Thinkige Kru 2

Q Among lesser known artists from less mainstream cultural traditions, which ones would be good for our hearts to listen to?

I would hesitate to claim anything is “good for the heart”. There are virtuous, emotionally-healthy people who listen to very boring, very obvious mainstream music, or to no music at all. And then are people into all kinds of experimental, adventurous, exploratory music who are not good citizens or nice people. I don’t think someone’s music taste or how wide open their listening is, is a reflection of that person’s moral or personal qualities. But perhaps I misunderstand the question and you are just hoping I will recommend something that most readers may not have heard?

I personally do feel I am elevated in some hard to explain way whenever I listen to roots reggae or dub reggae. It is spiritual music and even though I am not personally religious, let alone Rastafarian and indeed find many of the moral values of that belief-system to be the opposite of my own values, I find myself uplifted. The meditational serenity, the sense of belief and purpose that suffuses the sound and the singing, irradiates me. And then the grooves, the vocal melodies, the amazing production effects are just wonderful. So I would recommend the 1970s albums and productions of King Tubby, Lee Perry, Linval Thompson, Augustus Pablo, Keith Hudson, Creation Rebel, The Congos, Burning Spear and many more. And there are some beautiful examples of lover’s rock, a more romantic and secular form of reggae – artists like Janet Kay and Kofi.

 Better an honest curmudgeon than a career generalist with Botox prose, say I!

(A seasonally appropriate maxim)

in response to someone hailing jungle-in-1995 as the genre's mature peak, and using the phrase  "adulthood - a zenith of identity" - i.e. when the genre is most like itself, least like other genres, has sloughed off its formative influences...

I agree with this idea, but it raises a question or two

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it. 

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts. 

The character hardens and becomes a confinement.

It happens to genres and individual artists alike - they become predictable. You know what they are going to say before they open their mouths. They repeat the same anecdotes. They have their little catchphrases. 

It's that thin line between achieved style and self-parodic mannerism.

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Here's a playlist I made recently based on the Dissensus thread - it's enormous but still far from exhaustive of the year's mature brilliances. Frontloaded with the thread-starter's selections (sadly he never completed his own enormous run-down) and then into my own faves not as yet listed by him, and then some of the forum member's own choices...  What a year! 

(1994 is still my favorite jungle year, though - 1993/1994: something about sounds emerging, on the cusp. Jungle's early adulthood, maybe, as opposed to mature prime)

 E.M. Cioran having a rare chat with Jason Weiss - in this excerpt talking about music, without which life would be a mistake

 “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start.The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.

“I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”

- Theodor Adorno, 1968, televised interview, with imagery of Vietnam War and Joan Baez singing "Oh, Freedom".

 Sabbath = the great deaf-spot (auditory and ideological) of the Last Waltz/Stranded generation of rockwrite

Every generation of rockwrite has one, and has to have one. It's the essential by-product of having a value-system, a metrics of valorization.

So what was ours? (I'll leave the "us" of "ours" open-ended for now).

Thought: the vitiation of contemporary music-write = its attempt not to have any deaf-spots ... none at all, not one.

One of my favorite word twists, which I think I only ever used on  my blog, is "common groove"

Basically I have this perspective that the best black music, whether it's funk or disco, tends to be the most commercially successful stuff. The cream rises to the top. 

Because of all these obscurantist reissue labels, you have a generation of hipsters who have listened to all this objectively second or third division disco, funk, etc  - but never actually listened to Rose Royce or Stevie Wonder or whoever - the stuff that got into the charts and that masses of people bought and listened to.  

All that stuff is common groove because there are loads of vinyl copies lingering in the world, going cheap - and full of wonderful music. You could probably pick up 7 albums worth of it for the price of one of these stupid reissues. 

It relates to Northern Soul actually - that was the original 'rare groove'  although they didn't use that term, they talked about "rare soul".  

They had a whole inside-out perspective where they wouldn't play Motown because it was 'commercial' - meaning simply that it was so indisputably good that normal people liked it and bought it!

