|
|
|
|
|
|
5. Joanna Newsom
It's hard to image there ever being a worse singer than Joanna Newsom who has become successful by modernity's insistence for qualitative relativity in music. This singer/harpist who sounds like nails on a chalk board must be the work of some jocular God who is laughing at a population who takes this seriously, essentially by training one's ears to adapt to the sound of nails on a chalk board as being good, or as good modernists we should say "relatively good". Her album "YS" was championed for its uniqueness and nuanced arrangements that tended never to repeat. A lot of space was left open for string arrangements, harp, and upfront grating vocals that sounded like a child being whipped by a medieval school teacher. Common sense may have told Newsom to load up the production with more instruments and ambience to curtail the bitter sound of the vocals, but as always, that was the whole point, to let poor vocals stand out in their poorness as authenticity. Adding to the unlistenable vocals were songs that never ended and arrangements too subtle to ever make an impact on a listener except those who listen to music with unfounded ideas in their head of authenticity. The sycophantic praise that traversed the reviews of this album ignored the incessantly long songs and overabundance of poor singing that would be clear self-indulgence to the honest listener. Joanna Newsom greatly shows the lack of clarity in a person who listens to music like hers. Listen to what the person actual has to say in words when describing Joanna Newsom and you will understand this jargon of authenticity often revolves around the multitude of adjectives that are synonyms for "unique". 4. Blondie
 3. The Pixies
 2. The Clash
The Clash are understood as Gods within rock music mostly by people who like hearing "Should I stay or should I go" at bars and thinking they are living out a sequence in a trashy movie where only the rough and tumble go to drink. A close glimpse away from the haggard leather coats and smarmy vocals though shows a band who perennially failed to write good songs. Aside from the most obvious singles, albums like "Combat Rock" and "Sandinista" were massive yawn fests in average rock with hints at dub culture. "London Calling" which was part punk and part 50's rock was always inept in songwriting. The popularity of a song like "London Calling" is owed towards a fan base who doesn't listen to music, but listens to ideas, in this case, ideas of political injustice and social awareness that ostensibly makes a band better and more important than what they are. Pop music's tendency to adopt the same topical political positions regarding only the contemporary world continually shows why its embarrassing to hear what it has to say about any of these positions as their understanding of politics in general still hasn't effloresced out of childish quixoticism. This bratty attitude about supporting radical tendencies in bitching about modern government never grew past this most childish point. It never occurred to The Clash or any "socially aware" band of the possibility of a theoretical account of the inequality among men in general, nor of the much more primal constitution of understanding in general for any sort of idealized politic to exist. As these notions were not popular forms of radical modern politics and the chic of Chomsky, they were to never be thought of. Instead, because of The Clash we were led to believe that intelligence in rock music was equivalent to making your first political stand in the playground that was so naïve and so devoid of any actual depth in the history of statehood in general, that only the most credulous would become neophytes in this intellectual immaturity, which unfortunately happened to be an entire herd. Like many bands of their stature, people who say they like them usually don't listen to them, but when they are talked about in a conversation, you will hear aggrandized accolades like "they changed music", and "the world needs The Clash". When hearing these abominable platitudes, you can be certain that The Clash never won its success off its actual music.
1. Nirvana
 As is more understood than the existence of potato chips is the popular insight "After hair metal, Nirvana came in and changed everything". What Nirvana was, was nothing other than the fulfillment of underground rock as constituting the critical quality of music. What would previously be heard as cacophonous and blatantly a-tonal was somehow heard as the greatest sound in the world of that day. This popular fullfillment though was not a victory for music itself, but the victory of immaturity as the identity of what quality music was. Years and years after Nirvana saturated popular music with despair and no real clue for how instruments were to be played, bands would adapt this same style as the evidence of their own instincts, which was negating any sense of personal transcendence for the way of a conspicuous identity in downtrodden personality. The music itself, which often consisted of choruses where 2 or 3 words would be shouted behind 3 power chords running a speed circle, signified the absolute ease in which anyone could make non-pleasant sounding music. Its with this in mind that immaturity is not to be an analogy for simplicity like many had tried to make it out as. This immaturity in the form of the popularization of music for angry children who tended to live in 2-floor suburban houses, struck not a primal instinct for nature, but the modern instinct for entitlement, which was nothing other than one's insistence for being angry in the face of nothing appearably worth getting angry over. The problem though, was not the fact that nature will have its say in the growth of those younger in age, but that this form to be grown out of was recognized as the most pure quality for the listener, making any sense of musical taste and development static in the face of this puerile sound. The reason for this static sojourn in lugubriousness was not the musical experience of listening to Nirvana, but the most grotesque phenomena to come from the relativity of the social-human in the later half of the 20th century, which was nothing other than the idea of relativity (postmodernism) becoming herd-animalized, when outright expression (for its own sake) became the form of the herd. It's not as if expressionism first saw its ascension in Nirvana and the popularization of vexed underground music though. It has no claim for an appearance in originality. In the earlier part of the 20th century, one was treated to the forms of this mode of music in the likes of Schoenberg ("Survivor from Warsaw") and Alan Berg. The difference was, this music was not herded. One who went to see Schoenberg at the theater knew what he was hearing was purposely not pleasant, and was an index for madness that had no want for being identified by the herd, mostly because there was no herd to easily identify. It's with this in mind that we come to the most fundamental problem of pop music, which is the over exaggerating (over-rating) of bands to mass popularity and herd-mentality. There is no more identifiable band than Nirvana to display this phenomena where a band becomes over-rated purely for identities own sake, in this case, the identity for what is unmusical. This popularity for identifying in what is unmusical is the effect of popular culture in its technological developments combined with the intellectual insistence in the relativity of truth. In other words, when the camera starts taking pictures of angry children wearing dirty clothes. The challenge then for pop music, if its to win for itself true transcendence, is the negation of its own basic form, which is the negation of ones want to be seen a certain way by others via a camera or video recorder, and a rigorous turning to identifying the absolute truth in the universe. It is here where one will find how a band like Nirvana was never something to be idolized, but something to be quickly grown out of.
|
|
|
> |
