intelligent music

rarrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

I think all the music I listen to is intelligent. But I have an impossibly broad definition of "intelligent."

Yes, I think Sonny has nailed it.

criterion is the singular of criteria.

thanks colin! how intelligent....

hahaha

we used to have a joke about this concept in college, taken from this christopher lloyd film about summer camp, where he says, "you need to be smart enough to be dumb". like there is intelligence, in the traditional way you were brought up to understand it; and then there's all the other ways, that you can sort of grok but can't really get under your skin; and then there are sorts of intelligence you can't even really believe in, but on an intellectual level you know they exist.

for me, say, i listen to a lyric by chuck berry or dylan or wire or public enemy, and i put it up against other things they do, and things in the genre that are apt comparisons, and i use my normal criteria for intelligence that i also use for literature and painting: is it original, is it internally consistent, does it have a point, is it convincing, is it witty enough and concise enough, does it have a few killer lines, do the words flow, are the repetitions [chorus sung x times, etc.] justified, etc.

i use the same sort of q's in terms of the music and production, too. so the guitar solo in "you really got me" is smart, but not as smart as that weird buzz thing townshend does at the end of "my generation", which takes a chance and fits something very controlled into the chaos. i have heard billions of guitar solos and some of them sound generic or sloppy to me, some of them sound inventive and fresh; some of them sound like they are taking up space, others are trying to say something even if they don't quite make it for me, others are quite expressive. same goes for throwing riffs together, production choices, reinterpreting others' songs, etc.

ok, so that's the kind of thing i feel like i'm trained to understand. then, there's things i halfway get, and i'm not sure exactly what makes choice a smarter than choice b, but i somehow guess right more often than not, but make some very embarrassing mistakes, like i thought at first that the fake harpsichord on "the real slim shady" was idiotic. hip-hop, modern pop, 80s/90s dance, lots of pre-1950s pop: these things i don't really know much about the culture, i just "know what i like", i listen to lots of it, i can often tell what's cool, but i can't always say why. the artists are making intelligent decisions or misstepping, and i detect this, i feel it, but i'm sure i miss tons of nuance and insider cleverness.

then there are things that i just don't have any clue about. some of it i have no use for (when they sing on the jesus stations, death metal, 90% of poppy world music since about 1985), some of it i love (i like lots of recordings of composers dicking around with electronics, and any older field recording of africans banging on things usually enthralls me). are there people, i wonder, who could listen to all my sub-saharan africa field recording cds and tell me which ones are genuinely interesting, and which ones are generic, boring, genuinely unmusical, or whatever?

Wot?

Mig nailed it too!

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."

-J. Ashcroft

Wasn't that Rumsfeld? And wasn't it supposed to be an incomprehensible sentence? That baffles me, because it seems perfectly comprehensible, crystal clear even.

Fwiw that is a theory called the intellectual bubble.

A bloke in the pub called Dougie told me so.

If I had an intelligence test for music, it would be "could I (or other people I know) write this in five minutes?". For instance, a pop single might have "dumb" lyrics and a really simple melody, great, YOU try writing a #1 hit sometime. The best ideas can be the simplest ones.

I think the test can apply to many types of music.

Perhaps we have a too limited concept of intelligence, that is intelligence as complexity. Why would simplicity be dumber? It is often very difficult to 'reach the core' of something.

Yes, exactly.

Intelligence has something to do perhaps with sensitivity to one's audience and its needs? I'm thinking of music for children... The Wiggles approach that difficult challenge with a great deal of intelligence. And yet, their songs are simple ditties about fruit salad and parties on pirate ships.

Intelligent Lounge Music?????????

The concept of Intelligent Dance Music always struck me as moronic. I find most of the genre doesn't make me want to dance at all. From whence did this coinage come?

of 2 people found the following review helpful:

and a half stars......brilliant!, July 27, 2000
Reviewer: NOWAY (Kansas City, MO United States) - See all my reviews

What is 'Jungle' anyway? Should it be fast warp speed beats all the time? Must it be danceable? Should it have vocals, in order to make it appeal to the masses? I think the answer is "NO". None of these traits are present in this album, which makes it exceptionally original.

