Grieta editor Laura Estévez kicks things off with the initial question:
How to think music?
Simon Reynolds:
The first thought I had in response to this question is another question: do we need public thinking about music? What function does it serve? Especially at the present moment, but generally as well – it would seem to be an inessential activity. I have long thought the relief of human suffering, whether physical or mental, is the highest calling, and that belief has a new sharpness in the current crisis. Writing about music would seem to occupy a fairly low status on the hierarchy of human needs.
The first thought I had in response to this question is another question: do we need public thinking about music? What function does it serve? Especially at the present moment, but generally as well – it would seem to be an inessential activity. I have long thought the relief of human suffering, whether physical or mental, is the highest calling, and that belief has a new sharpness in the current crisis. Writing about music would seem to occupy a fairly low status on the hierarchy of human needs.
Then again, you might say that the inessentials are what
actually gives life flavor and elevates it beyond the grind of everyday
survival and getting by. These things
are luxuries, but ones we feel we can’t live without.
But even then, many
people – perhaps most people on the planet – enjoy music in a fairly
thoughtless way. And are no worse off for it, at least in terms of enjoyment.
Patterned sound provides an unreflective pleasure that might affect them
intensely, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a larger
significance – it’s on the same plane perhaps as food, or sports, or clothes,
which are all things that people feel passionate about. But they don’t look for criticism or theory
to make sense of it. What are they missing? Is there a surplus value that can
be created through public thinking about music that deepens the experience of
it, or helps to sustain a community around the music - a community of disagreement as much as
consensus?
The second thought I had stirred by this question is to do
with how much of the pleasure of music –
what makes a piece of music “good” or what makes it work – actually
bypasses thought. The challenge for me
as a critic from very early on was to do with wanting to register in prose all
these thoughtless elements – the insistence of rhythm, the sensuality of sound, in a sense the
violence of music as it floods your body. These elements are where the power of
music largely lies, as opposed to the cultures around music or the expressed
intent of the artists. But they’re very hard to verbalise, and accordingly,
have largely been written around, in a circuitous dance of avoidance, by music
critics.
This aspiration comes across in my writing more for a native
English speaker, where the prosody of the language, the kind of tricks I use
(“cheap tricks” like alliteration, subtler ones like assonance, rhythmic
effects and cadence) are things I do instinctively and viscerally – and
likewise affect English speakers in a largely unconscious way. Some of that
necessarily gets lost in translation, as it’s do with the musical properties of
the English language; if you reading the original text as a second language,
you can’t access the playfulness or “dance of words’ that is going on. But this kind of instinctively deployed
word-magic, this musication of language itself – this is actually me “thinking
music” – allowing the music into my thought, rather than describing it
from a distance.
What about scholarly music critics who know about keys and
structures? Technical musical language can describe these intensities in a very
narrow sense, like a diagram of an electrical circuit, but it doesn’t convey what an electric shock feels
like. When critics use that kind of
specialist terminology, the main effect
for the layperson reader is an aura of authority: you feel “this person knows
what they’re talking about”, and that might give you confidence in their
pronouncements. But you don’t understand what they’re offering as “proofs”.
Indeed a synesthetic metaphor or a ripe piece of imagery that someone like me
might come up with is probably more effective as a way of conveying to
listeners – who like me don’t know the technical terms - what they might experience when they listen
to the music.
I am interested in the huge gulf between how musicians think
about music and how critics and fans who lack musical training think about
it. At least 90 percent of what the
musician is concerned with is what I call “nonsignifying craft” – how to structure
a piece of music in terms of intros, outros, bridges, key changes; how to technically achieve
certain sounds; how to construct feel or groove. Composition, arrangement,
engineering, production – this effort results in about 90 percent of our
pleasure and sensation in music. We are caught up in the way tension builds and
releases, the surprising twists, the
juxtaposition of textures across a vertical organization of sound. And yet it’s
something that’s very hard to write about in anything but the vaguest terms
when it comes to a specific song or track.
Critics tend to approach music as if is primarily about communication –
the transmission of a lyrical statement, or of an emotional state. But much of
the pleasure and excitement of listening to music is about structure – the
structuring of an emotion, a construction that moves through time and is built
in four dimensions rather than just three.
And it’s about sensations. Again,
it’s very hard to think this stuff and put it into words. But it’s the pressure
of those sensations and movements against the mind that produces the most
interesting thinking about music for me.
