Music
Dancing with myself about architecture
The grand, idiotic music that moves you
A lot of time and effort went into not writing this column. For instance: I now know that The Golden Compass website believes my daemon to be Onthia the fox. Which is beside the point. (Which is totally my point.)
During another bout of procrastination, I found my way to Last.fm. For the uninitiated: Last.fm simply asks that you enter the name of one of your favourite music artists. It then dredges up a slew of recommendations based upon other listeners’ tendencies. Alas, the very same, overly familiar suggestions presented themselves regardless of which of “my” bands I entered. As Chuck Palahniuk once suggested: I was not a beautiful and unique snowflake. “The Social Music Revolution” had rendered me into Ouroboros, rabidly devouring my own musical tail.
Left rattled by the experience and feeling quite incapable of imparting any novel musical wisdom, I delved deeper into distraction masquerading as research. However, touring a cavalcade of mp3 blogs in search of inspiration only proved more disheartening. Wherever one turns online, a freshly leaked track awaits with an accompanying piece of commentary ranging from pithy to loquacious. It’s honestly enough to leave a music scribe questioning the rationale behind adding one more signal to the already calamitous noise.
At an utter loss and wary of taking pen to page (or whatever we’re calling this process nowadays), I forlornly turned to the oldest port in a storm. It was online at Pitchfork that I happened upon Tom Ewing’s Poptimist column from May 15. In his fantastic, revelatory piece, Ewing suggested that music criticism could one day become a “quaint and rarefied” activity akin to coin collecting. He contended that advocacy had replaced traditional criticism in music journalism. Ewing then detailed his criteria for “good” music writing. It’s a tremendously compelling read and highly recommended to anyone who’s slogged this far into this non-column.
One week later, Pitchfork premiered Okkervil River’s sublimely sorrowful “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe.” In heralding the track, Marc Hogan praised songwriter Will Sheff’s commonly cited “hyper-literate lyrics.” On this occasion, I couldn’t help but be amused by the assertion. In the concurrent May issue of The Believer, Sheff had declared that he found “the literate tag vaguely insulting to pop music.” He suggested that such phrases are bandied about in pretentious attempts to “ennoble” the only art form that revels in the reality that people are “dumb, stumbling idiots.” He subsequently offered a fine appraisal of Vancouver’s Dan “Destroyer” Bejar: “He takes pretension and turns it into this high-school costume show where everybody’s invited in and we all get to pretend to be so grand.”
I humbly suggest that this is precisely the kind of music criticism that would delight Mr. Ewing. It’s undoubtedly the type of insight that has given me pause to consider how best to utilize this space to serve you, the reading and listening public. And so, as we enjoy one issue of radio silence, I encourage you to join me in adjourning to your headphones and revelling in the grand, idiotic music that moves you.