"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist:

"I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humor"

- Philip Larkin

Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like." - James McNeill Whistler

 The death of Leslie Philips at the extremely ripe age of 98 had me thinking about his suave upper-class persona versus the fact that he came from a working-class East London background, as did other professionally posh actors + showbiz personalities of the same era such as Terry-Thomas and Frank Muir. The latter quipped that despite appearances "I was educated in E10, not Eton."  There are many other examples of artistes who did a kind of auto-Pygmalion job and taught themselves to speak proper. But this thing of performers adopting received pronunciation upon entry into the entertainment world is long gone. If anything, their modern equivalents would try to blunt any poshness in their speech patterns. There's this weird disjunction between a cultural ascendancy of the demotic, even as class divides and economic inequality are worsening and Eton rather than E10 continues to fill the cabinet.

  Better over the top than under the top

 "Is it possible - and I know this mad hypothesis is asking for ridicule - that we are poisoning ourselves with music? Our lot, my contemporaries, from our adolescence on, we listened to dance music, day and night, and it was all of it romantic or sentimental. It yearned, it wanted, it longed, it needed - and expected, too, for somewhere, some time, a promise had been made. Some day I'll find you... We were immersed in dreams. But since then music has changed. Its rhythms no longer swoon or sway or linger, they beat and pound and drive and the sound is so loud you have to hear it with your nerves....  So my question is, when some person goes out to kill or torture or maim, can one reason be that he or she has been set for the crime by music that has driven them mad? Shamans have used music for thousands of years to create special moods, young men are prepared for killing by stirring marches, churches use inspirational music to hold their flocks together, and it is known that real spiritual teachers use music, but this is so delicate a thing that it is used carefully, by specialists, in special circumstances. But we deluge ourselves with music, of every kind, soak ourselves in it, often feed it direct into the brain with machines designed for this purpose - and we never even ask what effect it may be having. Well, I, for one - and I know there are others think it is time we do ask."

- Doris Lessing, 1994

(from Under My Skin: Volume I of my Autobiography, to 1949)

 "Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so"

- Brian Eno

Questions for people who know music from a musician's point of view:

- why would Eno take against minor chords? (Is it because they connote a "subtlety" that he finds middebrow, a too easy signaling of sophistication?)

- does Eno in fact avoid minor chords in his work? I haven't inspected them with this in mind (and not wholly confident I would spot their presence) but I can't help thinking that the downbeat, dreamy-drifty songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science might feature some minor chords... 

There is something so delicious, so sensually pleasing, when you come across a thinker whose ideas fit – not your own ideas, but impulses that have yet to be properly formed into ideas – but now here they are, on the page, full-formed, spelled out clearly, substantiated by the evidently great amount of thinking, reading, listening behind it...  a lifetime’s work of deep thought and deep listening – and here you are, miraculously in accord – what you're reading strikes a chord, one that resonates across your whole being, like a tuning fork!

So it is with Vladimir Jankélévitch  and his book Music and the Ineffable

Can’t even remember how I came across it, what led me to it...

Vlad was a philosopher and music scholar, a contemporary of and an influence (probably) on Barthes and such

Gist of his polemic is that the essence of music, the most important and deepest yet also blindingly obvious and on-the-surface quality of it – is that it is something that cannot be spoken of, or written about. He, paradoxically, spends a whole book writing rivetingly about this impossiblity.

Attempts to write about music might have pleasing side effects and induce pleasure in their own right, but they are extraneous, existing to one side of the thing-in-itself

They do not, ultimately, illuminate what they are talking about

They do not capture the quintessence nor successfully convert its sensations into the currency of thought

Music is not in fact a form of thought.... nor is to compose or play music an act of thinking, at least so far as thinking involves language and reasoning

Music is not reducible to, nor can it be or properly understood as operating within the domain of  Meaning.  

Indeed "understanding" itself is not really the appropriate word.

For music doesn’t contain anything that could be sensibly called truth  

Nor does it work through representation

There is nothing to understand, but everything to be felt

Janko junks the idea that music develops or has depth

Since the sensuous surface of music is all that is – it follows that there is nothing behind it that is the truth of it, that can then be exposed or revealed

Moreover there is nothing outside the music that it refers to or derives it meaning from...

