Category: music

The Adoration of the Music of Pavement

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Some people remember their first kiss, some remember the first dollar they earned, others remember when they first met their wife, the birth of their child. I remember the first time I heard Pavement’s new song Stereo. My irrational exuberance, after spending two years listening to Wowee Zowee,  was such that Pavement could’ve released a three-minute single of Stephen Malkmus clearing his throat, and I would’ve been singing that for the next month, in anticipation of the release of an album they decided to title Brighten the Corners. My passion for them was silly, inexplicable, and embarrassing, but who can explain love?

Before Apple Music, Amazon Prime, and Spotify, consumers had to take a shot in the dark on musical artists. In the early 90’s, there were no college radio stations in my area, and the radio stations we did have, played the songs their advertisers demanded. We could choose between Billboard top 40 and classic rock stations. The only outlet lovers of relatively obscure music was corporate music magazine music reviews, and most of them only reviewed top-tier artists. Every once in a while, however, the corporate chieftains would allow a reviewer to review some obscure album that didn’t  help the sales of the magazine. I never cared about the names of album reviewers. I just read the review, and some of them clicked, 99% of them didn’t. When I read a review for an album called Slanted and Enchanted from a group of nondescript fellas I’d never heard of before, I liked it so much I bought the album. I don’t know why I bought the album, but the reviewer said something along the lines of “Slanted and Enchanted is an undiscovered gem from a band who will be making some noise in coming years”. Did this guy know what he was talking about? I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care, but for whatever reason, I decided to give these guys in a band called cement, concrete, or something like that, a shot. 

Whoever that guy was, he knew his music. I listened to Slanted and Enchanted as often as I did the Seattle bands of 1992. I wasn’t around the Cali scene, when Pavement were paying their dues, but I was one of the first person I knew to own a Pavement cassette tape. It was not love them at first listen however. Slanted and Enchanted was so different and so complicated that it took a number of spins to click. To my mind, the raw Westing (by Musket and Sextant) only reinforced the idea that these guys could piece together some of the most original music I ever heard. I’ve heard some suggest that Pavement, like all artists, were a culmination, or a compilation, of their influences. If that’s the case, these cats grew up listening to music I never heard before. They weren’t punk (by my narrow and uninformed definition), hard rock, or any genre I heard. They were something different, and to my mind that’s the greatest compliment we can give any artist in the crowded field of music.  

“A genius is the one most like himself.” –Thelonius Monk.  

In 1994, Pavement doubled down on something different, when they released an album called Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. I could go through this album and four-star and five-star the singles, but I won’t bore you with my narcissistic analysis. I will just say that I played this disc so often that almost all of the singles were playing during a seminal moment of my life between ‘94-’95. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain cemented Pavement in the upper echelon of my favorite bands. 

As brilliant as these two albums were, top to bottom, they did not prepare me for the “Holy ‘it, these guys are it” effect Wowee Zowee would have on my psyche. As lead singer Stephen sang somewhere, “Song is sacred.” The brilliance on this disc floored me. After hearing it the first 100 times, I decided that everything Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg wrote to that point culminated in Wowee Zowee. Slanted was the seed, Crooked Rain was the fertilizer, and Wowee Zowee was the flower. This analogy might be oversimplifying the evolution, and it might unintentionally denigrate the brilliance that can be found on the other two discs, but what Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (Spiral Stairs) put together on Wowee Zowee reached me on levels those other albums couldn’t.

When I write that Pavement were different that should not be confused with weird or strange. Compared to the other cassette tapes housed in my wall fixtures, Pavement were mainstream pop. When I would play their albums in my home, in my car, and in other people’s homes and cars, they were confused by what they were hearing. “I can’t believe you like this,” they would say. They were so accustomed to hearing obnoxiously complicated, noisy and difficult music coming out of my car speakers that they couldn’t believe I considered Range Life an absolute classic. The more they listened, the more confused they grew as each lyrical and musical stroke of paint Pavement put on their audio canvases had their own accessible inaccessibility.

