Nietzsche and music - or not

So I’m not going to read Nietzsche just yet. He’s written great things about it (notably in The Birth of Tragedy), and wrote some music himself. I’d like to say it’s because that’s not how I want to go about developing a phenomenology of music – but it’s really for the same reason why I haven’t posted anything in such a long time: no time. Also, writing and researching music really isn’t the best way to keep my job long-term in political studies – even though the Radiohead chapter turned out really well, even after the revisions requested by the editors. I think it’s a really good summing up of the vision of politics I developed through my thesis.

I will however say a few things about it, based on two articles, which are reviews of two books on Nietzsche and music: one on him as he wrote about it; the other on him as a musician. (I should warn that they’re in French.)

The first book would be called “Nietzsche’s musical aesthetics.” What I find very interesting in the approach of the book, is that the author affirms that we can’t talk about Nietzsche and music without some musical knowledge – and that we can’t really understand what he says about music without referring to the music itself and more specifically to the partition. I have two things to say about that kind of an approach: first, yes, when we talk about music, even about a person’s understanding of it, we have to keep talking about music. Second, although I’m tempted to say that I don’t need to look at the partition to “Jump” by Van Halen, that’s not actually the point – because I don’t think there’s as much of a difference between rock and classical music as we’re led to believe.

The second point is rather that a “scientific” approach such as that of musicology is definitely interesting and important – but it’s not the only rigorous approach to music, which also affects us. Judging from the excerpts in the review, we need to have a basic understanding of musical composition in order to understand the very book we’re reading.

It’s fine if you want to be read by specialists – who are the only ones who will understand even the review. And the review, by the way, tears the author a new one, because apparently he’s completely wrong as far as his analysis of the musical composition goes. So it sounds like it’s a complete waste of time, and I want these ten minutes of my life back. However, I’d still be curious to see what else the book says. For me, based on the approach described in the review, the musicological/science of music approach to Nietzsche misses what makes him most interesting: the whole existential focus: how does music affect us? What does it mean to us? Why is music (or art in general) from centuries ago still beautiful?

And that’s exactly what seems to be the focus of the second book, which takes Nietzsche seriously when he says that his books were undertaken because he wasn’t the great musician and composer he wished he were – and that some of them could be classified as music rather than philosophy. There’s the existential, lived, experienced meaning of music, the experience that goes beyond the sounds we hear and their arrangement. So the author looks at how Nietzsche’s relationship to music might have structured his philosophy.

And what’s more, she also adopts the standpoint of musicology. And here again, the reviewer talks about “mistakes” in her analysis. So once we’re doing “science” suddenly there’s only one way to approach a given piece of music? And it just so happens that reviewers, rather than readers, know the truth about Nietzsche and Wagner’s music?

This reviewer, at least (or maybe it’s the merit of the author of the book), sees some value in the book – let me translate:
“... not only is Nietzsche a musician in the sense that he has composed music, more or less well, but more profoundly because his whole work, books and music included, proceed from an outright musical disposition...” Music for Nietzsche precedes language, it is fecund with speech, and it is the atmosphere of speech.

And that’s how we can talk about music in new ways.

Repetition and anticipation

Walter Benjamin (who wrote mostly in the 1920s and 1930s) thought that mechanical and technical reproduction of works of art, and the incorporation of reproduction in art itself (photography, pictures of artworks and monuments, film as a new art form, and of course the recording of music) would change art radically, would transform it completely. I think there’s something there.

I was listening to two CDs today. The first was Bruce Springsteen’s latest one, “Magic.” I don’t think it’s particularly original. But it sounds fresh and new anyway. Springsteen has the ability to write Springsteen songs, to give in completely to his style, and to make something new out of it, songs that still speak to us today, with everything that’s happened – and here I mean political events as well as the way we mike drums. They’re basic rock songs, in the way he’s managed to help define what rock songs can sound like. But they don’t sound like they’ve been done before. They say something new, they give us new melodies. But I think it’s by their allusion to everything else Springsteen has done, to everything rock and roll has been and can be, that they speak to me so strongly. Even though those intonations, those tricks with the variations in the chorus, those instrumentations, those kinds of solos, have happened over and over, there’s still the possibility through repetition of saying something new, of sounding new.

The second CD was by Raphaël (a French singer we quite like – check it out!). Randee ordered it from France, pre-ordered it in fact, and now we’ve had it in the car for a few weeks. I liked it right away and it’s growing on me; I’m liking it more and more. I think that has to do with it becoming familiar: I’m not thrown off anymore by its difference from the music I’m used to or by its huge difference with his others songs on his previous CDs that sound so odd given that it’s still his voice, his style of writing, composing, arranging, singing (of using non-words for vocals, for instance). I know the twists that are coming, I know the basic melody – and from that, the changes in dynamics and in melodies start taking on a whole other life, I feel them coming, I’m hearing them before they start, in those that come before them. I’m getting more out of it now than I did the first time I heard it.

Pop music is meant to be repeated – it was made possible by recordings and repeated play on the radio – and it’s meant to be familiar, it’s very close to fashions in its evolution (even though there’s something in some old songs that still speaks to us today). It’s the very fact that we’ll listen to these CDs over and over that makes the music take certain directions, allude to itself and to its other possibilities. Pop music is made to be played and heard over and over, by everyone, everywhere. When your music is going to be constantly bombarded at everyone, sold as a commodity, played in order to then be sold, sandwiched between five other songs and overlapping with others, style counts above all. It’s a difference, a gap between your song and your last one, and the one that will be played after yours on the radio or on an mp3 player. Your voice, your sound, beyond making your songs identifiable and thus easier to remember and purchase, is your way of making your songs make sense, your way of saying something and getting it across to people.

And when I say: “saying something” I’m talking about the meaning of songs to us, far beyond their lyrics. Pop songs play on the fact that other music has been heard and will be heard – right away, with little attention, in moments and places that have little to do with the old concert halls. Letting us guess and anticipate what’s coming, making us sing, hum or think along, taking us out of our daily life and out of our habits, forcing us out of our routine, without us even really trying to escape in the first place: that’s a great thing about pop music.

Writing about Radiohead

In case anybody is following these things, my deadline for my book chapter on Radiohead is June 15. Even though I still have quite a bit of time, I thought I’d get to it now, when I’m not really in a rush to finish anything (that’s coming before too long, I’m sure!), and when I’m not quite willing to get to work on writing the last few chapters of my thesis, which seems like quite a daunting task at this point, especially given that I’m waiting to hear about that job at MacEwan. But enough biography.

I’ve written a very drafty first draft of the chapter. It might be a little long – the guidelines say that 12 pages might just be enough, and I have 20. Also, I’m not very consistent in my approach to the topic: here I speak of Thom Yorke and there of Radiohead; here I look very closely at lyrics, and there I look very closely at Camus and Merleau-Ponty… I have to figure out all that. But the main thing is there: by writing, I’ve sketched out and drawn my ideas together. So the bulk of the work is done, now it’s just revisions and re-writings. I’m also wondering my contribution is. I think that might come out better once I get away from Camus and Merleau-Ponty and mix up their ideas a bit more. Since I’m trying to get philosophical ideas out of Radiohead themselves, I should have to use new ideas, that weren’t present in texts that didn’t take music, let alone popular music, into consideration at all. Of course, I’m pulling both of them so far from what their stance is that I’m barely talking about them anymore. Maybe those are my ideas, then? I don’t know.

What’s sure is that I’m finding it hard to write about Radiohead and keep the sense of wonder and excitement that I get from their music. I think this feeling might fall under what Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist, said about objectifying the subject of your study. You have to respect the person you’re interviewing, listen to what they have to say and try to help them express it and put it into shape, but not coax out what you want to hear, which is actually a very common mistake that interviewers make in the social sciences. And once you talk about them, you have to go where they allow you to go, but still take into account what they’re saying and not replace your “objective” point of view with theirs: their experiences are worth just as much as yours and as anyone else’s.

Basically, I want for what Radiohead say to be present in what I’m writing, insofar as we share and agree on certain feelings and certain judgments about the world. Which is also what I’m saying in the essay. And I want to be able to go back to their CDs afterwards and still hear what they’re saying, maybe hear it in a new way as I live through more things – instead of thinking “well, been there, done that, theorized that.” I suppose it’s the same thing as when I’m dealing with any other subject: if I do it justice, there’ll always be more to be said about it, it’ll still be a problem and a source of amazement.

I’m also finding out just how much there is I could say starting with Radiohead – I’m working hard at not including every song or even every line in my essay, at sticking to my topic, which is their critique of rules and wisdoms in place and their suggestion for something else, as vague as it may be – coming together in revolt and in figuring that out is already meaning enough. See, maybe that’s my contribution.

