Feeling the Music

I mentioned in my review of Locked Out from the Inside and Only Revolutions at the start of the year, that I had been doing some thinking about what I think makes music good. This is linked with my distinct apathy towards the Arcade Fire, which I talked about a bit last June. That apathy has since extended (to varying extents) to Broken Social Scene and Pavement. You would think that, as big fan of indie music who even likes Neutral Milk Hotel, I would love these bands and any more like them that I’ve not discovered yet. I alluded to the reason why in June and I wanted expand on that a little more having given it a bit more thought. Today seemed as good a day as any given that nothing else has happened of note that I want to blog about this week.

The first thing that I feel I need to make clear is that I don’t dislike any of the bands I am going to talk about, or indeed any bands similar to them, in fact I do find their music quite pleasant. I just don’t love them in the same way that people think I should. When I first started listening to the Arcade Fire I thought I was missing something because they simply didn’t stand out in the same way I thought they should. The music didn’t grab me like music from Porcupine Tree or the Flaming Lips does. It took me a while to realise why the music was little more than quite pleasant but nothing special, in fact it took until I listened to You Forget it in People by Broken Social Scene.

One song on that album stood out for me; Anthems for a Seventeen Year-old Girl, the rest was ok, but nothing special. I soon realised that the reason it stood out was because it was packed full of emotion. Perhaps it was technically less interesting than the rest of the album, the lyrics are fairly simplistic and the overall message is pretty obvious, but that didn’t matter. For the first and only time the album made an emotional connection with me. I could feel the sense of loss and of regret, it was heart wrenching and I realised what had been missing from the rest of the album and from most of what I’d listened to from the Arcade Fire. It was what had been there in the Flaming Lips and Porcupine Tree. It’s what made bands like Nine Black Alps and Biffy Clyro stand out to me. Emotion.

Art is all about creating an emotional connection between the audience and the artist through the art. Good art is deeply moving because the emotions that the artist is pouring into the art are effectively expressed. Ultimately this is more important than creating complex, intellectually interesting art; complexity has to be aimed at creating deeper, more complex emotions, it is not an end in itself. A simple painting of a sunset which inspires awe is more effective than a complicated, technically brilliant painting which loses any emotion in the complexity.

This inevitably applies to music; a good song is one which invokes strong feeling in the listener. The purpose of a piece of music is to establish that same link between the artist and the listener through the music, so when I listen to the Arcade Fire and simply shrug apathetically I know that the music has failed. There is no emotional connection, there is no passion, and there is no reason to keep listening. By contrast I can listen to the Decembrists (a band that I have not mentioned yet, but rank alongside Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd and the Flaming Lips as one of my favourite bands) and feeling the emotions that are surging through the songs. I can listen to the Flaming Lips and get feel buoyed by the sheer joy of their music. The more I listen and the more I pay attention to the complexities of the song, the stronger the emotional connection.

When I listen to a new band I look for this emotional connection. I try to experience the emotions of the artists through the music. I don’t look for the technical quality or the lyrical complexity because that’s meaningless without the emotional connection being established. The kind of indie music which the Arcade Fire exemplifies is simply trying too hard. They over-think the music and end up sounding aloof and disconnected. The music might be technically brilliant, but it’s all for nothing because I simply could not care less. No emotional connection has been established, so all the technical brilliance is all for nothing.

Of course some of the song from the Arcade Fire and other such bands do have emotion and I can connect to them, it’s just that for the most part this is severely lacking. I am making very general statements and there are exceptions. It would also be a mistake to say that this lack of emotion makes these bands bad. I don’t dislike them; I just think they slightly miss the point.

Art is an expression of emotion, once you let technicalities get in the way of that expression; you have missed the point of what you are doing. In trying to be all clever and artsy, this particular brand of indie music has forgotten what art is. It doesn’t necessarily make for bad music, but it does make for bad art.

Embyronic

Little under a month ago I got the new Flaming Lips album, Embryonic. You would have thought that I’d review it shortly after getting it, and I intended to, but I ran up against a problem. I really like the album, the problem is that I don’t know why. This is not so much a review then as me simply attempting to rationalise what it is about the album that appeals.

I am a really big fan of The Flaming Lips; I have said before that I think The Soft Bulletin is pure happiness condensed into musical form. The reason for my love of them is that they are experts at producing what, on the face of it, amount to pop songs; relatively short, catchy songs which are very radio friendly. These songs however are not the generic, meaningless and talentless dross one normally hears on the radio, they have a deeper musical and lyrical quality to them. They are also completely absurd. These guys have written rock operas about Pink Robots taking over the world, songs full of distorted drums and strange melodies, lyrics about superman and mad scientists. In short they are completely bat-shit loco. Together this means that The Flaming Lips have achieved something very special; their music would be just as at home reverberating around an office at Pitchfork HQ as it would be blasting out of a radio is some kitchen somewhere. They have taken all the pretension and experimentation of indie music and decided that they can do it while still having commercial viability and, more importantly, fun.

