Week 32: JD McPherson - Signs & Signifiers (2010)

“I work hard every year/I seize my bread/I ain’t gonna let you women/Go to my head”

-          JD McPherson, “Country Boy”

My past birthday, a good friend of mine gave me a philosophy book, “The Sublime Object Of Ideology,” which is theoretically related to psychology, my academic vice of choice. I say ‘theoretically’ because I can’t make heads-or-tails of the bloody thing. The whole thing is just slightly beyond me, the language rendered impenetrable by alien phrases. I don’t consider myself dumb, but this is a book that makes me reconsider.

Though impressive technically, the insight the book contains and the craft used to put it together become pointless due to my inability to understand it. In the same way, most art rock, high-level jazz, and other deliberately complex music tends to fall on deaf ears. If people lack the vocabulary, the language, or, most importantly, the interest, then even the most technically impressive piece can be left deserted.

Pop hooks, past successes, and press buzz can help alleviate this issue, bringing even self-dubbed “art pop” into the #1 spot, but most of the time art music doesn’t even get glanced at by the majority. It gets consumed by small groups of people with scarves and far-too-large frames, as well as those of us who are always on the lookout for new things to hear. Otherwise, exposure to art music relies on word-of-mouth, blind luck, and lovely little bars and cafes willing to venture outside of Pandora and Starbucks sampler CDs.

The fact that people don’t like to seek out the kinds of music that often revel in their ability to offend and distance the listener doesn’t surprise me, and in fact it doesn’t even particularly bother me. All appearances to the contrary, I’m not enough of a snob to insist that people immerse themselves in the heady worlds of bebop and no-wave. Hell, even I don’t spend all of my time in those worlds, or even a majority of it; most of my leisure time is spent listening to music I enjoy rather than music that challenges me to decipher it.

Week 31: Screaming Females - Ugly (2012)

“Have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood.”

-          Larry, Closer

When art had its first golden age, ugliness would have been unthinkable. Classical artists sought to replicate the perfect nature that they believed in; their goal was to inspire a sense of grace and glory in their audience, to evoke God by perfectly portraying his Creation. To put flaws into the pictures, or worse, to make outright ugly images, would be spitting in the face of nature and, by extension, God.

I’m not enough of an art historian to say when, exactly, that began to change, but that opinions shifted is inarguable. Postmodernism takes error and ugliness as its main subject, with artists deliberately breaking the rules of their craft in an effort to explore its limits and make them obvious to the audience. This can be taken to unnecessary extremes, and even verge on self-parody in some cases, but it can also offer pieces of genuine interest. The key is that the artist can both prove that they’re breaking the rules knowingly and that they’re competent enough to be able to shed those rules.

Those rules of aesthetics are, often, where the beauty of an art piece comes from. When I use the word ‘craft’ I’m doing so to refer to artists attempting to give their audience a piece of perfection, a slice of Heaven. Such rules are tied to the classical tradition of giving an audience grace by offering them beauty, and by following such rules artists are attempting to do the same, though not necessarily with classical subjects. Pop music, for example, uses craft in an effort to inspire bliss in the listener, but it’s rarely tied to any kind of natural imagery. Instead, most pop relies solely upon the craft itself, using common, lovely chord progressions to augment the content of their choice.

Even the ugliest, rawest of subjects can be rendered graceful and lovely with the right degree of craft. A talented application of aesthetic principles can make even a child starving and sobbing in the streets appear beautiful, dulling the natural sympathy an audience has with a sense of elevated beauty. Such images are easier to digest than the reality of someone slowly dying in misery, and the ability to produce them is valued by charities and political groups all over the world.

Songs Of The Days: Week 31

July 30: Jeff Buckley - Lilac Wine (Grace, 1994)

July 31: Dead Kennedys - Kill The Poor (Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables, 1979)

August 2: Depeche Mode - Blasphemous Rumours (Some Great Reward, 1984)

August 3: Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

August 4: The Lovin' Spoonful - Summer In The City (Hums Of The Lovin' Spoonful, 1966)

August 5: AC/DC - Beating Around The Bush (Highway To Hell, 1979) (not available on Spotify)

Week 30: Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

“My TV ain’t HD, that’s too real"

     -    Frank Ocean, “Sweet Life”

Unlike his fellows in Odd Future, Frank Ocean seems to have no interest in sounding young. Like Prince, Laura Marling, or Jack White (all artists who started in their early-20s or younger), Ocean falls into the middle period of adolescence better than he does the categories of vapid youth or confident adult.

What makes Ocean and those artists more adolescent than, say, an album like Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is their indecision and lack of clear focus. The fatal flaw in Perry’s album is that no teenager would be able to narrow their fantasies down to someone as clearly defined as Katy Perry’s sugarplum-fairy-in-a-bikini image; indeed, most adolescents would be hard-pressed to narrow their fantasies down at all. It’s an era where, for the first time, we are forced to grapple with the fact that we can even have fantasies and dreams; childhood is an era in which everything we want seems readily available, and it ends as soon we realize how wrong we are.

The dreams of your average teenager more closely resemble the tenuously themed mixtapes or playlists they create or the television they watch, and both of those images are cornerstones of Ocean’s presentation. Nostalgia, Ultra was patterned after the former, complete with tape clicking noises and, at one point, a girlfriend’s insulting critique (“What’s a Radiohead anyway?”). This all fits with the literal mixtape presentation of the album; in recent years that term has taken on the meaning of a rapper’s self-released tape that uses wholesale sampling in lieu of professional production.

What truly unified Nostalgia, Ultra, aside from its presentation as a self-made mixtape, was how outwardly focused Ocean was in all of the songs. When Ocean does figure into the lyrics of the songs it’s only as part of some relationship that determines his actions. Much like a classic mixtape, all of the songs on the album are devoted to others, focused on relationships and people either real or imagined.