For what it's worth, I'm only working on OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac. It's for the sake of space, but also for other reasons, as in this paragraph I've cut out:

We can especially ask these questions about the songs on three albums: OK Computer; Kid A; and Amnesiac. Radiohead’s approach to songwriting before OK Computer is quite conventional. Even though they were at that early point of their career writing different music and developing their style, they hadn’t yet come to develop the identity that becomes clearer with OK Computer – and what we could find in those earlier songs might be put in them retrospectively. The break with OK Computer first has to do with having more creative license, thanks to the success of The Bends and of their singles, but also with their illustration of others: their lyrics become more abstract, “you” doesn’t refer to specific people about whom or to whom they speak. In Hail to the Thief, the lyrics will become more concrete again and will present a more obviously political discourse, starting with the title, which was borrowed from a book criticizing George W. Bush.

And here are the texts I'm working from:

- Albert Camus: "The Myth of Sysiphus", concluding chapter from the book of the same name, and its introduction. From The Rebel, the introduction and the first chapter, called "The Rebel," as well as the chapter called "Revolt and art."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "Cézanne's Doubt" from Sense and Non-Sense; "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" from Signs.

Starting a reading list

I have quite a few books I'm intending to read, eventually, about music. So this is a sort of reading list, then.

The first couple are This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin, and Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks, which is essentially a series of short stories about the neurology of music. I was convinced while reading Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception that philosophy has much to learn from all sciences - and more importantly that it can look at the results of scientific research and find meaning beyond what is said and what was meant to be found. I'll of course address that topic together with what is explained in these books. We can't discount the effect of music on the brain - especially given how weird it is, when you think of it, to listen to death metal or industrial music.

A note in passing: I can't help it if I found out about these books thanks to the huge buzz they got in the media... Eventually I'll look into it outside of any "actual" considerations.

I think that there's much that can be learned from history as well. On that side there'd be Du phonographe au MP3, XIXe-XXIe siècle. Une histoire de la musique enregistrée by Ludovic Tournès, which looks at the history of the process of recording and its more material aspects. I can't help but think that the technology we use to record and listen to music would have a huge effect on how we understand and approach it. There's also The Rest is Noise, Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross, which is about the history of classical music in the 20th. It's not so much classical music itself that interests me there, but rather how it evolved together with culture and... popular culture. Also, I know nothing about classical music. I've also had a book on Coltrane and radical politics in the U.S. in the 1960s that I really ought to read.

And then of course there's philosophy. I've had a collection of all (all?) of T.W. Adorno's writings on music (Essays on music) for a while, and Christophe David talked about music and art quite a bit in the seminar he gave on Adorno during my DEA at Paris 7. I know that Adorno was close to more experimental movements in classical music - and quite against jazz too. I can only imagine what he'd think about rock. But there's still something there, if only to go against him, or to push his logic further. For the sociology of music, Alfred Schütz (who also happens to be a phenomenological sociologist) wrote a few essays that might be interesting. And as for Merleau-Ponty, there are a few fragments, but I don't think that there's very much that's directly about music.

That would make quite the reading list already. And to think that my idea, in the first place, is to look directly at the music itself and my/our experience of it. The article on Radiohead is going to be really important as far as that goes.

Whatever happened to Trip-hop?

A few weeks ago, I don’t remember why now, the question hit me: whatever happened to trip-hop? It was everywhere, with Portishead and Tricky and Massive Attack (and even Unkle?). That was also when electronic music was very big: Orb, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin… Now you never hear about it. Maybe Elsa and Amber know. I don’t put much effort into finding music now.

By the way, did you know that Nelly Furtado was in a trip-hop band for a while? I don’t know where I heard that, maybe I had Much Music on in the background during the spotlight on her or something. Wasn’t it just so cool to be in a trip-hop band? I was seriously thinking about incorporating that kind of stuff in my music for a while. Of course, I never did. I have too many ideas like that.

It’s good music. I’m listening to Portishead now. It’s a bit dated, maybe – which could be because it didn’t really take on, because people didn’t start playing trip-hop enough, didn’t take it in new directions. That must have been the problem…

There’s a concept that Merleau-Ponty developed called “institution.” To put it as simply as possible, this is what it means: insofar as we live in a society, there are ways of acting and of being with others, there are ways of doing certain things, that we learn. We take them on and make them our own. We continue them in that way, they exist only insofar as they’re being used. Which means that they change constantly, even though on the whole they may stay the same. They’re habits, but at other times too we change them abruptly, sometimes consciously and sometimes without knowing, because they don’t work for us anymore or because something new and better becomes possible.

And there are two moments, two main things we do with institutions. First, we “found” them, we undertake a foundation. Like for a house. We do something new, that we can build on afterwards. Once it’s not so new anymore, it becomes sedimented, like layers of rock and soil deep in the ground. Whatever new action or creation we undertake, whatever the new foundations are, builds on this sedimented ground. And so institution works both ways, at once: there’s always something old, sedimented, available – sort of like all the words in the English language and everything that’s been said – and that opens the possibility of something new, of a new foundation, that will then become sedimented and eventually be used toward a new foundation – like all the new things we make language say all the time.

Trip-hop was a new institution. It wasn’t just living within an institution, and tweaking it, and making it one’s own, it was a whole new way to make music. For instance: heavy metal sounded quite the same on the whole starting with Metallica and Guns ‘n Roses, up until the mid-90s – then Korn and Tool (for instance) came along and changed it completely, you could barely hear the old way of doing things. Just like there’s actually very little that GnR and Led Zeppelin or Metallica and Black Sabbath have in common – even though there’s a similar general direction.

Trip-hop was based on a certain state of pop and electronic music. For reasons that could be discovered looking back now, it became possible to do something different, to take sampling somewhere else. From what I remember, Portishead made their own samples, recorded them themselves before using them, which takes quite a bit of time. They re-invented how to use sampling. And they re-invented lounge music, almost in the line of psychedelic music in the 60s. I really didn’t like Dummy when it came out, but after I fell in love with Portishead, I got into it. It was new and exciting. It made certain habits in listening to music possible, it made it possible to listen to music at times when I wouldn’t have felt like listening to other music.

Of course, it could also have just been a fashion. But I think that saying that would be a cop-out, because then we’d have to explain fashions anyway. Why is something fashionable, anyway? And in a way, isn’t that what an institution that “dies” is, a fashion? It was great for a while, it answered a need or a possibility, and it was exhausted and lost its meaning… Maybe it did pass on into other music, maybe it will still inspire people. But maybe it just didn’t open any possibilities, or something else more exciting came along.

And finally, of course again, maybe it just didn’t sell enough. Because that’s a great part of how artistic institutions live and die, survive or perish: someone has to give them the financial support to gain the kind of society-wide exposure that’s needed for most genres of music to survive. And all this really speeds up the lifespan of any musical movement, it limits the duration that might be needed for an institution to really be established and to become solid and to generate new music. That might be a problem of capitalism. See, everything is tied together.

But maybe also they just didn't get along, or got tired of doing this. Back to institutions slowly dying...

Now our next question: why does Beth Orton sound like she has a hot potato in her mouth when she sings, but only on some songs?

What does it mean to rock?

By now, we should be able to say “this song rocks” without being said to use slang. “Rocking” has a meaning: some songs rock, some don’t. Which isn’t to say that songs that don’t rock aren’t good. Or that all songs that do rock are good. For instance, it’s hard to say that “Pour Some Sugar On Me” or “Here I Go Again” don’t rock; it doesn’t keep them from sucking terribly (now, “suck,” that’s slang). To “rock” is a concept tied to rock music. By analogy, it can be used in other contexts, although often then it does fall into slang (“oh, you got me this great present, you rock!”). But when I say “this song rocks,” I’m saying something very precise, and the meaning of this song rocking is immediately understood by anyone I would be talking to (although of course it is culturally Western, and tied to a certain familiarity with rock music).

Now that I’ve established that “to rock” is a concept (have I established it? I’ve suggested it, in any case: let’s see where it takes us), there are two things that I want to look at. Both have to do with the fact that it’s not enough to just say that a song rocks, unless all we want to convey is the feeling and the judgment that it does – similarly to pointing out a beautiful sunset or an odd statue.