Listening to this album is almost like having the pleasure of listening to Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Vol 2", except with beats. This is the most intelligent version of "Drum and Bass", I have ever some across, next to Amon Tobin. Why? Let me explain.

First of all, I have never heard a remarkable display of background music to jungle beats. Although they are cold, they also leave the listener satisfied. Everything sounds scientific and brand new. By this I mean, it sounds futuristic. There is no way a human can dance to it. You have to settle for listening for the pleasure of it.

Secondly, the beats are very well calculated and organized. They may be repetitive from track to track, but that's not the idea. The background is more important. It gives the feel of techno music being man-made, rather than computer generated.

No 'Jungle' collection should be complete without this album. Don't expect to dance wildly....just bobb your head along with the beats and test your senses with the backgroung ambient.

Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)

Ahahhaa hmmmm.

But to address your intellectual superior's fourth question, yes, there is some music made with intelligence which doesn't interest me (that would be a lot of quasi-academic stuff as often covered by The Wire) as much as certain kinds of music made with what sounds to me to be relative lack of intelligence (say, The Germs, or The Ramones but I'm not sure about that, especially in the latter case).

Then again, maybe I'm thinking, that 'dumb' music is made with as much, or more, intelligence, than the quasi-academic stuff, and the real difference perhaps lies elsewhere, in educational experience and/or willingness to rebel or stand outside the social order - which takes courage or anger perhaps, more than intelligence.

Just an idea, I'm not sure I even agree with myself.

have thought about this a bit more.

one thing to bear in mind is the way your brain evaluates potential mates. is s/he cute? is s/he brilliant? is s/he interested in me? etc.

it's obvious that deep down you make decisions about what appeals to you almost instantly, in terms of how cute s/he or the song is, and then maybe you start to revise that initial lurch forward. you may realize this person/song is really shallow & dumb, or maybe you won't figure that out until you've heard her over and over for the last 6 months.

BUT. we take the broad view of this and consider it a spectrum, so, sure we make snap judgments about potential mates & sometimes it takes a long time to figure out the truth of their worth, but with artistic objects this happens to a lesser degree, especially if we are not predisposed to the artistic creator; and at the other end of this spectrum comes our ability to make snap judgments of utilitarian objects like things we want to buy in the store, where our snap judgments are fairly soundly based on how intelligently designed the product is for the price asked.

I think that the "intelligence" of all forms of music is directly related to the amount of thought the listener puts into it. This board and it's habit of overanalyzing/deconstructing what many percieve to be "dumb pop" is an excellent example of what I mean.

I dunno, I think simple music isn't always that simple. It's hard to write a good simple sentence that has its own resonance, and it's hard to attain what I call psychological truism in music. Don't really agree that "simple" always equals "best." I would like to hear a kind of pop that was insanely complex and subtle, actually. I guess what I'm driving at is that overloading a form has been the goal of many an artist since forever, and that what sometimes passes for intelligence in pop music is realizing that the form can't support it. Which may or may not be true. I'm in fact listening to Chuck Berry and he strikes me as very intelligent, very sly, but the overall package is pretty damned simple. Still, what he's doing is smart stuff--he's sending up everything and looking under girls' skirts and down their sweaters.

Seems like the overloading of form is what someone like Tortoise is trying to do? That's the example that springs to mind. Or Wilco on their last couple albums (I'm not a big Wilco fan, actually). But does Tortoise really do it formally or are they just discursive? That seems to me to be the rub and that gets back to the psychological aspect of music.

"intelligent" music is fucking stupid

i agree with eddie, although could you explain what you mean by overloading the form a bit more? thanks.