My final thought on “thinking music” is that it’s not
something you can be prescriptive about. As a writer, you are trying to get
people to think the way you do about something.
But as a reader, what I am looking for is thoughts I could never have
had myself. So often the most excitingly disorienting thing is when I encounter
a new writer whose mind moves in a completely different way. I think, “how on
Earth did you think of that?. Where do those images – that particular sensual
response to sound – spring from?” To the extent, that I’ve managed to get
people to think the way I do about music and use a similar kind of language in
their writing – it’s
self-defeating. You don’t want to read
something and think “I could have thought that”. You want to be startled by
completely alien perceptions.
Ezequiel Fanego:
First, I would say that as
publishers we were always interested not precisely in thinking music but
thinking through music. Music can be a life changing experience: a record or a
song can change the way you feel about politics, friendship, your own life,
etc. And not only through the lyrics but also through the perceptual world that
it triggered. So we like when the writing doesn’t impose it´s own concepts to
the music, but when it´s rather affected by it, and express how it was enriched
or impoverished by the aural experience. Music has its way of thinking, it´s
has it´s own concepts expressed as perceptual configurations. And if you let it
affect you it become your own perceptual reality, and you may accept that or
refuse it.
Yesterday for example I was listening to this chopped and screwed hip hop mixtape. You know, chopped and crewed is a technique of remixing hip hop music which developed in the Houston scene in the early 1990s and it consists in marely dramatically reducing the pitch of the original compositions to give them an hypnotic, heavy sound. It´s supposed to recreate the experience of being under the influence of the purple drank, a street narcotic made from the prescription opiod Codeine that treats mild pain and acts as a cough suppressant. One doesn’t has to use purple drank to fully understand it effects because the music itself slows your brain down, you enter in a purple hazed environment and your perfection is complete transfigured. So you can write about this music as if you very transfigured by it.
Another idea about musical writing that influenced as a lot as publisher was this notion that Simon shared with us, I think it was in an interview he did with Pablo Schanton when we published Después del rock. It´s that musical writing can not only reflect the aural experience but also to catalyze it, to intensify the listening experience. It happens to me a lot that I read one of Simon´s pieces, or David Toop´s or Kodwo Eshun´s, and I desperately need to listen to the music again because I know that the record won’t be the same. I will even hear thinks that I didn’t knew they were there!! So writing can also chance your experience of music by injecting those alien perfections that Simon mentioned before into your mind
Simon Reynolds:
I am intrigued by the idea that there are people for whom
listening to music is unaccompanied by thought – because it’s so foreign to me.
But there was a time when I just listened to music in a completely unreflective
way, totally without preconceptions, or a desire to understand, purely swept up
by its flooding sensations. When I was a child, hearing my parents’s records –
the soundtracks to musicals like West Side Story, Frank Sinatra’s Songs For
Swinging Lovers, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Holst’s The Planets. Or hearing
things on the radio, the Beatles, Bowie’s “A Space Oddity”, one hit wonders
like Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”. One of the
reasons I was drawn to glam as the subject of my last book was that it was
among the first music I could remember, from a time when I still had a primal
response to pop – particularly the
really kids-oriented teenage rampage stuff . I have a kind of primal scene with
T.Rex on TV, a memory that I referred to in the intro to my first book Blissed
Out and then again in the introduction to Glam book. A sort of personal
creation-myth based on the audio-visual impact of hearing and seeing Marc
Bolan, a mixture of excitement and astonishment mingled with disturbance and
even fear. An encounter with the pop sublime.
But then as teenager I got into punk and very soon after
discovered the music press, and all that changed for me – listening to music
became inextricable from thinking about it. At its wildest, the writing about
the music could be as exhilarating as the music. But the two were so
intertwined that you couldn’t separate them – they propelled each other
forward. Since that time – 1979 onwards – the listening to music has almost
always been generative of ideas and images. Only in states of great
intoxication have I returned to that primal, thoughtless, purely sensual
response that I had as a child.
So yes from the age of 16 or so I was a trainee critic,
already forming sentences and judgements in my head, for years before I became
one. I don’t know any other way to be. I think it intensifies my enjoyment of
music; I’ve never felt that criticism or theory is something that makes you
have a colder, detached relationship with music (or with anything – film,
books, TV), it actually takes you deeper, it heightens everything. But I would
admit that there’s a way in which being a writer-thinker has given me a warped
relationship with music. I’m locked into
this search for newness, in part because of the sonic rush of the new, but also
because it generates new ideas. I’m always looking for, and I’m hooked on, the
way music can spur fresh arrangements of words in your mind, tropes and images
that don’t feel stale. And this will push me on, because at a certain point,
even a supremely fertile and fast-moving genre like, say, jungle in the 90s,
will eventually slow down and fall into settled patterns. As a commentator,
I’ll start repeating myself and that’s a sensation I don’t like - the feeling
of self-predictability, a sluggishness in the troping mechanism of the mind.
