MR WRITER - Oxford Forum [Issue Two]

‘WRITING ABOUT MUSIC,” Elvis Costello famously said, “is like dancing about architecture.” It’s a stinging slight to those of us who have ever written – or, indeed, read – about music. It renders the whole exercise futile and fatuous. Our response to music is involuntary and occasionally akratic. Writing is an exercise of the intellect, and reading is an undoubtedly cerebral activity. The same can not be said of our response to music, unless we admit to thinking with parts of our body we shouldn’t. In the face of the immediacy of our reaction to melody and rhythm, the written word is foreign and plastic.
    Even those who set out merely to describe music (perhaps as Pevsner described buildings) will be defeated. Think of any piece of music. After being told even the most specific details – the time signature, key, the instruments used – will you ever be any closer to imagining what it sounds like?
    It seems that whatever the spurious motivation of the author (the ‘reviewer’ or, for those with a loftier self-image, ‘critic’), the result is invariably redundant. The same might be said of any attempt to explain, describe or evaluate a work of art. It brings to mind Wilde’s aphorism: “There are two ways of disliking art.…One is to dislike it. The other is to like it rationally”
    Yet, a difficulty unique to writing about music is that in writing about literature you can quote, in writing about architecture you can produce pictures. This distance between the subject and the writing occasionally causes a jarring effect when one finally hears a song. It dawns on you how ill-fitting, or, indeed, inane the original review was. This, however, is where new technology comes galloping to the rescue. On the internet words and music can happily cohabit. The purest example of this is the MP3 blog (my particular favourite is www.3hive.com), where one can, with the click of a mouse, listen to music being obsessed over. A neat comparison is found with podcasters – if podcasting is the new pirate radio, then MP3 blogging is the new rock journalism.
    And how ironic it is, too. The scribes who were decrying the death of music at the onset of the digital age are unaware the very same technology has breathed life into their trade. At the onset of the digital age the death knell of the album was sounded. As we become increasingly used to single-song digital formats, and as music-listening becomes increasingly embedded in busy lifestyles, intelligent discussion of popular music seems ever more distant. It makes sense: our music-listening patterns come to be defined by our lifestyle, not vice-versa. A song is just a song. Something to make commuting or ironing or exercise more bearable; a method of alleviating life’s humdrum monotony. This song’s good for working to; this one for jogging to. It’s the musical equivalent of buying a painting because it matches your sofa. If this is all that music amounts to, then we can only hope to enthuse about a song in the same manner as we would about wallpaper. Would anybody write about architecture – let alone dance about it – if they genuinely thought that a house was a machine for living in?
    Yet the music press are slowly coming to grips with this by developing their web presence, offering free downloads, and generally being more aware of music in non-traditional formats. Tellingly, Danger Mouse’s Gray Album, a bootleg which was, for legal reasons, only available to download, made numerous magazines’ ‘albums of 2004’. Similarly, Wilco, whose adventurous Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a trail blazing internet success when released online because Warner Bros thought it insufficiently radio-friendly for CD, proved that people are willing to have challenging music on their MP3 players and laptops. Yet new publications like Haymarket’s Rip and Burn mark an abject failure to grasp the difficulties and opportunities raised by the ‘download generation’. By offering a traditional magazine based on the new formats of music they offer you the worst of both worlds.
    The way we listen to music will continue to change. And so too will the way we read about it. In the same way that dog-eared vinyl has now become the domain of retro enthusiasts and collectors, so to will dog-eared copies of the NME. In the meantime, out of the tension between the music itself and the hopelessness of writing about it, the best journalism about music will spring. This is physically manifested in an iconic piece of rock journalism by Lester Bangs, entitled “My night of ecstasy with the J. Geils Band”, where he is challenged by the band to ‘do his thing’ on stage with them. Bangs, in a self-aware bout of egomania, takes them up on it. He gets on stage with them, and rhythmically hammers away on his amped-up typewriter, before smashing it to pieces as the set reaches its crescendo.
    Perhaps Costello had Lester Bangs in mind. As Bangs himself put it: “For is not every rock writer a frustrated rock star, and didn’t I deserve my fifteen minutes of instant celebrity-hood?”

Marcus Leroux writes for The Observer Music Monthly [Illustration Hannah Marks]

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