Seems to me--I'm not a lit-crit maven, though I'm pretty conversant with "theory"--that novels are almost by definition overloaded forms. There's a narrative and then there's the other stuff that comes with it. I guess what I'm groping toward here is that popsong form is quite simple, usually. As pop music progressed in the '60s and beyond, people began patching together lotsa small pieces to make forms that resembled European long-form compositions. Yes did it; I don't think there's a particularly good case to be made for it, although they did on occasion do some things that seem to work. But that kind of thing seems different from actually taking a form and cramming a lot of stuff in it--Phil Spector would be an example of someone obsessed with putting a lot of information into a small space. Or for that matter, something off of Beefheart's "Trout Mask" or "Lick My Decals" are also good examples. Where it gets complicated is whether you think the kind of anti-form or abandonment of form that someone like Van Vliet did works psychologically in the same way that traditional "harmonic" stuff does. I'm not totally sure it really matters, since I'd argue that the history of music since about 1960 has been all about lessening of harmonic rules. A lot of popular music these days is very uninteresting and in fact refractory about harmonic matters; jazz of course is still interested in it. So ultimately what I'm interested in would be a harmonic richness in a small space that I don't hear in pop music.

oh.

so what you're saying is that when pop songs have a lot of crap going on, but it's not very harmonically interesting, it's worse than a straight up simple song that just has a good melody?

Yeah. I mean I love simple pop songs and I agree with people who say it's a lot harder to make something that seems complex but which violates certain fairly set-in-stone psychological aspects of what makes music work than it is to pare it down and make it work thru simplicity. Since insane repetition is such a cornerstone of rock, I think that the rules don't always apply. This is one of things that drives people attuned to the "classic Tin Pan Alley" crap and so forth completely crazy, and I think, well, fuck 'em, go crazy. But there's a good point to be made for both approaches. A great example is Steely Dan and their jazz-derived harmonic language, which works but which in my darker moments I regard as somewhat dishonest. For all the "sophistication" of a group like that, I often get more out of someone like James Brown modulating to the good ol' IV chord after repeating a riff for an hour...

good posting eddie.

I'd argue that the history of music since about 1960 has been all about lessening of harmonic rules.

i'm not sure i need to point this out, but of course the history of western music since bach has been in large part the story of lessening harmonic constriction. as people got used to brahms' tantalizing techniques of resolving suspensions in experimental ways, wagner and debussy found the next paths deeper into harmonic murk, and schoenberg followed with his defoliation of the forest, then cage and then...

the fascinating contrast is with popular music in the 20th century, which ebbs and flows from simple one decade to complex in the next. the 30s were far more harmonically inclined than the decades before, as jazz bands luxuriated in a thick shag carpet of chords; then the harmonic innovators went underground with bop, and country music and r&b dominate the 50s... then by the late 60s there is a mass market for complexity, as the beatles and beach boys delve back into complexity. the disco of the late 70s is more intricate than thoughtful but far more complex than the synth-based top 40 dance that replaced it in the 80s. the pendulum kept creeping into more and more minimal territory as hip-hop dominated the 90s, but just because we're at the extreme end of a spike in unharmonic top 40, doesn't mean things will necessarily continue this way.

a few comments re overloading. i'm not sure a harlequin romance or a spy novel is very "overloaded", and something like stephen king is probably only halfway. i get the impression you would say the tradition of the art song (eg tenor and piano in 1910 doing strauss's lieder) is overloaded, and pop and blues songs from 1910 are not overloaded - am i right on this?

you might want to consider the contrast between the three forms of poetry that modern westerners deal with in their life:
1 hi-brow poetry, as presented to children in secondary school, which is massively "overloaded" to use your term. 99.9% of westerners have no use for this form of poetry - most poetry mags are bought by other poets and poetry students.
2 greeting cards, which are the low-brow mirror image of hi-brow poetry. this kind of poetry comes from the same literary culture of poetry, but have been debased from the likes of tennyson and robert service, the same way muzak has. these are aggressively non-overloaded, and play a meagre but consistent part in social interactions.
3 pop songs, which feature rhyming lyrics that quite clearly claim direct lineage from the ballad forms of oral culture, as opposed to literary culture. these play a big part in the arts consumption of most people, unlike above. and some are overloaded, some aren't. but i can't see why an overloaded lyric is worse than one that isn't. one is more like a useless (to most people) hibrow poem, one is more like a bland greeting card.

