Return of the son of last week's comment thread

Not to get too incestuous on this blog, but I sorta did promise to return to a certain discussion from last week. You know, the one that cropped up in this post, but simultaneously seemed to cry out for its own space.

Quick summary: it's basically a version of the old "recorded music vs. live music" debate. Mr. G and Steve smartly posited the superiority of the latter, while I attempted to argue for the value of both. (Apologies if I am misrepresenting.)

In an effort to get right back into that moment, and to cut off this damned preamble before it goes too far, can we just pretend that what follows is a natural extension of the previous comment thread?

Mr. G: I think it behooves us as musicians to remind folk how canned music is to music as canned peaches are to peaches, and they should re-gain the ears to hear that, and thus demand live music.

Durkin: Again, I'm a big fan of live music, and I agree we need to find ways to increase its presence in the world. But canned music is not to music as canned peaches are to peaches. "Canned music" (if we must call it that) is to music as apples are to oranges.

If, when listening to recorded music, your main question is, "How much does this sound like live music?" then of course you are in for disappointment. It's the wrong question to ask. The authenticity battle is a battle that engineers can never win (and so sound system ads that tout verisimilitude are disingenuous).

Which, by the way, is not to say that live music has a more convincing prior claim on authenticity. What seat do you have to be sitting in to get the "real" symphony? Which concert hall? Which orchestra and conductor does it have to be? What edition of the score should be used? What state of mind do you have to be in? What time of day does it have to be?

It's no disrespect to live music to wonder these things. But that's the problem with the "live" vs. "recorded" debate: we harbor all kinds of anxieties about "technology" (defined pretty narrowly), and so recorded music is regularly scrutinized to see if it passes the "real thing" test, and found wanting because it doesn't. Live music, we assume, is just "music" -- pure, unmediated, undifferentiated, and never filtered by the acoustic idiosyncrasies of the context in which it is heard, or even by the physical and/or psychological biases of its listeners! (Huh?)

Mr. G: As musicians we need to remember that Mintons was Monk, it was a place, it was the place and it was made special by the presence of the living Monk. Place the best Japanese Import LP in a glass case, it just ain't the same. The place is where the living music happened.

Durkin: Sure. But my childhood bedroom, where I spent long hours listening to music on headphones, deep into the night, was also a place. The music I discovered there sure felt alive to me. That's a testament to the records that were involved (many of which I wouldn't really understand until later) -- because with most of them the possibility of ever experiencing their content as actual "living music" had long past.

Mr. G: if music was simply wiggly air, then sound systems would work. What you and I hear, as musicians, is different than what the average person hears because you and I colour what we hear with prior experience. In other words, we imagine most of what we hear on records because we know what it really sounds like. Thus I can listen to old cylinder and victrola recordings and get really excited about the composition and musicianship, whereas everyone I have ever lived near (save a few, musicians all of them) will say "Turn Off That Noise!"

Durkin: Yes, as musicians we fill in a lot of the details when we listen to recordings (though see above reference to records I loved but didn't understand when I first heard them). However, many recordings have a beautiful sound unto themselves. Cylinder recordings are a pretty extreme counterexample, of course, but, for instance, I adore the creepy sound of the original 1928 version of "The Mooche" ("squashed" and "noisy" though it is by modern standards). In fact, I don't think I have ever heard a version I like better. In such cases (and there are many of them) the recorded sound is, for all intents and purposes, a compositional gesture.



More broadly, the recording studio, and recording technology in general -- as the "techno kids" you rightly admire know full well -- is just another instrument. It's a machine that produces sound, just like a trumpet, or an accordion, or a kazoo...

Mr. G: If it is all just filtered sound, everyone should be used to it, like how they all see circles where the eyes nearly always see ellipses, it needn't be a learned thing. Everyone has heard sound filtered through doors, through hats, through distorter muffs of all sorts, yet you play a soundsystem in a subway, you get sneers, you play a guitar, you get smiles. You play a brassband record out your shop window, you get nada, but the Hypnotic Brass plays a street corner and people (who cannot see them) swerve from blocks away to investigate the marvelous 'sound'.

