historical connections

Connecting dots like this is rewarding for me, partly because it gives me some perspective on current trends, and partly because I get this weird charge from it outside of any possible utility. I realize the whole enterprise is very problematic, not least because the idea that "X comes from Y" is usually an inaccurate simplification. But I can't deny I enjoy trying.

As a historian I totally see the fun and use in it. As a listener and critic I'm ambivalent: it's another one of those kind-of-cop-out moves that lets critics not really say much about the record 'at hand'. You're meant to be talking about Nuno, but actually you're talking about the people he influenced: you're meant to be talking about The Strokes, but actually you're talking about the Velvets and Television. Even assuming the question of 'influence' is relevant the more interesting thing to ask is surely "What are they doing that's different?", not noting the similarities.

Meanwhile the even more interesting (to me) questions - "Is what's being done here worthwhile? Is it worthwhile to me? What effect is it having on me?" - can go begging when you take the stringing-beads historical approach.

Not to steal Mark S's line, but I think that if there is a problem with this approach, it's that the whole developmental process from [X] in 1980 to [Y] in 2000 is summed up in the rather boring and inaccurate term "influenced" - even if that particular term isn't used. What I find to be the most interesting aspects of the comparison (what has remained the same? What has changed? How? Why? What does this suggest will happen after [Y]?) are thus passed over rather conveniently, concentrating instead on a sort of copyrighting of tricks. It ossifies and isolates the records in question, reducing the tangible sense of ideas evolving that otherwise hangs heavy in the air between the two records like electrical energy.

Duh - I should have read Tom's response before replying.

I agree somewhat about this tendency in criticism, but how does it feel when you yourself make these kind of connections? I'm thinking of historical threads as private entertainment. Like the excitement I got the first time I heard Manuel Gottsching's Inventions for Electric Guitar and connected it in my mind w/ all the sequenced music that came later. That was exciting.

Oh yeah thats great - and it's even better when the connections are really tenuous, historically bogus even, but still make you think and listen to records in new ways. This is why Chuck Eddy's apparently loopy 'accidental histories' are so valuable for instance.

Speaking as a musician, not as a critic or writer: The historical context of music is necessary, in most respects. Whenever I found something new and exciting that caught my attention, I would do a split search of music AND literature on the band/composer/whatnot. The purpose was to fill in the bigger picture of why the music was made, it's influences, it's origins. This is/was a way to crawl inside the mind of the music, in order to personalize it within myself. A way, I suppose, to transform it into me, so it comes as a honest extension of myself, as opposed to just copying something. So yeah, the history is important.

Pop History is already a deliberate part of the content of some pop. Leaving aside the vast and flagrant instance of 69 Love Songs, look at Lloyd Cole. His first solo LP:

Don't Look Back = Dylan movie ref

What Do You Know About Love?: 'raining on Bleecker Street' = S&G reference

No Blue Skies: inversion of Berlin's 'Blue Skies'; also 'Make it easy on yourself' (Bacharach)

Sweetheart: Sweet Jane / C20 Boy

To The Church: reference to George Jones

Downtown = Petula Clark

A Long Way Down: ref to Sympathy for the Devil

Undressed: is meant to sound like Dylan's 'I Want You' (which was also referenced in different way, of course, by Costello)

Waterline = Like A Rolling Stone; plus 'I Threw It All Away'

Mercy//Killing: 'Love Me Do'.

'Whistle past the graveyard': perhaps he says it all there.

Next question, I guess - does it matter? Does any of this make it more fun? I think so (esp. re. deepening over time); but it's not essential.

I find tracing music histories, as a personal endeavor, to be incredibly rewarding. As a form of music criticism, I find it rather useless. Especially with the existence of databases like AMG, what's the point, really, of reading someone make the "x = y, but earlier" equation? I can find out that information for myself...

Nonetheless, I love doing the digging myself. I think it's valuable on the level that pinefox is talking about, where it's sort of like reading Joyce and picking up on all of the allusions, which give the work some sort of historical/emotional/linguistic depth. But there have been times where tracing the historical roots of something was what gave me my very way in to a piece of music. The example that comes immediately to mind is PIL's "Second Edition," which I hated on first listen. But after listening to and sort of assimilating to my own musical palette Lydon/Levine's influences, I was able to come back to "Second Edition." And now I love it. So yeah, I'm all about musical archaeology...

The Joyce analogy is almost unavoidable (ie. I quite agree, but didn't really want to be the one to make it). But the most direct analogy for Lloyd Cole, as I've said before, is T.S. Eliot. The way LC sings 'Everybody knows that this is nowhere' ('Be There', 1995), not changing a word, is analogous to the amounts of stuff TSE rips off for eg. 'Gerontion'. (In both cases, it may be argued that the ripping-off goes too far and shows too little original work.)

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, the only way I could discover interesting and obscure music was by tracing trends and histories. For example, I remember reading a magazine article about Lou Reed and one paragraph mentioned a large number of bands who were supposedly influenced by the Velvet Underground. The list included Can, Faust, Neu!, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith Group, Suicide, Television, Joy Division and probably a few others. I didn't know anything about these bands (few of them were part of the rock canon of the time), but I vowed to hear every one of them. Since I liked the Velvets so much, the chances were I would like any band who sounded a bit like them.

Tracking down these records was sometimes a pleasure and sometimes a chore. I had to spend many hours in second-hand record shops. Of course, systematically working through a particular musical tradition has its drawbacks because not every band will be to your taste. For example, I bought a New York Dolls album without having heard a note of their music beforehand, and I wasn't impressed by the record. However, I still love most of the music in that list that I mentioned.

Nowadays, it is probably easier to find non-canonical bands without having to work your way through vast linear musical traditions first. The internet cuts out most of the hard work. When browsing through web sites it is possible to discover all sorts of unfamiliar music just by chance.

Comparing everything to historical precedents is CLASSIC, because it pisses off the "There's never been anything like this ever" baldy hooded technoids so much!

pissing off baldy hooded technoids = making teenagers depressed = shooting fish in barrell.

True Tales of Redemption:

I used to (and still do sometimes) read the collected reviews of Robert Cristgau. I remember one especially noteworthy:.. Since I grew up near Cleveland, where Michael Stanley was all the rage - although he just wrote power-chord anthems - and being a bit fed up with the cheesiness of Cleveland at the time, read the following review of Michael Stanley by Robert Christgau: "Cleveland's answer to Pere Ubu." ... So I wondered, "what the FUCK does that mean?" Nevertheless, I bought a Pere Ubu album, and I was saved.

Also, Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" is a great read for historical context. I used to read his charts over & over, until I had heard all of the bands mentioned. (OK, maybe not Spooky Tooth.) And having done so, I can now say things (as posted in the classic rock thread) like, "Black Crowes? What makes them so fucking great? They're a poor man's Doobie Brothers. (literally.)"

Here is a list of writers and compilers who have been invaluable in tracing the musics I like. http:// www.geocities.com/jahsonic/MusicJournalists.html

Apart from http://www.allmusic.com, there is a definiteve lack of a central source documenting 20th century (popular) music; which is illustrated by the fact that the 20th century is not even included in http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/ History/

Yours http://www.jahsonic.com

"All disco is implicitly orgy"--what a great line! I've really gotta read that Albert Goldman book. Forget "fruity" and "disco" as euphemisms for homosexual--I'm implicitly orgy, that's me!

Thanks for all the links, Jan.