“I was never that young/I was born old and grey/Alone and in
shambles/It’s alright, it's ok”
-
Dr. Dog, “Get Away”
What place does the topic of age deserve in discussions
about music? One of the most basic ways to dismiss something, from a critical
perspective, is to label it as ‘immature’ or ‘childish’, a criticism that I’ve
used on this very blog. I stand by my usage of those terms, mainly because such
things don’t generally hold up under an analytic lens.
Poptimism, the critical perspective that pop music should
not be criticized in the manner I described above, runs into this problem
constantly. Artists like Beyonce may be making music that is brilliantly put
together, but the accomplished whole doesn’t appear to me to have any real
content. Most everything about pop music is put clearly on the surface level,
without any need to dig deep for meaning, a pop song can only generate interest
in itself by making sure the music is intricately arranged and, at best, offers
some kind of interesting composition.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that approach to
music. Entire books have been written on The Beatles, including their poppiest
songs along with the ones that came closest to blues or folk music. Oftentimes
it’s those intricate pop songs that attract the most critical attention, thanks
to how readily they offer themselves to music majors with heads teeming with
Italian words and a lot of free time. In a more general sense, pop songs are
often the songs large groups unite around when they need something to fill the
dead air between conversations. Taking examples from my own blog, I love “The Radicalization
Of D” by Gareth Liddiard, but if I were to throw a party I’d be more likely to
reach for Holy Ghost. Similarly, if I were to play some Kanye I’d have to
cherry-pick from 808s quite a bit (“Heartless” would be a good choice;
leave it to Kanye to make crippling depression danceable).
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make pleasant music,
which is the only thing that truly unites all pop musicians. I hate modern pop
for its constant, almost desperate attempts to eliminate all traces of humanity
from their music, simply because doing so transforms pop into uncanny
electronica. Making the human voice into an instrument has a long proud
tradition in music all around the world and visa versa, but attempts to
manipulate the voice in post as if it were a guitar string to be fretted gives me
the oogies. How can you have joyful, happy music if the humanity has been
clinically removed? It’s like marrying a Stepford Wife.
The exact opposite of that draining style is sampling,
which, nowadays, is essentially the art of cramming as much as humanly possible
into a single song. I read a
story recently about the film Raging Bull and Martin Scorsese’s
obsessive need to have a perfect sound mix, to the point where an inaudible
line delivered by an unimportant extra could drive him into a fit of apoplexy.
That same kind of minute attention to details is what fuels the best examples
of sampling, which, even at the most basic, rely on the ability to pick out
neat drum loops in old funk songs and string them together. The first guys to
notice that break on “Funky Drummer”, or any number of other songs, were
geniuses; those are the kind of eureka moments that require a combination of
luck and expertise to achieve.
Sampling quickly grew into an art of collage making, first
peaking with the Dust Brothers in the late 80s, who crafted detailed little
instrumentals that were noticed by the Beastie Boys and transformed into Paul’s
Boutique. The Brothers proved themselves able producers in any capacity
with “MMMBop”, which pulls off the magic trick of making you ignore the fact
that half of what you hear is multi-tracked to oblivion (I think there are at
least two drum tracks, for example), then reaffirmed their sampling chops with
Beck’s Odelay. That album helped prove the utility of sampling; it didn’t
have to be used simply to build backing tracks for rappers, but could also be
used to provide conventional rock hooks and the little elaborations that had
been trapped in a keyboard ghetto since the 60s.
That ramshackle style was essentially a hip-hop undercurrent
to Beck’s original plan for a dark, acoustic album more in line with Mutations
or Sea Change (“Ramshackle” is one of the few survivors from that
original idea). The production adds stuff under, around, and over that idea, making
the album sound, with few exceptions, like something knocked out in a fabulously
well-equipped treehouse owned by somebody’s grandfather; young kids playing in
an old toy-store.
