Rock 101: Academia Tunes In, Turns On, Turnip

one tidbid ross doesn't address: i suspect that pop studies in the academy will differ from jazz studies in that it will be divorced from the conservatory aspect--i.e. the practice of making music.

i'm sure most of what's produced initially will suck beyond all imaginings, but hopefully an actual poetics of popular music will emerge in time.

though i don't think, per weisbard, that academics need to "loosen up"--if anything they are too hellbent on appearing loose. they need to make like archie bell and tighten up.

more later. i'm off to see the crimson pirate.

I may be projecting, but "hip-hop production is the site of some of the weirdest, wittiest thinking in pop music today" sounds like the kind of thing Ross just has to repeat to his NYer audience, not nec. his own oh wow spellbinding insight.

Write a book Alex!!

ok now i really must get going.

And I rilly disliked the bit about how this was unnecessisary extravigance which misses just how necessary these things ARE for pop. Ppl. think its a fucking ACCIDENT that timbo is a hot producer -- like "ooh look. an auter slipped through the cracks. and he did it again. and again. and again." like maybe those cracks aren't what they're cracked up to be, or the pavement isn't. y'know?

it is unnecessary because it is an unusually good song by the standards of its competition, in ross's opinion (and mine).

sterling you don't seem to want to acknowledge that ross is not writing for ilm. his piece was not primiarly about j.tim or timbaland--"cry me a river" was used to illustrate a point, namely that pop can be approached from the POV of historical/formal analysis like the classical music whose study has found a place in the academy.

anyway, i'm sure ross would have more to say about the production of that song but he had a word limit!

or partly getting round to asserting bach was the pop of his day, or at least playing with the idea which means we gotta treat tim like the bach of OURS! even if there's grips with the treatment of bach in the first place. so its like he's circling this new way of lookin at things and then just re-frigin-verts.

but anyway the interesting part of the discusssion (the unnecessary part?) is in how you'd define "ostensibly functional" w/r/t music.

the glut of 'mass' publication (I'm sure one of you like amst or nitsuh knows the correct way to describe it) just makes this worse by unleashing work measured largely by internal, formalized criteria out on the 'rest of the world'. the later demand for publication (multiple books, often in the humanities!) continues the problem after the dissertations are published, too.

I guess all of which is to say that this stuff speaks against academia as an institution, rather than the potential of some of its inhabitants doing something worthwhile (though the former inhibits the latter).

My question is, what is "a new way to describe musical events"? He doesn't give us much to go on there. Or is the last paragraph meant to be a gesture in that direction? And if so, what does the last paragraph mean?

"Pop music is music stripped bare. It is like the haphazard funeral portrayed in Wallace Stevens’s 'Emperor of Ice Cream': a woman laid out with all her flaws intact, covered with a sheet from a chest of drawers that is missing three knobs, her horny feet protruding. Boys bring flowers in last month’s newspapers, but she is noble to look upon. Twentieth-century music, the empire of ice cream, lies before us in all its damaged majesty. "

And the example he uses is not necessarily the critical point, although Ned I suspect you are in the minority when it comes to not liking this particular track.

Ben: yeah I'm still not sure what he meant by that last graf, but then I'm pretty dense when it comes to literary analogy. Maybe someone can explain it?

Actually I think that last para has something to do with the sentence in the previous para where he says pop "exposes the hard realities of how music is made, how it is paid for, and how it is consumed."

I have to say that I think it's very nicely-written, but it sounds a bit 1907 to me, not just stylistically but as an insight--I hear overtones of the art of noise there, and the call for a new language is very trad avant-garde. I guess I wonder, doesn't he think any of the already-canonical rock critics have made any strides in this direction in the last 40 years? If not, why not? He makes it sound like pop/rock criticism is just getting started, it's a brave new world, etc.

But that aside, I thought it was an excellent piece.

So far as formal analysis of popular music goes, that's basically true!

But I agree that he seems to be waffling a bit on what exactly he's calling for--an analysis of pop that centers around its production (commercial and social context) or its materials (form)?

