The Night Mail's 2016 Dispatch

I wanted to give a short update on my activities over the last year. While this blog has lain pretty much dormant since last January, I have still had a fairly busy year with regard to music writing and I've begun a couple of projects that I hope will make their way onto this site within the next few months.

1. Live music as theatre/ritual

My main project this year has been developing a theory of music theatre that incorporates all live music performance. The impetus for this came from a short catalogue essay I wrote for a showcase of British music theatre companies at the Music Theatre Now meeting in Rotterdam. Having been challenged to characterise a national 'scene' on the basis of a diverse group of artists and companies (working with rock, pop and electronic music, as well as classical vocal and experimental styles), I attempted an inclusive definition of 'music' and 'theatre' that would allow me to think about the differences between musical performance genres and the meanings that they variously assign to the music therein. It is also a   reaction against another attempt at such a definition that I encountered this year: in Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi's book The New Music Theater. The text was greatly aided by my fortuitous reading of Richard Schechner's performance theory, and infused with my palpable relief at finally having finished  Alain Badiou's Being and Event.

The resulting essays, which I have published on my other blog the biting point, could constitute the very first elements of a far bigger project. They are primarily designed to provide a flexible framework for talking about any kind of musical performance, from a very particular perspective: one that I consider under-theorised. Like most of my academic work, it proposes a theoretical frame designed to aid the discussion of specific musical phenomena that nevertheless doesn't rely on traditional musical analysis or a musicological background (which, for me, has always been incapable of really engaging with the things I love most about the music that I love most).

I initially split my music writing between these two blogs according to genre ('popular' and 'classical'), but the music theatre essays have as much to say about pop music as they do about classical music and opera. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the more significant divide between the two blogs is based on recorded music (this site) vs live music (the other site)—although this too is far from strict. At any rate, the music-as-theatre theory is designed to serve as a complement to the theory of recorded music that is still being developed on this blog.

Here are links to the essays:

1. Staking a Claim: Music Theatre as Provocation (Catalogue Essay)
2. Surveying New Music Theatre in the UK
3. What is Music Theatre?
4. What is Music Theatre Actually? (A Theory of Musical Performance)
5. Logics of Musical Worlds (A Theory of Musical Genre)

2. Music and (Queer) Failure

I've spent this year engaging with some of the canonical texts of contemporary queer theory (Halberstam, Edelman, Muñoz), which has proven a revelatory experience for me on a personal level. In addition though, these texts have suggested a number of fruitful ways to think through my own musical tastes, and various 'gay' or 'alternative' aesthetics in music more generally. The discussions of failure and utopia in these texts supports and enriches my existing interest in performative negativity (fragility, humiliation, masochism, failure) in relation to some of my favourite queer artists (e.g., Xiu Xiu, ANOHNI/Antony & the Johnsons), while clarifying certain questions about how we might conceive of a 'successful' musical act or identity, within genred fictions as well as in musical discourse and systems of judgement.

I'm excited to begin developing a theory of primarily gay male music in relation to queer failure, that would allow me to talk about most of my favourite artists and think through my massive predilection towards a certain tradition of gay pop. I also think that this approach allows an examination of a specifically musical queer aesthetic among gay performers who are less easy to discuss in relation to their appearance onstage, their subversive gestures/iconography and their music video aesthetics (the non-sonic dimensions usually privileged by performance/cultural theorists).

Moreover, I think an investigation of the song act in terms of the possibility of success/failure—and therefore also a notion of the 'ideal' or 'utopian' conditions of musical action—can be used to characterise a particular sonic aspect to the 'alternativeness' of alternative music, in relation to the hegemonic rules/laws/desires of genre.

So, perhaps more of this in the months/years to come…

3. Ten Albums of 2016

I still periodically feel the desire to turn this blog back into a normal, up-to-date music blog that discusses and reviews music as it is released, not many months later, and features short posts rather than huge essays. And then I think: who am I kidding? It's not so much that I find it hard to write short articles to short deadlines; it's more that I think there's far far too much of that around. The more I read music reviews, the more I balk at the banal and often destructive narratives that they rely on in order to make their takes seem substantial. In a way, it's fascinating: more so than any other mainstream art critical discourse, music reviewing borrows from and reproduces raw ideology. I know I obsess about it (and one publication especially), but I think it's a critique that is rarely made and one that I'd also like to develop over the next few years.