Be The Void is squarely in that mood and style, with
a genre I can only describe with words like ‘ramshackle’ or ‘dusty’. Like most
pop music, Dr. Dog have crafted intricate little songs, but they’ve assembled
them using natural sounding instruments. Many of those instruments have been
heavily altered, especially the drums, which are given a flat, booming sound,
but these alterations are done to add personality rather than subtract it. It’s
a finely controlled chaos, not unlike a well performed concert.
Aside from Odelay, the most obvious ancestor for the
album, one could also compare this to Blunderbuss, Jack White’s solo
album that mimicked his deliberately messy lead guitar style with eclectic
production and huge personality. Though this album isn’t as consciously funny
as White’s work (nothing on here is as impish as “I’m Shakin’”), it shares the
general mood that I previously described as “adolescent” in my write-up for Blunderbuss.
The problems and conflicts described by Dr. Dog aren’t on the catastrophic,
dramatic scale of tween-aimed pop, nor are they as empty and glitter-flaked as
the nothings seen in bubblegum. At the same time, this isn’t a story album or
anything describing raw emotion, pushing it slightly out of typical ‘adult’
music. Like Jack White, Dr. Dog is found somewhere in the middle of things.
These age classifications are arguable, of course. An
equally valid argument would be that Dr. Dog, Beck, Jack White, and others
along those lines represent the truly childlike music, delighting in the tools
they have in the studio as if they were toys. Similarly, the grandiose, orchestral
swells mastered by pop artists like Phil Spector and Roy Orbison could be
called teenage, echoing the catastrophic-in-scale emotions we all get throttled
by at the onset of puberty. That linking of high-level drama to teens is the
reason why nu-metal is labeled as teenage.
I feel that teens nowadays, and maybe in general, are
naturally suspicious, and even dismissive, of that kind of outsized emotion. Unless
the expression is couched in irony and weakened with a wink to the audience,
the teen operas of past years get dismissed as “corny” or “simple-minded”. This
is not to say that “Running Scared” is an accurate depiction of the nerves one
feels in a relationship, but I find it odd that people seem unwilling to take
such things at face value.
If Be The Void does have a through-line of emotion,
it’s those very same nerves that Roy Orbison enshrined in deservedly beloved
crescendos. The nerves of Be The Void, however, are more neurotic and
repressed; the Woody Allen comedy to teen opera’s The Notebook, let’s
say. Maybe that’s what makes this seem more teenaged to me, considering how
little my teenage years resembled Roy Orbison songs (that didn’t happen until
my 20s!). But this opens up the Pandora’s Box that ends with a smart aleck
asking whether or not I see ‘blue’ the same way that he does.
Tone is the most important thing in these discussions. When
Win Butler says shit like “Something filled up, my heart with nothing/Someone
told me not to cry/But now that I'm older, my heart's colder/And I can see that
it's a lie” on ‘Wake Up”, the only reason anyone pays attention is because he
says it so earnestly, with music so beautiful that you almost want to believe
his claims that growing up is torture designed to kill a soul. Similarly, empty
little lines like “There's a pistol and a crystal underneath my pillow/There's
a tender heart inside that ugly armadillo” from Be The Void’s “That Old
Black Hole” are silly, but Dr. Dog present them so guilelessly that they’re
also pleasant and almost charming.
Anything can be considered dull, boring, or outright
offensive when taken out of context. The lyrics to something like Dr. Dog’s “Lonesome”
are repetitive and moderately uninteresting on the page, but are brought to
life through delivery and passion. They’re animated by personality, which is
only further enhanced by the ramshackle production and dust-covered
instruments. We can describe it any number of ways, but the only reason to do
so is to convince someone to give the piece a listen. The best way to convey
music’s quality is to play it for someone directly. This is why I’m using
Spotify and YouTube in conjunction with my lovely written words; without context,
this blog would be useless. The goal of writing about music is to convince
people to give it the attention it deserves.
Cheers.
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