1) On the difficulty of writing about music
Writing about music is like describing the color blue. You can try to explain what you see when you see blue, but it is unlikely that a blind person will picture the exact shade you mean. Similarly, you can write about music all you want, but the chances you will be able to transmit what is beautiful and true about it – and most especially, what is beautiful about it to you. The best one can do is to write all your way around it, describing sensations and opinions that are at bottom just the feelings it invokes in a single individual soul, feelings that may depend on something as fragile and momentary as the weather you were experiencing when you heard the music first, or the smell that wafted by you on the wind.
2) On the way music speaks to us in a deeply personal way
As I believe is the case with all true lovers of art and music and therefore the readers of this book, my favorite novels, songs, and movies are all always ongoing in my head, and they speak to me far more profoundly than the events of everyday life.
3) On the task of discovering cool new bands in the 1990s
If you wanted to hear what a band sounded like, there was no way of doing so except by, well, going out and hearing it. Sometimes you could convince someone else, like the local radio station, or a record store clerk who had an open copy; or your friend who prided himself on owning everything first, to play it for you. But usually you had to buy the thing yourself, or go to see the band live. There was no other way to actually hear the music. The result of this system was that the people who recommended things – label owners, college radio DJs, and fanzine writers – had to be relied on. The hapless consumer was dependent on them in order to hear new music. And inevitably, if one were a music lover, one was held in thrall to the gatekeepers, those with access to the records you couldn’t afford to experiment with purchasing.
4) On the weird indie-rock fixation with authenticity
Another word new technology has affected is “authenticity.” In art and literature, authenticity used to be a term that implied authorship. It denoted that a single artist created a single piece of art. Walter Benjamin has famously explicated the idea of aura by deducing that what we value in a work of art is not only its aesthetic excellence and the world it conveys, but its singularity, its irreproducibility. But in the world of indie rock, “authenticity” has a slightly different valence. Since the advent of the folk-rock revival, rock fans have added an additional requirement to the definition of “authentic”: namely, that the artists is sincere about what he or she is singing.
5) On the weird indie-rock fixation with obscurity
By contrast, in a world that privileges the practice of record collecting as the most authentic way to experience music, the best measure of authenticity is rarity, because rarity is often connected to obscurity, and obscurity means that the artist was not embraced by the masses. Indeed, the zenith in the field of collecting is to embrace an artist or group who is acknowledged to be a genius, but who also sold very few records.
6) On the elitist spirit behind listening to vinyl records
Oh, you can still collect vinyl records and buy a turntable – indeed, sales of these items are said to be on the rise – but you can only do so in the same spirit that you can buy a pony and a stable to keep it in; that is, in the rarified, elitist spirit of a connoisseur of the past.
7) On the Nietzschean historicism of indie rock purists
Nietzsche’s remarks about the uses and abuses of history can surely be applied to the way that different writers and artists think about rock music. Nietzsche sees historical actions as coming in three different modes: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. The monumental historian (that is, he who thinks of history as monumental) tends to disparage everything around him as less than what came before. This is a marked characteristic of the indie rock fan, for whom an encyclopedia-like amount of knowledge of old records is key, and for whom the magnificence of past rock albums serve as a focal point for countless “best of” lists and contests.
8) On how popular music has changed in the 21st century
In the twentieth century, what was popular was decided by a handful of humans who head music, guessed what might sell a lot, and then went about seeing that the music was marketed and distributed. Now the equation starts at the other end, with music fans finding music they like and downloading it. But it’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, fans get to hear more music for less money. On the other, artists are being under-remunerated, making artistry less appealing. After all, the science of amassing click-throughs, downloads, and followers is a very different business from recording in someone’s home studio, practicing in a loft, and touring the country in a van.
9) On the advantages of making music in the 21st century
Today’s artists are able to carve out their audiences in their own image, without resorting to middlemen to choose the canon. That means no artist today needs to depend on a chain of corporations and events to control his or her career. Artists need not change their music, or their look, or their lyrics, or their sound, to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And no artist needs to have his or her motives or authenticity and commitment questioned or belittled. Hence, many of the inadvertently masculine standards and overtones of the scene itself are in the process of being dismantled.
Read the book:
Share This