(NB I'm talking about music here as opposed to stuff that can be attached to the music - like lyrics)

Vladimir's stance is anti-hermeneutic –in that sense very much like Sontag’s "Against Interpretation" and I wonder if perchance she had read it (La Musique et L'Ineffable it was published in 1961, in French only, but only translated into English decades later)

 Ah but Richard is "truth" even the right word for what music gives us?

According to the Man like Vlad...

Music is not mimetic, it doesn’t depict, nor does it really evoke

Music does, music acts, music moves, music functions

It is an enchantment of time

Vladdo uses the concept of Charm, which is philosophically freighted and derived from a particular thinker, but is understandable in the original magical sense of the word, i.e. enchants (interesting that this word has "chants" in it -  enchants comes from the French enchanter, which descends from Latin incantare, from in- ‘in’ + cantare ‘sing’)

Music fascinates and enthralls rather than signifies or enlightens

It lightens, irradiates

Two of  VJ's key concepts are "charm" and the word "drastic" 

Music beguiles (charm has a magical undertone but it also simply means a kind of attraction or magnetism that can't be explained)

By 'drastic' I think he means a dramatic, decisive, inarguable, unilateral effect on the listener, imposed whether you consent to it or not 

Now I’ve long thought – probably since I first began formulating unformed thoughts about music, which would have been the Monitor years—that pop and rock are fundamentally irrational. Well, all music is: its effects on us bypass the faculties of reason and, at the extreme, sanity. 

For sure, music can be harnessed for various ends, which might be more or less reasonable (as a vehicle for ideologies, beliefs, wisdom). It can be deployed for individual purposes by those gifted with its magic. 

Critics and commentators can reason about music, about its cultural context and its social repercussions; they say things that make sense, that are more or less accurate or persuasive, about what surrounds music, or precedes music (the motivations and ideas of the artists) or comes out of music, "when the music's over". 

But at heart and at base, music, even at its gentlest, is a kind of violence: it is an involuntary alteration of the listener’s mood, it incites or quells energy through intoxication, subjugation, force, enervation, melting.   

Reference or association is either non-existent, tenuous, or arbitrarily imposed, a completely external application to the music itself.

One version of “what this music is about” is substitutable by another

With program music, the association – narrative, landscape – does not inhere in any meaningful way to the sound itself.

The glommed-on story is not the truth of the music, and is only its referent via an agreed upon convention of listeners and critics. 

Now popular music of course is entirely based around this arbitrary imposition of a meaning to music

Since it is mostly – in the modern era, the post-jazz era  – largely vocal and lyric-based

"Words and Music by _____"

Today, outside the specialist realm of dance music, there is very little popular music that doesn’t have words welded to it that tell us what to feel, instruct us in what the song is about

But, but, the music of a song, any song, has no inherent relation to the lyrics

Any song you can think of could work almost as well, if different lyrics were substituted

Except in the very loosest and vaguest form  - the mood, tempo, the inherited associations of certain kinds of key, vocal timbre.... 

Yes, it's true that lyrics can seem to fit the music perfectly, directing how we receive its sensations and emotions

Rather like set and setting with a drug trip

And this is indeed the miracle achieved by a great pop song – you feel like “Eleanor Rigby” could only have the words that "go with" that music.

But what Janko is talking about helps to explain why music can have the opposite effect on us that its lyrics ought to induce

The paradox of sad music making us happy, uplifted

Now The Doors "LA Woman" – ought to be desolate, faintly apocalyptic, and sorrowful – in fact it’s a celebration, rolling energy, all ease and glory. 

A good example of this is that the lyrics of "Street Fighting Man" were decided upon very late in the process - after the music was basically done. Originally it had lyrics about something else altogether. 

Precisely because of the power of music, the lyrics that were attached it to feel indelibly imprinted on the music and on popular memory, creating the feeling that this is the only thing the song could ever have been about. 

But it might have been just as potent sonically and rhythmically with a bunch of words that were typical Stones stuff about chasing or demeaning a  woman. 

