Week 34: Coldplay - Parachutes (2000)

“I want to fly, never come down/And live my life, and have friends around”

-    Coldplay, “We Never Change”

Unity doesn’t get much respect in music criticism. The appearance of chaos, of many voices saying many things, gathered up under the pretext of a common subject, is far more valued, as it is seen as more difficult to manufacture. Homophony, many voices speaking as one, is dismissed as overly classical, while polyphony, the sounds of loosely yoked chaos, reigns as the ideal.

This preference is hardly difficult to call up examples of, especially now that the pre-ripped jeans aesthetic of dubstep and grime has infiltrated the mainstream pop scene. The most prized producers are now regularly achieving the Dickensian feat of speaking in many different voices, layering instrument upon instrument in an effort to baffle the listener into praise. It often works, simply because layer upon layer of music can very easily seem impressive, by dint of sheer scale and power. I didn’t necessarily like most of the album, but Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy exemplifies that idea of “more is more” as much as Queen did back in the 70s with A Night At The Opera; putting issues of songwriting aside, most people can agree that both albums sound impressive from the layering and production alone.

That massive production goes back for decades in Western music, dating back to Phil Spector’s work with wall-of-sound production and the baroque pop style of The Beach Boys. Moreso than Spector, who, as the name of his production style suggests, favored a unified wall of instruments, a bludgeon of sound, The Beach Boys reveled in the styles that required the kind of riches they were granted. “Good Vibrations” is the sound of a master songwriter dumping out his toybox and staging a large-scale play for all of his friends, just as “Power” is the sound of one man yelling his own praises over a mob’s jeers.

Week 13: Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica (2000, remastered in 2004)

The one genre I haven’t really discussed much is the horribly broad, entirely non-descriptive ‘alternative’. This has mainly been due to a lack of energy; unpacking the alternative genre is like breaking down the meaning and history of ‘rock’ as a genre name, except even vaguer. Rock has at least a few, albeit slim hand-holds for identification (electric guitar, strong percussion, long hair, etc). Alternative, much like indie, has little cohesion at all.

The easiest way to define the alternative scene is with the word ‘eccentricity’. Alternative music often has a wide range of influences, both in sound and lyric, which makes sense considering it began developing in the 80s, later reaching its crystallization point with the Pixies and the Northwest grunge scene. Alternative, by and large, is music made by music nerds and music lovers, combined with a somewhat infuriating need to impress the listener.

That drive to impress, shock, or otherwise astonish one’s audience is what leads alternative bands to erect something of a wall between their basic songs and the presented product. One of the clearest examples of this is Nirvana’s “Rape Me” which, structurally speaking, is a nearly perfect/archetypal piece of rock music. The lyrics are another story, obviously, as is the distortion-heavy production and Cobain’s screamed vocals (particularly at the end). This is the wall so characteristic of the alternative scene; it seems born of a strong desire to both distinguish oneself from the competition and to distance oneself from the audience.

It could also be seen as an example of how the scene attempted to distance itself from the classically composed Tin Pan Alley sounds of pop and R&B. Alternative singers rarely qualify as even halfway-competent when judged by traditional standards; much like classic blues singers, they simply don’t match the cookie-cutter model of singing, and this gives the best alternative songs enormous personality. Forced to accommodate their less than brilliant lead singers while also presenting some measure of variety on their albums, the songwriters and performers of an alternative band are forced into creativity. Hard times breed creativity, it seems.