[To take one example, Pitchfork's supposedly whimsical but actually exasperating 'Thank You Note to Everyone Who Didn't Release an Album in 2016' post… because the most important thing for Pitchfork is absolute control over the master narrative of 'our musical moment' (a master narrative whose apparent dramatis personae are handily listed in the article). It is this master narrative, or musical history in the making ('it was a good year for music', etc.), that is the primary product of Pitchfork as an enterprise. It is a narrative whose figures are mythic giants like Rihanna and Beyoncé, and James Blake and Arcade Fire, but whose meanings and import is dictated by the Pitchfork writers as witnesses. It is these faceless writers and not the famous protagonists who have the story to tell—always the same story, the story of Western art, the story of the creative individual, the story of romantic love, the story of the human story, the story of telling one's own story, the story of here-we-are-now-in-the-present-being-human-story-universal-story-of-everyone-has-days-when-they-feel-like-this story. And the real purpose of this story is to deflect the guilt these people rightly feel because their job effectively entails legislating on which creative expressions/human labours/personal testimonies are incrementally 'better' or 'worse' than the others. Because we can't do musical tribalism anymore: we can't write zines saying all disco is terrible or all rap is bollocks, and we can't just say 'I hate the way this sounds, I think it's shit'. And yet we still have to review and quantify and rank, as if we don't all believe in the relativism of all value systems and the arbitrariness of personal taste and the impossibility of objective judgement, etc etc. And so, we end up writing an open letter that may as well be addressed 'from all music fans', thanking the music industry in general for not making more music, because the stuff we got was so important and historic… (To quote the actual letter, the year was 'cluttered', because 'a staggering amount of huge artists released major albums'). I hope that, in 2017, all those artists release an album a month so that  the Pitchfork writers are so inundated that they can't possibly wring it into another boring 'This was the year in music' narrative without very obviously picking and choosing, and thus drawing attention to their construction of certain market-determined categories that need to be attacked ('huge artists', 'major albums'), and undermining their whole 'musical creativity = universal-liberal-humanism' schtick which pretty much prevents them from saying anything interesting about any music!!!]

Anyway, I'm happy with my own slow and deeply partial approach to music criticism, finding something to say about the music that seems most meaningful to me, to introduce these meanings (that I consider valuable) into the reader's subsequent experience of that music. On this basis, there are a number of albums from this year that seem to me to be bursting with valuable (and beautiful) meanings, and which I subsequently wanted to review. Still, I didn't manage to write any album reviews last year, so instead I want to repeat what I did last year and write ten reviews over the next month or so, for…

my ten favourite albums of 2016, unranked:::

1. ANOHNI —  Hopelessness
2. Deerhoof — The Magic
3. Xiu Xiu — Plays the Music of Twin Peaks
4. Beyoncé – Lemonade
5. Rihanna – ANTI
6. Michaela Dennis – Miracles
7. Chrysanthemum Bear – Prophecy
8. Bon Iver – 22, A Million
9. Frank Ocean – Blonde
10. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo

Thanks to everyone who read and shared articles from 2016—and all the best for a hopeful New Year…

10 Records of 2015: Advance Base's Nephew in the Wild

This album was the soundtrack to one of the most beautiful autumns of my life, beneath the resplendent foliage of Plauen’s wide, quiet streets and sprawling Stadtwald. Like so much of Owen Ashworth’s music, it’s small-town music, but it’s the first time that I’ve ever really lived somewhere that fits this bill. Similarly to Sufjan (see previous post), Nephew in the Wild finds redemption in details, although this functions in a very different way.

In addition, as in the case of the Sufjan album, the Pitchfork review of this record really pissed me off. One line in particular: the reviewer lists the ‘hallmarks of [Ashworth’s] sound’ as ‘twinkling melodies’ and ‘sustained minor chords’, even though there are hardly any minor chords on this or any Ashworth record. It may seem like I'm being awfully pedantic here, but this is important because, for me, one of the actual hallmarks of his sound is precisely this absence of minor chords. While the use of technical jargon is by no means necessary for music criticism, it seems a little perverse for a reviewer to choose to deploy a technical term like this in such an utterly erroneous way, and I think it suggests a rather cursory engagement on their part. (Perhaps I’m just aggrieved at the Pitchfork review for employing what is now my most hated review cliché: ‘[Insert album name] feels like a logical progression from their past work’. Euuurrrgh, ban this filth!)