Conversely, the lyrics of "Street Fighting Man" would have zero incendiary qualities if clad in the sound of, say, Poco.

I also read recently that Exile on Main Street had a rather different working title - Tropical Disease. Imagine if that had stuck! The actual title is so determinative of how we respond to the music and how we read the whole Stones vibe of that moment. 

Bit like how the title "Moments In Love" - chosen by Morley - determines how you respond to the music, originally an instrumental with no determinate or intended feeling. Such that Ann Dudley said the title alone deserves half the publishing credit. 

Another good example out of so many - Roxy Music. Initially Bryan Ferry wrote the vocal melody and lyric at the piano. But at a certain point, quite early on, the band would write the whole track first, independently - and then Ferry would compose the vocal melody and come up with the words (being quite secretive about that process, as well as doing it at the very last minute - Manzanera told me of the surprise and the suspense re. what the words would be). So for instance "Mother of Pearl" - the music was created first, and then Ferry came up with what the song was "about".  An indication of how "about" is not really an applicable word to use in regards to music-qua-music.

(I believe this was the case with quite a few Smiths songs - specifically "How Soon Is Now", which Marr created almost entirely on his own one weekend). 

So yes, it's a convention that we all tacitly agree to adhere to - fans, critics, creators - that lyrics of songs and their titles have some kind of  quasi-organic relationship to the music. That the semantic content is what the music is about, what it dramatizes. 

But consider all the stories about how albums are actually written - so many involve the words being scrabbled together at the last minute in the studio. Stories of how the lyric-writing process starts with abstract vocalese or nonsense words, that only later get formed into lyrics. 

The fated-feeling relationship between form and content is one of the great illusions pulled off by music -  a testament to the way the music itself conjures a feeling of inevitability . You feel that the song could only have sounded this way, in this definitive execution - and as a knock-on effect, the words inherit or acquire the same rightness. (But of course there are demos and alternate takes and different mixes that in themselves show the contingent nature of any recording or writing)

Of course classical music – instrumental art music  - often does have a relationship to the text

Not really meaning lieder here

But the tradition of composers taking inspiration from poetry (or books, novels, plays, scripture, myth, folk tales) for works of instrumental music.

Often literally setting the poem to music, or being inspired by it, sent on a musical journey

Yet the relationship of the poem to the musical outcome is actually largely – ultimately - arbitrary

As can be seen by examples of different composers using the same poem or sacred text - and coming up with a completely different outcome, musically.

The poem is a bit like the yeast in bread making -  or some other germinal element

The sand in the oyster that results in the pearl – a kind of inspirational irritant

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The elusive meta-ness of music - even a kind of tautologous opacity - is something that Boston reach for in their song "More Than A Feeling"

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Now as an example of this syndrome where you read the book and it articulates and ratifies what you already feel.... here's something I wrote about a year before reading Jankélévitch, on the ineluctable mystery of Television and Tom Verlaine's guitar:

The lyrics are purest dream -  interpretation is beside the point, at once superfluous and sullying.  The music is the main thing, but that too defies description or characterisation. Television's kinetic abstraction works through elemental dynamics of tension-build and climax. It's not about anything except its own structure-in-motion, the tone and timbre of the immaterial material out of which it constructs itself before your ears. Something for the technical guitar magazines, in a way, and yet that kind of terminology gets no closer to the magic than mind's eye guff  does. 

Surveying the literature on Television, even the most penetrating writers... I don't think anyone really gets near the magic and the mystery.  I found a lot of it rather predictably evasive - not consciously so but veering off nonetheless to talk about the lyrics (in actual fact, usually just quoting favorite lyrics) or inter-band dynamics, the conflict with Richard Hell, how Television fit and didn't fit into the CBGB punk scene, Verlaine's personality / artistic-literary interests and influences, the legacy etc. 

The magic and mystery gets written around more than written about. Which is something that goes on with a lot of music  - maybe most music -  but seems a particularly glaring absence with a group that is so purely musical - that says what it has to say through the music ( "say" itself is inadequate, not the right word -  when communication is so ecstatically non-verbal, can it really be described as communication? It's more like an electric communion, a pure zapping transfer of energy... like being electrocuted. "Lightning struck itself" is the perfect meta-lyric in fact).

