[ni'k]

From Howard Slater's mute music column http://www.metamute.org/node/12853

Tellingly Inarticulate (1)

When Mark E. Smith semi-sang ‘Let's get this thing together, let's get this thing together... and make it... bad' and when Sun Ra spoke of there being no mistakes, that ‘if someone's playing off key... the rest of us will do the same' we're not only in the terrain of an affinity dynamic that permits the impermissible and defies expectation whilst creating collective bonds, we are in the presence of what poet Nathaniel Mackey called ‘telling inarticulacy'. There have been many terms for this: dirty timbre, dirt music, freak playing, skiffle, punk, messthetics, noise etc. So when Mackay speaks of the way that some jazz playing conveys a sense of ‘apprehension and self-conscious duress by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite' we are in an area where music assumes an acutely political mantle. Militating against expected industry standards of production (the Fall's Dragnet as well as the Slits' Y album spring to mind) as well as against an alleged musical coherence that befits those automated by a common sense consciousness, this approach to non-virtuosity and ‘making it bad' is a direct affront to notions of specialisation and commodification that not only restrict our confidence to participate but dull our senses. The self-same creates a lull and a dulling of the senses that can be awoken by the sudden shocks of an off-note or a staggered, stuttering rhythm. There's something enchanting about Sun Ra's percussive tracks on Atlantis that sound, to too trained ears, like a bunch of kids randomly banging stuff in a room. Or, the way King Oliver, a lot less smooth than Louis Armstrong, suddenly seems to have stuffed some broken glass down his trumpet. Such a reference to the beginnings of jazz is not without relevance as ‘telling inarticulacy' is there at the root of it all: sandpaper used on a snare drum before brushes were invented, the intrusion of the saxophone into the New Orleans combos as if it were an alien instrument. This inarticulacy not only seems to respond both to the ‘non tempered psyche' and to an emotional polyphony by means of its putting strict meaning into abeyance and addressing the affective, but it also seems to place us in the presence of a coming-to-articulation; something that could be prior to commodification. This latter, because it is a result of an ‘affinity dynamics' that legitimates it, carries a sense of meaning as being made in the collective moment. So, ‘telling inarticulacy' is a constant reminder that our creative powers need not be alienated by some debilitating version of virtuosity and, in that there is always a guaranteed audience for telling inarticulacy in the fellow musicians, that these creative powers have a constitutive force that's based in shared precarity...
__________________________________________________ _________

i think this makes it clear why the fall where inexplicably namedropped as an influence by so many shitty 00's indie bands. their very "inarticulacy" made themdrop completly off the radar for years, it must have seemed completly outdated, like the very thing that modern bands had surpassed with the technological and stylistic "innovations" that are mistaken for such because they are so widely spread over the present as to give it a character that can only really be noticed once it's gone. like how people growing up in the 90's fetished the type of now dated filmstock used in the 70's and 80's, how the signs of the present become the signifiers of the past. what is so false about the lo fi stuff of the 00's is that the worst of it (pens) simply tries to recreate the conditions of the past as a reaction against the uncertainties of the future, while the best stuff, like zola jesus, tries to create new palates out of the sound of datedness. if you listen to what the fall are doing now, in a way the stuff off country on the click and imperial wax solvent and whats surfaced from our future -your clutter sounds like they are only catching up with the alterna rock crunch sound of the 90's. i always thought what sounded "off" in the fall was the result of the intensly individual and facistic tendencies of m.e.s. it wasn't contrived, it was in a way completly natural because the fall were never feeding off their influences, (until their latter days), they always believed what ever they did was better than their influences because of the very fact that they did it. and by they i mean m.e.s. of course. it was this kind of arrogance and narcissism that sheds light on m.e.s.'s mysticism and the appeal of the fall, because it is the appeal of an individualism that will always react to any attempts to collaborate with it and never truly reveal its foundations or stance because it's very stance is ruled by the law that whatever is happening is centred around it and is malleable enough to be shaped by it. this explains why m.e.s. says things like "i had horrible dreams before 9/11". we know he's probably making it up, but he is always right because his very individualism and refusal to see the world as a reflection of himself but rather reflect the world back onto his self creates a kind of isolated schizoid fiction. wherein manchester becomes a haunted kingdom with m.e.s. as the only lone siren who can truly see it. some posters here have said that they can't really understand the fall and they think it's because they are american. this is in a way quite accurate. when you see cut out characters from coronation street in the inner lp art of fall heads roll it means something that only the fall could make it mean. if any other band from manchester (where coronation street) is filmed did that it would just look stupid and cheesy. when people call the fall conservative or right wing they miss the point entirely. m.e.s. singing victoria and lording it in old victorian era costumes in the video isn't some sort of imperialist arrogance, it's not the same as an american band playing against the backdrop of the flag. in the fall's universe, reality is distorted in such a way that it looses its moralistic options, it becomes more like how we actually expieriance reality because there is only really our will and we don't know what's going to happen, but we'll go on into the unknown and decide what we did was correct because we did it. it's a kind of nihilism that comforts us. i am trying to explain why the fall seem to always mean something of the utmost importance despite having little effect on anything. it's like when you're drunk and getting home and eating chips and doing stupid shit seems so filled with importance and feel so much more consequential. reality opens up to meanings of indivdual interpretation that allows you to twist and project it into terrifying or wonderful meanings.