That is why I love albums like The Soft Bulletin; it is so packed full of bizarre brilliance and pretentious absurdity that you would think that it would get self indulgent, but it manages to stay away from that. It has some truly wonderful pop songs, like ‘Waiting for Superman’ and ‘A spoonful weighs a ton’. These songs and indeed this album can be understood on so many levels; they are great pop songs, they are also deep, experimental and wholly pretentious. I love it because I can listen to it in pretty much any mood. If I feel happy and want something to match my mood, then I can put the Soft Bulletin on, if I’m pissed off and need something absurd and completely off the wall to take my mind off something, then I can out The Soft Bulletin on as well. If I’m feeling all sophisticated and pretentious I can try to get all uppity about the deeper meanings and experimental genius while I make my way to the closest bridge and throw myself off it. I can literally put all my Flaming Lips (and I have a lot of it) on shuffle and listen to it for as long as I want. It never gets old or annoying. Sure I may crave another band for a time, but I know they are one of those bands that I can always fall back on when I’m at a loss as to what to listen to.

There is one exception to all this. Back in 1997 the Flaming Lips produced the most awful 4 disk mess called Zaireeka. The idea was to put 4 parts of the same set of songs onto 4 different disks, such that in order to actually listen to the album you had to play all 4 disks at the same time. What? What kind of substance do you have to be taking to make that seem like a good idea? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to find 4 CD players, enlist 3 friends and get them all to press play at the same time before fully appreciate an album. I’ve no doubt that when put together you get some pretty decent music, but it’s like giving your fans the drum, guitar, bass and vocal tracks separately and asking them to mix it together for you. Actually it’s worse because having all the different parts to some songs would actually be pretty interesting. When you listen to the album as it comes, ie in four different CDs, it’s just lots of silence followed by occasional snippets of songs. In short, not very fun to listen to. Thankfully they had recovered from this bout of insanity in time for 1999, which brought the release of The Soft Bulletin. And all was well again.

The thing about Embryonic then, after a very long preamble, is that it most resembles Zaireeka in concept; it completely tears down all established conventions about song structure and lyrics. I’m used to lyrics being unclear, but even I still don’t have a clue what half the lyrics actually are unless I look in the lyric book provided with the album. There are no pop songs here; it is solid experimental, pretentious, structureless absurdity. No wonder Pitchfork gave it 9/10. This is the sort of music that I should hate. It represents all the ridiculousness of Indie music that I so ardently stand against. Even The Arcade Fire manage to produce albums full of songs as opposed to what feels like little more than a protracted jam session. It feels like someone shoved The Flaming Lips into a recording studio with a month’s supply of food and E and told them to come up with something. What lyrics there are flirt incoherently between Horoscopes, Evil, nature and The Machine. I should hate this album. And yet I love it.

For some reason, this mess of incoherent, unstructured, confused and wholly absurd excuses for songs appeals to me. It feels like Wayne Coyne (the front man) and co. have just snapped, refused to write any more songs that conform to expected conventions, no matter how sensible they are. Instead of creating an album as such they have simply poured their creative energy unchecked and formless onto a CD in the hope of creating a masterpiece and somehow they have managed it.

I didn’t know at the start of this blog what makes this album so good, and after much thought and many words I still don’t. I encourage you to buy the album because it is an experience that is unique. Few albums that I know of have managed to defy convention is such a stunningly successful way. Sure Rock Operas, concept albums and song which last the length of an album have all pushed the boundaries of conventions, but Embryonic crashes like a speeding train through these boundaries. They have gone so far past what is accepted that they have gone past the point were they can be dismissed as pretentious hipster onto a whole new level. Their album works because is simply refuses to half arse anything. Because of this they have gotten away with what would normally be considered artistic suicide. I’m not saying this album will redefine what is accepted because the very reason is it so outstanding is because it is so unacceptable. In short, it is an album that can only be made once.

A good old rant

Sorry about the total no-show last week, I just didn’t have anything worth saying and not even any filler to distract you from the lack of content. However this past week I have been doing interesting things, if you count listening to music that I hadn’t heard before interesting, which I do. Anyway one of the bands that I’ve discovered recently is called Porcupine Tree, if you like Pink Floyd you should check them out, especially their early stuff which is beautifully psychedelic, if you don’t like Pink Floyd you should go find a beach at low tide, bury yourself up to the neck and wait for the tide to come in. The second band that I have discovered is called The Flaming Lips, whose music is basically just happiness condensed into musical form. You should definitely check out Soft Bulletin because it’s one of the most joy inducing albums I have heard in a while.

