I'm with Rich--Hamlet 2 is really, really, really good. He's saving his take for the DVD, but here's mine. (I'll go light on the spoilers, but I am going to talk about plot points. This shouldn't be too big of a problem, but come back after you've seen it, if you'd rather.)
If you want to know what Hamlet 2 is about, just check the structure. Sure, it's got a standard overall arc, which the movie itself makes fun of with Mr. Marsch's (the drama teacher and main character, played by Steve Coogan) repeated references to inspirational-teacher flicks like Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, and Dangerous Minds. Yes, there's a setup, a period of trouble, and then a successful resolution. But how does it resolve? After what amounts to a really long build-up, we get to see the performance of the titular play--and that's it. After the performance, there's a brief (and fantastic) epilogue, but it's only a couple minutes long. The thing the movie was leading up to was not the resolution of various emotional and character arcs--the kids don't learn any lessons, and Marschz's romantic interest exists purely as a gag--but the actual performance of the play itself. What matters is not the journey the characters went through, but the journey the play itself went through. The movie, in other words, is about the unpredictable and ignoble nature of the creative process.
As any critic can tell you, creative types are rarely what we want them to be. Sure, every once in a while there's a David Byrne who's as culturally literate, thoughtful, and intentional as we critics are (or, at least, like to think of ourselves as being). In the main, though, artists, writers, and musicians are the kind of people who we'd be embarassed to know if they weren't geniuses. They're boorish, dickish, passive-aggressive, fickle, emotionally stunted, alcoholic, abusive, and/or pathetic. They have an extremely difficult time maintaining healthy relationships, with any friendships or marriages characterized by neediness, selfishness, leechiness, and sulking. They are, in short, losers--jobless wrecks of humanity who are so pathetic that you can't engage them in a conversation without feeling kinda guilty that you're a normal, together person. Worst of all, at least from the critic's standpoint, they are generally incapable of talking about their creations, either coming up with simplistic explanations revolving around their own personal issues or refusing to explain them at all.
And this is exactly what Marschz is for almost the entire movie--in fact, that's where the humor comes from. He has to roller-skate everywhere because of a past DUI, and he's not very good at roller-skating. When he breaks his sobriety, he ends up pantsless on a couch in the middle of a field. After getting him to wear a caftan so that his testicles are at room temperature, his wife leaves him with their roomate, who it turns out is the one who actually impregnated her. Marschz says it himself: "My life is a parody of a tragedy." And yet, after a life as a loser, his last-ditch effort succeeds wildly. In the world of the film, whether or not we think so, his play is a masterpiece both creatively and commercially. How does he do this?
The movie's explanation, in a memorable line, is this: "It doesn't matter if you have talent as long as you have enthusiasm." This is a funny little epigraph for the current generation, but it's also true. Marschz has enthusiasm in spades, and it's that enthusiasm that allows the play to be a success. His enthusiasm draws talented people to him, and this pathetic loser is at the center of a group of very successful people: a great actor, a great lighting designer, great security guys, a great lawyer. And when they all work together and deploy their talents in service of Marschz's enthusiasm, they produce something that is well and truly moving.
What's funny about this is that the creative process depicted in the rest of the movie gives no indication that this will be the case. A sequal to Hamlet is, as many people point out over the course of the film, a horrible idea, and Marschz has given no indication at any point that he's a good enough writer or director to make up for that questionable decision. And at no point does he suddenly develop a full artistic sensibility, complete with taste, thematic complexity, and nuance. It works because he pours all those loser qualities out in such a charming way that, when surrounded with an aura of success and competence, it seems to glow with meaning. None of which, it becomes clear, he actually intended. When one character argues with her mother that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is intended as a critique of celebrity, Marschz interjects, "That's an oversimplification." The Christians who come to the foot of the stage to protest change their minds when they come up with their own interpretation, that "Jesus kicks the devil's ass!" All the while, the play, in which Marschz is simply working out his own issues with his father, continues on its merry way, oblivious to the storms of meaning being kicked up on its periphery. That, indeed, is why it works. Because people are able to pin their own meaning to it, it speaks to them on a personal level. Marschz's "parody of a tragedy" life is ultimately so knowable that it forges a multitude of connections with otherwise disperate identities. The restraint that taste imposes is generally crucial. When absent, it is almost always embarassing and cringe-inducing. But sometimes--when surrounded by talent--tastelessness allows for such an openness that beauty can rush through.
