Pop Goes the Culture
What is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date?
Whenever I hear bands like America or Jefferson Airplane, I marvel that so many people once took such great comfort in these things that most now consider rather silly. This keeps on happening: a movie will define a generation only to be laughed at by the next. Is this a necessary function of popular culture?
I complained to my friend Alan Jacobs about the bad timing of my releasing a new book of poems just when all the bookstores in America closed down and he replied “thankfully, poetry is news that stays news, so people will eventually find it”. News that stays news.
That phrase has haunted me since he said it. Because I am—aren't you?—not only uninterested, but basically disgusted by yesterday's news, to say nothing of last weeks'. We throw out as garbage what we we're very eager for just hours before. By contrast, how much consolation, how much joy I have had in Constantine Cavafy's poems from a century ago!
I am trying to think about why this should be or why it might matter. The poet Percy Shelley often thought about the eternality, or lack thereof, of artistic productions. He admired painting, but worried that its shelf life was necessarily short due to the degradation of its materials. Sculpture he found the more lasting, but was still upset by the way later curators felt free to alter it, adding fig leafs, or whole limbs to replace missing ones. Poetry he saw as eternal, not, I think, only because it is his own chosen medium, but because of the thing I'm talking about here. A Shakespeare sonnet that I read now is not similar to, but identical to the one recited at the court of Elizabeth I. If the past is any indication of the future, we can be fairly certain that in another 100 years, or 500, the sonnets will endure and endure in precisely their same state, losing none of their affective power due to the half-life of certain molecules.
So, it seems, the problem isn't in the lyrics: either in the ideas or in their enunciation in sentences. But the problem also doesn't seem to be in the music. Duke Ellington's three-minute miracles are every bit as powerful today as they were nearly a century ago. Beethoven, though he likely sounds a little different, likewise. The work doesn't sound dated. We don't listen to it for nostalgic purposes but because we find it beautiful and useful in the present: as full of power as it ever might have been.
My question then is the following: what is it about combining lyrics and instrumentation that reduces so the use-by date? I suppose to engage it, you'd have to believe that it does. I can imagine some people arguing that The Beatles haven't really aged. They'd be wrong, and hilariously so, but I can imagine it. My sense is the that the Fab Four endure almost purely for nostalgic, and then for ideological reasons. Those of us who listen do so to remember certain times or feelings from our youth, or to sign up for the rebellious posture they advocate--down with religion! Your teachers are stupid! The government is evil! Whether one supports such rallying cries is irrelevant to the issue that that's a large part of the band's appeal. I can hear people saying Bob Dylan music is beyond time as well, but I don't think that's right either. There is nothing eternal or universal in that music. But given that you're a normal person, surely you'd have to admit--even if the music of your upbringing was great, like mine was, that it begins to show its age eventually. Some records I unashamedly love, even still from 30 years ago; others I can only love because I have decided to place their obvious emotional manipulations to one side, to look past their excesses in the same way I agree to look past their hair or attire.
Even if you don't agree completely with the way I've framed the question here, don't we think this odd? Poems last forever. Non-vocal music lasts a rather long time, sometimes centuries. But put them together and it starts looking not only threadbare, but comical, embarrassing, within a decade, if that. It doesn't seem to me self-evident why that should be the case and yet there are literally thousands of examples.
To further complcate matters, it seems also as if the breadth of appeal is inversely proportinate to the linear. So, Richard Marx reached across nearly the entire spectrum in the English-speaking world in the early 1990’s, but did so insanely briefly, only to be so cringeworthy as to be unlistenable, not long thereafter. I think there is more going on here than the sense of backlash, our corporate embarrassment over having loved something so much. It seems to me more like rose bushes that only have so much energy inbuilt. They can spend it on fragrance, or color or size or lasting-ness, but they must still choose somehow which.
Music/ 2021
My annual round-up of the music that shaped the year.
Strokes
The New Abnormal
This record came out at the tail end of 2020 and so I featured it on my year-in-review post, though I’d only been listening to it for a month or so by year’s end. It stayed with me (and with us: the whole family loves it) throughout this year too. My son Sebastian (4) has choreographed a dance to the song “Bad Decisions.” I think every Strokes record lands on a best-of list of mine somewhere (apart from that RCA one, yuck) because I think this band is tops. They won a Grammy for this one, right, for Album of the Year category? So apparently loads of people agree with me on this one.
Luxury
Health and Sport
Luxury is perhaps my single favorite band, ever, from any time period, the way The Beatles or U2 are for some people, so seeing this will surprise no one. It’s one of their missing albums, not present on streaming platforms and thus not present at all for most listeners. That meant for me having the great fun of committing to—paying for—a record I hadn’t heard a single note of, which really is fun, a kind of gambling. I mean, I did have the recommendation of Andy Prickett from the Parallel Love documentary to go on, which isn’t nothing. Also, earlier this year I was on a panel of “experts” making cases for which is the best Luxury album and Lee Bozeman asserted at the end that this was his favorite from their catalog. Happily, they’ve just issued a vinyl pressing. It’s a moody and dramatic record, triumphant somehow and experimental and perfect.
TobyMac
The Elements
This is Not a Test
I believe I am old enough now not to have to apologize for my liking Christian music. I always have, since those early Benny Hester, Leslie Phillips, Amy Grant, and Petra LP’s I spun as a precocious 6 year-old, ignoring the Mickey Mouse sing-a-long 77’s they’d bought me the plastic turntable for. It continued through high school and college and life thereafter: whatever else I was listening to, I always simultaneously treasured CCM. DC Talk’s records were deeply formative for me, but I fell off the train after Jesus Freak and left TobyMac’s solo work alone until I randomly played his demos CD last year for my kids when we were on a road trip. They were hooked. So was I. We’ve spent this year going through his catalog and these two new records were our most played music of 2021 by a huge margin. They ask for him all the time. I took everyone to see his concert (their first) at the fair (also their first). It’s a great gift to be able to share this with them, our whole family moving to music that moved me first when I was a teenager. I’m grateful both for his creative longevity and his witness.