My favorite out of the pieces I've read remains the Nick Kent paean - not necessarily because it gets much closer to the quick of it  - but because it's so immediate - there's a feeling of moment in the cadences  - you imagine the writer trembling with the sense of occasion,  the privilege of being the one who gets to mount the podium and introduce the world to this transformational record, this miracle... it's a tour de force of magisterially controlled excitement - in that sense, a prose mirror-image of its subject, Marquee Moon the album and the song.

This Nick Kent piece makes me think of what Artforum critic Carter Ratcliff said of his flamboyant contemporary Rene Ricard - not the negative carping, but the stuff about "gestures made in the vicinity" of a work, working not so much as analysis but as a kind of heralding, "Behold the New!""

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Some earlier thoughts of mine in this vicinity, on the subject of "the kind of rap I like"

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Jankélévitch in his own words

"My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly.

"As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex part of it is fine. Occasionally it’s musically interesting, but you know, ninety-nine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded. 

"I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating" 

Harold Bloom, 1991 

 "The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions.... as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock & roll is a sign of depersonalisation of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity”

- Dr Joost A.M. Meerlo, New York Times, 1957

 "What's interesting about rock 'n' roll is that its truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more revolutionary than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did." 

- Robert Ray

"My argument has always been that the way rock works, both in terms of its emotional effectiveness but also in terms of its politics, is at the level of sound.  No matter how powerful you think “Ohio” is, in terms of politics “Tutti Frutti” is more politically profound."

- Robert Ray 

Having trouble correlating these righteous remarks with the barely-there quality of the sound of Ray's band The Vulgar Boatmen - The Feelies clarified to a consomme that barely touches the sides as it goes down.

Thinking more generally about this vague area of music - college rock  (Ray is an actual college professor) and Amerindie....   Hoboken as haven on Earth.... The Feelies, Camper Van Beethoven, Miracle Legion, Yo La Tengo.... a sensibility big in the Eighties, as a reaction-formation against mainstream rock, but one that endures as a strain to this day

Is it that America is still a Puritan nation at heart? 

How else to explain this musical preference for frugality of means and modesty of mode? The Quakerish  premium on egalitarianism  - the person onstage has no more of a voice than you do.  A dislike of drama that taps into the deep Puritan tradition of anti-theatricality. 

This taste formation doesn't go in for 'thickness'... it recoils from texturitis....  Performers can never be too self-effacing. 

Which is why Scrawl, say, got a better critical reception than Throwing Muses

Why the Mekons were always more of a cause here than Morrissey & Marr

"What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students"

-  Vaughan Williams

(talking about his friendship with Gustav Holst) 

 “Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”

― Norman O. Brown

“The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.”

― Norman O. Brown

“I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

― Norman O. Brown

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.”

― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

"Message songs are a drag!" 

- Bob Dylan, datebook magazine 1966

“Elektra is not the tool of anyone's revolution. We feel that the revolution will be won by poetics and not by politics - that poetics will change the structure of the world." 

- Jac Holzman of Elektra Records, in Rolling Stone 1969

"The act of being in a band and strapping on an electric guitar is a political action" 

- Jon Spencer, The Quietus, 2025

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, of humble origin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

 For, nothing spake to me but the fair Face

 Of Hev'n and Earth, when yet I could not speak:

 I did my Bliss, when I did Silence, break.

Traherne, "Dumness."'

 "Above the lake in the valley and the grove along the hillside, high over the sea

and the passing clouds, and even past the sun!

To the farthest confines of the starry vault

mount, my spirit, wander at your ease

and range exultant through transparent space

like a rugged swimmer reveling in the waves

with an unutterable male delight.

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere *

to a higher plane, and purify yourself

by drinking as if it were ambrosia

the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness.

Free from the futile striving and the cares

which dim existence to a realm of mist,

happy is he who wings an upward way

on mighty pinions to the fields of light;

whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise

into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked,

outreaches life and readily comprehends

the language of flowers and of all mute things.