The question Pavement, more than any other band I listened to, asked was how does we explain appeal? Why does one listener enjoy weird and obnoxiously complicated music, while another prefers a smoother flow? Drilling down deeper, why do most Pavement fans prefer one of the first two albums and I prefer the third? “Because the other two albums are superior,” you might say, “and you choose to be different for all the mileage you think that gains you.” I can’t deny that provided some initial appeal, but I’m still chasing the dragon of those obnoxiously complicated, noisy and difficult musicians, and I still love Wowee Zowee more than the other two. I don’t search for weird for the sake of being weird, but when a group like Ween can create contextual oddities, I’m all over that. If Pavement were in any way weird, it was so contextual that the listener had to dig through the cracks to find it.   

Back when the sole, mobile unit for playing music was the cassette, I think I went through three different copies of Wowee Zowee, as many will attest cassettes, and their players, weren’t built for hundreds of repeated plays. I also bought a CD version of the album later (you’re welcome fellas). After exhausting the albums, I bought all of Pavement’s cassingles (cassette singles), EP’s, and any and every musical production that had the group’s name attached to it. So, when it came time for a new Pavement album to come out, two long years later, I thought it would be the next logical step in Pavement’s evolution. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t) I never stopped to think of artistic peaks at the time, and how Wowee Zowee just happened to dot all my personal I’s and cross my T’s in a way no album ever had. I thought if Slanted was great, Crooked Rain was even better, and Wowee Zowee had such personal appeal, then Brighten the Corners had to be an end product of whatever gap great, better, and ingenious left.     

Some people prefer to only listen to music outside the mainframe, some only listen to music that charts in Billboard top 40. There is a conceit relative to both parties, as the Billboard guy brags about his rock star’s record sales and top hits, whereas the obscure guy condemns the rock star’s audience for not knowing how deep to dig for true, quality music. I don’t know where Pavement sits in this paradigm, as I know they’ve had some record sales, some appearances on Billboard charts, and some play on MTV. I can’t deny dining out on the obscure side, but Pavement were one of the few bands that if everyone loved them, or no one did, I would continue to worship their art. 

This statement might shock those in other parts of the country, but I’ve yet to meet a tangible person who listened to Pavement at any point, and I’ve only met a few outside of my inner circle who actually heard of them. In my locale, Pavement was so obscure that people wondered how I heard of them, and other groups like Mr. Bungle and Captain Beefheart. Someone once asked me where I find such obscure music. I told her they could be found at a place called a record store.   

My frustration that no one had ever heard of these relatively obscure artists abated long before Pavement’s Wowee Zowee came out, and I put the whole “You have to hear these guys. They’re incredible” personal promotion machine behind me years prior. Very, very few people listened to my recommendations anyway, and on those occasions when I would loan my CDs out to them, they never came back saying, “You were right, these guys are incredible.” Between roughly 1992 and 1996, some Pavement album was spinning in a CD player, or spooling in a cassette player, and no one cared, and I didn’t care that they didn’t. 

The only problem for me then was that it was far more difficult to know when a relatively obscure band was coming out with a new disc in 1997. The internet has changed that dramatically. We can now subscribe to their site, check their Facebook page, or search the name of their band to learn about a new release. In 1997, we had a dry erase board at our local mom and pop record store with dates of releases and names written in fluorescent ink. “2/17,”, the whiteboard said one day, “Pavement: Brighten the Corners.”  

As a 27-year-old man, I was that kid who found out Santa was coming. I actually formed my own personal countdown that I would say to friends, “You know what today is?” I would ask, tongue-in-cheek. “Day 11, until the release of Brighten the Corners.”   

The people I knew and loved craved career advancement, money, romance, or some other form of concrete, identifiable advancement that defined them as a greater man. My identity was wrapped up in music. It’s almost embarrassing now to admit how much music has meant to me throughout my life. I had nothing to do with the music, or course, and I didn’t prosper in any way when one of “my artists” came out with a new disc, but I felt some kind of personal glory when they came out with a spectacular, spine-tingling release.  