First, philosophy comes into play here. What is the “essence” of rocking? Yes, I’m serious. I can say that a person is good, that something is beautiful, that an action is unjust, just as I can say that a song rock. But sometimes we need or simply want to know what it means to be good, beautiful, just… or to rock. Phenomenology, as I’ve said, and mostly as I understand it, will say that the essence of the phenomenon that is a song that rocks, is its meaning. It’s the same kind of question that arises in ethics or morality and in aesthetics or in the philosophy of music. Why does it rock?

That question does two things: it sends us back to ourselves – why do I think this rocks? – and to others – why does this person think this rocks, how could they possibly think that, I hate Bon Jovi. Or still: how come this song, as it is written and performed by these people, rocks? We’re not sent back to ourselves as individuals disconnected from the world, but as we live in a world where we’ve heard thousands of songs and where people keep picking up guitars, amps and distortion pedals – as we interact with others, and in this particular case, through songs that are being played, that have been recorded.

We’re in a relationship with the people who wrote and performed the songs we listen to, and through them, we can be in a relationship with the other people who are listening to them. We’re being addressed, we’re being called to attention, asked to listen, by musicians. So it makes sense in that way that we’d like to know more about them than simply what they’re telling us. The music industry feeds on this and presents us with interviews and pictures that cover three pages in a magazine, to make money, but the basic relationship is still there.

Second, we can’t just say that a song rocks, or that musicians write and arrange songs just because if they do this or that, they rock (just in case, broadly speaking: arranging songs is adding different instruments and different variations on the basic structures). For instance: in “Exit Music (for a film),” the bass comes in very strong, with distortion, and it’s mixed in at the front, together with Thom Yorke’s vocals hitting a new intensity. That, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the rockingest things ever done in music. The question still remains: why does it rock?

I think it’s because it conveys something, it means something. There’s an emotion, of course, and the bass can’t be separated from Yorke singing “and now we are one in everlasting peace,” just as those vocals can’t be separated from the bass. It’s an effect, there’s a “hook” there (that’s another concept I’d like to look at later). So “rocking” is at the same time a result and an intention. There is no distinction between getting the bass to kick in right then; conveying an emotion (on purpose or not); and wanting the song to rock. Saying that they arranged the song in that way so that it rocks is not enough – there’s always more, it meant something more to them and it means something more to us.

So rocking (I’ll drop the scare quotes) is connected to emotions. These can vary quite a bit – there’s hope and ultimate anger in “Exit Music,” there’s joy in, say, “Bad Medicine,” there’s the happiness of being between friends (and probably the euphoria of being drunk) in Metallica’s or Thin Lizzy’s (I think?) “Whisky in the Jar.” As I just said, it’s also connected to relationships.

And of course, there’s the enjoyment of playing music and of listening to music. It’s probably the most important part of it: it’s fun. It takes us somewhere, it lifts us up. People have reasons to make a song rock here or there. Part of it is craft, being able to make a good song, a good work of art; part of it is trying to convey something.

But to rock is not just one thing, rocking can mean quite different things – although I think there’s a general feeling attached to it, one that is present every time. The feeling is that it rocks. I’m not avoiding concepts here, I’m just pointing out that we have a particularly good one already: rocking. “Euphoria” for instance could describe it, but not as well. Just like when I say I’m angry I mean nothing else than I’m angry, and I mean everything that “angry” also refers to. A song rocks like a picture is beautiful, like a person is solemn. There’s a reality to rocking that we can’t really quite get at with other words. It’s what happens when Jack Kerouac shouts and then writes “Go! Go! Go!” when listening to jazz musicians solo. It’s what happened when people put up their fist and put up their index and pinky like devil horns to copy Ozzy Osbourne (or was it Angus Young?). And that’s what I wanted to get at: rocking is something.

And so the elusive “meaning,” what songs convey, is yet again put off until later.

Radiohead and Philosophy (III)

(Picking up where the last post left off. I used the website Green Plastic Radiohead to get the lyrics:
http://www.greenplastic.com/.)

Kid A

Green Plastic says that: “The title of the song, "Kid A", may have something to do with a project of Carl Steadman's about the work of Jacques Lacan entitled "Kid A in Alphabet Land.”
(http://www.greenplastic.com/lyrics/kida.php)
I’m not sure what to make of that.

Everything in its right place: two colours (black and white, blue and red, would it matter if there are only two?) – as opposed to waking up sucking a lemon yesterday. Kid A: heads on sticks and ventriloquists: is that an either/or? If so, either people have no depth, no reality, are just talking heads, or they don’t let show that they’re speaking, they’re hiding something, they have someone else speak for them. Either they have no self that can speak or they are not the ones speaking. The ventriloquist dummy and the head on a stick are two versions of the same shadows (at the end of his bed). Especially given the computer program voice and the reference to slipping on a white lie at the beginning of the song. The “Come on kids” means that he’s not unhappy that kids and rats are following him out of their homes, out of town. I’m not sure what all that means, though. Communication… He’s appealing to those who aren’t the heads on sticks or the ventriloquists. Which are rats and children. The signification of the children is a bit more obvious than that of the rats.

And again on The National Anthem, is voice is sampled (Green Plastic says “Pro Tooled”). Definitely the voice is not the centre of the songs, it finds it place among other instruments, it’s used more like an instrument (hence the layering). So we could say that interpreting the lyrics isn’t the way to go. The music here would become more important: TNA has a “huge” bass line, it has a lot of noise covering it, it has horns just like anthems usually do, but they’re in discord – the harmony emerges out of discord. I don’t want to get rid of the lyrics though: they’re not absent, they’re not secondary, they’re part of a cohesive whole and the approach to their place is the same in their volume and treatment as in their brevity. So the discord and fear – there’s menace in that brooding bass line: everyone keeps near, because of the fear. It’s holding on… People hold on, the fear holds on – continuation, things are going nowhere because of an effort to hold on to them. People and places aren’t defined “here,” his bed, “everyone,” heads on sticks, ventriloquists, children, rats…. They all act like one-word metaphors. Meaning arises between signs – but there are very few signs that are spoken – so the music becomes important again.

How to Disappear Completely (which used to have as its title “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found). Again from Green Plastic: Thom: (when asked about the meaning of the line "I float down the Liffey"): "I dreamt i was floating down the liffey and there was nothing i could do. i was flying around Dublin and I really was in the Dream. the whole song is my experiences of really floating". The song mixes that feeling and the wish, the hope that “this” isn’t happening. If you hope that blown speakers (which is a problem for musicians) and hurricanes don’t happen, you also have to hope that strobe lights (which they used on stage for that tour, esp. for Idioteque) and fireworks, those things that make people happy and create a euphoric experience, don’t happen either. Of course there could be a lot said philosophically about “That’s not me” and “I’m not here” in relation to the moment having just passed or being about to pass. Floating through life as through walls or down a river. It’s an overall feeling, one that’s not limited to dreams.

Treefingers is instrumental. It’s a break between the two songs.

Optimistic. Being optimistic about the situation described means what? The image of the pigs again (went to market…). But this time it’s political, there’s the allusion to Animal Farm. Flies and vultures, waiting to eat him – he’s the small fish, will be eaten by the big ones, there’s no other way. Optimism is then trying the best you can, which will be good enough given there’s not much you can do. Pigs reconduct the old order. Then marionettes, being handled by someone else (by the puppeteers, same as ventriloquists). Would like to help the others – tries the best he can given he’s not among those who have the power. Or is he? Back to parallel with politicians. The state of things is that of dinosaurs – they won’t always roam the earth. It’ll end, either because we’re all dinosaurs, or because those who are will end up disappearing (which would be the optimistic interpretation).

In Limbo. Back to the trapdoors that open. He’s lost and apparently happy about it; he doesn’t live in a fantasy world. It’s not the same thing. Can’t read, can’t communicate. Being on “your” side, can’t hide, will be bothered. Two possibilities, remaining lost and safe, helping out and being uncovered. Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea – are those the ways out to the ocean? If so: going away from one’s own and sole place, towards others, toward the sea – with the risk of getting lost there; or on the contrary, is it going away from people and going away from land and getting lost (and being happy being lost)?

Being lost at sea, image present also in “women and children first” – but there’s mention of a bunker instead. Not being sure, seen enough or not enough, brink of madness; laughing will incur getting his head cut off (well, it’ll come off anyway). Not sure if he should hide, doing the right thing in the meantime? Ice age coming: back to the dinosaurs that won’t roam the earth for long. And it’s happening. Reference of course to climate change. What others are doing: taking the money and running, after much excitement on their cell phones. First of the children, of what’s left – end of forbidden things, allowed everything all the time. There will be an end to the order in place, he’ll be able to do what he wants. In the meantime, uncertainty.