What Ashworth does on Nephew in the Wild, as on previous records, is deliver concise epistolary stories within a kind of ‘deadpan’ sonic medium of organs, electric pianos and drum machines. I’ve described his previous project —Casiotone for the Painfully Alone — in terms of voicemail messages, on which the cycling of major key harmonies (or ‘pre-recorded’ progressions) added to a sense of detachment, or the performative ‘withholding’ of a composed message, suggesting currents of untraceable feeling beneath. While his Advance Base songs switch similarly between first-, second- and third-person perspectives, there is a greater sense of authority in the lyrics, which tends to shift the focus from the singing voice itself onto the people it describes or addresses (with the understandable exception of Jody Weinmann’s guest vocal on ‘My Love For You Is Like A Puppy Underfoot’).

10 Records of 2015: Sufjan Stevens's Carrie & Lowell

This was a year in which a spate of overly biographical reviews nearly ruined certain records for me. As a listener, I have no interest in the actual biographies of artists. I have no interest in listening to songs about anyone’s actual parents, just like I have no interest in listening to songs about Matthew Barney or Andy Samberg. I find musicians’ biographies pretty boring anyway. A lot of them have fairly similar backgrounds and routines, and the more we obsess over their biographies in our reviews and features, the more we reduce the scope of each record to meditations on their careers, their ‘artistry’, the recording process itself: a horizon of interpretation that extends little further than the studio’s soundproofed walls.

More to the point though, I would argue that this kind of biographical listening is a doomed pursuit anyway. For example, none of the general listenership actually know Sufjan Stevens’s family, the purported subjects of Carrie & Lowell, just as none of us know Sufjan. Thankfully, we do not need to know them (or even try/pretend to know them) to understand, enjoy or value the music.

This is not to say that such records don’t play with the fictionalised biographies of fictional personas. No doubt there are parents on the record. No doubt there is a son who has lost his mother. We can listen for this son and this mother in consecutive songs and imagine their biographies in the silences between. However, this is not the real Sufjan or the real Carrie; these characters are already composites of the clues on the record (and perhaps in photos, interviews, press releases) and all the mothers and sons (perhaps our own, perhaps ourselves) that we know. Maybe, for real Sufjan, this record was an exercise in autobiography. There is still no way that this can be communicated to the listener in any meaningful way: songs are always fictions.

Words Fail Carly Rae Jepsen

I don’t read conventional music journalism/album reviews so much any more, because they increasingly drive me to despair. More and more, I perceive the insufficiency of writing when it comes to dealing with pop music. Music writing is its own genre, of course, and it can be very powerful, but it is also guilty of producing a whole load of bizarre value categories and interpretative frameworks in its desperate attempt to differentiate, define and assess musical phenomena. Most of all, I really believe that most of the dominant music review ‘narratives’ — i.e., the ways in which a review is given its own ‘literary’ structure — have very little if anything to do with how people actually listen to music.

Two recent and extensively discussed albums — Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and Ryan Adams’s 1989 — provide perfect examples of this. I have to thank my friend Georgia (@gmllgn) for alerting me to the controversies surrounding both of them; her arguments were the motivation for this post. While both album releases were their own events, reading the resulting critical reactions alongside each other proves fascinating. The Ryan Adams album is a song-for-song cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989, with each song reworked/reinterpreted in Adams’s own style. This provided some (but thankfully not all) reviewers with the opportunity to rehearse their most unreconstructed rockist arguments, about Adams finding the depth and the complexity in Swift’s superficial music, etc. etc. This is a line of argument that is quite unambiguously sexist, in 1) its arbitrary attribution of certain values (depth, complexity) to some sonic characteristics and not others, and 2) its privileging of these (usually ‘masculine’/rock) values over others (usually ‘feminine’/pop). For a round-up of such critical reactions and analysis of their problematic aspects, Anna Leszkiewicz’s article ‘Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift’, in The New Statesman, says it all.

