Epilogue II: Pathos

 

Purportedly, all of history can be rendered discernable only because of numerous conflicts, each precipitating and bringing together every distinctive arc in its hulking continuity. If this should be the case, then at the root of all beginnings must be some cataclysm, no matter how minute; some agitation that threatens the greater balance, demanding resolution. My personal struggle, I feel, has largely corroborated this pattern.  From the cavernous delirium of my infancy, disturbances of no mild scale unsettled enormous forms deep beneath the watery surface that was my waking cognition. Lost though they might be from my remembrance, these events initiated the metaphorical iceberg’s sundering. A wretched nemesis to sanity would draw its first screeching breathes in that era.

            Juxtaposed alongside the typical comic-hero joys from early youth is also the fear that saturates my oldest memories, no doubt causally related to those worrisome tremors. Even in the dawning days after I learned speech, I found myself in a world stalked by myriad phantasms where reason presented itself only as mere wishful thinking, scarcely any greater comfort than clear weather just before a nuclear detonation.  Whatever monstrosity or horrible demise I could fathom did not appear to be without at least scant plausibility, and nocturnal unrest imposed a loneliness that further bolstered the verisimilitude of each twisted thought. Through frightened eyes, then, I looked out upon a menacing reality, everything in it a horror to be reviled.

Still, I tentatively restricted my hysteria to fears of the paranormal that ambushed when entering dank basements untouched by the sun or houses kept in shade by nightfall. That was, until the instabilities from that bygone infancy erupted upward with tectonic violence during the ides of one particularly fateful year. I remember the sudden jolt that came on an otherwise unspectacular evening while my family and I raced down the freeway, as if the universe had, like a macrocosmic computing apparatus, frozen while processing its countless equations. Not more than a week later, I sat reading in the library that epitomized life’s normality until that very day, when without warning an immense dysphoria bore down through every strand of my being. It was a maelstrom - kinetic turbulence pulling muscles and tendons in every direction; psychogenic squalls dismembering a young mind, and weathering a soul beyond recognition.

    Ever since that solitary instant, I have endured a malediction that I still fail to sufficiently explicate with the verbal accounts I can contrive. An abyssal gate crashed open on that day and the grotesqueries that wailed and thrashed behind it surged beyond into the heartland before them. For the first time, I felt space, in all three of its dimensions, weighing down on me with its immensity, and somewhere behind my eyes, I knew something had been irremediably altered. Nine years have passed since that momentous disintegration. Ghost towns sit fallow in moody sandstorms. I now wait in my sanctum, an unattended king without a living subject to entreat for consolation or an unbroken domicile to seek for shelter. I stand on the flat plains of ash that used to be Eden and gaze into the horizon, bearing the cold wind and the caustic rain upon my brazen face.

A Refutation

Greetings again, meager viewership, and though my long absence was regrettable, I must say that much has been thought during this time and a great many wonders await you in the near future, beginning with the first of a number of more conventional posts on such quaintly bloggish subjects as pop culture, political thought, and fashion. Yes, I can play fetch and mind my manners in a household. So let us now turn from these craven self-objectifications of mine to a matter that I trust has weighed heavily upon many of your hearts for quite some time now – or perhaps only on your eyelids. I refer to music criticism, no less; a precipitant for tirades if ever one could be found on a simple checklist. There is plenty to be said, but I will do my best to remain clear on the essential premises that have revealed themselves to me in the days previous.