Another disaster, but personal – fighting, divorcing, cutting the kids in half. Could have been prevented. Happened because of not being understood – because of not being listened to. On one hand: the lights are on – we want to be slaves (but to what? To others?). We’re not hiding, then. On the other hand: being friends instead of slaves. Same situation, the lights are still on. Are these our choices – both of which leave the lights on. We’ll go back to who we are once we’re friends? Or is it something in between?

Motion Picture Soundtrack. Same as “glass house”. Trying to get back to her arms, asking for her help; but she might be crazy. Wants to get out of the wine, the sleeping pills, the cheap sex, the sad movies, what keeps him from something? They’re lies, they’re part of the lies we’re fed. They keep us apart. Or in any case will see her in the next life. Pyramid Song? Will reunite in any case, once all that is gone.

Amnesiac

In Amnesiac and Kid A, the lyrics as a whole are abstract. Others are present either without being defined or under the guise of metaphors. Morning Bell is the most obvious: divorce or the fear of it, fights anyway – yet it has the same unreal character as “How to disappear completely.” Especially taken in opposition to Motion Picture Soundtrack, which dates from OK Computer. They’re the two songs where another is obviously a romantic partner.

Who does Thom speak to in “Sardines” – everyone: the other who would see you in that position, waiting for years, seeing your life flash before your eyes, realizing you were in the wrong place. The other always has to do with the self. Pyramid Song seems to pick up on that life flashing before his eyes. No fear anymore in front of the dream. Dream and fantasy, which isolate him and a few people (and angels), are against the fear that huddles everyone together. Also comes from right after OK Computer (performed at Tibetan Freedom Concert; Egyptian Song). Egypt and Pyramids – a lost magical time. Refers (and admittedly from Yorke) to various books about the afterlife. Afterlife – revolving doors? Dream of an afterlife is a revolving door. Kinds of doors… Solitude in any case.

You and whose army, you and your cronies. Take us on – here the same dynamic as with the children and the rats on one side, the heads on sticks and ventriloquists on the other.

There’s a turning point: what would I do if I did not have you? The dream or fantasy of being alone, of going in through a secret door or a door that won’t let you back, of the afterlife – against asking “you” to open the door.

Knives Out is talking about someone to people to whom orders are being given and to someone else who’s asking about this person. Cannibalism, for sure. Yorke talks about a businessman.

What’s the meaning of the parts taken out of Morning Bell for Amnesiac? Sleep only, no waking?

Dollars and Cents – critique of capitalism. Cannibalism. Soul and not head will be cracked – so will crack those good things at the beginning of the album? It’s like Yorke is being spoken to. Like Spinning Plates: putting on a show, being fed to the lions. Allusion to a speech. Here the bodies (dead) float in a muddy river, as opposed to the river leading to the moon; a could cuckoo land as opposed to the sky of moon and stars.

Is the “only friend” his wife, who he’s afraid of fighting/breaking with? Can’t just talk, there’s someone listening, watching – ominous undefined presence. She’s trying to put paper over the windows, a smile over (well, what can a smile cover?). He’s even hungry for a lynching, goes along with what he despises. He’s being told what to do again.

Radiohead and Philosophy (II)

Sorry about the rag-tag notes. I think there’s something in there. I’ve gone through OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac to prepare the abstract for that book chapter on Radiohead. I’ll wait to do more until I hear whether or not my abstract was selected.

I’m looking at the lyrics first, because (1) I have a hard time focusing on them and hearing them and (2) they’re not at the forefront in the songs. But I’ve listened to these CDs hundreds of times…

Romeo and Juliet

I could use the phrase “We hope your rules and wisdom choke you. / And now we are one” as a starting point. The song “Exit Music” is about Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, it was inspired by the movie. That understanding of Romeo and Juliet is one that wasn't possible at the time, it reinterprets the longing into contestation; it's this longing that is the source of the contestation. It's not just rage: the way it's sung, there's despair and hope at once, it rises, it’s strong. And it's followed by “And now we are one in everlasting peace” - impossible dream ending in death, yet still pursued? It's this hope that drives them. That's how it finds its place in OK Computer: the contestation.

“Exit Music” is for the credits, it’s inspired by the moment Juliet holds a gun to her head. It’s about Romeo and Juliet, the characters who can make us cry and whose revolt we can sympathize with (quotation on Green Plastic: Thom also had the 1968 version of the film in his head: "I saw the Zeffirelli version when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand why, the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away. The song is written for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff starts. A personal song.").

Retiring from the world with another. Could be death, could be bliss, too – which is a possible interpretation of R+J. Look through the play to see if they ever allude to rules and/or wisdom.

And, later in Amnesiac: “after years of waiting nothing came then you realize you're sitting in the wrong place - I'm a reasonable man get off my case” – is it the same longing, the wait for something, a desire for independence but not at all costs?

The laugh (“you can laugh a spineless laugh”) is associated with the choking. It’s from the height of the rules and the wisdom that this laugh is possible – but choking is also a possibility, nothing is actually done to provoke it, unless perhaps the act of leaving, of escaping, of dying together, which breaks the rules and nulls the wisdom.

All the themes I want to discuss are in this song: sing us a song to keep us warm; wanting to escape and flee; the possibility of everything falling apart; the mean other; “I can’t do this alone.”

And there’s violence in this song, which is even more palpable in “Talk Show Host” (which is on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and in the movie itself). The person talking wants to be someone else or will explode, so there’s an effort toward being someone else, to go against what identity has been ascribed, and there’s a threat to him as well. But if those who made him into what he is have a problem, he’s prepared to use violence (“waiting with a gun…”), and he’s prepared for the long run, without any illusion that the threat would ever just go away (“…and a pack of sandwiches”). They’ll have to “break the door down.” The language itself is violent, and the music starts slow and determined and itself leads to violence. At the end, over and over, “I’m ready.”

The rest of OK Computer

Airbag. About of course surviving an accident. Themes of being born again – and with a mission. Amazement, turning back toward others after a limit experience. Will alternate throughout the album with just letting go. This song was meant to be different.

Paranoid Android. It’s the android voice who says it’s not an android. Retreat and vision of the future it will procure, but he’s changed by that ambition. Or actually, he’s revealed by his ambition – “Gucci” little piggy, just squealing. Pigs and yuppies as others – it’s the same person who’s referred to in that line and who’s told to leave. He doesn’t put him against the wall, despite the threats: he was recognized. Sees him, as a “pig”, asks if he knows who he is (the one striving to be king – recognition and name), so he’s telling the other what he himself is, sees in him what he should see in himself; that violence is followed by a certain calm, the rain and the music quieting down (although coming up again and quieting again); and then he tells him to leave, to rejoin the yuppies, the dust, the screaming, the panic, the vomit – everything he wants to get rid of, but he just lets it be. The whole thing is a bit of a revolt against feeling like an android.

Subt. Homesick Alien. The wish to be other. Same as in PA. Feeling and wish to be alien, stemming from the experience of being like an android, uptight, locked in and from themselves, unable to communicate with others. If he saw the world from the aliens’ perspective, he could be at peace with it – he could have their point of view, the other point of view, whence he could show the meaning of life because right now he doesn’t have access to it. Even shut away, after that experience, would be alright.

Let down. But on the whole, does have the vision of humans of aliens, although not their vision of the world: the start and stop, the emptiness, disappointment… They would see humans like bugs in the ground, would see them like bugs – sees himself as one, but there’s hope even in that, because this is just a state and he will grow wings (be abducted by aliens; be king), will be hysterical and useless because being useful and serious is the problem in the first place, is what is being asked.

Karma Police. Yorke has said (perhaps jokingly) that it’s about bosses. It’s about those others, anyway. Someone who buzzes, who doesn’t quite speak in tune with you nor tries to (hence the intervention of karma); someone who reminds him of Hitler and whose “party”, who is disturbed by his very existence. Neither should mess with “them” and there “they” side against those people. Giving all you can, doing all you can, in that world, isn’t enough to let you off the hook, there’s always more asked of you even though it’s not you, not who you are that matters. And thinking these thoughts is losing yourself, losing who you should be, just like stopping thinking these thoughts is losing yourself. Back-and-forth.

Fitter happier is exactly who he’s supposed to be. It’s the android (as opposed to the alien). It’s of course not all bad and quite reasonable. But it’s in a loop and it’s not his voice.

Electioneering. Parallel between politicians and themselves. Not completely unlike those others. Say the right things when you’re trying to sell something. It’s menacing, going forwards makes others go backwards. Meeting becomes impossible – “somewhere we will meet” is ironic. Cattle prods and the IMF – shocks for another purpose.