the upshot of this is that it's natural for a sophisticated lyric to be presented in a sophisticated musical context, and music made by guys who love harmonically complex jazz sort of demands literary lyrics. speaking of steely dan, how do you feel about a relatively early song like show biz kids? harmonically pretty simple and hypnotic, same basic chords endlessly, but the mix gets quite cramped with cross currents of voices and noises.

I agree, mig. I think, in general, literature is by definition overloaded form. The great modernist poets, like Stevens, and the great postmodernist poets, like Ashbery, certainly fall into this category. And novels have traditionally been overloaded forms; "Dead Souls" contains a lot of material that doesn't seem to contribute to the "narrative" but which does add to the sense of the insidious, the inexplicable, that Gogol delineates so well. And Gogol's disciple Nabokov did the same thing in his best stuff.

Pop lyrics quite often have been sorta the tail-end of the modernist impulse, with lots of undigested and self-contradictory material stuck in there. I suppose you could say that all the place-name songs, songs which reference brand names, passing fads, briefly popular dances and the like are somewhat in the tradition of Joyce's obsessive focus on the quotidian in "Ulysses." I don't want to go down the Greil Marcus path of bringin' in "Moby Dick" to explain Presley, though, because Elvis Presley is about the enclosed world of Memphis, the emblematic city of classic American rock and roll--a weird ahistorical world that is nonetheless full of historical resonance, only no one doing the actual music could quite articulate it.

I'd say that Brian Wilson was somewhat more harmonically rich than the Beatles. I prefer the Beach Boys to the Beatles and have for a long time now. "Pet Sounds," "Good Vibrations" and "Wild Honey" are all pretty rich recordings. The early Beatles stuff is quite rich, actually. They're figuring out how to put those minor sevenths Goffin and King used so well into the context of basic rock and roll, and I've always, when someone goes on about the Beatles, had the standard putdown ready that "Yeah, they put a fuckin' G minor seventh where no man had gone before," which is obviously a reduction but which I think is also true.

Steely Dan: I like that era of the group, "Countdown to Ecstasy," the best. I see what you mean about "Show Biz Kids" and also "My Old School" and "Bodhissatva" (sp?), they're really great recordings which use fairly advanced harmonic language but which don't plunge into the swamp of the "Aja" stuff. I think they were trying to project a kind of post-'60s ominousness, a this-is-all-over feeling, with recordings like "Josie," which I think is one of their best.

"Bodhisattva" in particular is deceptively layered. The first time I heard it I was disappointed, it seemed mediocre by the standards of the other Dan stuff I knew. Further listens led me to think that the core of the song is somehow in its repetitions and in the texture of the sound. Which given its subject matter seems fair enough.

there's no fixed idea really of what it is, nor should there be. intelligence is how it's discussed.

I protest energetically against the "Gogol's disciple Nabokov" line, but that's probably a different discussion altogether.

So what about intelligent lyrics on top of basic / halfass / placeholder music? Is this overloading? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm actually trying to figure this out for myself: why is, for instance, a catchy pop song with unusually intelligent lyrics automatically perceived as an arch exercise (Merritt, Momus) when it's still technically a catchy pop song? So exactly when and how did our tolerance of cleverness drop so drastically?

you're missing the point. your conception of "unusually intelligent lyrics... (merritt, momus)" is a sort of tunnel-vision view of what intelligence really is. intelligence isn't just about having proficiency with literature, it's about making money, it's about making friends, it's about making breakthroughs in how people view reality, it's about cutting through crap and discovering new truths, or translating old truths into the language of our age. there's more ways to make an intelligent lyric than just being erudite and rhyming odd words and so forth... ask yourself, "what is the job of the lyricist? what do they get rewarded for, what sorts of lyrics hit the jackpot nowadays?" the answer to this question depends on the answerer, and what kind of music you happen to like (hip-hop, pop, country, ranchero, indie rock, indie guys with keyboards making cole porter music, etc.)