That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself--and a pretty powerful one, I might add. Don't get me wrong: this is a deserved cult classic in the making, and there are a lot of hilarious testicle jokes that I was a bit Shue about. But it's also a really smart and, I think, important piece of art.
1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon 2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone 3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub 4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You 5) Blur - This is a Low 6) Boris - Farewell 7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1 8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release 9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love 10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean 11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger 12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride
(click on any song to start it streaming)
In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.
This is a scene from HayaoMiyazaki'sSpirited Away:
In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.
The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.
Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?
Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.
This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.
The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?
Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.
To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:
The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
I can be heard in this week's edition of the BBC show Songlines, which is about "Halellujah." Go here and scroll down to "Monday." The version about the football player is pretty awesome. My riff around the 21 minute mark will hopefully become a post here shortly.
(Only available for a week--I'll try and upload a copy later.)
Lots of great stuff coming up in reaction to the previous post, two of which are elsewhere. It got a link from Songs About Buildings And Food, a blog so good that it makes me wish I liked The Hills so I could better understand what he's talking about. (And I mean that sincerely!) Laguna Beach and all its offshoots are a pretty perfect example of what I'm talking about--MTV has built a whole programming bloc out of televising reenactments of the gossip-worthy moments in a particular real-world social group, and people love it. That's no accident. As stupid as MTV's programming can look to adults, it's generally ahead of the curve on these things.
Also, for those of your that are uncomfortable applying this theory to "lightweights" like Miley and Britney, Alex Rawls sees a connection between my model and Bob Dylan's construction of character. I think that's true, but only insofar as Dylan is a singularly iconic character. There's a difference between the obsessive information completism of fandom and the social capital of gossip, which relies on widely shared knowledge.
Adults are confused by Hannah Montana. Why were her concert tickets going for hundreds of dollars? Why does she have a 3-D movie? Who is this Miley person? Is she really the daughter of the "Achey Breaky Heart" guy? And he's her dad on the show? How does that all work, exactly?
It is true that the Hannah Montana gestalt encompasses an odd number of identity issues. On a normal TV show, there would be the character, Hannah, and the actress, Miley Cyus. The character would not appear outside the show, and the actress' real life would not be reflected on the show itself. But from the beginning, that line was blurred. The character named Hannah Montana is the secret identity of a character named Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart's dad, who knows her secret, is a character named Robbie. Robbie is played by former country star Billy Ray Cyrus, and his daughter on the show is played by his daughter in real life, Miley Cyrus. (Who isn't actually named Miley, but let's not even get into that.)
So far, so good; it's really just one step removed from Jerry Seinfeld playing a character named Jerry Seinfeld, right? What makes it confusing is that there are also albums associated with this particular gestalt. The first album, Hannah Montana, was credited to the character Hannah but one song was sung by Miley Cyrus as herself and her dad as Billy Ray Cyrus. The second album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus is a double album, with the first disc being credited to Hannah and referring to the show's world and the second disc being credited to Miley and referring to the actress as a real person. There is then a concert movie, in which Miley performs songs as herself and as Hannah Montana.
To sum up: the character Hannah Montana has released an album and toured. The actress who plays Hannah has also released an album and toured, but always in combination with the character she plays. She has also sung a song as herself with the actor who plays her dad on the show, who is actually her dad. And who also sang "Achey Breaky Heart."
The reason I go through all this rigamarole is to show that, when you try and lay it all out, it is a fairly tangled web of connections that can be confusing if you're not immersed in it. And yet, for all its structural complexities (!!!), children have no trouble grasping how the Hannah Montana universe works. There's a good reason for this: for all that Hannah Montana might seem like a fantastically complicated postmodern art experiment (think Nikki S. Lee), she fits seamlessly into the current media/entertainment environment. And this is especially true for children. Adults are too tied to their formative experiences with straightforward entertainment television to really grasp what's going on. But for those people growing up in the reality show era, Hannah Montana makes total intuitive sense.