Durkin: This seems to me to be a pretty broad generalization. I have personal experience with friends playing guitars in subways, only to be met with rolling eyes, and then to be escorted out a few minutes later by cops who certainly weren't smiling. And anyone who has been to a discotheque, or a rave, or any other environment that is driven by DJs and sound systems (and the cultures that surround them), knows that whatever "sneering" happens in those contexts is typically unrelated the source of the music.

Both recorded and live music are filtered, inevitably. And so they will remain -- at least until we figure out a way to beam songs directly into each other's brains.

[Photo credit: Eva101]

We tweeted about it

Last night's dialogue started off in reference to a comment the great Gunther Schuller made in this interview (which you should also read):

uglyrug G. Schuller: "I wanted to write music that is not written in any way to entertain someone, even though I hope it will be entertaining." Huh?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug he hoped people would enjoy his music but didn't try to write likeable music. He hoped the audience would elevate to appreciate it

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But how could he expect people to enjoy it if it wasn't likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He didn't TRY to make it likeable. He wrote what he wanted and HOPED people would like the result. It's a fine line.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug His process wasn't cluttered with concern for audience reaction. But like all composers he wanted his music to be liked.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But if he wanted it to be likeable... why didn't he try to make it likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He hoped it would be liked but he didn't want to inadvertently censor himself to be liked. He wanted to bring his audience to him.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Is trying to make something that is likeable the same thing as being inauthentic, then?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug No. Different folks have different concepts. I have a tendency to simplify thing because I am in a Univ. setting and want it played

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I have to remind myself to write what I intend to write regardless of playability or audience reaction.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But surely, on some level, you "intend" for some % of the audience to like it? Even if that % is only you, the composer?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug BTW, this is hard to do in 130 character bursts!!!

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Yeah! I'm trying to do it while watching the news. (BTW, Olbermann quote (on Palin): "Twitter rhymes with quitter.")

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I do try to write things I'd like but sometimes it's about writing what's in your head. Good line from Olbermann, BTW.

kctiner @uglyrug @jimmuscomp you guys are cracking me up.

uglyrug @kctiner @jimmuscomp Yeah, that was fun.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug @kctiner that was fun. Now on the road back to Bak-O. Boo-hoo.

Who says twitter is good for nothing?

Why I hate blog posts about hating things

Well, actually, I don't, not really. I kind of dig them, actually, because they provoke discussions, and discussions are good. (I do, however, hate the idea that blog posts should be considered "definitive documents" of a writer's state of mind. For the record, much of what I write here (and in comments at other people's blogs) is a reflection of a thought process, not always a conclusive position. (I am large, I contain multitudes.))

Anyway, here's one post, and here's another, that prompted some unplanned fireworks over the weekend. I added my own commentary at that last link, but as usual, I can't let the shit go, so I wanted to throw in one or two more thoughts here on my home turf.

First is a bit that I discovered in the course of following up, for my own edification, on the subject of female jazz critics. Serendipitously, it serves to unite that subject with the "precision" meme stirred up by Matt Rubin's "Why I Hate Big Bands" post. It is contained in this excerpt from a book I haven't yet read, John Gennari's Blowin' Hot and Cool:

From the violent gangster milieu of jazz's early sporting life environs; to the urbane, stylized machismo of the jazz-inflected New Frontier; to Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch's tendentious feminization of the 1960s counterculture; jazz culture has been dominated by masculinist voices and sensibilities. I've noted in this book several important instances in which male critics have buttressed their masculinist authority by distancing themselves from sentimental attachments to the popular music of their youth. This feeds a larger pattern in which jazz's reputed high art autonomy and profundity are complemented by a concept of criticism that stresses taut discipline, rationality, and judiciousness -- qualities assumed to be part of a masculine intellectual seriousness set off from the infantilized and feminized emotional realm of mass popular culture.

I'm not sure I agree with these assessments totally, but I think Gennari is at least productively interested in the "why" question (i.e., why are there so few female jazz critics?) in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. So now I have to read his book, I guess.

(Gennari also reminded me of Helen Oakley Dance, an early glass-ceiling-breaker. I actually read a bit of her work in grad school, and am duly chagrined about my subsequent oversight.)