Skillet
Victorious
I’ve always maintained that these lists are not necessarily what I think to be “the best” records of a given year—often they weren’t even released during the year in question—but the ones that defined the year for me. I loved and still love that first Skillet record but haven’t followed anything in-between. This one I only played because I turned my garage into a weight room during COVID and needed some testosterone-fueled workout music. I tried all kinds of playlists and punk bands, but nothing got my blood pumping so much as this one, so I played it at least once a week when I got out there. They’ve still got it though. “Terrify the Dark”? That song has me gasping for breath.
War on Drugs
I Don’t Live Here Anymore
War on Drugs last appeared on my 2014 list when I sunk deep in Lost in a Dream. I tried the next one, but couldn’t get into it, though many others revere it as a masterpiece. But this one had me from the first track, from the first few seconds of the first track. There’s just so much going on musically in this record. Each year, I send my dad a CD that I think he, audiophile, will appreciate. This year, it’ll be this one, an instant classic that achieves that status in part by not ignoring the classics.
Coda: I don’t usually have a runner-up category or anything like that, but this year, the two records I thought about most were Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud and Natalie Berman’s Mercy. I don’t know what to do with either of them, exactly, which is why I’m reluctant to place them on the list. I can develop relationships with some artists slowly and I wouldn’t be surprised to see either of these become essential for me, but it could just as easily go the other way and I never listen to either of them again. I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.
Music/ 2014
My favorite records.
Temples
Sun Structures
Sun Structures is one of those rare records I liked from the first note. After that, I liked each song better than the one before it and a hundred or so listens has done nothing to blunt that first thrill. It's big hooky Brit-rock, but dirty, and full of fun musical references to bands from way before any of these lads were born.
War on Drugs
Lost in a Dream
Here's a case where the people's voice was dead on. The album topped every respectable year-end list, and for good reason. It's a bit of a grower. At first, one doesn't see what the big deal is with what sounds like a Springsteen cover band, but the deeper one goes into the dream, the more the album's patience and musicality reveal themselves.
Damien Jurado
Brothers and Sisters of Eternal Son
Pretty much every year that Damien Jurado releases an album, it makes my Best-Of list. No two of them are really alike, some heavy rock, some country-folk, some space-age pop. I love every single one out of all proportion. If I had to pick one artist to listen to, to the exclusion of all others (horrid world, that) I wouldn't hesitate to select Jurado. This album is psychedelia--not my usual cup of tea--and it took a month or so to understand what was going on here. Now, I think about this record even when I'm not listening to it, wondering how its doing and how long we'll have together.
Spoon
They Want my Soul
I've loved Spoon since 2002's Kill the Moonlight, but between that record and this, though I've adored some of the singles, none of the albums caught me quite right. This one brings it all back home: the swagger, but also the joy. This album is a band in top form. It's like watching Achilles in battle; not only like they won't miss a step, but like they can't somehow.
Future Islands
Singles
This album defines my time in London more than any other. I rode the tube for at least two hours every day, so I listened to tons of music, including most of the albums on this list, thanks to the new deep-bench streaming services. I started listening to Singles before I knew anything at all about the band, finding it compelling--oddly confident, throw-back lounge music but somehow unmistakably of-the-moment. Then I saw the band's beautiful performance on Dave Letterman and was hooked.
Favorite Things: Rdio
There are heaps of great music-steaming services out there, now that, apparently, music is free. Really, they should be used as over-qualified previewers in determining which LPs or CDs you really need in your collection, if permanence and sound quality matter to you. Among them,
- Spotify: of which I might be a terrific fan, where it legal in Germany, where I am currently living, but alas, it is not.
- Pandora: the great pioneer and game-changer that plays a virtual radio station built on a matrix of similar-sounding artists. A great service, but it won't play an entire album, and I've never been much of a singles guy. Also illegal in Germany.
- Naxos: this is the largest classical record label in the world, and they're buying up smaller companies by the cello case to add to their online streaming service. It is a subscription service, so you pay for access to their 800,000+ tracks but can stream them at CD quality, if you have the bandwidth. They also have a pretty deep bench when it comes to jazz.
- Rdio: Another subscription service (my plan costs something like $6 a month), Rdio features the best interface of the lot, tons of obscure recordings, a social feature that is (for once) actually useful--I'm not talking about updating one's facebook automatically every time a new record comes on, but the "playlists" feature, where some pretty tasteful people put together great jazz mixes, Christmas tunes, KEXP-based melodica, and other turn-ons for this traveller.
Year's Best
Last year, one of my favorite musicians ever, Iron and Wine, released their new album on my birthday, which felt like a gift from the world. The year before, the band that has taught me more than any other (about art, about life) Bright Eyes, released two albums on my birthday. It seems fitting then, that I should offer something back, in the form of a Best-of list, since this year's birthday has just passed without fanfare from the musical community. Here then are my favorite albums from 2011, offered in a spirit of generosity rather than contention, for those of you with whom I no longer share car rides or mix tapes.
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| Girls- Listen Here |
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| Iron and Wine- Listen Here |
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| The Antlers- Listen Here |
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| Youth Lagoon- Listen Here |
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| Bon Iver- Listen Here |