John Ellis' essay "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon" is a useful touchpoint for explaining all of this, though I don't want to get totally behind its occasionally overwrought "OMG postmodernism" tendencies. His take, basically, is that an individual performer had a a "star image" made up partially of their actual performances and partially through entering into "subsidiary forms of circulation" (see?), which is his way of saying "publicity." By giving interviews and being written about in the press and having your picture taken, a performer creates an image (tough, sexy, stoner, slutty, whatever) that then works as a way of informing the public's understanding and anticipation of their performances in films. To simplify: Brad breaks up with Jen and starts dating Angelina, so let's go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
That may be true from the perspective of, say, a film studio interested in making money. But from the perspective of everyone else, the really interesting thing about all this, the thing we followed and remembered, wasn't the movie. It was the actual story of Brad breaking up with Jen and dating Angelina, and why, and what would happen next. Ellis would consider this to be a failure--that the system has failed in its intended purpose if the movie in question is less memorable than the story surrounding it. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that would speak kindly of our "obsession with celebrity," as it is generally put. But that, to me, seems unproductive. This system that has evolved is intensely fascinating--that's why, after all, we're all "obsessed" with it. And that's interesting. So rather than (just) criticizing this, we should recognize it as a new form of entertainment. Or, rather, a new incarnation of a very old form.
Mass media did not invent entertainment, though previous forms of entertainment might not seem very, er, entertaining to a modern audience. The Reign of Terror, for instance, was a form of popular entertainment. So were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is why they lasted for three hours. (More bang for the buck!) These are momentous events that represent practices (public executions, public speaking) that reach far back into human history. Perhaps we should think of another ancient human behavior as entertainment: gossip. I'm not alone in suggesting this by any means, but I have a slightly different take on it. Whereas others think of it in terms of its effect on the people doing the gossiping (display of social status, strengthening bonds, enforcing norms, etc.), I'd like to discuss the things that gossip collectively creates. In other words, I'd like to talk about gossip as narrative.
Humans seem to have an inherent tendency toward narrative. We form stories out of the bits and pieces of our lives in order to make some sense of them--to figure out what caused us to get where we are, or to at least feel like we know what made us get here. This urge extends to other people. We get pleasure out of learning other people's stories because to have a glimpse into others' lives helps us make further sense of the world. This is clear in our consumption of pop culture, especially TV, but is also clear in longstanding traditions of oral history and folk stories and even, arguably, news reporting. These are all stories about lives lived.
The great advantage of gossip is that it structures true stories about others in a way most advantageous to pleasure. Because bits of gossip are things we're not supposed to know, they give us the thrill of the illicit as well as the clarity of a secret revealed. Moreover, because the story is being revealed in pieces, we get the sort of tension and release dynamic that structures most great narrative works. At first, we don't really know what's going on. A problem is introduced. Then, we get more information. Tension builds. What is going on? What is she going to do? Is he going to find out? And then, finally, there's a break and things are resolved--or, they're not, and we get to speculate endlessly about what happened in the perpetual glow of limitless possibility. The slow drip of information keeps us coming back for more, keeps us interested in these stories, keeps us engaged with those around us. I can't wait to see you again, we say to our informant, and our informant can't wait to see us, either.
This is precisely what's going on with modern-day celebrities. For all that paying attention to news about Britney feels illicit and wrong, we are ultimately doing nothing more than following someone's story, doled out teasingly in daily doses. Rather than sitting and passively having a story told to us, we are expected to figure it out for ourselves from fragments of news, from photos we have to decipher, from actions the main character didn't want us to know about. We process these and judge these and try and decide what kind of character we're dealing with. The phrase "soap opera" is intended as a kind of pejorative when applied to such cases, but it's entirely accurate. The fact that the story is about a non-fictional person ultimately matters little to the end-of-the line consumer who's following the gossip. All it does is make the whole thing less predictable, since real people don't always follow stock storylines, and give the events an extra charge of verisimilitude. And let's not moralize around the bush here about people being exploited. If you are a celebrity and don't want to be the subject of gossip, there is a simple solution: move out of LA. There aren't paparazzi in Ohio. Britney in particular is an interesting test case for this, since for all her problems, she seems to have a collaborative relationship with the media.