Climbing Up the Walls. The menace in ourselves, the fear that is put and that we put in our heads. “The eyes” are those that look at us when we don’t know, that menace us, that are just waiting to assault us by our own fault. Like in PA, but things can always be reversed; not clear who the pig is in the first place. Mind, skull, head… protection, appearance, self… Lots more to be said here. Fear of the unknown others, of being punished for not being careful enough.

No Surprises. The opposite. The heart full, the job that kills, the traces of the past, unhappiness. As a result? Blame on the government, they don’t speak for us because they disregard all this. Instead of taking down the government, things as they are, without alarms, or surprises for that matter, so no need for alarms. No fear. Pretty house, pretty garden. But turn it around – there’s still the eyes that look in at night.

Lucky. And even when things go well, they can always turn around. Hope for the government, politicians, to notice, but no time for them, no time for that. Nothing would come out of it anyway, or things would start going badly. Don’t change anything, don’t do anything drastic, luck could change (it’s for the worst: right now is on a roll). Kill me Sarah – Sarah is a name he likes, could be anyone, and it would be glorious to be so full of love as to be killed by it. Might as well end it when it goes well. But the chorus? Superhero needs help. Airbag again. Standing on the edge: things could go terribly wrong. Pull me out of the aircrash, of the lake: what could happen, crashing or drowning, as a response to love or politics?

The tourist. Going too fast. Sparks, overcharged – but no one knows, only the dog. Not taking the time to see things, trying to see it all (tourists in Paris, as seen by J. Greenwood).

Radiohead and Philosophy (I)

There's a book called "Radiohead and Philosophy" that's being developed right now, and the editors are asking for proposal for chapters. So I'll send one in. Radiohead has been one of my favourite bands for quite some time and I would have liked to talk about them on here anyway. So I'll use the blog to jot down ideas as I go through the albums, even though they may not have anything to do with my topic, which I would like to be the way in which the relationship with other people is described in their songs. That should involve music and lyrics, but on this topic, music may take a complementary role.

Here are some of the guidelines: "Accepted proposals will be those that bring philosophical concepts, arguments, and/or sensibilities to bear on issues or ideas latent in, or raised by, the band Radiohead, its music, its popular success, or its various roles in popular culture." There's a more particular topic idea they suggest, and I might just follow up on it: "Critics often argue that Radiohead *says* things about the world. Can a rock band genuinely cultivate an original and unique form of discourse? If so, does this discourse exceed, somehow, poetry, prose or logic?"

I want to do it from a perspective close to Merleau-Ponty's (phenomenology and existentialism), where meaning comes between signs (so between words, between sentences, between instruments and melodies perhaps?). Lyrics are their own form of writing. The word "discourse" isn’t necessarily the right term – expression may be better. They aren’t poetry, either, although they are close to it and are influenced by it. Maybe they're what's left of the "spoken" quality of poetry, which wasn't always meant to be mostly read and not "performed" (rap would be the best example). They are a description and sometimes a more straightforward narrative. And description - well, that's phenomenology. Not that music is phenomenological, but phenomenology does take up something that's already in our lives, an attempt to speak, to figure out our relationship to the world and to others.

Radiohead do talking about the world we share – about our relationship to the world and to others. More specifically, they describe the breakdown, the difficulty of relationships.

Most songs in popular music where someone else appears is about them, or addressed to them. (Is that the case for their song “You”?) Thom Yorke talked about “fridge buzz” to describe popular music on the radio – adding that “Creep” would be “friendly fridge buzz” (he’s always hated singing that song live anyway). The name of the band sends us back to the omnipresence of the radio in our lives, yet they haven’t had a hit since OK Computer.

Radiohead’s songs present others as we live among and with them. In looking at the relationship with others that is drawn in their songs, I need to ask: who is the “you”?

Radiohead’s songs present others as we live among and with them. Sarah is just a name he likes, could be anyone (find quotation perhaps?). Who is the polystyrene man? Look at the relationship with others that is drawn in their songs. Who is the “you”?

In Pablo Honey, My Iron Lung and The Bends, Radiohead’s approach to songwriting and their illustration of others is quite conventional. There are things like “this is our new song/the same as the last one,” but overall, their music is different but they haven’t really come to the identity that they’ve made clear starting with OK Computer (and that we can find in those CDs retrospectively). “You,” in those songs, is his girlfriend or specific people he talks about or talks to.

In OKC and in Kid A and Amnesiac (I’m not sure afterwards), “you” becomes more abstract. Sarah is just a name he likes, could be anyone (I need to find that quotation), and so he could be calling on to “anyone” to pull him out of the aircrash. Because their originality is in what comes then, that’s what I want to focus on.

There’s a contrast between Kid A (the mountains, the peaks) and Amnesiac (the depths, the volcano-coloured (or hell-coloured) cover). Everything in its right place / sitting in the wrong place.

I should contrast the other, the others, with the self: there are many Thom Yorkes; his voice is layered (three Thoms singing at once), or often and especially live, it's sampled. Is he the tourist? That would have to do with “Subterranean Homesick Alien” where he talks about wishing he’d be abducted by aliens.

That's enough for now.

Listening to an album for the first time: The Frames – The Cost.

I'm listening to the CD "The Cost" by The Frames, and Irish rock band whose singer is Glen Hansard, who played in "Once" and wrote/co-wrote most of the songs on there too, probably at around the same time and around the same themes. I'm listening to it for the first time (I've been waiting to have the time to do that), but technically speaking, it can never really be the first time, can it? We’ll see. Each paragraph is a song. Sorry, too, this is sketchy, but that's the point, it's like extended notes.

For what it's worth: http://www.theframes.ie

There’s lots of space, the voice is very much up front, very separate from the rest of the instruments, although they match each other’s intensity. They enter the chorus progressively from the verse together, with the drums and electric guitar coming to the front. It’s easy enough to guess when the chorus will end, when the voice will come back. Based on the first verse, there’s an expectation for the second verse. The bridge is less certain, although it does lead into an instrumental chorus with strings and faint singing. This is something that’s hard for me, but I can’t really pay attention to the lyrics. There’s alternating between “you” and “her” and there’s a certainty from the beginning, he knows where he stands and what he’s waiting for.

I’m not sure that the second song is different when it starts – but it’s quite clear after the intro that it’s “Falling Slowly” which I know from the Once soundtrack. Here the focus is on the band, the instrumentation is fuller, the singer seems to do his own background vocals. It’s more of a call than a dialogue. It’s more dynamic, and at the same time the voice is more subtle. There’s a solo too, which carries the chorus further. The band aspect is clear, too, with the count before the third chorus, the bass and drums coming back in. The last chorus has more intensity, it really emphasizes the difference in the chorus lyrics, that something else is asked. And it’s the band that closes the song, not the voice. The comparison makes sense: it was co-written with M. Irglova, so this is the second shot at it.

People get ready – a song about breaking up? The third verse, after the first chorus, there’s talk of breaking up the band, and the band (following the pop dynamics) picks up in intensity. All the love in the world – the same thing that’s done in both kinds of relationship, all the love in the world between two people, all the love that’s “set alight” by the music. “People get ready” – coming to a stop, this time referencing the song.

“Together we will rise/fly” / “sometimes we will fall” – “fall from the light, but it shines on us tonight.” First time the Irish accent really comes through. More personal? When he talks about a Plan. Surprising change to the solo/chorus, odd progression, cello becomes the main, distortion on the guitar, screaming. Do it anyway: rise even with the falling. Together – who? People get ready, same ambiguity, him and her in front of the people, or all of us who are listening and the band? Who’s talking, and who’s talking to whom?

The band is already together at the beginning of “when your mind’s made up,” the cutting into the second verse isn’t as surprising, the voice never really stops between the chorus and the verse. No acoustic (first time on the album?). Some things don’t have to be redone. The guitar and the keys play the same melody, the violin follows the voice, underlies it, lifts it up and carries it. There’s something tortuous about not changing your mind, even though “there’s no point.” Screaming, distortion. Then fall back, quiet resolution?

The drum marks the shift to a new song, a more upbeat one. The cover doesn’t leave much room for a very intense impression, it’s very nice, very melancholic and foggy. There’s a lot of talk of light in the songs – but mostly of it being elusive, taken away. Talk of fame in “sad songs” and yet more equivocation, the “public” couldn’t have won him over. There’s me, you, and them, and no obvious differences. Too many sad words make a sad song – who’s talking, who’s being talked about, who’s being talked to?