[ni'k]

the mute article also got me thinking about derrida's ideas about improvisation which you can see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT106qB65-A

'It's not easy to improvise, it's the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one's place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already preprogrammed. It's already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can't say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it's impossible. And there where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it's what I will see, no, I won't see it. It's for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no I won't ever see him.'
JACQUES DERRIDA
UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW, 1982

and this explains why thurston moore churns out so many noise releases, because he thinks he is doing something artistic, but he is just the guitar hero of noise. he's a post modern version of an 80's gtr god who still gets to fretwank pointlessly because it's apparently arty. when kim gordon sings about getting her poem published in good housekeeping it's the height of conservatism because its making an irrelevant detail "art" simply because it is art. she's saying that this is important because you don't know how important it could be too me, so don't dare try to impose on me, stay away and let me bask in my individualism. sy are never really influenced by anything, they are immersing themselves into an underground that is never doing anything new, only sylistically altering itself because new people are doing the same thing as someone else already did. i think sy copied this kind of approach from the fall. when they say that they are releasing an album on starbuck's because it's "perverse" who are they fooling? they are only saying that so we know they are at least pretending to have some sort of individual autonomy and freedom that is supposedly represnted in their music when in actual fact they are just americans grabbing whatever oppurtunity for cash they can just like the rest of us. as if it matters. some punk hates the corporations and refuses to have anything to do with them? so fucking what? what do they care? it doesn't affect them at all. its not as if he's going to take them down or his money doesnt end up back with them anyway. the illusion that is being shattered is that the punk form of expression is somehow "pure" when it is just reactionary. when thurston says that the republicans "refuse to listen" to his and ecstatic peace's protest art he is only trying to keep alive the dead idea that this form of protest actually matters anymore. he knows noone in power will take it into consideration, he is simply trying to keep alive the idea that this protest matters simply because it is being done. it's the approach that "well things might be fucked up but we can at least protest and prove to ourselves that we care even though we have no interest in changing anything". it's trying to make the point that "you can take away our freedom but you can't take away our right to express artistically that we feel our freedom has been taken away and we don't like it but we don't want to do anything to change it". because nowadays freedom is seen as something that has to be imposed rather than just a description of an actuality that can only be changed by outside forces. oh please america make me free i'm too afraid to do it by myself! we are protesting impotently because our real beliefs lie in narcissitic individualism not actual freedom. this is why the idea of punk is more important than the reality of what punk ever was. it requires an individual to experience it and it feeds off the idea of a constantly regenerating individualism but it will only ever lead the individual in question to the point of "well im killing myself but at least I'M killing myself!" this is where it lead me anyway. and i think it has a lot to do with peoples idea of god and the increase in athiesm in society. the idea that there is no god because god doesn't exist leads people to think they are the only thing in the universe, the problem is that they are concieving of god existentially. by definition god is not existential. he has to be beyond existance. but people conceive of the modern world as being completly created by and composed by individuals, far too many for them to know. punk seemed to be a reaction to this, the idea that the individual is generated by the society and so each of us can be and do whatever the hell we want because we can act as if there is another individual that we never really know or meet but who all our actions are being done for. this is the distance between the performer and the fans, they act as if they are trying to enlighten somebody and spread some message to someone in order to wake someone up. but actually they are just enshrining their own individualism. its very appealing. it's the attitude that if there is no god (existentially that is) then i die alone but i can at least die alone by myself if that makes sense. punk should be remembered as a very athiest movement, it may not be so clear that that was the case now but it definitly was for people.