When Pavement released the single Stereo, I grabbed a copy of it in the aforementioned record store in a manner that suggested I thought a melee might break out if others knew it was sitting on the shelf. When I listened to it, I thought it was a harbinger of the greatest album ever made. As I mentioned earlier, the progressive, five-year build up to that disc let my imagination go wild. I not only loved every album that built up to it, but their B sides were some of my favorite songs, and I dove deep into their EPs, particularly the Give it a Day/Gangsters and Pranksters EP. When one of Pavement’s songs appeared on a soundtrack or compilation tape, I snapped it up quickly, even if I didn’t care for any other artist on it. (My favorite single among those released in this manner was an R.E.M. homage called Unseen Power of the Picket Fence. It appeared on a No Alternative compilation, and it now appears on the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins anniversary edition.) With all that, I looked forward to Pavement’s next release as I would Quentin Tarantino’s next release after Pulp Fiction and everything that contained Mike Patton or David Bowie’s.   

The question I should’ve asked myself, in preparation for the release of Brighten the Corners, is how could Pavement possibly top Wowee Zowee? I didn’t ask that question, because they already established a track record of constantly topping themselves the next time out. I had such a nebulous understanding of artistic peaks that I didn’t even consider it. The artists themselves don’t understand them. If they did, they’d know how to duplicate it.

Some suggest that artistic peaks are a time and place phenomenon relative to the fan. The idea behind the time and place phenomenon suggests that a band such as Green Day wouldn’t have enjoyed the commercial success they did, if they released their first album ten years earlier or later, and if Nirvana’s Nevermind were released ten years earlier or later, it wouldn’t have had the enormous sales it did. While I find the idea thought-provoking and fascinating, it also suggests that if we somehow flipped the release dates of Brighten the Corners and Wowee Zowee around on another timeline, I might’ve consider Brighten the Corners the masterpiece and Wowee Zowee the comparative disappointment, because of the place I was in, in 1995. I don’t see it. Wowee Zowee just hit too many of my personal touchstones, and it crossed every one of my T’s and dotted my I’s so well that I considered it such an artistic peak that my anticipation for its follow-up was unprecedented, and I never looked forward to another artist’s future release so much before or since.  

As such, Brighten the Corners proved to be the most disappointed I’ve ever been in an album. Was it bad? No, not even close, but I didn’t know that at the time. I listen to the album now, and it has a number of classic Pavement songs on it. Aside from Stereo, the next three songs on the disc were, and are, really good, and Embassy Row might be one of my favorite Pavement singles. There really isn’t a terrible song on Brighten the Corners, but it had the unenviable chore of trying to follow one of my favorite albums of all time.      

The fact that I still remember the time and place I first heard Stereo shouldn’t suggest that the song was that great either. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It was good, really good, but it couldn’t possibly meet my expectations. It was the album before that, and the album before that, and the album before that. 

Some Johnny-on-the-spot, 1995 reviewers stated that with Wowee Zowee, Pavement seemed to be “self-sabotaging, of being afraid of success”. Prior to Wowee, Pavement were critical darlings, but the critics considered the disc a gigantic leap down from what they considered their legendary first two discs. I had to read those words three times to try to make sense of them. These critics weren’t jumping off the Pavement ship, but they thought it was a gigantic step down from five-stars to four and a half. Go to just about any site that reviews albums now, Allmusic.com in particular, and you’ll read unending praise of the first two discs, coupled with five-star ratings. More often than not, you’ll read that Wowee Zowee has a four and a half star rating. It doesn’t sway my opinion in the least of course, but it does lead me to wonder if the critics didn’t fall prey to the time and place theory or if I did, but I still view Wowee Zowee as the absolute pinnacle of Pavement’s artistic peak.