All reality shows did was serve as a factory floor for generating these sorts of stories about people's lives. The thing that makes something like America's Next Top Model a reality show, of course, isn't the competition aspect of it--that's just any old talent show. What makes it a reality show is the Real World element. By putting all the girls into a house and filming their interactions under the always-fraught conditions of communal living, producers are able to generate stories that they can then edit skillfully into compact narrative chunks. The gossip that would normally have to come from a secondary source is here related directly by the cameras that film the offending behavior. And each week, good reality shows are able to edit their material in order to make clear in viewers' minds what kind of character each contestant is.
But from the beginning, reality shows never limited themselves to the show itself. The first American reality show of the post-MTV era, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, was successful in no small part because of the "controversy" that erupted in the media after the show aired. The idea of the program (on Fox, natch) is that a bunch of women would compete to marry, sight unseen, a multi-millionaire who was watching on monitors in a hidden room. At the end of the show, he would pick one, and they would get married then and there. This is indeed what happened, but because of the setup, we ended up with very little information about the multi-millionaire in question, Rick Rockwell (whose name makes him sound like a character in a Marvel comic). Afterwards, however, we found out a number of things about Rockwell that were textbook examples of gossip, because they complicated the simplistic public image he'd tried to construct for himself. He had multiple restraining orders placed on him, and was probably an abuser. He was not actually a multi-millionaire, but just some guy that dabbled in real estate. And theirs was not a fairy-tale marriage, but one that was quickly annulled.
At the time, this seemed like a disaster for Fox, and commentators predicted that this would be the end of reality shows. In hindsight, we can see that it demonstrated just how potent reality shows can be. By promoting an unknown into the public eye, we're able to find out their story from scratch. Reality show participants are, in essence, each their own little novel (or maybe just short story), a new character whose life story we now get to hear. They might not be very good novels, but the best selling ones rarely are.
This, then, became the model for reality shows. Bad ones stayed self-contained, because no one cared enough about them to unearth dirt on the contestants. But good ones generated coverage simply as a result of being interesting. Since what was happening on the shows was essentially gossip to begin with, these external pieces of information just became part of the overall narrative. Again, this is a violation of Ellis' idea of the star system. The gossip wasn't working as contextual information to enhance our viewing of major motion pictures, but creating its own gestalt, its own story told in bits and pieces. But this is what the modern media is built on. Political campaigns work this way as surely as American Idol does. And, to be honest, I think it's pretty awesome. If we were more willing to be honest about what we found entertaining and to embrace this as a source of pleasure rather than a source of shame, we might be willing to endorse strategies that took pleasure as a positive force rather than a debased one.
Anyway, point being, if this is all second nature to you--if the construction of character through multiple streams that duplicate and build on existing information just seems like the way the media works--then Hannah Montana fits right in. Taking the show on its own, we have essentially a superhero narrative; taken in context with the identity issued detailed above, it's basically Keeping Up With the Kardashians, except less soul-destroying. There's a family on a show that's like a family in real life, and sometimes the family on the show/in real life does stuff like make albums or release, uh, movies. This isn't confusing, but elevating. Instead of sealing all these things off from each other behind characters and fourth walls, they're able to mix and mingle as they would in real life. This is ultimately the real power of gossip-based narrative: it tells a story like we would get it in real life. Each episode is a phone conversation, the gossip is what you hear from other people or see at the grocery store. We rarely find out life stories all in one gulp (except when we're drinking with strangers), but slowly, as they're lived. We have to get through a lot of banality to reach the dramatic high points. Not coincidentally, this is how the best fictional shows on TV construct their narratives as well (think Ugly Betty, or even more appropriately, Gossip Girl). Hannah Montana's real strength is that it does all this without ever calling attention to its constructedness or to its radical collapsing of information streams. It comes off as easy as breathing, as the most natural thing in the world, and to its young audience, it most assuredly is.
ADDENDUM: Two related things that I couldn't figure out how to work into the actual entry: this quote from Rebecca West, via Marc, and of course the whole microfame thing. There's more to be said about YouTube as a medium, but that's another post.