- Charles Baudelaire, Elevation

* in some translations, rendered as "miasma"

Sylvère Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"

by Friedrich Nietzsche 

 "Shitting, like death, is a great leveller. It renders beluga caviar indistinguishable from tinned ham, a duchess as creaturely as a dog."

Alex Blasdel

For some reason this quote has reminded me of a Brian Aldiss story I never read but always meant to. In my hazy memory,  Aldiss's speculative train of thought had begun with the fact that religions, in their imagery and their ceremonies, often spiritualize bodily functions like eating (as with the communion wafer) and sex. Aldiss wondered: "well, why not  the excretory functions?". So he spun out a story that imagines a form of religion whose rituals are based around defecation.  

Well, it turns out I have garbled this (read about long long ago, probably in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). The novel appears to be Aldiss's early effort, The Dark Light-Years  - originally published in 1964 - and here is a summary of its scenario, which involves a disorienting first-contact between humans and an alien race: 

The Utods are an ancient race who live in a distant galaxy -- they have a highly developed biological system that coincides with the rotation of their planet between three distinct suns. Their social, cultural, and religious beliefs all center on the process (and product) of defecation (no joke), which they see as a gift that symbolizes the ultimate cycle of life where bodies enter the carrion stage and feed the trees on the planet, becoming once again part of the universe. So, the Utods basically sit around in wallows of dirt and shit all day.

They are also giant and kind of hippo-like with six retractable arms and two heads, one that talks and one that shits. They are peaceful, but went through a period of revolution in their culture many generations ago where a sect of Utods shunned defecation for cleanliness, invented all kinds of spaceships and things, but eventually died out in a big war between themselves. The remaining Utods kept the technological knowledge and use it to travel to and colonize other hospitable planets.

The humans run across a pod of Utods in their temporary wallow on a planet they are both exploring. When the Utods say something to the humans (their language sounds like high pitched squeaks and screams and comes from all their orifices), they shoot all but two of the group. A scientist on board on the ship makes them capture the remaining Utods for study instead of shooting them. But are they intelligent?

All the shit really makes it hard for the humans to see the Utods as anything less than animals. All the cleanliness makes it really hard for the Utods to see the humans as an intelligent, thinking race. Both groups are at a standstill and while they have a lot of philosophical discussions about what "intelligent life" really is, neither race really makes a breakthrough.

Another precis: 

The Utods are multi-headed multi-limbed hippo-like mud-wallowing creatures which alternate genders.  They live with their lizard-like parasites in large mud and feces filled ponds which they wallow in and philosophize.  They journey between their planets in seedpod spaceships filled with their own filth.  They feel no pain, are pacifists, and are happy.

Some humans encounter a bunch of them and their seedpod spaceship....  The humans of this future time live in ultra-hygienic conditions eating their synthesized foods and drinking non-alcoholic beverages.... The  complete inability of the humans to communicate with the aliens (who have chosen not to communicate) introduces the main theme of the work:  the humans are so repulsed by the filth of the Utods that they are forced to reevaluate the meaning and criteria of the words/concepts sentience, intelligence, civilization, progress — not only as applied to the aliens but ourselves.  Does our conception of civilization completely exclude all other forms civilization might take?

Here's Aldiss's own gloss: 

A novel written in anger following inhumane experiments on dolphins. Space-going men and women find an alien race, the utods, on a planet alien to both parties. The utods enrich their lives and bodies by wallowing in their own droppings, a ceremony incompatible with terrestrial preconceptions: according to the latter “civilisation is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta”. Result: disaster. A serio-comic novel with diverse multi-national characters exemplifying human madness.

It all reminds me a bit of Bataille and the idea that higher mental faculties are built on, or over, lower bodily ones - the secret proximity of elevation and abjection, the lofty and base materialism.   

Soul and arse. 