It seems to me that critics penalize Wowee Zowee by half a star for following Pavement’s epic releases. I also wonder if, in the critics’ minds, Pavement lost their indie/alternative cred by that point, and they viewed them as more established artists, even if they never managed huge sales. If the former is the case, should we penalize Slanted and Crooked for not being as good as Wowee. No, I still give all three five stars. I don’t know when it started, but many critics and fans have attempted to retroactively whitewash their initial reactions to Wowee Zowee by now calling it Pavement’s masterpiece. I honestly didn’t care why the critics slammed it then, and I don’t care how they try to clean it up now. I was so artistically moved by the album that I thought their next artistic adventure would break through whatever stratosphere Wowee Zowee didn’t. I never sat down and tried to imagine how it could, as I wrote, but Pavement did so much in such a short span that they made me believe anything was possible. If I were an obnoxious critic, I might retroactively assign Brighten the Corners four and a half stars, to assuage my guilt for initially calling it the most disappointing album I’ve ever heard.  

As Pavement puts a cap on their career with a now 23-year retrospective release of Terror Twilight, called Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal, those of us who loved them can say they released three incredible albums, one great one, and another that put a really good exclamation point on their career. Pick any artist who seeks artistic adventure, and you’re going to be able to pinpoint an artistic peak. “They’re not as good as they used to be,” is a phrase we love to say to build up an artist and tear them down, so we can identify with them better. We also think it gives us some form of critical panache to say such things, but in retrospect it makes us all look a little silly.  

Klosterman’s 90’s: Nevermind the 90’s 

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When I first saw Charles John Klosterman had a new book coming out about the The Nineties. I knew he would devote space, for too much space, to Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Klosterman’s essays and books cover a wide array of topics, but his primary focus has always been music. As such, we can call him a music critic without feeling too much guilt about limiting his curriculum vitae (or CV). As a music critic, Klosterman is professionally required to one superlative per every one hundred words. His awareness of this is quota is illustrated by various attempts to qualify his superlatives with qualifiers. The problem with this exercise is that he uses superlatives in conjunction with qualifiers so often that reading a Klosterman book can become a literal exercise in the form of mental jumping jacks.  

Some readers might view an Klosterman’s excessive use of superlatives as silly, but others might view the practice as the author making bold statements. If, that is, the author can back them up, and Klosterman does. Most readers, whether they agree or not, also view it as better reading when an author litters his narrative with bold statements. As my 8th grade teacher once told me after failing an opinion piece of mine, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong with conviction.” The problem with superlatives is that most authors feel compelled to address subjective tastes with qualifiers. I write this for those readers who might have a tough time making it through their jumping jacks.  

The best way to call Nevermind the greatest album of all time, as Klosterman does, is to say everything but. This literary device allows the author to load their but with supporting evidence to allow the reader to reach their own conclusions. Yet, those of us who read music critics, like Klosterman, on a regular basis, can’t help but think Nevermind is overrated. Most of us think it was a fantastic and transcendent album (I can’t remember meeting anyone, even those in the “sellout” crowd, who told me they thought the album sucked, but I’m they’re out there). Reading music critics, however, Kurt Cobain walked up Mt. Sanai and came down with these thirteen songs.  

Klosterman qualifies his superlatives in his first essay on Nevermind, saying, “The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style [heavy metal] of Western culture ends and another begins.” Once he gets that humorous qualifiers out of the way, Klosterman writes that “In the post Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way he did.”   

This theory reminded me of a conversation I had with my uncle’s friend on the weekend after John Lennon was killed. I was not yet a teen, and this guy was well into his forties. As such, he had his finger on the pulse of the culture surrounding John Lennon far better than I did. When he said, “The man changed the world,” he said that to defend Lennon against the charge I made that Lennon was nothing more than a rock star. Even at that young age, I knew Lennon was a significant figure in our culture, but I thought the media attention devoted to the man was a bit over the top. “We were all asleep before John Lennon,” he added. “He woke us up.”  

“Really?” I asked. “He affected your life that much?” He maintained it did. 

I lost a lot of respect for my uncle’s friend when he said that, for even then I had a tough time understanding how a rock singer, or any entertainment figure, could alter an individual’s philosophy to such a degree that it changed how they react with people, and the way they lived their life. As I’ve grown older, I realized some people read too many music critics and watched too many retrospective shows with cultural doyens dropping such bromides. The latter often occurs after the tragic death of a cultural icon, and we all rewrite our past to fit that narrative.  