Also: I was very flattered that James Hirschfeld brought up the infernal Industrial Jazz Group as an instance of an "imprecise" big band (James' comment can also be found at Darcy's post, linked above).

Here is how I hinted at our ensemble concept in one of my posts about our European tour (May 2007):

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of our portion of the evening (confirmed later when I started working my way through the recording) was the emergence of a unified looseness in the group sound. In the past I have generally aimed for precision when it came to the execution of my written charts. I have tended to shy away from recording the band's live performances, because I was always concerned with things staying as "close to the ink" as possible... and the ink is, well, difficult to execute. But I have never subscribed to the "benevolent dictator" model of the composer-conductor, and I think everyone in the band has known that, and with this show there was a strange transmogrification of the set, in that the majority of the players knew the music well enough to be able to play it as if it were all improvised. In other words, the group as a whole started to develop some of the suppleness -- in terms of well-placed and judicious interpretive liberties that never sacrificed the cohesion of a given piece -- that is usually only possible in a smaller configuration (a quartet or quintet, say). They owned the music -- an exceedingly difficult thing to do in a big band setting. Once again, my hat is off to the cats involved: I am humbled and in awe.

"Unified looseness," "well-placed and judicious interpretive liberties that never sacrifice the cohesion of a given piece," and playing the music "as if it were all improvised": still a pretty accurate description of what we do.

Possibly related: with the IJG, I have long been after what Ben Watson, in describing Zappa's early Mothers recordings, called "pachuco charm." Sort of punk, and sort of big band, all at once.

Having a thing

Speaking of rituals of validation, Google Reader just handed me this interesting post by east-coast trumpeter Jason Palmer. It touches on the time-honored critical use of the word "voice" (usually paired with the word "original") as a way of praising (or conferring worth on) a given work.

The (or my) question is: nowadays, how does one recognize such a thing?

I frequently read album reviews of artists that are in my generation (25-35). Many of the writers proclaim that the artist doesn’t quite have their own “voice” or that the artist is still in the process of finding his/her own “voice”. Whenever I read a statement like this I can’t help but wonder if the writer were to put the record on repeat and listen to it all day, day in and day out (no one I know has time for this, but you know what I mean), would that artist then have their own “voice” in the view of the writer’s mind’s ear?

Good question. Is the ability to recognize a musical voice (particularly a "new" and / or "original" voice) akin to the process of learning a new language? Does it involve, you know, hard work?

That "no one I know has time for this" is actually pretty important. I strongly suspect that if you factor in whatever gets counted as "indie" (and maybe even if you don't), there is much more recorded music being produced today than, say, forty years ago. Who has time to listen to it all? And yet, if you can't listen to it all, how do you know what an original voice is? ("Original voice" would have to be defined in the context of "all recorded music," no?)

For me, it is all related to definitions of "listening." I have read about critics dismissing a disc after two or three spins in the car. Huh? Have they really heard the thing? I realize, of course, that this is a strategy for making the review glut more manageable -- as the review copies start to pile up, one reaches for any excuse to cross an item off the list, and thus get closer to a feeling of "critical mastery" (a pretty elusive feeling in this day and age). But come on! Some of my current favorite recordings have taken weeks (or even months) for me to warm up to -- time that involved listening in different contexts, and usually (at some point) setting aside an evening for deep listening with headphones.

(Which is not to say that there isn't some music that I pretty much know on first listen is never really gonna resonate with me.)

In the long run we want to be remembered for having our own “thing”. I’ve heard some say that the age of obtaining a personal unique style of improvising [or composing?] in jazz is gone. I don’t really agree with that assessment [...]

Me neither. But I do wonder if it is getting harder to recognize "a thing" when we hear it.

I should just shut my mouth

But sometimes I go on a commenting spree. Totally uncalled for, I know. I'm sorry!

Here's today's. The "critic" referred to herein is a radio listener who complained loudly to a jazz DJ who dared to play a Steely Dan song. Oy!

Music (one of the most social art forms if you ask me) thrives on cross-pollination and hybridization. What we call “American music” today would not exist if previous advocates of musical purity had had their way. I suspect that, a hundred years ago, your critic would have most likely been working to *prevent the development of jazz in the first place*. Oh, the irony!

