuss music is naively. That word isn’t meant as a pejorative; a naïve perspective is simply one in which only the music in question is being discussed. Nothing else is brought into the conversation, and for that reason such discussion is often limited to stating facts (“That keyboard is a Melotron set to imitate a flute.” [A fabulous no-prize to anyone who guesses that one]) or opinions (“I like this song.”). Understandably, such a perspective often gets short shrift.
One of the things music snobs like me lose is the ability to listen to music in a naïve way, at least not without expending some minor effort. My past few years of greedily devouring as much music as I could afford (often considerably more than that, to be honest) means that anytime I listen to a new song, I instinctively compare it to something else. I suspect this is what prevents, along with many others, from enjoying bland radio pap; when I hear something like Shinedown’s “Second Chance”, my mind parses it with a library of other similar songs and finds that one woefully lacking. I’m fundamentally incapable of making it past “Well I just say Hailey’s Comet, she waved/Said why you always running in place?” without vomiting up a stream of dismissal, critique, and violent sarcasm. The song deserves it, no doubt about it, but I’d hardly call that a typical response.
As far as I can tell from casual observation, the typical response to such music is to pay as little attention to it as possible. Most people, in my experience, do not pay close attention to what’s playing on the radio when they’re in the office, the club, or even their own car. It’s just noise to work along to, dance along to, or drive along to; a superior alternative to silence and little more.
Chalk it up to a highly pretentious upbringing if you will, but such an attitude is preposterous to me. If you’re not enjoying a piece of music than there’s no reason at all to continue listening to it, so change the station or leave the club. It’s hardly rocket science.
Still, that naïve perspective is something many music critics and snobs could learn from. The critical write-up requires a critic to adopt a detached viewpoint from the music, and oftentimes talk around it entirely. A well-known cliché about music writing, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” (from Martin Mull) gives the reason for this more succinctly than I ever could. Critical reviews and retrospectives are filled with lovely facts and, on occasion, breakdowns of a song’s sheet music simply because there’s no real way to concretely discuss a song without doing such a thing. Attempts to break this rule result in patterned nonsense.
That approach is all well and good, and certainly results in nicely long and thick reviews, full of big words with at least five syllables a piece. It can even provide readers with an idea of whether they’ll like a given album or not, which is generally the point of these things when you get right down to it.
However, it also strips reviewers of their ability to enjoy basic pop music that they didn’t hear before they first discovered jazz and/or classical. This is a rather limiting handicap, especially when it comes to a full-time job, night on the town, or cross-state road trips. We become shrill harpies, incapable of starting a sentence without either cursing or a variation on, “Let me tell you why this is terrible.”
We all need to relax a bit is what I’m saying. It’s tough to listen to music without flexing the critical muscles of our wrinkled brains, especially when we’re battered with banal couplets like the one quoted above (see also: Katy Perry, LMFAO, Black Eyed Peas, and early Beatles songs). We need to occupy the slightly less reflexively hateful middle-ground between hipster and poptimist, which I’m hereby dubbing the Christgau Plateau.
One of the things that can comfortably exist in that cheerful middle-ground is J-Rock like this week’s album (technically an EP but whatever). While J and K-Pop can be a bit too… sugary for my tastes (and those of many others, presumably), J-Rock is a perfectly accessible genre to virtually anyone. Part of the reason for this is how ridiculously broad that genre is; J-Rock can be assigned to artists varying from fast-paced acoustic music to hard rock, and many other genres besides.
EVE2009, this week’s album of choice, is itself something of a blend between funk and jazz, with an additional hip-hop influence that can be heard in some of the vocals. As you may know by now, a strong rhythm section is one my great weaknesses when it comes to rock music; it’s why The Who is one my favorite classic rock bands, and the only reason why I can suffer through The Joshua Tree. This album has a lot to offer on that front, as it should considering how integral such things are to both of the most obvious genres for the album.
Integral to the album as a whole is a generally laid-back mood, similar to the cerulean blues of West Coast hip-hop like De La Soul or the similarly Japanese, sadly deceased, hip-hop artist Nujabes. This is not music that is attempting to impress or dig its hooks deep into your mind; it just wants you to have a good time.
All of this is perfectly well and good, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with why I’m suggesting it as a baby step for those of us with a deep set hatred of vacuous pop. That bit is down to this being an album with no real handholds for an American listener. It doesn’t conform to any one genre, it uses odd song structures, and, most importantly, you can’t understand a single word they’re saying (with the occasional exception).
I can’t remember what it felt like to discover music for the first time, or even how it felt when I realized how deep the well of musical history runs in my late teens. To jaded enthusiasts like myself, the thrill of novelty is precious in its rarity, and foreign music is the perfect way to rediscover that thrill of hearing a song you never even imagined before. I may never recapture the thrill of hearing “A Day In The Life” for the first time, but at least I can still find sounds I haven’t heard before.
On a final note, regardless of what you may have read into my statements above, I’m not making an adjustment in my position on the difference between good music and plasticine pop. There is a fundamental difference in quality, ambition, and emotion between the two, and they will never be interchangeable or even equivalent in my eyes. I’m simply distancing myself from the kind of reflex vomiting you’ll see on most music forums (or in most franchise cafes) the moment you mention the word ‘pop’ or, heaven forbid, ‘mainstream’. My gradual progression from that into calm debate doesn’t mean I ever stopped hating Katy Perry’s noxious ilk, it just means I’ve learned to articulate it a bit better. Take my advice all you hipster teens; you’ll win more friends if you can explain why you hate “Yeah”. Doesn’t mean you can’t swear why you’re doing it though.
Cheers.
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