As if to address this issue, Klosterman quotes Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. “I suspect that [Walter Benjamin] would be a little surprised by the extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with the memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories too.”  

The media permits us to touch the touching sentiment of the moment, so that we might become part of it. We remember where we were when we first heard the news. “I was eating a chili dog at the Dairy Queen that was just three blocks from my home, when a fella in knit cap told me that John Lennon was shot. I’ll never forget that cap. It was blue with a yellow line on it. He also had a beard similar to the one Lennon wore in his solo years. It was almost eery.”  

We repeat the lines media figures and figurines say and write with their king of the mountain characterizations of iconic figures and figurines to impress their peers, because we want to be their audience. We also want to be the writer writing to other writers, and we do so by speaking in superlatives to suggest we understand profound greatness. Common, every day people turn to their friends and say things like, “The voice of a generation, he woke us up, and I think about him every day.” We talk about his music changed our life, and how we’ll never be the same. These are touching sentiments that we might mean in the moment, but they’re enhanced by the media, and ultimately untrue.  

I tried to establish a link with an impressive individual I met. The best way to do that, I thought, was to relay whatever information I had about his hometown, Dublin, Ireland. I mentioned that I read most of Ulysses, and I added the joke, “I’ve probably read as much of that book as anyone has.” That joke played on the Larry King quote, “Everyone I know owns Ulysses, but no one I know has finished it.” The impressive individual looked confused, but I didn’t realize how confused he was, until he said:  

“Is that a book?” 

“Well, yeah,” I said completely thrown off, “by James Joyce?”  

“Never heard of him,” he said. 

“The author,” I said. He shrugged. “You’ve never heard of James Joyce?! I thought he was the most famous Dubliner this side of Bono. Don’t they have statues built for him in the town square?” Nothing.

This lifelong resident of Dublin had never heard of someone I considered one of his city’s top five most famous residents. After all my reading on Joyce, I considered it impossible that a Dubliner had never heard of him. I considered it the cultural equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. I realized that I fell prey to cultural insiders writing to impress fellow insiders. I love reading Klosterman, but this, too, is his motif. 

To Klosterman’s credit, he does qualify his superlatives at the beginning of the essay, writing, “The songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind did not tangibly change the world. There are limits to what art can do, to what a record can do, to what sound can do.”  

After submitting that qualifier, he writes, “Nevermind changed everything.” (Perhaps in an intangible way?) He focuses this thesis on advertising, specifically an ad that involved Subaru’s introduction of the Impreza. Klosterman concludes that Subaru’s spokesman in the ad had to “talk about Nirvana without talking about Nirvana,” because “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.” Klosterman basically admits that the pairing would’ve been disastrous if it happened, but he doesn’t explain why. He simply contributes to the narrative Cobain parlayed with the “corporate magazines still suck” T-shirt he wore on a Rolling Stone cover.  

I have no doubt that if Subaru approached Cobain, he would’ve laughed it off. Cobain gave us no reason to believe he was into the whole corporate sphere, and for the most part, he never wavered from the punk ethos. (Though he did force his bandmates to sign over most of the writing credits for Nirvana’s music. We should have no problem with that, since by all accounts Cobain wrote the lyrics and most of the music, but that action doesn’t align with the “One for all and all for one” Three Musketeers, punk ethos.)       

What if the Subaru proposal hit Cobain’s desk at Nirvana Inc., and Cobain was all about it. “Punk ethos be damned, look what they’re offering to pay me for a couple hours of work.” His business partners would’ve informed him that this move would not only irreparably damage Cobain’s image, but everyone involved and the legacy they were creating. “This will force your fans to defend the Subaru ad for the rest of time,” a member of his management team, probably named Todd, would say, “and I don’t care how much they’re paying you, your bottom line will be affected long-term.”  

Klosterman does admit that Nirvana (without singling Cobain out) made “conscious choices in order to become the most popular band in the world,” but Klosterman still feels the need to write “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.”    

