Week 29: Beck - Sea Change (2002)

"Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange”

-          William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”

There are few things in music more difficult than making quiet music sound interesting. Unlike rock or pop, which can fall back on danceable, clappable rhythms to keep people interested, quiet genres like folk or blue jazz must rely on either sheer quality or a hope that the audience is stoned enough to pay attention to anything. By definition, the awe-inspiring, bombastic wall-of-sound techniques of baroque pop are out, as are virtuosic solos and sudden shifts in mood or volume. Quiet music must either focus on maintaining its atmosphere and mood over the entire song or build to a crescendo; there’s little room for the terraced dynamics found in alternative music.

Generally, quiet music is designed to provide a vehicle for the singer. It’s no coincidence that the singer-songwriter genre provides most of the best examples of understated, near-silent songs; even if such songs are often dappled with strings and other instruments, the focus is still almost always on the artist whose name graces the album cover.

While that focus on the singer is present, to some extent, in most Western music, folk, singer-songwriter, and other similar genres are bound by their tendency towards quiet volume. In genres like pop or soul, where the singer is the unquestioned master and ruler, the vocals are allowed to soar in volume and octave to the limits of the singer’s ability. Artists like Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston, and Freddie Mercury used volume and melody to keep the attention of the listener on them during all but the 8-bar intros and solos of their songs. However, that freedom of range isn’t as total in other genres; when changes do happen, they happen slowly.

In quiet genres, the singer must demand attention in other ways, usually through their lyrics. Leonard Cohen, a man often lambasted for possessing almost no vocal range at all, nevertheless commands respect and attention simply through his inventive, beautiful lyrics. Bob Dylan is another case of this, and John Darnielle and Laura Marling are borderline cases.

Week 22: Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)

“I'm sick of spending these lonely nights/Training myself not to care”

-       Interpol, “NYC”, Turn On The Bright Lights

Few bands were as hated for their quality as Interpol was in 2002. Low-level music snobs were united in celebration; finally, there was a good, popular band that wore their influences so obviously and openly that their quality could be dismissed out of hand by even the least well-listened hipster. It was like a connect-the-dots puzzle for dummies, with a straight line between Joy Division and this band of charlatan mimics. People waved off the band, laughing while wearing a Closer t-shirt from Hot Topic: “You only think they’re good because you think they’re original.”

You may have guessed that I was one of those sneering snobs, for a while at least. I enjoyed the bigger singles from the album (“PDA” and “Obstacle 1”) when they were originally released, but the more I read about the band, the more irritated I became. I was outraged that they had allegedly ripped off Joy Division (despite never having heard one of their albums all the way through at that point) and The Chameleons (who I started listening to due to their claimed similarities to Interpol), and I quickly dropped the album out of my rotation.

It was at that point that I attempted to enter the off-putting world of post-punk, one of those cheerful genres that actively works at being alien and intimidating. The effort was short-lived; I enjoyed The Chameleons and have a firm, unyielding love for the Bowie albums that contributed a basic foundation for the genre (the Berlin trilogy and Station To Station, namely), but found the rest of the genre rather masturbatory.

I realize that’s a bit of an odd term to apply to a genre that was apparently focused on reducing music to elements even rawer than punks, but even a cursory glance at the genre reveals that the idea faded rather quickly. Post-punk and punk have in common two things: intent to rip up popular music and start over again (devolution, in other words) and a complete and utter failure to do so. Post-punk had been scooped on the idea of radical minimalism and primitivism in music decades ago; Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” did everything post-punk sought for in 1913, and incited a riot in doing so. By the time Public Image LTD rolled around, John Cage had already mastered the idea with “4’ 33””, a ‘song’ devoted to exploring the natural aesthetics of a quiet room.

There’s also the simple fact that the post-punk music that is today well-known and respected is still pop music. Like the best punk music, post-punk lacks the reckless courage of John Cage and other avant-garde artists in the way it clings to basic pop structures. A more accurate mission statement for punk would have been that they were seeking the devolution of Western pop, a mission in which they arguably succeeded.

Week 21: Porcupine Tree - In Absentia (2002)

"It's about people on the fringes, on the edges of humanity and society. […] Why are they unable to empathize? It’s sort of a metaphor - there's something missing, a black hole, a cancer in their soul. It's an absence in the soul."

-          Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree on the concept behind In Absentia, Vox Online

Progressive rock is much like pop in that it relies almost entirely on presentation. Regardless of the relative minimums of technical proficiency and sex appeal (respectively), both genres strive to present a flashy, impressive exterior with little attention spent on providing meaningful emotional content. Lots of sound and very little fury, in other words.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the tightly arranged, technically pruned sounds of present-day plastic pop was originally inspired by the similarly controlled sounds of 70s progressive rock. Granted, prog achieved that perfected sound through careful production, obsessive songwriters, and extremely talented musicians while pop simply runs raw sound through computer programs, but the end result of glossy product is essentially the same. It’s the aural equivalent of comparing a photograph of a naturally beautiful woman with light makeup to a homely woman airbrushed and Photoshopped to hell and back; the methods may be different, with prog being a playground for musicians and pop for producers, but the final images are fairly similar.

The main difference between those images, in a more complex metaphor, would be the content. Progressive rock, thanks mainly to the boundless influence of Led Zeppelin, tends to be descriptive. It’s no mistake that prog and fantasy imagery often gets linked by artists and record sleeve designers alike; the two fields are similar in that they’re trying to build extremely detailed worlds that can be marveled at by the consumer.