Much has been made of the notion, at least in Occidental universities, that all things once esteemed as imitative acts demand ceaseless and bewildering scrutiny. That is not to say that deep thought over the Arts is a recent tendency, or even that the greater procedures of interpretation are in any way exclusive to Europe or the Americas. Rather, it is a certain relentlessness and an anal pugnacity that is at home in the numerous diatribes produced by these scholastic centers et al, riddling every dissertation on the politics of toilet manufacturing, dripping from the excoriations of physics as a patriarchal complex. Comprehensibly, it appears to be the case that this primitive impulse to bash and bludgeon meaning from a work of art was initially quarantined to items of the written word. The reader will no doubt be familiar with the many hundreds of credit hours devoted to literary vivisection available for retail at colleges across every developed nation on the face of the earth. Of course, a superstructure like that enjoyed by the worldwide Lit Theory department didn’t spring forth overnight. It has in fact been growing handily since the mid-twentieth century. Ancillary to this growth, it so happens, was the absorption of several other creative domains into the scope examined by the critical theorist.

That is when music criticism as we know it unveiled its gruesome pate. If I am to be precise, I should feign to relate to you the harsh chasm between Popular Music, its journalistic attachés, and European ‘Art Music,’ with its more observant aficionados, but it should become plain soon enough which of the two are bearing the brunt of my distaste, as well as why I may be disinclined to offer any kindnesses by recognizing the distinction. Back on point - during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a generation of disgruntled English-majors began to take a chillingly clinical interest in the multimedia sensation that was rock music. Although magazines publicizing the genre had been existent in Great Britain for some time, these were primarily marketing devices; directing subscribers to whichever entertainers had a new vinyl ready for distribution. It was an innovation of sorts that these younger writers stressed their own evaluations of the quality of the music they discussed, and sooner rather than later, many of them were afforded positions at major outlets like the Rolling Stone or the Village Voice. Those that were allotted no such luck started their own music editorials, and the rest became an entry in a dusty tome on contemporary musicology: artists slated this way or that by careerists with cerebral ambitions for every decade since.

Critics ride a pipeline of dogma that makes Papal inerrancy appear as a gentle wave. They’re guilty of pulling invisible rabbits out of impossibly thin air, and worst of all, but perhaps almost expectedly, they are paid for it. A majority of them profess little to no theoretical understanding of music – certainly nothing of a graduate kind – and with the exception of perhaps Lester Bangs, none of them possess any practical experience with the craft itself. Moreover, it is difficult to guess at any set of criteria they might use in reaching their conclusions. Musicians like Radiohead are scorned for abusive reliance upon electronic effects, whilst the Kanye Wests of the world are praised for it. Outfits from the Heavy Metal pantheons are maligned for their indulgences, but Stefani Germanotta and Dwayne Michael Carter are exalted, perceivably for the same reason.

 Investigators of popular media who act under even the pretense of some grander academic purpose often appeal to naïve Deconstruction as a way of countering such complaints. By renouncing any formal means of judgment or classification, they argue that they can make all kinds of claims without requiring any evidence or sound reasoning to buttress their statements. Because they focus on materials not included in the literary Canon, and that can be seen as ‘texts’ only in postmodern thought, things like ‘evidence’ and ‘objectivity’ are felt to be highbrow anachronisms, with no relevance to their profession. Still, they are guilty of consciously touting the precept of an authoritative standard to which only they are initiated, as any critic must, and they show no sign of conscientiousness about doing so. Indeed, even their patrons make no comments about this.

Hopefully, at this juncture one thing is unmistakable: Music Criticism is dishonest. It is crass. It is contradictory, and knowingly so. All demonstrations used thus far have sought to prove this by argument, and I have yet to mention qualitative problems to be had with the stuff. There is a ghastly hollowness to the experience of reading many commentaries produced by seasoned music columnists, be they featured in a periodical shelved at a newsstand or one measured in bytes. Even a weighty locomotive like the Consumer Guide emits a field of draining tediousness and cynicism that almost suffocates its audience, perhaps enticing them with witticism on occasion, but more regularly buffeting them with an invective that disbelieves even itself. One could also say that Popular Music Criticism is unfair because it bars the very audience that the music has been created for from the conversation. By standing on their authority, critics define themselves out of their own work.