I still think it's *mostly* a matter of talking to his audience in terms they will appreciate/understand.

The Timberlake stuff is a little odd tonally (personally I thought the bit about heterosexual rock critics liking him was the most off), but the four paragraphs previous are all about the dichotomy between "collective ritual"/songs written by committee vs solitary genius/pop stars. He says we'd like to project fantasies of omniscience onto the guy behind the scenes, but we're always more compelled by the humanness of the stars... "so it would be foolish to write Timberlake off to quickly."

It's not conflicted. He's showing two sides of an argument, that's all.

I think it would be interesting to ask Yer Random Listener whether they think it's a Timberlake or Timbaland song. My guess is: majority would say the former and probably would be a bit bemused at the other option -- in the same way that one thinks of a classic Temptations or Supremes song as being a Temptations or Supremes song instead of one by the Motown house band, that recent film notwithstanding (and that happened almost forty years after the fact).

Why? Diddley's "bump-a-bump bump" doesn't even have any tremolo in it. Isn't this kind of thing, an awed respect/canonization of one point of view despite not really even being able to identify the reasons or logic behind the point of view, the whole reason why folks *don't* want to buy an "authenticity" argument in pop?

I was surprised by the assertion in the piece that "authenticity" (with quote marks) = simplicity. The whole mystique of "authenticity" goes much deeper than that -- it gets into race, myth-making, bio info, etc., etc. I never thought the way a piece of music sounded had anything to do with the idea of authenticity: authenticity = an acceptable/expected context, i.e. a musician's personal biography must = that musician's discography.

it is, for example, generally agreed that eric clapton and the rolling stones were making "authentic" blues in the '60s, though no one could possibly claim that they had "authentic" blues biographies. it's the sound of their playing and singing that gave them their authenticity.

fred durst, on the other hand, makes music that absolutely matches his personal biography -- that dude is an honest singer, you've gotta give him that -- but i don't know many people who would hold him up as a poster child for "authentic" hip-hop.

but then again, this is all academic to me. art reveals truths, but it uses artifice to get there. i find it hard to believe that robert johnson's or skip james' backgrounds required that they produce their life's work as three-line verses sung over I-IV-V patterns played on stringed instruments.

there are many different ways of measuring what makes somethign pleasurable and interesting. the salient virtues of 2pac or bo diddley are plainly not the salient virtues of most classical music. but that does not mean that pop music's virtues are not virtues of form!!!!

That's true, Dom. However, when writers talk about pop musicians in that way I often see this strange disconnect where there's an implication that the performer isn't aware of what he/she is doing -- as if whatever technique comes naturally or was somehow inbred in them from a young age. It's almost as if certain artists are judged as better solely because some formal elements can be found in their work.

But I dunno what that has to do with anything.

so i should change "generally agreed..." to "a lot of people would argue..."

doesn't change my basic point.

Actually, what really got me was the part where he said something like "I don't understand what that means but it sure makes me think of Bo Diddley in a different way". If he really didn't know what it meant, why would it suddenly enhance his opinion of anything? This is not mystical revelations we're talking about, it's a technical explanation of why something sounds the way it does -- and the writer didn't even understand it! To me, it reads like a typical attempt to justify one's opinion with "authentic" criteria, based on admittedly shaky "evidence".

his point by the way with the bo diddley thing was simply that diddley wasn't some "primitive" simply tapping in to centuries of black musical expression as by seance (something even david toop seems in danger of implying in "rap attack") but actually did something very specific and pretty new with his instrument, intentionally. which is the sort of innovation even the most hidebound classicist can respect, if it's framed in those terms. now i know people will come screaming that WHO CARES if the classicists appreciate bo diddley but the article is about finding a place for pop in the academy and surely to make it to the academy you need a common set of respected methodological tools!

(=> ideology of composed music = idealist not materialist?)