“Love’s been the cost of all this suffering?” The distortion stops with the question of giving in to letting (what, love?) burn “us” down, returns after. Clearly, now it’s he and her, reuniting, because we’re listening to him saying it. The violin solo and the wordless singing does imply the “burning”, especially with the electric guitar added: “maybe it will turn us around.” For the better, for a change anyway. My favourite song so far.

Always a progression between songs, they pick up almost right away after a song, an idea, is over.

A song in major, shifting to minor (I think but I’m probably wrong). Sounds a bit happier at first, anyway. That stops with the lyrics. He’s lying, he’s taking off. There’s barely any instrumentation, more mood-setting. Again, the second half, with the happy music again, the idea of trying anyway, hope despite all the lying, the impossibility of continuing in the same way that’s emphasized with the different direction for the song. The intro foreshadows the second chorus. A feminine voice, for the first time clearly, through the singing. A bass line that’s differentiated from the guitars. The feminine voice echoes what he has been saying.

An unambiguously upbeat song, which clashes with the lack of faith, with the closing up on himself. The side you never get to see and to reach is the one he keeps from everyone, is a lie and is alive, comes alive. The song is it coming alive, too, it stands out against the rest of the CD, although it does echo “When your mind’s made up.” If there’s a musical relation, the themes could be echoing each other as well. In both cases it’s very subjective, self-aware, reflective, and it takes place alone.

And that’s what’s described in the last song – a bad bone in him that’s at the source of all the problems, him being cursed with jealousy (the one that kills the love – love the source of suffering, is it tied to that bad bone?), her bitter with scars she doesn’t show – poisons, the sky wasn’t seen but felt, and starts to show with their meeting? Naked on the balcony, for all to see, but making him wait – doing it for himself, regardless to a great point of her. Thoughts of going clear (see David Usher and Leonard Cohen). Dying before his time, with her, following her. The whole band comes in. Back to the bad bone, following the comment about letting her lead the way. Wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t change things (I can’t see it being literally about death), if it wasn’t for someone else, for her specifically.

[Watch out: from now on there are spoilers about the movie “Once.”]

There’s not a lot to be said formally. Pop songs have a general structure – that I won’t really talk about for now. It allows us to anticipate, but also to be surprised, it allows for variations on the same themes, more or less meaningful ones… Songs follow each other, they can recall other songs, refer to them, change their meaning, get their own meaning from them. On “The Cost” as an album, there’s a mood throughout – as for the theme, it’s mostly about a relationship that can either fall apart, and both of them with it, or be turned around, which seems to be the goal, although with difficulties coming from their pasts and their selves, who would seem to have to change for it to work at all. I could even say, for the theme, that the songs from “Once” could be added straight to these, but here there’s more ambiguity, especially without the storyline from the movie to make it clear what he’s going to do. It’s almost like “Once” is the positive, upbeat, happy ending version of “The Cost,” this one leading technically to the same result but with much difficulty and brooding and fear of failing. Also “Once” deals with two people, and a third who’s the loved one; “The Cost” deals with two people and “people,” an audience, those in front of whom the relationship is played out, in front of whom and partially toward whom the call is directed at her. There’s meaning in talking to oneself in front of other people, it shows the resolution. The band is also present on this album, making it less clear sometimes who exactly is speaking, while in “Once” it’s very much two voices and two instruments, and people playing along, I’d say “accompagner” in French, as when you’re walking someone to where they’re going, when you’re going along – “accompagnateurs” are playing somewhere beside or behind the actually important people. But both times there’s a very important third person, a person or an audience, in “Once” it’s a main character, in “The Cost” it’s who’s listening to the CD. The first is more concrete and the second more abstract, so it makes sense that the first is more positive, leads to a resolution: there’s a mediation, something new is actually tried; in the second, the call goes out without much in return, it’s still very uncertain. It’s more of a call than a resolution, than making up your mind. He goes with it, with the certainty in the first song, which can be positive or negative.

There’s a realization – I’d have to see where, maybe it’s more between the lines – that although his mind’s made up, although that’s what he wants, that it’s going to be difficult, that it’s uncertain, that it’s a gamble, and that the problems are deep, the cracks go deep, that the change is going to have to be total and will need both of them. He’s sure about himself, but still not about her and asks her to lead the way, it’s the confidence he still lacks. The cost of love, right, having to lead the way and let the other lead at the same time, both in the dark?

Once (with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova)

Credit given where due: Randee thought we should go see Once. So we did. We’re a little late but this is the first time it played in Saskatoon. I really liked the story and the psychological depth of the movie, which managed not to get heavy-handed or melodramatic and not to become a full-out musical. I liked that the problems were those not of “ordinary people” and not of the upper-class, but of characters who were very specific and well-developed. But beyond the story (which I don’t want to tell here – but there would be spoilers in here and it’s not intended) and the film aspects of the movie (about which I still know nothing), I thought it showed amazingly well the creation process in music.

I. Songs don’t mean anything. “Oh broken-hearted hoover-fixer sucker guy...” The song is just sort of improvised on a generic chord pattern, and it carries emotions and a story. The point of course is for it to avoid seriousness, it’s complete self-deprecation. It works in the movie much better than it does on the soundtrack.

II. Songs mean everything. There are no monologues being spoken at other characters. Instead the guy and the girl (as far as I know, they’re not named) will sing together, because, well, they’ve met and they’re eager to open up to each other and they’re excited to share their music and they’re scared of the reaction and they’re willing to just play along. The words of the songs aren’t particularly poetic, in fact they’re simply excellent pop/rock lyrics, and they’re sung by each character along with the other, who’s always somewhere doing the harmonies even when one is singing alone (and, something I enjoyed, this is always done through some support, like the song playing on a CD player for instance). The recording being played back can stand for that connection we still feel to others even when we’re alone. But it’s in the songs, in any case, that what they really feel is expressed. Not that they’re not being themselves the rest of the time – the songs are a moment for honesty, for opening up, for communicating something that would sound completely out of place otherwise.

III. The musical relationship. So we see this relationship that musicians have and that’s not unlike most human relationships, except that it’s one of their modalities. It feeds on the non-musical part of any relationship, and it adds a whole other layer to it. Between the guy and the girl, there’s a complicity – I’d say in French un accord, which is the word for chord and for getting along – not right from the start, but just as soon as they actually step out of their role (“I’m a busker let me sing” / “I must keep my distance”) and do something about their need for relationships. Some relationships (and here of course I mean acquaintance and friendship just as well as love) are troublesome, are forced, while others are symbiotic or, more accurately, give way to a real exchange. Musical relationships work in the same way: bonds are made and broken, arguments happen over what is beautiful, over matters of taste and direction and image, moments are made to last a bit longer than they should, outsiders don’t see the same meaning that’s put into it… This isn’t to say “oh relationships are just like music” on the level of a metaphor – it’s really that there is such a thing as a musical relationship, ranging from professional ones to passionate ones.

There’s a bond that takes shape through creation, and that especially when it happens between people to whom an attraction and emotional involvement are possible, can be mistaken, confused with romantic intimacy. There is intimacy in music, we open ourselves to others in ways we don’t usually. Maybe it’s because the meaning of songs is ambiguous, which makes us less scared to open up, to confess things; to see things in others that we want to find there. There’s also something oddly shared in creating a song with someone else, it’s not just a collaboration (although that happens with, say, session musicians), but a co-creation, an intertwined labour where it’s really hard to see what comes from whom. Voices reach for the same notes or for harmonious ones, instruments complement each other, play the same notes at the same time and fill in each others’ silences, continue the melodies, prepare them, take them on, take them somewhere new, reigns them in, make space and spaces, take a breath knowing there’ll be a place to pick up. Words sung lead to new ones, melodies played will deliver new ones, will just bring them about, will almost cause them, as if they already had them within themselves, as if it were just a matter of unravelling them. The brainwave/soundwave image wouldn’t be a bad one in this case: from the same notes, new notes that may or may not make sense happen.

And ultimately it brings us back to our own lives, because the songs end, our part ends, it’s recorded, we have to let go of it, we decide to stop rehearsing, the time that was put aside, the life that was put between parentheses comes back to the forefront, the instruments are left aside. Maybe music does something like what phenomenology attempts to do in philosophy: put daily life between parentheses in order to look at it differently, to find new meanings in it, to bring new meanings to it. And the same goes whether we’re listening or we’re playing – it’s just that playing music is something you have to commit to, you can’t just do it while driving or having a discussion. We listen to what other people have to say about their world, their perspective on a life we share for the most part; in playing music, we share, we communicate something of our own perspective, we put it out there for all to see, yet we shade it, we dissociate ourselves from it as well: a song is never really complete, the lyrics are never quite enough, there’s always new melodies that are possible, more things, more nuances to add.