Noticeable that none of the covers of these editions attempt to pictorialise the Utods or the defecatory concept - the images are completely unrelated. The original Faber and Faber cover below, the designer makes no attempt at all

I like the way he reprimands himself for not having bought his pale blue pegs from the right shop - “should have been from Lord John or Take Six”. The mod/soul boy obsession with these minutiae is the thing that is most alien to me still. I was once poking around a casuals forum when researching a piece and it was amazing to see how ferociously these middle aged verging on elderly types were arguing about which specific month in a particular year of the mid-80s that a certain shoe came into vogue, or the color of the laces that were de rigeur for that precise patch of time. 30 years on. It’s a kind of mystical investment in consumerism. As an indifferently dressed bourgeois from a bit further into the home counties than Burnt Oak I agree with Toyah - “don’t want to be told what to wear / so long as you’re warm who cares”. Music exists in commodity form but it transcends that and you don’t need to own it to hear it - it’s a common culture. Style culture is all about chasing overpriced stuff that only a few get to put on their bodies, a self-imposed prison of rules and restrictions.

 "If you understood everything I said, you'd be me." 

 - Miles Davis

(via Andrew Parker)

the structure / pay off reminds me a bit of this

 "You've probably noticed, grime is having a lot of impact at the moment. That's because it's telling the truth about what's going on in our cities. We were doing the same thing twenty years ago - but we did it with sound"  - Goldie, 2017

Zone of Fruitless Intensification coined here in this Jan 2007 blogpost

... on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.

The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.

... I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).

[of course ZFI is a bit of a poncy way of saying  "you can have too much of a good thing" or "enough's as good as a feast"

Full post for context

Blissblog 

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Gimme danger

Rather belatedly picking up from Tim Finney’s Skykicking post on drum’n’bass and the loss of its “rhythmic danger” of December 20….

---first, if you’re going to talk about “rhythmic danger” then the role of the bass, and how that changed/deteriorated, is worth considering… “Dangerbass” is what I titled some mystery tune on an early ’94 pirate tape (still never identified, sigh)… back in those days the way the bass moved in relation to the drums, the vibe it created--stealth, trepidation, ominousness, lurking malevolence, a sort of tectonic instability--was crucial to that feel of rhythmic jeopardy Tim talks about… it also strikes me that jungle’s bass-motion was more musical, or musically interesting, than the way bass related to the beats in later drum’n’bass … from techstep onwards, the bass-riffs, as slathered as they are in “evil distortion”, operate in a much more regular and dependable-feeling way…

--- one thing that struck me is how the meaning of speed changed. The first acceleration, the foundational surge in tempo that turned house into hardcore into jungle, was felt as a cataclysmic increase. Catastrophic/revolutionary. Thousands dropped by the wayside, way more left the scene than stuck with it, they just couldn’t cope with both the speed and the choppiness of the breaks. But if you could handle the bpm surge, thrive on that sensation, then you were one of the headstrong hardcore. The headfuck, body-confound of the speed-surge--1991-1994, approx 120 bpm to approx 150 bpm--that was what made people says things like “you can’t dance to it” or “it’s just not music”.

The odd thing, though, is that drum’n’bass carried on getting faster after 94. It probably went up another 30 or 40 bpm in the four or five years after jungle had ‘arrived’ in terms of wider mainstream consciousness. But no one really noticed or commented on that further increase, it didn’t register as an equivalent amplification of intensity, either within the scene or outside it. But some people, some of the original ‘speed tribe’, did notice, and mourn, the way that as the music continued to get faster, all the interesting internal musical relationships of half-speed basslines etc disappeared. The further increase of speed seemed to narrow the music down drastically until all that was left was the sensation of pure linearity. The endless one bar loop chase-scene treadmill.

This suggests that on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.

The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.

One of the things that’s striking about jungle is that so many things were going on in the music you had multiple axes with the potential for fuck up and going into the Bad Zone and sure enough all of them were taken. The zone of fruitlessly intensified jazziness (think Wax Doctor, the later Good Looking stuff, the stuff Fabio ended up with); the zone of fruitless complexification (think what happened to Reinforced, Vortexion, all that stuff); the zone of fruitlessly exaggerated tumbly-Amen-exuberance (Aphrodite), the ZFI of apocalypticness/darkness (post-No U Turn).