Adams’s project, like any white indie guy’s appropriation and ‘authentication’ of a female pop artist’s music to make it palatable for his own earnest white male audience, was quite straightforwardly sexist, even before the critics weighed in. The case of E•MO•TION is far more complicated. It is, of course, an incredible album, with brilliant pop song after brilliant pop song, no filler. It is even better than 1989 (the original). And yet it has proven near impossible for some critics to write about. I am mainly talking here about the review by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (that Georgia discusses, below) and the eerily similar review by Corban Goble in Pitchfork.

Some recommended reading...

1)1)1)

Check out this Guardian interview with The Knife, getting all politisch
-::---

There's a narrative that culture or music should not have to do with politics. We are learned all the time to not think, and that of course comes through in many cultural workers. But I believe that it's in the music where you can really try out political alternatives and utopias. I have many friends who play around with these issues in their music – Planningtorock, for example, is doing that in really exciting ways – but the kind of vocabulary used around these artists is that it's pretentious or the production is not good enough. And that makes me think more about who is writing those things. (Olof Dreijer)

or how about:

We are constructed to like certain things... We've been teaching a bit at this summer camp for teenage girls who want to make electronic music, and there we often talk about this idea of quality in music and what informs our ideas of what is supposed to be good and bad music. You know that music history is written by privileged white men, so we can ask ourselves how important it is to repeat their ideas. (Olof Dreijer)

Read the full interview HERE (ignoring the snarky, reactionary commentary from the interviewer), and get excited for Shaking the Habitual on April 8th.

2)2)2)

More importantly though, this fabulous essay from n+1 magazine (Jan 2012), by Richard Beck, wryly styled as a 'review of Pitchfork' (he gives them 5.4 out of 10). 

2012: The Year in Musical Disappointments

2012 was a frustrating kind of musical year for The Night Mail. Despite the fact that there were significant new releases from practically all of my super-official, fantasy-league, pantheon artists* (including my two hyper-ultra-official, gun-to-my-head favourite bands**), it was actually a pretty disappointing year for music. Or maybe it was because of that fact. There's nothing quite so conducive to disappointment as looking forward to things.

For one thing, I didn’t really latch onto any earth-shattering new artists or stylistic ideas, and - while admittedly this might be due to some personal critical oversight on my part - skimming over the various ‘End of Year’ lists on my most trusted blogs and webzines would suggest that my own awareness of the year’s hypees wasn’t too far removed from that of the broader blogosphere hegemony.

For another thing (strike two), 'Call Me Maybe' aside, it was an incredibly bad year for proper pop too. It's a good indication of the state of affairs when learning the 'Gangnam Style' dance becomes a significant plot thread on Glee. (Notes for a future thesis: Arguably the success of the first two seasons of Glee had a lot to do with the quality of the chart pop circulating at the time. To some extent, the requirement to include hit songs has a determining factor on the direction of the plot and the nature and affective quality of the musico-dramatic set-pieces available to the writers. Glee has been crap all year, go figure.)

On Aesthetic Imagination

Enjoyed this article, which touches on the kind of thing that I've ended up writing about quite a lot here:

READ READ READ

The writer explores the distinction between what he calls the 'aesthetic imagination' of pop on the one hand and indie on the other. In doing so, he touches on the depth to which signifying styles and tropes are expected to permeate musical and visual personas in each culture, and how far an artist's 'theatricality' can extend before appearing 'inauthentic'...

Some heartening notions...

I try more and more to view art and culture, as a whole, with as much optimism as I can muster. It isn't hard at the moment, because I genuinely think that pop music has never been better (and the same could be said for cinema and television). There are various lines of cynicism that it can seem easy to subscribe to, but when I start to become more cynical about contemporary culture, then I will know that I am old. Meanwhile, here are some nice (alphabetised) quotations from Pitchfork's column, Poptimist (by Tom Ewing), which present a more upbeat take on some familiar moans:

'B is for Bloghouse: And Bleep, Broken Beat, Bassline... the proliferation of electronic microgenres seems to truly rile some people, who assume any differences are barely detectable. In fact these taxonomies are vital for tracking shifts in the bigger pictures: ways of telling stories about scenes which are often still doggedly star-free. Besides which, they're so much fun-- each one the light-trail of an idea being tested and refined in public.'