OK, so perhaps the writer is playing by the rules of the "academy" here. Intent is one of the hallmarks of most authenticity arguments as I know them, and I can appreciate people who acknowledge that all this music didn't just fall together by luck (although, I also believe some of it does). Still, I think this writer makes a wrong turn when he tries to align authenticity and "rawness", because the version of it I've encountered the most was just the opposite.

where does he try to align authenticity and rawness?

i think this "authenticity" stuff ("pro" or "con") is also a bit of a side-issue and anyway it REALLY cries out for historical framing, not blanket theorizing.

i read that as fitting into his larger theme, that classical musicology, of which this could be seen as an example, doesn't work for pop and instead we must have some unspecified new language.

He's apparently trying to show that "real" music doesn't have to be "raw", hence all the tech stuff, I guess. So then, is he saying "real" music is "not raw"? Something else? What, Alex Ross, is "real" music? Are you trying to tell me that you don't believe in any of that kind of talk? Are you trying to tell me that I should have more respect for Bo Diddley because he had a nifty way of getting cool sounds out of his guitar? I can buy that. What if one day Bo Diddley told you that was a bunch of hogwash, and that it was just something he stumbled before a gig? Would he then be less "real"? Or, according to your jibe at the "scholars", would that actually make him more "real"?

All he's saying by citing that Diddley passage is "I didn't really know what I was hearing when I heard Bo Diddley [disingenuous or not], - and previous references to how authentic he may or may not have been in usual pop music discourse didn't help me; and now I think I do understand a bit more of what is happening in Bo Diddley's music. The helps me be a more-informed listener and my apprehension of Diddley's music takes on a new cast."

mark s nailed it with the idealist/materialist thing.

I find it hard to believe he actually thinks of pop as newfangled, but whatever. It's not as if pop hasn't been written about in this fashion before -- there are 100 books analysing the music of the Beatles if there is one. Duke Ellington too.

(super x-post)

Timbaland may be personally lauded, but the drive of Ross's article is rather that Timbaland's musical tropes have become a new, post-pop-auteurist, meme on the move. His "fingerprints" may be detectable on certain records but this would be (by this stage) merely forensic.

Hence the final para referring primarily to the "empire", rather than the "emperor[s]", of ice-cream and/or pop.

Why is that a problem? I think that Ross's problem with Waksman's description of Bo Diddley's tremolo is that it succeeds in making a relatively simple phenomenon sound needlessly complex. That is the point of his sarcasm. Whereas, the description of the descending semitones is no more complex than it needs to be and is part of a well-defined system of musicology for describing this type of music. This is why later in the piece, Ross writes that "pop writers have to find a new way to describe musical events, and not just by offering dopey imitations of classical musicology". I think he likes that Waksman is making an effort to analyze the music itself, although he also clearly thinks that there is still some ways to go.

I used to think that the interesting stuff came with buzzwords; now I think the buzzwords are just as likely to be hiding mundane ideas. And they often don't work outside of their own context.

I have the distinct feeling that the academic infighting over issues of race/class/gender has been exhausted almost completely. I read a super essay that's related to this & absolutely worth a read on the blog Invisible Adjunct Do We Really Need Another 'Other'?..

What is jarring to me in the New Yorker article is that the writer seems to have wanted the JT song and album to be.. hmm, how do you say, a metonym for every other outstanding and innovative pop record in the past year or so - and at the same time, a striking and individual work of art that doesn't sound like any other pop record of the past year, and it's hard to accept both of those things at once.
Oh, and not to mention the familiar setting up a straw man by presupposing yr readership is so drastically removed from all ideas that are fresh and new (hip hop can be experimental! pop music is worth thinking about!), they might as well be.. uh, running for Congress.

(I think it's almost fair enough that the writer focuses on Timbaland b/c "Cry Me A River" is the track above all others on Justified that screams "auteur producer" and is thus not I think particularly metonymic of pop generally - whereas the attraction of "Rock Your Body" is so much more obviously rooted in the vocal hooks, the male/female interplay, the beat box, making up silly dances on the dancefloor and smiling foolishly in spite of yourself - not that that is particularly metonymic either, but now we're starting to touch on the entire problem of metonymic pop criticism)

So, yeah! Talk!

But: I just noticed on Alex Ross's blog that "Rock 101" was selected for inclusion in BOTH the Da Capo book and Best American Essays this year!