“I think we live our lives the best we can,” Kevin said. “We’ve grown up with the idea that even when you’re at the top, act like you’re at the bottom. We’re growing and learning together, and it is important for us to stay true to the family that we are.”
This quote, from one of the Jonas Brothers (a pop-rock band that's been shot to success by the Disney machine), would seem to be fodder for people who want to dismiss commercial pop music, especially that music that can be accurately described as the product of a machine. It's a horrifying combination of banal and cliché, so inconsequential that your eyes can pass over it multiple times without really catching the meaning. It would seem to reveal its speaker as someone who does not think very deeply about things and who is terminally lacking in personality. Compare it to a quote from Dylan or Lennon and it's like a rice puff. Whoever said this does not match up with our idea of what a musician is supposed to be.
On the other hand, if an athlete said it, it would sound perfectly normal. In fact, it falls right in line with Kevin Costner's advice to Tim Robbins in Bull Durham:
Costner: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time." Robbins: Got to play... it's pretty boring. Costner: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.
Say nothing, in other words, and it doesn't hurt you. Say something interesting and it's only going to cause trouble.
The difficult thing for critics dealing with commercial pop stars is precisely this kind of advice. Underground musicians get publicity for saying crazy things to the underground press; commercial pop artists, especially those with a young audience, can only lose sales from saying interesting things. So they're media-trained into oblivion, and come out with the kind of meaningless quotes you see above. For an athlete, that would be fine. Ultimately, we get our ideas of their personalities from their performances; the things that create meaning are their actions on the field. But for a musician, it's a hard thing to get around.
Musicians are not athletes because they are not creatures of action. Words and voices are a big part of their chosen profession. And so, when we're trying to make sense of musicians, we tend to regard speaking in interviews as a kind of extension of singing in songs. When we create our impressions of a musician's personality from their performances, this involves listening to what comes out of their mouths. If what they say in interviews is part of this, and what they say in interviews is boring, then they themselves must be shallow.
This causes a few problems. First, as various folks have pointed out, it leads to critics overvaluing "eccentric" pop stars. We might not pay attention to someone with a bucketful of hits until they give a wacky interview or take on an unhinged public persona. Objectively, regular mainstream pop music is no less worthy of our attention than any other genre, so we shouldn't require pop stars to act like eccentric geniuses before we pay attention to them.
There's a bigger issue, too. As much as I like the star system, as much as I think it's valuable and sit is awe of its ability to create meaning, it's just one way that meaning is created. There's no reason that we can't judge musicians in the same way that we judge athletes: look at their performances alone and marvel. Musicians don't have to create a persona, and they don't have to embody a social force. We can appreciate them as machines of grace, admiring the ease with which they produce beauty. It's certainly not the way I always want to approach music. But if a musician seems off-putting, it's one way to be able to appreciate the music they make regardless.
Scott over at Pretty Goes With Pretty has a couple of reactions to my No Age post that are worth reading; he's much more positive about local scenes, and negative about the internet, than I am.
If you're interested in music, you owe it to yourself to read Alex Ross' article in the New Yorker about composer John Luther Adams. You should also listen to the sound file at the bottom, a recording of his piece "Dark Waves." Regular readers will know (or will have gotten the sense) that I have little patience for hippies, and so the fact that I am endorsing a guy who writes pieces about "the land" should tell you just how good this is.
It's unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to "good music" are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra's image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud. The three loudest experiences of my life are standing directly in front of Luke Jenner's amp at a Rapture show, taking my earplugs out for a second while performing Glenn Branca's "100 guitars" symphony, and playing in the back of the violin section for a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus. Sure, none of the instruments in an orchestra are electronically amplified, but there are 100 people all playing at the same time. Even if they were all paying harmonicas, that would be pretty loud. Once you start putting trumpets and cymbals and violins in there--lots and lots of violins--you can make a hell of a racket. That we think of orchestras as quiet has something to do, of course, with the fact that the audience is supposed to be quiet at performances; the noise of the music is not being amplified by the reaction of the crowd. And orchestras certainly have a much broader dynamic range than do rock bands. Somehow, we've come to think of these giant collections of musicians as restrained and quiet.