One particularly obnoxious and useless complaint I have is Klosterman repeating the line, [Kurt Cobain] “didn’t know” about a company putting out a deodorant called Smells Like Teen Spirit. By writing this open-ended line, Chuck Klosterman contributes to a fable on par with “I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down that cherry tree” or every president in the last thirty years telling a reporter, “I haven’t read the report in question.” 

Klosterman relays the story of how a girlfriend (Kathleen Hanna) of one of Kurt’s girlfriends wrote, “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on his wall in lipstick. This was her note to Kurt and the girlfriend that informed them she was onto the fact that they were involved romantically. Now, it’s plausible that Kurt thought the lipstick message referred to the general smells of sex, but Kurt was a writer, and her message obviously inspired him. If he was so inspired to write a song about it, wouldn’t he say, “That’s hilarious, but what did you mean by it?” to Kathleen Hanna. If that didn’t happen, wouldn’t his friends ask him what it was about? If he told them what he thought it meant, wouldn’t they correct him, if he thought it was about the smell of sex? “No, what Kathleen Hanna was saying was your girlfriend uses a deodorant with the brand name Smells Like Teen Spirit, and the fact that you smell like that deodorant means she knows you’re having sex with her friend.”

If the origin of the message managed to escape his friends, family, and all of the small venues he played in to test the material out, wouldn’t someone in his band or any of the teams of people involved in the production process of the album inform him of the name of the deodorant before they released it?

Michael Azzarad writes Cobain claimed that he thought Kathleen Hanna’s message was in reference to “the conversation we were having, but … I didn’t know the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.” I’ve never been involved in the process of a song, granular to final press, but I can only guess that in the 90’s, a song passed through hundreds to thousands of ears before final production.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that so many people hit Cobain from so many quarters that he asked for help. I imagine Cobain saying something like. “I love the name of the song so much, and I’ve tried to come up with other titles, but none of them feel as right. How do we escape this unfortunate tie-in that everyone goes on and on about? I can’t play it anywhere without someone telling me about that damned spray.”  

To which, a friend or a management type, probably said, “Just feign ignorance.” 

“But they’re not going to stop asking about it.”  

“They’re not, but when they do, just maintain that you didn’t know. Don’t include a timeframe. Just leave that comment open-ended, because it’s true, you didn’t know for a time. No one is going to ask a “What did he know, and when did he know it?” question about the name of a song. Nobody’s going to care that much.” 

Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree, did Led Zeppelin sell their souls to the devil, did Kurt Cobain know about the similarities between the name of his most famous song and a deodorant’s brand name, and did he seek fame and fortune?

On the latter, I suspect that Cobain wanted to make the best album possible, and he allowed some corporate guys to do whatever they had to do to make Nevermind as great as it could possibly be. Some, including Cobain, say that something was lost in the mixing process. So, why did he do it? Why did Cobain succumb to the pressure from label execs and permit Andy Wallace to master it with what some call an “airplay-inviting varnish”? I’ve read that many in his inner circle were against it, and Cobain later regretted it. To understand why he did it, we probably need sort through some deep psychoanalysis of Kurt’s past and present, but that would likely be so far off base that it’s not even worth trying. Some of those who were close to Kurt in the present tense of Nevermind’s pre-production and production, suggest he wanted it more than they will ever tell you. What is it? We don’t know, but I believe Kurt when he said he never wanted to be famous, and I don’t think he ever strove to be rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I have to imagine that he wanted greatness bestowed upon him by his peers first and foremost, rock critics and journalists, and us. I don’t think he necessarily wanted or needed the spoils that come with it however. 

All theory and analysis is autobiographical, as I wrote, and most of it is probably wrong, but the one thing we do know is Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana, wrote one hell of an album. Did the iconography of Kurt Cobain lead to rock critics, like Chuck Klosterman, using so many superlatives that Nevermind is now overrated? Perhaps. If Cobain’s worldview didn’t align so well with most of the rock critic world, they might have had a different take on his music. If the timing of the release of Nevermind was different, and it didn’t change the face of music (allegedly, single-handedly), would it have been regarded with such superlatives? Ifs and what if are for children, however, and when we wipe away all of it, and the myths, the narratives, and iconographic worship of Kurt Cobain, we still have to admit he and Nirvana wrote one hell of an album. On that note, Chuck Klosterman wrote one hell of a book, containing essays on Nirvana, 911, and other matters. His book on The Nineties is chock full of deep, entertaining insight into what made that decade what it was, and the reverberations that the decade sent down (or up?) to the modern era.