The genre might still be producing quality material, but I’ll be ready to move
on, as a writer even more so than as a listener.
I happened to get into music seriously during postpunk,
which was a high fever time for both the music and the discourse around it.
That is a potent drug to taste when you are so impressionable and susceptible –
16, 17, 18 – and seething with idealism and impatience. The combined effect of
the rapid mutation of postpunk music, and the way writers at the NME in
particular, but also Sounds and Melody Maker,
tried not just to keep up with all the changes but to make things go
even faster - the combination of that is
what I’ve called the quickening. That’s an old-fashioned word that no
one uses nowadays (“quick” used to mean “living” as in “the quick and the
dead”). But the quickening feels
like the right word to describe the effect of that combined sonic and literary
stimulus on a young mind: it’s a power surge of cultural electricity, a
galvanic rush.
I’ve been chasing that feeling for the rest of my life. If you happen to get into music during one of
these !UP! phases, you might get locked into a bipolar rhythm, like I did. A
period of sustained acceleration is followed by a crash, a terrible slowing
down, the scene gets torpid and disparate. That’s what happened in the
mid-Eighties, what I call the Bad Music Era. Then things picked up again and
became insanely exciting. That bipolar rhythm of rush and crash - ultra-intense excitement and emotional
over-investment, followed by disappointment and despair – can actually be
unhealthy, if you happen to have manic-depressive tendencies, as did my poor
friend and comrade Mark Fisher. But for someone like me who is naturally
stolid, the combination of the music and the writing (by others, by myself) has
worked as a jolt, shocking me alive again and again.
Ezequiel Fanego:
There is a
crucial aspect that we have not mentioned yet and that is as fundamental as the
intimate experience that your body or mind can have of a piece of music. I mean
the social, relational aspect. When I think of the impact that music had in my
life I can hardly reduce it to a private listening experience. Of course, like
all of us, I have had several epiphanic moments in which the discovery of
some track or some artist resulted in an expansion of the doors of
my perception: the revelation of some aesthetic possibilities totally
unthinkable so far. But above all music always involved, at the same time as a
sensitive experience, an access to a world of cultural exchanges, the
possibility of making new friends, embarking on new projects, enriching your
networks.
During my
teenage years I used to go to a park near my house where a book and record fair
took place. When I started going I was looking mostly for hardcore bands,
things like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., etc. Soon,
just as a result of the exchange with the record sellers or local friends, my
musical horizon expanded considerably: I discovered dub, garage, postpunk. For
some reason music mobilizes that curiosity (one always needs more) and also the
need to share with others our discoveries. It may have to do with that
ineffitable aspect of music: the emotions they generate are sometimes so
difficult to understand, so irrational, that we need to share them with others
to somehow verify that there is something objective in that experience. We soom
become preachers of our musical passions.
Which brings
me to Simon's first reflection about the need of public thinking about music.
Do we need this public thinking to give social meaning to our most intimate
emotions? I remember when music download blogs started to emerge in the early
2000s. At full speed there were countless blogs about the most diverse,
super-documented micro-scenes, from where you could download the most esoteric
records around the world. Faced with this overload of information andi nevitable
one wondered about what drives this cyberculture heroes to take the effort to
upload all those records with their corresponding covers and brief historical
reviews. There was probably something to do with reputation, but most of those
blogs were anonymous, besides that only a few achieved some kind of notoriety.
So the right answer seemed to be that they took that effort simply because of the
need to share the music that passionate them, to cultivate a determinate
subculture. Of course, one could say the same about literature, film or even
sports. But I think music's tendency to generate such an urge to share your
personal experience and to built an identity around a certain cultural
consumption is somehow superior to any other form of art.
Simon Reynolds:
Yes
Ezequiel is right, there is much more to music and to thinking about music than
just this individualized experience of rapture or the rush of ideas in one’s
head. It’s not just this solipsistic drug-like thing. Simply to write about
music at all presupposes people reading it, the existence of some kind of
audience – and not just as a recipient of the ideas, but as an audience that
critically engages with them, building on them or disagreeing with them. Even
the loneliest blogger is engaged in an act of communication that relies to some
degree on the notion of a community out
there.