When we’re playing with someone else, we’re sharing what they’re saying, we’re taking it on as our own as well, we’re letting others claim our voice as their own. The singer in a band speaks on behalf of the whole band, and thus not just of himself/herself. Of course here I’m talking about an extreme case where everything that’s sung is personal, where it’s not just stories. But wouldn’t that count as personal too? I suppose there is the whole entertainment side of it too: here I mean personal songs like “When Your Mind’s Made Up” and not “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” or “The Final Countdown” or “We Will Rock You.”

I like that idea, of putting our lives aside, of taking a step back to see them better. There are things we can communicate with music that cannot be said. There are ways to communicate through music that are not that of words.

Disintegration - I. Themes in the album.

The title in a lot of albums is indicative of the meaning of the album as a whole. Even if it's simply the name of the band, it stands for a number of songs written by the band and probably not having much more in common. If it's simply the name of a song, without relation to the themes in other songs, then again, that song does get a certain prominence, it comes to stand for the album as a whole, it is central to everything else that's going on in all songs, to a theme close to the concerns of the songwriters, to the general mood of the collection. But in these cases, where there is no unifying theme, it could just be that what we have is a collection, a series of songs that each stand on their own (some of which will undoubtedly make it on the next "greatest hits" CD). Here are the songs we wrote this year / these past three years.

But in some cases the title does come to stand for something else, and here I'm not even talking about concept albums (anything from Snow Patrol's "Eyes Open" where you might miss the progression in the story, to Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" which presents songs all having to do with the same themes in a loose progression, to Genesis' "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" where most of the songs sound completely silly when taken out of the album; that ought to be its own topic).

I'm thinking of "Disintegration" by The Cure. I want to say that it wasn't completely written by Robert Smith, and of course I'd need to pick up a book on the band (which at this point is pretty much just him and some random people - but this album came out at the peak of their success) - it just sounds like there's a unity to the record, I mean the sound itself is carried from song to song, and that has to do with the composition of the songs as well as with the production of the record. But then again, Robert Smith is the singer, he's the poet, he's the one who is talking to us, who is addressing us, whose words we are hearing, along whom we are (or I am in any case) singing. So I'll talk about Robert Smith to mean the band in general, a kind of multi-faceted subject or multi-dimensional speaker - he comes to stand for a character who is partly fictional and partly those people whose names we know who wrote, recorded and released the CD.

"Disintegration" is the theme of the whole album. Note that it's not "disintegrated" or "disintegrating": it's the process of disintegration as a whole, and not something that's happened or that is being done actively. It's a passive state or progress. And what makes the album not a concept album is that there is no progression, just a loose unity.

Robert Smith is talking to us from the brink of disintegration, from the brink of disappearance, of death, of complete solitude/loneliness. There's echo everywhere, from the repetition of the bass lines to the treatment of his voice; there's floating, again in the elongated sentences, in the way the guitars and keyboards come in and out with very high notes; there's dryness, too, in the few words he uses; there's imploring in his tone... Of course none of that is particular to this album by the Cure, or even to the Cure (Cocteau Twins do the same thing, it was the new wave thing to do; but then again it's not the outright celestial, ethereal feeling of Cocteau Twins, nor is it the dancy beats of Depeche Mode - and it does take place in this album). The cover might be influencing me in this image, too (but then again isn't that the point of the cover?), but there's a sense of being far away, cut off, not in distance anymore: we hear voices and sounds but we can't quite see yet, or anymore, where they are coming from. It's very dark, yet some unnatural lights are still flaring here and there, soothing and pathetic.

The bass and drums here are omnipresent, they keep the album grounded, they give us repetition and predictability and movement, yet they aren't playing obsessive beats: they carry the line, the emotion that there *is* still something left, something of Robert Smith that hasn't disintegrated, something he can rely on, something he can take on, lean on, a starting point for his words, a departing point for the guitars and keyboards, those flights and frights that appear throughout, that come in and out more or less together, more or less matching the direction of the rhythm section.

The bass and drums are like the "pictures of you" - it seems like they're all he can feel, yet it's from them, because of them that he feels something, there's still something telling him they're not real, something else that's real that he can feel. They're the "prayers for rain", and the rain comes naturally enough in waves. (And perhaps this is actually the case for bass and drums in general; it just is particularly so here.)

And they change too, sure, there's the basic structures of the pop songs that are like the basic structures of the personality, of the psyche of Robert Smith (his soul, his self, whatever), and it's within those structures that they make sense, at the same time as they contribute to making up these structures. He's the grounded Robert Smith as much as the melancholy, interrupting, beckoning Robert Smith, and only because he's all those things at the same time. The Robert Smith that was and the one that is through disintegration. The changing bass and drum lines, which aren't just there for rhythm, the way they're mixed and the lines they play are melodious as well, they contribute to the song as much by allowing the guitar and keyboards to do what they do than by playing off them and doubling them at times; the changing bass and drum lines with regard to the guitars and keyboards are like the words in "lovesong."

I want to say more. It’s not a matter of systematicity, but I’ll look at more particular things in the album in another post. Just because I’ve got this written and if I wait, I’ll never put this here online.

Why "Manifestations"

Clapton allegedly writes in his autobiography: “It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth, that’s why they’re songs.” There’s also a quote that’s sometimes attributed to Frank Zappa that goes something like “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” I don’t intend to dance, or to write songs about songs either. It must be that I’m more a writer than anything else – I think I can make sense of music with words. To me, writing about music is a very specific exercise; it’s a lot like talking about music. The problem is the same either way: I need an approach to music that will make it possible to say something else than “this song rocks!” or to look only at the history of a song or its critical reception or its sales… and yet to be able to take those ideas in consideration. The point is also to say something else that was communicated in the song itself (take that, Clapton).

Yet I don’t want to talk about music theory, or throw myself in a detailed study of the neurology of music (even though I already have some books lined up on that topic), mostly because I really don’t know much about it. I know, it’s a cop-out; I’ll do it when I feel I need to or ought to.

I want to describe the ways we experience music. That involves a list of activities:
- listening to CDs;
- attending a concert (including our relationship to musicians);
- digital downloading (whether legal or not, which I think will end up showing that the economic activity around music it is secondary);
- having music in our environment (in the car, in stores, when we’re not really listening to it);
- wanting to listen to a song, to a CD;
- liking and disliking music;
- having a song stuck in our head;
- making music, writing music, playing someone else’s song, performing for people, recording music, hearing our own songs…

And I want everyone, no matter how educated, to be able to respond to these attempts at describing the experience of music.

I’m betting on the word “description” here: phenomenology is the discourse (“logy”) on phenomena (things in our life), right – I will describe my/our experience of music in the hope of finding what it means. The meaning of a phenomenon (according to Merleau-Ponty in any case) is its essence, what never changes, no matter who experiences it or when it is experienced, across the board for everything that is this phenomenon.

“Everything that is this phenomenon” is an odd phrase; it’s simply a way to say something backwards. Let me explain, it’ll allow me to get back to what the essence is. When we are listening to music, we’re not making it up; even as we are playing music and improvising, we’re playing what we are hearing, we’re hearing what we are hearing. This is to say that music manifests itself to us, it is manifested to us: it is present to us, through a process where someone plays it (whether it’s on an instrument or on a support like a CD). We hear it, we pay attention to it – we are active in listening to music. But music is also always playing, it’s played to us (“Hey Mr. deejay play my favourite song” or “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man play a song for me”) – we’re passive in listening to music, and it happens without us necessarily making an effort.

It’s in this way that I use the word “manifestation” – I think, but I’m not sure, that this will lead to the idea of different manifestations of one song: Keith Urban writing a song, playing it to Nicole Kidman, transforming it with his band and taking their input, recording it – the recorded song “Used to the Pain”, “Used to the Pain” played live in Edmonton, “Used to the Pain” played live in New York City – “Used to the Pain” played by a cover band in Nashville, me playing “Used to the Pain” quite badly on an acoustic guitar, half-singing the lyrics. What makes a song stay the same song every time? It would be that something stays the same: its essence.

The essence of “Used to the Pain” doesn’t exist in the air, it’s tied to a few chord progressions, to lyrics, to a CD, to an mp3 file, to Keith Urban having written and recorded it, to having been heard at a show once, eventually to be heard on the radio without knowing who plays it. What stays the same, through all those variations, is what the song is: it manifests itself to us. And so a song could then become a different song when the essence changes. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is the same song whether Bob Dylan, Guns ‘n Roses or Avril Lavigne sing it. Say I use the chords and change the rhythm, use lots of distortion, put different lyrics on it. I’ve changed things enough that it’s not “Used to the Pain” – it’s “Used to the Paint” or “Used to the Pint” or “Get to the Point” or something like that. Naming the song is important, then. But I’ll need to look at that some more.