beyond that, you might ask yourself why cole porter in the 1920s & 30s was exemplifying modernism, and why someone in the 90s mimicking porter is no longer very representative of the spirit of his age and therefore might toil in relative obscurity. our tolerance of that particular kind of cleverness has dropped drastically, yes.

I protest energetically against the "Gogol's disciple Nabokov" line, but that's probably a different discussion altogether.

Fair enough. I'd be interested to know why you protest. I love both Gogol and Nabokov and am aware that V.N. always said he wasn't influenced by anyone. But it seems to me that Gogol is a major influence on Nabokov. "Lolita" seems to me to be an updating of "Dead Souls" set in America, and the theme of "poshlust" so expertly defined by V.N. in his book on Gogol fits perfectly into "Lolita" and many other works by Nabokov. I didn't mean to say that Nabokov was a mere epigone of Gogol but in my opinion if there's one writer of whom it could be said that Nabokov was a "disciple" it'd be Gogol.

>So what about intelligent lyrics on top of basic / halfass / placeholder music? Is this overloading? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm actually trying to figure this out for myself: why is, for instance, a catchy pop song with unusually intelligent lyrics automatically perceived as an arch exercise (Merritt, Momus) when it's still technically a catchy pop song? So exactly when and how did our tolerance of cleverness drop so drastically?

I think it is overloading. I would say that things by XTC and They Might Be Giants, for ex., could be construed as mere cleverness--not to say that they aren't worthwhile, entertaining or even enlightening. I like the way that pop music dissolves categories and forces us to question why we take things supposedly "sacred" seriously and what "seriousness" is in the first place. I have enough sympathy with what I guess you'd call folkie consciouness to admit that readymade music with "intelligent" lyrics can be worthwhile. But where I might part company with that is when there isn't enough attention paid to musical form--I like pop music when it's catchy, and I also have learned to like things that seem forbidding and non-catchy when there's a certain force behind them, when the conviction/passion overrides all that fancy-ass stuff that the great Masters of American Song did so well (which can also be interesting as a sophisticated, urban riposte to "provincial" values, which after all can be such a drag). I like both but since I'm a product of mass, demotic, pop sensibility I tend to go for the things that mock not only the supposed high-art values but also the provincial...which I think the best rock and roll does quite neatly. Real agony, real pain and real struggle are never things to take lightly and I think one of the weaknesses of the Porters of the world is that they don't get into those realms. Whereas someone like, oh, Arthur Lee does, and even when his words are the merest hipster talk I think he does get at something that Cole Porter never dreamed of. What I think it comes down to is a recognition of the insanity of the common man, and also the artistry and soul, likewise. And I don't think pop music is particulary good at being political for that reason, because it's so hard to reconcile populist impulses with the things that go into "art" as we've traditionally come to know it. And they are, for better or worse, "elitist" values and I'm not totally comfortable with just throwing them out.

"Lolita" seems to me to be an updating of "Dead Souls" set in America.

Never thought of it this way! Nabokov was certainly being coy when he said he wasn't influenced by anyone - one look at his early poems betrays an almost childish adulation of Pushkin (downright crippling - it's the main reason VN was never taken seriously as a poet). A number of his later novels seem to nod at Tolstoy, specificaly "Anna Karenina." You can make a case for "Ulysses" as well.

Gogol, however, was first and foremost a folk writer, a fabulist; more often than not, his characters lack diegetic motivations and serve to flesh out a "type" or a concept. Nabokov despised this sort of thing in Chernyshevsky (whom he eviscerated so spectacularly in "The Gift"), and I suspect he wasn't too happy about it in Gogol, either. I've read his lectures on "Dead Souls" -- he appears to relish the carnivalesque side of it, and the precision of comic descriptions, but he's not genuflecting before it they way he does with "Anna Karenina."