One of the
attractions of the British music press as a place to work was the idea that if
I managed to get into it, I would find people I could talk to – that I would be
entering a space of argument and shared enthusiasm. And also of antagonism – an
environment that to some extent was fueled by the sparks that came from
friction, the clash of ideas. The music press worked as a space in which competition (all these young
egos looking to make their mark and distinguish themselves in some way, to
define their own path) and collaboration were finely balanced.
If I look back
at the times when I’ve been happiest in my working life, it’s been periods when
I was part of a team engaged in a collective project. In my early twenties, my
friends and I operated our own magazine, Monitor. We were ex-students living on
unemployment benefit but the magazine was very much like creating a job for
ourselves, a purpose. There was a tremendous collective energy of us all
pulling together to finish an issue and then get it out into the world. And a
ferment of ideas between us - an article
by one would spark a reply or an expansion from another in the next issue.
Then a few
years later, I had the experience of working at Melody Maker, one of the weekly
music papers, and being involved in giving it a new direction, a reborn sense
of intellectual energy, an escalating excitement about underground bands and
emerging directions in music. In those
days, before email, writers had to physically bring in their copy to the office
and so there was a hub of socializing and face-to-face discussion – drinking
and thinking aloud. This institutional
vibe is something I have seen gradually disappear from magazines during the
Nineties as the writers increasingly
sent in their work remotely and never met each other or the magazine staff.
After around 2000, you might go into a music magazine office and it would be
like a ghost ship in there – a few editorial staff, often no music or music
playing very quietly.
And then the
third time I had that feeling of being part of a community of thinking about
music – with that balance of frictional competition versus reciprocal influence
– was the early days of the blogs. Not the music download blogs that Ezequiel
referred to, but the circuit that included K-punk, Woebot, and many others.
Once again there was that feeling of a common purpose, even if undefined – that
electric sensation I referred to before as the quickening. Which I
realized is actually an old fashioned term for the moment when the mother can
first feel the unborn baby moving. But
that makes it even better because it describes the way that the music scene,
which is always a combination of musical creativity and the critical discourse
around music, can go through these phases of entropy, when everything feels
disparate and scattered – a terrible sluggishness that can feel like a kind of
death. And then suddenly it all lurches into vibrant life again. Things start
moving. And this quickening is a collective feeling as much something in your
own nervous system.
As an
individual writer you can have a feeling like that – of surge and focus - on
your own, when you launch into a large project like a book or some kind of
really energizing thinkpiece or feature that involves a lot of research and
discovery. But it’s much more fun if
there are a bunch of you engaged in a shared mobilization of energy,
synchronized to the same accelerated and propulsive rhythm.
So one thing
I still look out for hopefully with music magazines is when they seem to be a
hub of energy – a publication becomes an
attractor for a bunch of lively and peculiar minds, and they all inspire each
other in that collaborative-competitive way. Publishers can work in the same
way, as we see for instance with Repeater in the UK, which in fact was an
attempt to build on the energy of the blog scene in the first decade of the 21st
Century and siphon it into larger, long-lasting projects.
I don’t see
it very often with magazines in recent times – probably one of the last ones,
in terms of music, was Tiny Mix Tapes,
which has now gone into some kind of indefinite hibernation, but definitely had
a collective identity for a long while.
The original dialogue was done about six weeks, when crisis meant covid-19 and lockdown - before the other crisis blew up in this country. Subsequent to that, Ezequiel added a final comment, which went straight to Spanish. You can probably work out what he's saying.
Ezequiel:
Mientras terminamos con esta conversación llegan las noticias del brutal asesinato de George Floyd a manos de la policía de Minneapolis. Casualmente me entero que Big Floyd, como lo llamaban sus amigos, era parte de la Screwed Up Click, la familia musical de Dj Screw. No puedo dejar de pensar en sus últimas palabras, “I can´t breath” y en la relación que hay entre la respiración, la poesía y el ritmo. Y en cómo la música puede ser de alguna manera un ejercicio para respirar con los otros, crear comunidad, habitar los barrios y las calles de un modo estrictamente no-policial. No sé si será cierto, pero hay algo de poético en eso que cuentan de que ayer Anonymous hackeo las radios policiales de Minneapolis para que suene ininterrumpidamente “Fuck the police”.