With all this being understood, the next matter is reclaiming dialogues about music for the public. Any lover of the aural arts knows that discussions are not only inevitable, but even welcome under the right contexts. So in what fashion, then, do we conduct ourselves in said discussions? I propose that we form our own opinions by reverting to what would nowadays be considered a Classical approach. We can make our own judgments about a band or artist by considering the traits of the actual music itself, and making decisions about their quallity. A musical production, be it an album, a composition, or otherwise, can be thought of as having three gradable characteristics: Ingenuity, Technical Display, and Tunefulness. Ingenuity can be seen as a measurement of the artists sheer creative intelligence, whether it be patenting a distinctive phrase or riff, developing a new stylistic direction, or even inventing new ways of making musical sounds. Technical Display refers to the virtuosity of the musicians involved, and Tunefulness, perhaps the most subtle of the three, corresponds to the artist or band’s interesting use of harmony and melodic control.

Whereas a Christgauian or Rogatisian discussion might proceed like the following:

Person A – What do you think of Group 1?

Person B – Pompous Dignitary X says they are pretentious.

Person A – Huh. Interesting.

A Williamsian discussion would unfold more like this:

Person A – What do you think of Group 1?

Person B – Their keyboardist has a wonderful talent for improvising very elegant passages, but the percussion section is a bit underwhelming. I can’t hear any interesting fills or rolls. I much prefer Group 2 overall.

Person A – I don’t think that Group 2 is as fun to listen to, myself. They just aren’t as tuneful, but I can see how you might not be impressed by their drummer. Still, I am fond of the steady rhythms he lays down.

This system is appreciably more helpful than the current procedural doctrine. Substantive debates that were never possible under a Guccionean or Pitchfork regime would be commonplace. Instead of relying upon the vague, superficial politicizing offered by an Everett True or a Julie Burchill, listeners are encouraged to learn more about songwriting, and thereby develop a greater intimacy with it. My hope is that with this and similar rubrics we will enter a new era wherein listeners are empowered to cooperate with each other and further their knowledge.

Epilogue I: Summation

This is the first of a series of epilogues that will precede my more detailed blog posts relating to current events in the life of... me.

I fell asleep some time ago believing the quandaries I faced in my own mental experience were as substantive as those found in the material world. I have yet to awaken. Something, perhaps not unbidden, compelled me to pursue a life within the perimeters of the contexts and environments my imagination had surreptitiously concretized around me. Divided between seperate mental states, one fragment of my being remains in a tranquil dimension suffuse with clarity of mind, and the other in a horrid demesne where all the blackest  concievable scenarios come true. My more angelic nature perpetually calls out to me so that I might someday be reunited with it, and in so doing overcome the multitudinous wraiths that spawn forth from the darkest reaches of my soul. I fear, however, that I am always a reality away from my objective.

Such is the transience of the ontology of Jared Williams; to chase the shadows of shadows amid dark corridors and to wander through dreams within dreams that lead only to other haunted domains far, far away from anywhere that looks like home. Be it in the sterile, corporeal desert revealed by daylight, or in the roiling, infernal lucidity of night, I persist. I try to keep my eyes open so that the viscous atrocities of my subconscious envisioning will not supplant my earthly locality, or worse, the beliefs I cherish the most. This is my virus to bear; the moon under which I was born. Phobos waits for me alone. 

 For a brief span, I was once able to transcend this dilemma and pierce the fog of my neurosis to unveil a seemingly empyrean calm. Though this singular instance would not last, my memories of that time and the serenity that accompanied it have not faded. Coupled with recent events, these recollections have inspired me to embark upon a private crusade into the netherworld of my untamed psyche, so that I might at last confront my demons objectively. At first, it seemed that I would be successful, but entropy is again gaining the upper hand.  I fear that despite all my sudden positivism, as a result of circumstances thrust upon me by super-ordinate forces, the realization of my hopes for unity and indeed, the very continuation of my existence may be impeded by the determinations of Another.