Beat The Beatles

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“The Beatles are overrated,” wrote someone who probably wears black sweaters, prefers goatees, and still considers the ascot a mandatory fashion accessory. “While many find enjoyment in singing along to Hey Jude or I Want To Hold Your Hand, I find the vast majority of [The] Beatles’ lyrics insultingly simple, and [their] individual musical talent is surpassed in almost every regard.” Those who wear normal clothes don’t truly care about such accessories. To us, song is sacred. When we hear The Beatles, we might hear evidence of the critic’s complaints, but we view the songs they created as simplistic brilliance.  

It would be a fool’s errand to try to suggest that one artist’s artistic expression is superior to another, but the author draws many comparisons. She focuses most of her critique on the technical proficiency of The Beatles stating that three of the four musicians are inferior to their peers. The author conceded that George Harrison proved a gifted musician, but The Beatles restrained his abilities in most of their songs. This begs the question, does the sacred nature of the song require some level of restraint? We might enjoy hearing gifted virtuosos play their instruments, but how often does technical mastery lend itself to crafting great songs? We can all think of some songs where instruments commanded the music, but even the most gifted musicians learn to restrain their abilities for the sake of the song.     

When we attempt to examine our favorite songs dispassionately, we might acknowledge that some of the lyrics might be simple, and that a novice might be able to play them on a piano, but as Bill Murray once said, “It just doesn’t matter”. We enjoy a clever relationship between the lyrics and the music. Our favorite composers often write lyrics for the sole purpose of developing a relationship with the music.  

Most people will express awe over an eighteen-minute guitar solo at a concert. My question is do they really appreciate an eighteen-minute solo, or do they want to appreciate it? I might be alone, but I consider solos, in the midst of a rock concert, self-indulgent drivel. “Get back to the songs!” I want to yell. Unless someone wants to play guitar, and they want to learn from the masters, I don’t understand their appreciation. Unless they want to say they love it, so they can say they love it, because that’s just kind of what we do, I guess. Some of them, and I’ve met them, actually appreciate a big long solo so much that they time it. Perhaps they think a big, long solo from a guitar god gives them their money’s worth, or something, but I don’t understand it. 

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An argument put forth by Ashawnta Jackson, however, suggests that we don’t really consider bands like the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys great. By enjoying their music as much as we do, she writes, we’re just doing what we’re told. We don’t know any better. She appears to believe that the underlying reason 1965-69 bands are still part of the modern canon is a result of a multi-generational mass delusion based on an institutional, repetitive messaging. She writes that others chose this music for us, and we haven’t examined those who decided what music we are to enjoy well enough.    

The inference is that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world still love the music of these bands because everyone from the corporate types to the DJ’s constantly play them, and our parents and uncles and aunts have propagated this notion that we should continue enjoying listening to the music they enjoyed. This mass delusion is so entrenched now that listeners from all over the world, and from just about every demographic, now accept the fact that certain music “overrepresented in the 1965-69 era” is now considered so great we want to listen to it often. The cure, Jackson states, can be found “by examining the who chooses and why, the “dominant canon of the dominant” can be opened up as listeners reflect on their exclusions and “find their own ways off the beaten track.”  

Rick Moran’s piece counters that young people are falling under this spell too, as “[Media Research Center Sales data] states that “old songs” currently represent an astonishing 70% of the U.S. market.” Listening to music is often a solitary activity. Suggesting that those listed above do not influence our choices is foolish, but to suggest that it constantly influences what we stream in our cars, at our computers, and all the other times when we’re alone appears equally foolish. One might think that young people, who traditionally abhor everything their elders prefer, might be a demographic that Jackson could count on to put an end to these institutional decrees, but the data suggests they went and had their minds melded.