(Mind you, there’s a perspectival element to this obviously. What many would think of as the Optimal Range of Intensification for hardcore>jungle is what a trad househead would think of, and did think of, as a ZFI--“fucking E-heads destroying the music”. And my ZFI for metal might be where thrash/death/black/etc headz think the key threshold into fabulousity actually starts)

In hip hop, an obvious axis on which there’s a ZFI would be Bling, also Thuggizm/Gangsta-Realism. Also, in undie, the encryption/prolixity/too many words to the bar axis.

I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).

Now it’d be intriguing to work out what the significant axis on which the Zone of Fruitless Intensification will manifest itself, looking at some current musics. With Grime, one possibility is clunkiness. At the moment the music exploits the aesthetic possibilities of clunky-but-in-a-good way -- the clunk-crunk-funk nexus (the fact that stiff and lurching is actually more funky, or more rhythmically arresting/compelling, than fluid, nimble ‘funky’ playing). But I can already imagine that good-clunk turning to bad-clunk, getting both caned into the ground and exaggerated to the point of non-enjoyability. Same with the bombastic/doomladen post-Swizz/Ludacris fanfare-riff, although perhaps that's just a subset of "clunk".

I’m curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it’s just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World’s Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill.

-- The Role of social energy. It’s not that drum’n’bass got shit because everyone ran out of ideas (or not only that--I do think most genres have finite possibilities, a seam that gets exhausted). Nor is that all the talented ones moved off to other fields (like steve gurley going into garage, 4 Hero doing broken beat, or Photek moving into house, and then onto hip hop [recent Deuce interview with rupert parkes: “‘s always been my roots, hip hop, honest! Detroit? Never heard of it.”]). A handful of producers did had the suss to move out of the negative vortex of d&B, but by and large it seems like a really high proportion of the original producers--dillinja, andy c, ed rush etc--are still involved, still at the helm. So why haven’t they been able to steer d&B in a better direction? Once a genius, always a genius, surely? It’s because of the massive. (“Scenius” isn’t a collectivized version of auteur theory, because at least 50 percent of “scenius” is the audience input). The jungle massive’s composition changed. It’s a different massive. A more studenty white M/C following embraced drum’n’bass in the late 90s; the orrrrrrrignal junglissss drifted off. Presumably, the new recruits were originally attracted by something “other”, but unconsciously, involuntarily, they gradually changed it back to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates. The DJs are the membrane for this transfer of desire-data. Without necessarily being hyper-conscous about it, the DJs assimilate what the crowd respond to; there’s a positive reinforcement syndrome. The DJs are either DJ/producers and when they make new tracks they’ll consciously or unconsciously amplify the aspects that are getting the best response from the crowd; or they are in close contact with the producers, like Grooverider with his coterie of “boys”, and pass on the data that way, by selecting certain dubs and reject others. Either way the massive actually dictates, through a selective response to the new tunes coming on the scene, the music’s future path. That’s how dance musics evolve in the first place, and that’s how they devolve, in this case.

I noticed a different kind of dancing at a Dieselboy show in NYC in probably-1998, 1999, at any rate one of the last d&b nights for me EVER. There was a lot of energy in the club, but the way people moved was totally different than how people used to dance to jungle or even d&b -- very athletic, they were dancing to the fastest rhythmic element in the music. It was especially striking with these solja-girls dancing real hard, bounding on their feet, almost jogging. There was absolutely no wind-your-waist, no hips or bump’n’grind element in the physical response to the music, because there was no space in the music for that kind of movement. Now, the only place I saw dancing since that which resembled it was, interestingly, at psy-trance parties. Same sort of athletic/amazonian girls dancing very hard and very fast, bounding like antelopes or commandos. So when I said before about the new M/C recruits to d&B unconsciously, involuntarily, changing it to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates -- I guess what I’m saying is they changed jungle into a kind of trance music--propulsive, cold techno-y textures, diminished role of MC, and most crucially the internal musical tensions that made jungle a form of black music gradually flattened out. It was exciting, the Dieselboy show, I’m not saying it wasn’t “valid” or buzz-worthy, but it was nothing to do with jungle. No danger.