The essence isn’t something that’s necessarily stable: it can change through time. The essence of something is, as I said, what remains the same for everyone who experiences it. Now, I can’t go into your head and find out how your experience that song, what it means to you. But – I can ask you about it, I can read what people have said about it, I can use my imagination to find the different ways it could manifest itself. I can imagine different manifestations of a song, and it’s the same process I use there than what I do when I’m listening to what you’re telling me about it, about the way it affected you.

This will make a lot more sense later. Also, don’t take the July-October silence for something normal. I’m always putting it off because right now there are a lot of things I need to figure out. After the first few posts, it’ll be a lot easier to have shorter ones about more topical things.

The idea of phenomenology

Because of a series of coincidences during my bachelor’s and my master’s degrees in philosophy (at Ottawa U), I came in contact with a philosopher named Maurice Merleau-Ponty. When I read some of his texts, I was completely thrown aback: everything was so clear, he was expressing exactly what I thought, what I felt. I the text in question was an article called “Indirect language and the voices of silence,” which I’ve read a few times since – and I still agree with it. I chose to write my PhD dissertation on his political philosophy, but I’ve had to study everything he’s written. When I went to Paris this spring, I even went and read his manuscript notes for courses and for a book he never finished at the National Library.

Merleau-Ponty is mostly known as an existentialist and after all, he was close friends with Jean-Paul Sartre. But he understood himself as a phenomenologist: he had studied philosophers in a tradition called phenomenology and most of all, Edmund Husserl, who started it. Phenomenology is, simply enough, the philosophical study of phenomena. The problems start once you try to figure out what a phenomenon is, and how you should approach it, how you should talk about it.

There are two main lines of reasoning in Husserl’s thought. First, science is creating a problem for us, insofar as we are losing touch with the world we live in. Sure, we can create all kinds of techniques to use the power of nature, we can dominate nature and consume it and make life better for a lot of people. However, we are unable to think what we are doing, because we see everything in terms of cause and effect and we see ourselves as separate from the world and from nature. What we do has effects on things, what we do to others has effects on others, but we think it doesn’t affect us.

What’s even worse is that we are headed for a catastrophe. Science can tell us what we are able to do. It can’t tell us what we should do, it can’t tell us whether we should do something or not. Science can’t tell us what science should be use for. For instance, nuclear physics developed the Atomic bomb (and Husserl didn’t know about it, this is Hannah Arendt’s example). But nuclear physics, which tells us that splitting the atom will result in a gigantic explosion, or biology, which tells us what will be the short-term effects of the blast and the long-term effects of radiation, neither of these sciences can tell us whether we should use the Atomic bomb or not. Such decisions ought to be able to be made through rational discussion by the largest number of people possible, not even just President Truman.

Husserl was a German Jew writing in the early 1930s; he died of old age before the concentration camps were set up. He more or less saw something coming: when people stop having a respect for life, the lives of a lot of people begin to be very hard to live. For what it’s worth, the lack of respect for life was as minimal in everyone who sent people out to the front, who chose war for whatever motive: most European and North American countries had done it during the First World War.

But even after the war, other people have taken on his ideas as still valid, because, according to Hannah Arendt or Jan Patocka, for instance, we are headed for a disaster even now (Arendt died in 1975; Patocka, in 1977). We are able to destroy the world, because our life is only aimed toward work. Even writers and artists, even politicians, who build things that outlast lives and give them meaning and security, they understand for the most part their work as a job, as something for survival. We are using all the means available to us in nature, we are burning up all the Earth’s resources, just to keep on living in as little discomfort as possible – and none of it gives us meaning, because we can’t think about what we are doing, so we just want more of it.


This end-of-the-world scenario is actually quite different from the one Al Gore and his friends are warning us about – I could get into it, but that’s not the point right now. What’s needed, instead, is a way to think about the world and about what we do, in order to find meaning again. Of course, this isn’t how Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Patocka present it; but I think when you strip away the traditional philosophical aspects of their ideas, you still get at the old common understanding of philosophy as a quest for the meaning of life. Only, they offer us a way to find the meaning of our lives – of your life, of my life. And this way of thinking is what can be used for any phenomenon (I’ll get to that) – so I intend to use it to talk about music, without any sense of the end of the world coming anytime soon.

So the second orientation of phenomenology is that this problem can be solved by going back to things themselves. So if that’s the case, if we’re going to listen to Husserl’s call for these reasons and others I don’t want to get into at this moment, why not talk about “things,” instead of “phenomena”? Honestly, I’m not sure it’s not just convention at this point, but I’d suggest this, in any case: “things” is a term that is very vague, that is very much part of everyday language, and it’s actually something else we are aiming for when we are talking about phenomena. “Phenomena” is a more inclusive term: it’s difficult to talk about someone’s presence as a “thing,” just as it is to talk about oppression, or sight. But these are all phenomena: they appear, they manifest themselves, and it is part of what they are that when we (or for that matter when cats) walk by them or experience them, they become visible. In other words, going back to things, to phenomena, is to go back to our experience of phenomena, to our experience of the world in which they appear, in which they take their meaning, in which we live.

The world in which we live: that’s what Husserl called the “lifeworld.” But in order to actually go back to these phenomena and this world, to really see them, we have to put everything else aside to concentrate only on them, on our experience of them (which is the same thing, basically). And that includes the scientific view of the world: we have to put everything else between parentheses, act as if it wasn’t there anymore, until we’re down to only what we want to look at; from there, we can start looking at what is exactly surrounding these phenomena, what they evoke immediately, what they are associated with, and move back from there until we have a view of the whole phenomena, and of everything in the world that has to do with it.

This is abstract, right? Okay. Not everything will be like this first post. Just bear with me: I want to look at the phenomenon of rock music. Simply saying “what is the phenomenon of music” is actually quite vague, it’s like saying, “what is the phenomenon of utensils?” I could look at what everything that is called music has in common. That’d be one way of doing it. But since right now I’m doing the work that would be necessary before even looking at music in general. So I’m going to start with a very specific experience of a very specific phenomenon: a song, a show, etc. The music, the melody, what the experience of that is; then a little bit further: the lyrics, the persons singing and playing; further yet: the disc it’s on, the show that’s happening, the radio, the musicians from the present or the past that can be associated with it, the music industry… That’s what I’m intending to do. I hope it’s clearer for you than it is for me.

A few links, each time in order of readability:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merleau-Ponty,

http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/merleau.htm,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/;

Pour ceux qui parlent français:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty.

Hannah Arendt:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/arendt.html,

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/arendt.htm,

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/.

Jan Patocka

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Patočka

Edmund Husserl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husserl

http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/husserl.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

What it is exactly I’m doing here.

What I want to do on this blog, for the most part, is to use it as a kind of open notebook to jot down my thoughts on music. In the next post I’ll explain the reasons why. For the time being, in a first series of posts, I’ll try to explain the background in theory of this “philosophy of music” and which (I’ll tell you why in the next post) I’m going to call phenomenology of music.

More precisely, I want to talk about pop music. For now, I’ll say that pop music is all music that is 1) Western (that is, from the Western world, usually from Canada, the U.S. or England); 2) not classical and not jazz; 3) belonging to a tradition of music that calls itself “popular music” either through direct references and attempts to pick up what other musicians have done or through attempting to be different from it. It’s vague, but I think we all have a rather basic understanding of what pop music is anyway. And more precisely, I want to talk about a variety of pop that is rock music, because, well, that’s what I like. All these statements will have to be re-examined. In good time.

I also intend to comment on politics when important events take place: the next Saskatchewan, Québec or Canadian elections, disasters, actions that give me hope, articles I read that strike me as particularly worthy of attention, and so on. However, for now, I don’t plan to concentrate on politics.

I’m going to try to do it all in plain language, too, which is a bit of a challenge for me given that I’m in the habit of using very technical philosophical language. I want people to be able to read what I want to say and to respond to it. Don’t be afraid of skipping a paragraph (I try to keep each to one idea), and please forgive my run-on sentences and many odd punctuation marks. I won’t always be as abstract as I am in my first few posts. Most of all, I’d like to see responses and comments to these posts if they strike anything in you. And even if they don’t, do ask me to clarify anything that isn’t clear.

So look at the labels to my post, you can reach them through those once they’re archived. I hope this comes to something, but we’ll see if I can publicize this blog enough for it to ever even get read. Even my friends have better things to do.