Often people who take the purist view feel they are defending something that is in danger of disappearing. So your critic may be worried that “traditional” or “classic” jazz is dying, and that a DJ’s gesture of eclecticism (whatever its motivation) only makes that death more imminent. However, with our increasingly niche-driven culture, in which digital technology and social networking make it possible for fans of even the most obscure art form to connect and celebrate it, this seems to me to be a less and less sustainable argument. Sure, there may never be as many “pure” jazz fans as there are Steely Dan fans (though who knows?), but the audience for the former will never disappear.

Peeling away the layers, I personally think your critic’s comments have very little to do with music per se. He / she has gone way beyond simply marveling at the wonderful variety of human taste, and being mildly inconvenienced by that variety for a few minutes. Instead, he / she seems driven by a (alas, very human) need to proclaim membership in a given club. It almost doesn’t matter what the club is *for*…

In response to this post.

Whee!

Things I'm trying to reconcile

1. My sense that the Internet, in its many manifestations, is the structural element / organizing principle of the still-emerging 21st century music economy, and that "winning at the internet" is a key technique for making a living with your own music,

and

2. My sense that Internet addiction is a real phenomenon, with real negative physical and psychological consequences.

Ugh.

Halloween in February

In an effort to buffer some of the stressful politics-oriented reading I've been doing lately, I decided to start making my way through Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia today. Bad idea:

Dwight Mamlok was a cultivated man of seventy-five with mild high-frequency deafness who came to see me in 1999. He told me how he had first started to "hear music" -- very loud and in minute detail -- ten years earlier, on a flight from New York to California. It seemed to have been stimulated by the drone of the plane engine [...] and, indeed, the music ceased when he got off the plane. [...] The pattern changed when he flew to California in the summer of 1999, for this time the music continued when he got off the plane. It had been going on almost nonstop for three months when he first came to see me. [...]

When I asked Mr. Mamlok what his internal music was like, he exclaimed, angrily, that it was "tonal" and "corny." I found this choice of adjectives intriguing and asked him why he used them. His wife, he explained, was a composer of atonal music, and his own tastes were for Schoenberg and other atonal masters, though he was fond of classical and, especially, chamber music, too. But the music he hallucinated was nothing like this. It started, he said, with a German Christmas song (he immediately hummed this) and then other Christmas songs and lullabies; these were followed by marches, especially the Nazi marching songs he had heard growing up in Hamburg in the 1930s. These songs were particularly distressing to him, for he was Jewish and had lived in the terror of the Hitlerjugend, the belligerent gangs who had roamed the streets looking for Jews [pp. 60-62]

Certainly not the first time I've ever heard of the weird things the mind's ear can do as it ages (or responds to injury) -- but it spooked me all the same.

This is actually a fascinating book -- if I get my shit together at some point I'll write a more detailed commentary.

Part v. whole

The always-astute Seth Godin hits upon one of the issues facing those of us who work in genres (like jazz composition) that depend upon the development of an idea, as much as the quality of that idea:

The web has become a giant highlights reel... [...] We can skim really fast now. [...] As consumers of information, though, I wonder if the best parts are really the best parts. [...] the parts you miss are there for a reason.

Real change is rarely caused by the good parts. Real change and impact and joy come from the foundation and the transitions and the little messages that sneak in when you least expect them. The highlights of the baseball game are highlights largely because the rest of the game got you ready for them.

Oh, the irony! Did you notice how I highlighted key quotes from a post about the dangers of highlighting?

But it's true, and he's right. One of the, oh, I dunno, 5 million reasons I adore Frank Zappa is that he understood there was a certain aesthetic value in, well, momentary boredom, and that sometimes you have to let dumb shit happen on tape for a little bit in order to make the beautiful sections of an album really stand out.

The web, for all its potential as a tool for focusing our attention on the specifics of something (I guess "cropping" would be the main metaphor here), is also a deep hit of short-term gratification (cue Louis CK noting how quickly impatience can morph into ingratitude).

To put all that another way: for independent musicians, it's great how sites like CD Baby and eMusic offer browsing customers an opportunity to hear 2 minute clips before actually purchasing an album. But honestly -- how would you go about selecting a representative 2 minute clip from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Or Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"?