Rock bands, on the other hand, had to become seen as loud. Jonathan Richman had it right in "Fender Stratocaster" when he described the sound of that most iconic of rock instruments as "so thin it's barely there." We think of Jimmy Page and John Bonham as having these massive, gigantic sounds, but listen to "Black Dog" after you've played the John Luther Adams piece for a while. The guitar sounds tinny now, the drums thin. Partially, of course, this is just a technical issue. Guitars occupy a fairly narrow sonic range, and even with a pitch shifter they can't reach the robust heights that a violin can. The drums fill in some of that spectrum, especially with the cymbals taking over the upper register, but they're recorded we have to perform technical tricks to make it sound as rich as an orchestra does. And we still have to make sacrifices. The kick drum is simply smaller than a full bass drum or timpani, and so we can boost its low end, but then we give up some of the thump. Thump or whoomp: each serves an important purpose for rock, but it's hard to have both. Rock bands have tried to imitate the feel of an orchestra, even going so far as to add orchestral instruments, but ultimately, orchestras make a noise that rock bands simply can't, and you hear that noise in "Dark Waves."
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I may lament the absence of orchestras from our musical life, but in terms of classical music, my alligiences ultimately lie with string quartets. This should come as no surprise; after all, quartets are structurally almost identical to rock bands, sans drummer. Four people, working without a conductor, have to listen to each other to follow along, and play off what everyone else is doing. They're lean but versitile. Even the parts are similar: the first violin is the lead singer, the second violin is the lead guitar, the viola is the rhythm guitar, and the cello is the bass. Not everyone writes for quartets this way, but you certainly could.
It's interesting, then, that Adams' work echoes many of the values associated with rock. Certainly "music you can live with" is pop's economic motor, and his emphasis on texture is key to rock's appeal, too. In the piece Ross focuses on, "The Place," you find classically rockist ideas, and I'm using that in a neutral way here:
“The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound. “The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season...
“Actually, my original conception for ‘The Place’ was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea—tuning the whole world—stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth.”
This emphasis on place speaks strongly to rock's standards. The idea of localism and of community play a strong part in rock's mythos, of course, from local scenes to regional music. But in placing the piece not only within a particular environment but within a particular room, Adams echoes rock's strange obsession with "hearing the space." On a good rock album, supposedly, you can hear the room it's recorded in, and the particular venues bands play have meaning. Even live recordings are as much about the particular place of the performance as the performance itself.
So maybe "loud" is the wrong word to use here. Maybe what I'm really talking about is hugeness. Ross describes "Dark Waves," in a lovely turn of phrase, as suggesting "a huge entity, of indeterminate shape, that approaches slowly, exerts apocalyptic force, and then recedes." You can mass enough Marshall stacks to produce more decibels than an orchestra, but you never quite get that sense of hugeness. Again, this is partially a technical issue. With 100 people, you can get a much higher variety of sounds, and these can then build up to sound occupied, dense and rich. Because you have so many different instruments, you have all these different tambres. And because you have all these violin, viola, cello, and bass players playing the same part at the same time, the minute variations in each individual person's performance combine into this slightly fuzzy yet coordinated recitation of the part. Rock, again, tries to get this effect by technological manipulation; that's what chorus pedals are for. (Chorus, for those who are unfamiliar, is the effect that, when applied to a guitar, makes you think of 80s hair metal bands.) But it never quite sounds right.
Nevertheless, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Listen to "Dark Waves." Surely that's a sound worth producing; hell, it almost sounds like metal. The feeling I get from the piece is essentially the same one I get from watching a thunderstorm: an ineffable physical reaction to some immense externality. I feel isolated from other people but wrapped up entirely in this phenomenon. I get that feeling from other classical music, too. If I get it from other places, it would probably be Carla Bozulich's Red Headed Stranger album, which used similarly indistinct sonorities and dynamic shifts. But I liked the smallness of that; for all its virtues (it's certainly in my top ten for the current decade), it ultimately evokes a distant storm more than one passing over you.
I'm not just saying that there's something to be gained from reconsidering the orchestra. I think Adams has a lot to say to non-classical composers in the way he approaches familiar problems and issues in unfamiliar ways. And art music in general has something to say to lots of other styles; it always has, and as much as we might consider it to be a remote thing, it always will.