but what is so spectacular about this punk attitude is that in spite of any social reality it can still sneer and lead you to a stance away from the world and in (semi illusiory) opposition to it and this can open up a kind of narcisstic drive that can vindicate your decisions retroactively and give you a healthy distance from the world. it opens up a way of evaluating the motives of others actions from a standpoint that isn't morally superior but marks you out in relation to others and helps you stay true to the parts of your soul that otherwise would get lost in the milleu of all the other reasonable rational realities of other people. you would just drift along and loose your dreams without it. but maybe this just reflects our growing knowledge of the frightening reality that the self is increasingly becoming a commodity itself. maybe this was foreseen by the punks and they tried desperately to regain some control over it. certainly the state we are in today seems to dwell from the corruption of punk but also its weird kinda fufillment. all the difficult bits have been cut out and sanitised so it is crucilly important to remember it for what it really was and what was really being said at the time instead of just a vague palate of fashion styles. i think the parts of punk (mostly the lyrics) that are important are the ones that we mostly oblivious to and forgetting about. the ones that make us the most uncomfortable.

but you can see the blatant bias in this post because some of my criticisms of sy can equally be levelled at the fall. and there's a lot more i havent said about the fall that shows them up as well. it's just that i still care about the fall's music because it can still have an affect on me. whereas sy are just about keeping up with the latest so called art trends.

[Dead-Air]

God, what a load of over intellectualizing one's tastes.

His writing is twice as fatiguing as Thurston's most wankish noise release and the fact he misses entirely that some of them are actually quite good just makes him look like the textual equivalent of somebody who likes listening to their own voice.

His point about conceptual art being more conceptual than art (my interpretive paraphrase) might be better accentuated if he didn't outright prove they've successfully made him think a whole lot about it all.

I have much more respect for people who say they don't like Sonic Youth because they don't like the way the music sounds.

[ni'k]

seriously name me some good thurston noise releases because i can't think of ONE.

i have less respect for someone who says they don't like sy because of how it sounds rather than what is actually going on in it. surely that is just flippant taste you are talking about rather than the actual substance.

i did use to like sy a lot that's why i think about it so much. in a way i still do like them but i am trying to kill that taste off because its so stagnant and not leading anywhere and that's why i am thinking and writing about them in such detail.

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by ni'k

seriously name me some good thurston noise releases because i can't think of ONE.

i have less respect for someone who says they don't like sy because of how it sounds rather than what is actually going on in it. surely that is just flippant taste you are talking about rather than the actual substance.

i did use to like sy a lot that's why i think about it so much. in a way i still do like them but i am trying to kill that taste off because its so stagnant and not leading anywhere and that's why i am thinking and writing about them in such detail.

This confuses me. You say that flippant taste is irrelevant to "actual substance," but your following paragraph speaks toward a basis in taste to which you are trying to intellectualize away, which I assume is what you mean by "actual substance." Doesn't that admit that taste is the base substance of it all?

[Decayed Rhapsody]

Most music writing is a load of fucking bollocks. Between the unending panegyrics to Animal Collective and shit like this.. blegh.

