The Backstory: how important is it?

Little is known about the sessions, beyond the influence of drink.

Our understandings interfere with our perception of music as pure sound. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- some will insist that you can't "properly" appreciate music without understanding its physics or provenance in some sense. But the the fact that knowledge artifacting distorts sensory audition is, nevertheless, simply and unavoidably true.

Perhaps this argument seems absurd or perverse. I accept that knowledge can illuminate and deepen our appreciation of music as art or music as intellectual object. But music as music, music as pure sound is cheapened by what we call understanding.

seems like the result of an overly simplistic reading of the relationship between backstory and said song/album/movie.

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

that example is about a slightly different kind of backstory, though: reception rather than artist's biography/historical context/etc.

Do remember that it was awful damn funny.

To horseshoe, I think the passage quoted is precisely appropriate, in that all those people are approaching the barn not as itself, but with the idea of its backstory in mind. They can't simply perceive the barn (as they might if they encountered it accidentally) because they are trapped in the thicket of their own intellectual pre-perception. They know what the barn is before they encounter it. Thus they cannot ever really "encounter" it at all. All they can do is compare fragments of perception to fragments of understanding.

You see the echos of this fragmented dissonance is criticism of every kind. The more people care about art, the more knowledgeable they become. But the more knowledgeable they are, the more disconnected their perceptions become. Causes lots of weirdness.

So, fine. You got me. I'm talking more about gray areas than some kinda either/or scenario. But I defend the basic principle. If we were brainless things, each individual perception would be an all-encompassing, featureless, meaningless TOTALITY. The more we know/experience, the more we can categorize, compare and thus (in a sense) perceive new experiences.

But there's a sort of tipping point that occurs somewhere along the line. When we're not just accumulating reference points but beginning to think about our own thinking. When we begin not only to know, but to know we know.

That's where the dissonance starts. And the dissonance isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a product of knowledge, and I think knowledge is an (almost) absolute good. But the dissonance does eventually begin to occlude actual perception. More in some people than others, more in some thoughts than others. But it is real, it can be a problem, and you see it written very plainly in tons of informed criticism.

The more academic, the more distorted, IMO.

(Akshully this isn't really what the thread question's about tho.)

They can't simply perceive the barn (as they might if they encountered it accidentally) because they are trapped in the thicket of their own intellectual pre-perception. They know what the barn is before they encounter it. Thus they cannot ever really "encounter" it at all.

is precisely what Murray's driving at in that passage. (the fact that Murray's language is elliptical conveniently makes it hard to pinpoint exactly what he's driving at, of course.) but I think Murray just likes the idea that these people have all gathered to see together, and that their collective act of seeing trumps the object of their vision. rather than being interested in the philosophy of perception. this is why I would align him with a readerly school of criticism.

True, but maybe not the whole picture. As I vaguely recall, White Noise is largely about the experience of living in a commodified, prepackaged, information-dense landscape -- a landscape whose features have been designed for us, with our expectations in mind -- and the loss/blindness/paralysis that results from overexposure to such an environment. An environment that can't ever really be perceived for what it is, because what it intentionally and/or apparently signfies keeps gets getting in the way. You can read Murray's point (or at least DD's point) that way too, and that's what I was getting at.

But I do agree that we're kinda drifting away from the ostensible thread topic.

Tangentially related: Many years ago I made the acquaintance of a young woman from a small town in Brazil. She liked music but knew very little about American music or Western pop history. I lent her 20 or so CDs for her to check out, and the one that resonated most was the Velvet Underground & Nico. She had no idea who they were, didn't know the Warhol connection (it was just the CD, no cover), knew nothing of their importance or even what era they were from. But loved the music straight off. This was really interesting to me b/c it's almost impossible to hear VU like that, esp. if you're any kind of music geek, and they still "worked" for her the way all the journalists say they should.

In any case, I have on more than one occasion been turned off music because of a backstory, probably more often than being turned on by one (tho it's certainly happened as well, and almost always an accident, as I very rarely go looking for a musical story when I don't already like the "outcome").

In 1985, a friend lent me a tape with the Violent Femmes' "Hallowed Ground" on one side, and King Crimson's "Three of a Perfect Pair" on the other. I was unfamiliar with both bands at the time, being caught up in the genius of Adam Ant, Billy Joel, and The J. Geils Band. But I knew that this was "cool" music and that it somehow unified my cooler-than-me friends.

So, I listened to it one night on my shitty Amway clock-stereo, staring at the ceiling with my head hung off the end of the bed. I listened to it like three times. While I didn't like either side at first, I eventually began to see the genius in the King Crimson stuff - the layers and layers of interlocking rhythms and weird harmonies. It was like a light bulb flicking on in my head.

I HATED the Violent Femmes record. It seemed dreary and amateurish. The voices and arragements felt so flat and irritating that I could hardly bear to listen to them. After about 1.5 plays, I just fast-forwarded it so I could hear King Crimson again.

Next time I saw my cool friend and his cool friends and that whole unarguably cool gang, the guy who'd initially made the tape asked me what I thought. I said that the one side was really great, but country music shit on the other side was boring. Everyone stared at me in shock. I hadn't "gotten it."

This made me feel bad, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what there was to like about the Violent Femmes. It took a bit more work, but I liked their first record a whole lot better, and that eventually allowed me access to "Hallowed Ground". In the long run, I think it contributed more to my overall taste in music than King Crimson did, though both were revelatory to me at the time.

Would I ever have listened to either band if they hadn't been presented to me as cool? Would my musical tastes have evolved differently if I hadn't bowed to critical pressure and struggled to align myself with the Violent Femmes? Was I seeing things clearly that first night, listening to both bands in total ignorance, with only the vaguest idea what "prog" and "punk" might actually mean? And was it equally honest to decide, after I'd immersed myself in both bands and their respective cultural significances, that my initial impressions were off base?

Here's the kicker: I'll never really know. Knowledge makes unclouded perception impossible.

xpost: nice story...it reminded me of the time I loaned a Lee Hazlewood CD to a friend...when I got it back, I stuck it in, and heard a drum machine with some misc. electonic bleeps...took me a few minutes (I was only half-paying attention) before I realized my friend had accidentally slipped the wrong CD in the Hazlewood jewel box...to this day, I imagine Lee Hazlewood as this semi-electronic country singer (even though of course I know better!) because of that brief-yet-potent association I had made...

can you really separate the backstory from the story? and can you separate the lives and experiences of the artists from the album's backstory? i suppose if just comes down to the question of what kind of level you give a shit about trying to understand the record and the process on.

backstory or no ... records are amazing, but they're definitely tied together.

I was actually thinking this morning, as I was listening to Stereolab's Margerine Eclipse, that if it had been the first Stereolab record I'd ever heard, instead of like the 10th or whatever, I'd probably think it was fantastic instead of "oh yeah, this one's decent" -- and that's an interesting way in which context affects judgment.

But the fact that it's the first Stereolab record since Mary Hansen died means very little to me in terms of how I perceive the music.

I´m so postmodern!

Is it about her? I generally have no idea what they're singing about: lol marxism etc.

Also my searchtermes is pretty fuzzy when it comes to music. It´s all good.

(recent example: "... but get this, right, they're NOT FROM BARCELONA at all, they're from Sweden and there are 29 of them! harharhar! Here's a song.")