So those are the two bands that I’ve discovered and actually liked. While exploring I also decided to check out some of the better known and notoriously awesome indie bands that every indie music fan from here to the moon obsess over. I had a look at some My Bloody Valentine and Broken Social Scene, both of whom I will probably check out more of later because I got a bit distracted by unhealthy amounts of Porcupine Tree. Anyway the one band that I did check out in a big way was The Arcade Fire. I have been hearing for a good while now from everything associated with indie music that The Arcade Fire are god’s gift to indie music and that I should listen to them and then proceed to thrown adoration and unquestioning love at their feet. I downloaded their second album, Neon Bible and to be honest I am distinctly unimpressed. It’s just a bunch of dreary, emotionally devoid mediocrity. It’s not that it’s bad in the same way that rap music is bad; it’s just not that good. There seems to be no musical ingenuity at all and most of the songs lack melody to the extent that it really hard to listen to them for any length of time. I have to concede that there are some quite good songs on the album, like No Cars Go and Antichrist Television Blues, but frankly I have heard nothing that leads me to think that The Arcade Fire deserve any of the absurd amount of acclaim they get from literally everyone. Even bands like Coldplay and David fucking Bowie love these guys; they get perfect scores from every music reviewer on the planet. I just don’t get why, they are nothing more that decent.

Exploring all this new music made me think a little about the culture and trends associated with different types of music. I’ve always found it really bizarre how some people feel the need to identify solely with one distinct group of people to the extent that they neglect all other forms of social interaction outside the specific group. These groups are often associated with music tastes; people group together because they all like the same music, but their music tastes, like their entire lives become single tracked; they listen to one type of music and one type only, refusing to diversify for fear of betraying their group. The most infuriating of these are the ones who claim to be being ‘independent’. They think that somehow being in a group of people who all reject the same social norms like dressing is a way that doesn’t make you look like a have just been dragged through a charity shop or shaving more than once a decade, in exactly the same way is somehow being independent, it’s not; it’s just being different.

Being independent is doing what you want to do, listening to music that you want to listen to, dressing in a way that you want to, believing what you think is right, not jumping on a slightly smaller bandwagon going in a different direction from the rest of us. The problem is that any attempt to be independent by rejecting what the majority do is ultimately doomed to failure because you confine yourself to avoiding certain things because they’re popular, rather than doing things regardless of what other people think about them.

The same is the case for music taste. People get into bands that are unsigned simply because they’re unsigned and not popular. They become attached to this band simply because of what they represent; independence from the popular music industry. When that band gets recognised and finally signed up to a record label so that they can distribute their music to a wider audience they suddenly get accused of ‘selling-out’, as though becoming part of the popular music scene, getting a recording contract and finally getting the credit they deserve for being good musicians is a bad thing and it would have been better if they had just remained unsigned so only you and a few other people know about them. It seems to me that these people don’t actually listen to the music because they think it’s good music, rather because they want to be different, to be independent from everyone else. If they can quote bands that no-one has ever heard of and boast about how many times they’ve seen them live they think that somehow they’re better then everyone else.

The problem is that this happens with all kinds of music, not just unsigned music. People listen to music because they buy into the image that the music represents instead of listening to music because they like how it sounds. People buy into one genre of music to the extent that they only listen to that one style of music, not because they think that that style is immeasurably better than any other type of music, but because it fits with whatever bullshit image that they have unquestioningly accepted because they think it makes them look different.

Obviously I am looking at extremes here and almost everyone I know, and hopefully all of the people reading this, don’t buy into one specific style to the exclusion of everything else. However most people do regard music with a certain amount of snobbery, I know I have done in the past. People regard music solely as an art form designed to convey some sort of message that they can either accept or reject according to personal preference, and the best music will have an element of this, however most music is just there to entertain. Music doesn’t need to have some deeper meaning to be good music; primarily music needs to be aesthetically enjoyable. This is why I found The Arcade Fire to be so overrated; it simply was not interesting or overtly enjoyable to listen to. You can bang on all day about the deeper meanings or the serious and intelligent lyrics but that is all irrelevant if the music is drab and uninteresting. People are far too willing to dismiss music as being generic, manufactured and samey and often I don’t disagree I just contest that this makes it bad music. A catchy tune can be just that, a catchy tune and you should let yourself enjoy it without worrying about the message that the band is trying to convey or the technical quality of the music. Some songs are just designed to make you happy, not to make you think.

This is not of course to say that songs which are thought provoking and do have a better technical quality to them are no better than catchy, manufactured pop songs, that would be absurd; Dark Side of the Moon is far better than anything the Killers could ever hope to write. What we need to remember is that we can appreciate both type of music and everything in between for different reasons. We don’t need to limit ourselves to a small subsection of the music industry for pretentious artistic reasons when there is perfectly good music doing exactly what it is intended to do waiting to be enjoyed by us. Sure sometimes you may be in mood for something deeper and more meaningful, or something slightly less generic, but occasionally pop songs can bed fun to listen to.

So I suggest that next time you happen to hear a song on the radio, don’t worry about who the artists is, or what image is associated with the music. Don’t search for deeper meanings or complicated musical subtleties. Just shut your eyes and listen to the song for what it is. It may be a generic, manufactured pile of crap, but if it isn’t a damn catchy generic, manufactured pile of crap. It might just make you happy.