Sunday Random Ten, special yarrowstalk edition


 


1. Rusted Root - She Roll Me Up
2. Meat Beat Manifesto - Martenot Waves
3. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Rudie Can't Fail
4. Trio Mediæval - Ave regina gloriosa (Lauda VII) [Gavin Bryars]
5. The Rolling Stones - Tops
6. Bill Nelson - Alchemia
7. Aerosmith - Janie's Got A Gun
8. M-Base Collective - anatomy of a rhythm
9. Barbara Dennerlein - Mabuse
10. Foo Fighters - My Hero

and the crown of the sephiroth: 11.Metallica - Thorn Within.

I spent my adolescence fighting it, and most of the rest of my life living it, so I might be excused if i really haven't asked the question before now: how did, in fact That Awful Racket become a part of our music?

Teenage rebellion didn't used to have vast amounts of dissonant noise as part of its process. Sex, substance abuse, political revolt and bad fashion sense, of course--but awful music seems to be a twentieth century addition.
And make no mistake--I love my awful music, probably more than most. There are times when Ministry or Metallica or Prong cranked up full is just what I need. And that's very interesting to someone who dotes on Mozart. And while symphony halls still go empty when ambitious programmers put Schönberg or Xenakis on the bill, there are thousands of people who will pay cash money to stand in a room with sticky floors and unspeakable bathrooms to be washed over with wave after wave of deep-throated, grinding noise.

So what happened?

What made millions of us, not just just expose ourself to abrasive noise, but embrace it? Not embrace it in any mystic sense-- just plain enjoy it? How did we go from a people who sang sweet Stephen Foster tunes to a people who regard the only painful part of a metal concert to be the power ballad? Who would (as I saw at Capricon to some delight) karaoke Metallica to seven minutes of electrical feedback by shouting oneself hoarse? What gave us our taste for this stuff?

Growing up, it certainly seemed like a mutant shift. The whole previous generation seemed to recoil in horror at the horrible noise, while we clung to it. I remember (gentle soul that I am) trying to bridge the gap with one of my dad's co-workers (Andy Mihaily, may they both rest in peace) by trying to play him some Moody Blues--surely that was sweet enough for him! But no--it was still too raucous. Likewise with my mom and the New Riders Of The Purple Sage: how could she find that unpleasant? But it was clear that even that was on the other side of the chasm. It was hopeless--and to this day, I don't know if the previous generation has ever gotten to like it, or just gotten resigned to it.
But I don't think it started with Clapton and Hendrix--or Chuck Berrry and Buddy Holly. I discovered (though it wasn't easy in 60's suburbia) that the previous generation didn't grow up listening to 101 Strings Plays Mood Music for Dining--that there was this stuff called Big Band Swing, with Harry James screaming his trumpet like a lead guitar and blazing horn sections on top of stuff to, oh my stars and garters, dance to. Don't listen to Gene Krupa's drum solo on Sing, Sing, Sing and talk to me about awful racket, y'old farts!

And at the other end, there's a limit. I once made the mistake of, upon meeting a young woman who was into Slayer, playing her some Ornette Coleman, which, to my addled senses, seemed to me to be turning the knob up to 12. She had no patience with it and called it crap. (She ended up passed out on my bathroom floor amid a welter of MD-20/20 bottles. It was one of the more interesting parties I ever threw.) Metal heads won't sit still for Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Art Ensemble of Chicago or even Zappa. Ditto for the industrial crowd, and especially not the punkers. Play them some real chaos, and they don't like it one bit.

And I can't blame them, either. Can't blame us, after all, because i respond to the stuff too, and know the difference here.

Because while the noise is new, it's not that new. It's not the triumph of George Antheil that we're hearing up on stage--it isn't a rejection of outdated melodic and harmonic forms because Wagner took it as far as it could go. It's not any postmodern deconstruction of artistic form, because everybody's too wasted. No, what's what's washing over us in thunders of tortured electric circuits is not that different from the assault that the Basie horn section committed on our parents--that high dive off the melodic plateau started with the first hideously bent note at the top of a Louis Armstrong solo, and it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing, right, Mr. Reznor?

Because that's the instrument that can encompass all the dissonance in the world, all the hair-straightening eye-crossing tooth-filling-extracting torture of That Awful Racket, as long as it's played right. It's what insinuated itself into our America from the great drowned and dreaming city of New Orleans and spoke to us white folks across thousands of years and rearranged our innards. It's the sound that changed America infinitely for the better.

You know I'm talking about the Drum.

A drum can sound like broken glass and a tortured dolphin, as long as it beats. It doesn't need melody, or harmony, or the thoughtful development of the theme--just the rhythm. All the things that we Europeans learned about the beauty of expressive musical structure can be violated in the Drum. (And for that matter all the rules of the raga and of the Chinese opera fall before it as well.) The Drum has its own rules, and as long as they are followed, you can strip away almost everything and shout doggerel over it snd people will leap for joy and dance like the loa takes them, and you can throw mangled synthesizers and distorted tape loops and all manner of godawful aesthetic misdeeds and people will dance until the sweat flies like sprinklers, and you can take the crappiest simple tunes and ancient blues progressions and smear them on top and stadiums full of people will set their hands on fire if you ask them to.

I found it laughingly incredible that Allan Bloom in that famous cri de cœur The Closing of the American Mind actually called rock'n'roll jungle music, and tried to analyze it as the rhythms of sex. It's hopelessly clueless, and echoes legions of voices intent on beating the Bible arhythmically into our skulls. I always used to counter that the beat is not the rhythm of sex but the rhythm of the heart, that musicians know that the beat of the Drum has different effects when it is faster than the human heart or slower--but that's only part of it. Anchored in the heart, the Drum pulls us and pushes us through time, and gives us new rhythms as it tracks the old.

It doesn't surprise me that they listened to That Awful Racket and heard the jungle, heard sex, and covered their ears. And it wasn't the rampaging thunder of Keith Moon or John Bonham, but goddamn Ringo Starr they were running from! But the great thing was that, as is the case of devotion to a god, submission to the Drum gave incredible freedom. Listen to the opening of Hendrix's Purple Haze: off key, dissonant as any academically perverse scholarly composer--but the beat is there, so let's go!

So we accommodate noise now into our music, and we can also leave it alone. And we can mingle the sweet pure traditional streams of good old fashioned European traditions, and drip in jangle and buzz--and it's all good. And those of us on the other side of the chasm know that out music is richer now, and our lives are richer now in general, because of it.

After all, it makes no difference if it's sweet or hot...

Posted: Sunday - February 25, 2007 at 08:35 PM        

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