[ni'k]

taste can obscure substance but it also can re-energise substance with interpretations that would not become available otherwise. i was talking about dead airs comment about how music sounds and i took this to mean a superficial vantage point where the first impression of music is negative because it is not familiar to the usual style the listener is familiar with. i don't think taste is the base substance of music. i got into sy because of stupid ideas that their particular sound must be so great and mean so much more because i was judging it in contrast with the mainstream. to me then it was as if sy where choosing to sound like this in opposition to the very things i wanted them to be in opposition to.

[ni'k]

Originally Posted by Decayed Rhapsody

Most music writing is a load of fucking bollocks. Between the unending panegyrics to Animal Collective and shit like this.. blegh.

you've obviously read it all and are now jaded, plus you hate animal collective. we're all so impressed.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I like the Fall, but I don't think they're that good that Mark E. Smith can be all high and mighty.

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by ni'k

taste can obscure substance but it also can re-energise substance with interpretations that would not become available otherwise. i was talking about dead airs comment about how music sounds and i took this to mean a superficial vantage point where the first impression of music is negative because it is not familiar to the usual style the listener is familiar with. i don't think taste is the base substance of music. i got into sy because of stupid ideas that their particular sound must be so great and mean so much more because i was judging it in contrast with the mainstream. to me then it was as if sy where choosing to sound like this in opposition to the very things i wanted them to be in opposition to.

Then why not just watch their interviews and the like instead of listening to their music? What purpose does listening to the music serve if the idea of their music is more substancial? Taste is a thing that is broadened and it takes some exposure to get to the heart of quality. I don't think "first impression" is a clear example of taste. What is the substance of music, then?

[TheDom]

Originally Posted by ni'k

as well as the Slits' Y album

I got to this part & stopped reading.

[ni'k]

the substance of music would be whatever essence of it is impossible to articulate in other forms. i think. i don't know. maybe that's the point. perhaps what music does is to express an echo of a substance that we can't directly access but know or imagine that it's there somehow?

you are not explicity stating it so im not directing it at you but i hate this argument that everyone constantly makes "why not just enjoy it its just for enjoyment if you dont enjoy it you're trying to make me think and not enjoy" i hate music being reduced to this.

[ni'k]

Originally Posted by SpectralJulianIsNotDead

I like the Fall, but I don't think they're that good that Mark E. Smith can be all high and mighty.

i don't think he is. a lot of people do but it's just because they really need him to be. it is more the position he has carved out for himself that is interesting.

and if you look at what its done to him over the years it's had it's bad side too.

[pbradley]

It think taste has always been a deeper kind of thing than how it is commonly used... a matter of spirituality, as vague as that sounds. But I'll shut up. I'm not in the mood to pontificate on the internet, at the moment.

[DeadDiscoDildo]

I really want to post in this thread...but I'm too tired to make any real sense.

In short, music to me has to have some kind of undertone, good energy with good songstructure....hits me the most. Something just "sounding good" doesnt make sense to me. It's all relative to personal taste.

I'd say it's about 50% knowing whats going on underneath the surface, some kind of knowledge mixed with 50% striking a nerve in your subconcious.

You should kind of know why you dig it, but also not be quite sure...a balance perhaps?

[Glice]

Originally Posted by ni'k

you are not explicity stating it so im not directing it at you but i hate this argument that everyone constantly makes "why not just enjoy it its just for enjoyment if you dont enjoy it you're trying to make me think and not enjoy" i hate music being reduced to this.

I'm really enjoying your posts of late ni'k. I think there's a certain irony to people saying they don't like music journalism on a message board which has as its central nexus discussion about music.

I think it's a very conservative, antiquated aesthetics that wants to see music as a rarefied craft hermetically sealed off from external influences; often, there's so little going on in rock music that it's impossible to talk about anything but external influences. Writing like the above, while not entirely too my taste, definitely contributes more to our understanding (even if entirely negatively) than a vapid assertion of personal affection like 'oh, I just love it because it's good'. That's what 9-year-olds do.

[Genteel Death]

i got the fall the minute i first listened to them. Enjoyed and spared myself the wank.