On the parallel topic: I think we've come to the sordid point in the discussion where we have to define "cleverness" versus "intelligence"... The problem with "real agony, real pain" etc is that the pop song format is inherently trivializing -- nothing is "real" when stuck into rhymed couplets -- so the cards should theoretically be stacked up in favor of empty "cleverness." But here's where an odd effect kicks in: the music , and all sorts of external circumstance, begin to dictate another "reality." This is how it becomes possible for people to consider "a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido" TRAGIC and AUTHENTIC lyrics, and "No one will ever love you, honestly / no one will ever love you for your honesty" a whack-off, halfass genre mimicry.

>Gogol, however, was first and foremost a folk writer, a fabulist; more often than not, his characters lack diegetic motivations and serve to flesh out a "type" or a concept. Nabokov despised this sort of thing in Chernyshevsky (whom he eviscerated so spectacularly in "The Gift"), and I suspect he wasn't too happy about it in Gogol, either. I've read his lectures on "Dead Souls" -- he appears to relish the carnivalesque side of it, and the precision of comic descriptions, but he's not genuflecting before it they way he does with "Anna Karenina."

Dunno if you've read VN's book on Gogol, written in the early '40s. It's great. Nabokov doesn't like the "folk" writer aspect of Gogol's early works at all, but rates "The Overcoat," "Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" (the first, pre-Christian-conversion part) really highly, and rejects the view that Gogol was writing a tract against serfdom, etc. For VN Chichikov is a rolling wheel embodying the essential banality of "poshlust," and VN basically says disregard the plot of "Dead Souls," since the whole idea of buying up dead souls is silly on the surface. I know what you mean about "The Gift." Nabokov really takes apart the social-realist angle there. And yeah, VN was influenced so heavily by Pushkin that his poetry is perhaps underrated. And Joyce is an influence as well. I'd rate Nabokov very, very high in the list of 20th-century novelists but he's not Joyce. Still and all, I think VN rated Gogol very highly--a great poet of the irrational, etc.

On the parallel topic: I think we've come to the sordid point in the discussion where we have to define "cleverness" versus "intelligence"... The problem with "real agony, real pain" etc is that the pop song format is inherently trivializing -- nothing is "real" when stuck into rhymed couplets -- so the cards should theoretically be stacked up in favor of empty "cleverness." But here's where an odd effect kicks in: the music , and all sorts of external circumstance, begin to dictate another "reality." This is how it becomes possible for people to consider "a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido" TRAGIC and AUTHENTIC lyrics, and "No one will ever love you, honestly / no one will ever love you for your honesty" a whack-off, halfass genre mimicry.

By the way--yep, I'd say there's a parallel between Nabokov's "cleverness" and what you're saying about pop music. I don't think a writer as obsessed with death as Nabokov can really be accused of mere "cleverness" but I see why many people regard him as just an illusionist with no moral center, etc. And I suppose you could say the same thing about pop music. Where I part company with bands like, name 'em, They Might Be Giants is a group I've gone back and listened to lately, is exactly what you're talking about re genre exercises. They're so busy dictating reality that they don't seem to allow any of the irrational in (good example you give there, lyrically). And again parallel to VN, who admired Gogol for the things that don't necessarily serve a functional purpose (the gun that hangs on the wall in the first act that not only doesn't go off in the third but which is never even mentioned again), but which add...something...to the whole. And this gets to what I've been going on far too long about, overloading of form...

" 'dumb' music is made with as much, or more, intelligence, than the quasi-academic stuff"

Yeah, what is music anyway? Just some sounds over some time and maybe a short bit of words. Those who realize the whole concept of music is kind of dumb are the most intelligent. But that doesn't determine if they will put their inteligence towards making the music inteligent, or put there inteligence towards not bothering to try and make it intelligent.