[Genteel Death]

the minute i first listened to them, i meant.

[Decayed Rhapsody]

Alright, so reading all of this over again I think I may have jumped the gun. This isn't so much about the bands themselves, but larger societal issues. You have some valid points. I, too, abhor it when people think their protest is substantive and worthwhile simply by virtue of its existence. Some political groups in my school have "subversive art" listed in their description.. which seems really depraved because it valorizes the reactionary as the best form and assumes a need to constantly be reactionary. Shouldn't one aspire to a status quo where the need for being reactionary isn't there? Art with a rhetorical-political basis shouldn't be judged any higher or lower than art without this kind of motivation, but the art alone isn't going to bring about political change.

The stuff about individualism interests me, are you are a Marxist? Some would say it is a myth to assume some kind of self-autonomy in art or any other aspect of life when one is always going to be firmly tied to a class positioning, and that configuring oneself as an "outsider" is a bourgeois notion. There is a constant fetishization of the "outsider"/underground. I think that's why CASSETTE TAPES have come back and people are churning out 10 billion subpar noise releases with their pet project bands. I wouldn't mind this as much if people didn't attach their outmoded notions of authenticity to it.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

I finally read all this.

I think individualism is inherent in music, as well as a longing to escape from individualism.

When someone writes a piece of music, the connotations of the sounds are dictated my multiple things- connotations given from personal experiences past and present and universal connotations.

When listening, the same process happens.

When I listen to Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, I think of children sleeping peacefully. This is partially from the universal connotations of the music- it's very peaceful sounding and delicate. Part of this is the romanticize of my own childhood, hearing it during Christmas time as a child- which was always very happy and warm in my household with lots of baked goods and festivities. And it was always a sleepy time. Always dark at 4 or 5.

When I hear other more popular pieces from the Nutcracker, I feel mixed emotions- because I both romanticize it from early childhood but I hate the commercial use of those pieces.

The individual connotation has a lot to do with personal taste and how we view aesthetics.

But of course universal connotation is important as well. Regardless of knowing the story of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, or having seen the Fantasia version, everyone hears the megalithic power of the music I think. And that's another part of the allure of music.

While we love music for our personal reasons, we're drawn to music for it's unification of both our individual and communal selves. We think through this unification we can break our own personal isolation. We see music as a superior form of communication to normal speaking- that through the primitive means of musical motifs, we can express ourselves far more than we can with words.

We keep throwing our individualism (whether at a punk rock show or on facebook) at each other as a way to escape I think. If we can share who we are with others, and others with us, we believe we can be freed from our own prisons.

In subcultures, this results in sort of a dimwitted tribalism. . . people group with others they feel are like them, but it's a failure of sorts to defeat ones own isolation.

But I don't know where I'm going with this anymore. I don't really know what the answer is to any of this. I like what I like in art and music, and I'm attracted to people who like similar things. Though I've realized over the years that people's similarities in taste (especially in music) may have nothing to do with each other. For some reason taste in film, television, and literature seem to be more universal among groups of people, and I tend to relate people more on that platform. Music is very personal to me, and I'm ambivalent about that.


I like Sonic Youth and I like the Fall. But I've always liked music because of the way it strikes me.

And this new wave of lofi is annoying. I've made lofi music, but that's because of low income and inexperience at recording.

There's a certain fetichization of style over substance in music today. I'm not talking from the intellectual progressive type view, but from merely a compositional view. There are so many bands writing shit music and trying to dress it up by making it sound cool.

Guided By Voices Bee Thousand was a good album because the songs were good, and the sound and the performances fit the songs themselves.

The Ramones and Misfits made good music because they wrote good songs, and the way they performed them from the vocal stylings to guitar timbers fit the music.

Too many musicians seem to focus entirely too much on timber. To me timber should be present in the songwriting process because it is inspirational, but the quality of the recording shouldn't be considered, nor should the timber be thought to stand on its own. I can make my voice sound really cool and I can make my guitar sound really cool, but that doesn't mean shit if I only write rubbish.