I guess it's karma

Just learned of the latest LEEF review, by Brad Glanden (published yesterday in AAJ). Not gonna quote the whole thing here, but there are some bits that are turning my face various shades of I'm-not-worthy-red. Among them:

It's difficult to fathom a universe where someone would not enjoy listening to LEEF.

Durkin could be writing great pop-rock if only he had a narrower instrumental imagination.

”The Job Song” will offer laughs to anyone who has pursued an artistic career against the financial advice of parents, teachers, and -- Satan? The moral is that doing what one loves yields rewards far greater than monetary ones; the song proves its own thesis beautifully [...]

Durkin is the Conan O'Brien of jazz, joking about the band's alleged lack of appeal when so much evidence exists to the contrary [...]

So this seems a fitting rebuttal to my ornery and totally uncalled for outburst about a single bad review (from a guy who was probably just trying to do his best, and who probably had no idea his quickly-dashed-off words were going to be responded to with such precious hand-wringing).

What's to complain about when clearly there are some folks who are into what we're doing?

Say it ain't so

(Photo: "Art Shock" by eliazar.)

Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news.

The good news:

The IJG tune "PDX LIX LAX" made it to the second round of judging at the fan-driven site Garageband.com. That's farther than any of our tunes have gotten on GB previously -- and with any luck, "PDX" is not finished yet. Cool!

The bad news:

Today we got the following review from a Garageband user (who shall remain nameless).

This is a bad joke -- right?

This is great for circus clowns or grade 'B' comedians. Can you play all of these notes again in the same sequence? Pretty good musicians but very poor composing on this piece. The discordant sections do not belong. The rest might due [sic] for a Disney soundtrack.

This fella also had the good sense to give "PDX" a "Stupidest Song I've Ever Heard" award.

Hot diggity!

I'm not going for a petulant frenzy here, I swear. Mostly I think the review is funny.

Okay, maybe it did piss me off just a wee little bit at first (I'm only human). But, honestly... mostly I think it's funny. What other response can I have?

One of the many interesting conversations I had with Evan Francis on the way down to LA from Oakland last March (pre-tour) was on the subject of the surprise we both feel when we come across people who are shocked by musical "noise" or "atonality" or "dissonance" (not that those are all strictly identical). It's easy for fools like us, who dabble in such things all the time, to forget that our choice to do so can actually still be "radical" or "offensive" to some people.

And maybe that's not as big a deal as it initially seems. I mean, it's all well and good for me to roll my eyes every time I hear the sort of smooth-jazz-and-funk-derived stuff that is kicking our ass on Garageband right now. But honestly, where would I (or folks like me) be without that consonant norm to buck up against? Of course, that works both ways. How else can insistently sweet stuff make "sense" (even to its most avid fans) except in the context of a sound-world that is constantly threatening to descend into harmonic strangeness?

So maybe I owe this reviewer a big thank you, because he got me thinking about one of my dear old favorite issues: perception.

For me, art is an expectations game. There's plenty of music I enjoy (and / or love) because it more or less fulfills a certain expectation -- it's like satisfying a craving for hummus. I've eaten hummus before, I know what it tastes like, and sometimes I just want to replicate that taste experience. There are subtle variations in the formula -- different brands, different flavors. But once you know what hummus tastes like, the pleasure of eating it doesn't come from surprise, per se.

Two other things. First: I only want so much hummus. And second: I can remember how much I enjoyed the first hummus I ever tasted.

In other words (dropping the food metaphor now), what really drives my listening, what keeps me constantly hunting down new bands and artists and composers, is not necessarily a desire to find more variations of the stuff I already know I like (that's more of a nice fringe benefit), but to re-experience the kind of astonishment I felt the first time I heard, say, "Struttin' With Some Barbecue." Astonishment, for me, is a weird combination of surprise, disorientation, and potential-for-growth, and it accompanies the discovery of something I don't immediately recognize, and something I don't immediately understand (I try not to confuse not understanding something with not liking it). It's easy to forget that astonishment is psychically important (the human nervous system ceases to perceive phenomena that do not change), and that love and astonishment are not the same thing.

Maybe true astonishment happens less and less as you get older, and maybe the quest for it is an idealistic pipe-dream. But for me, it's still the aesthetic bottom line. It's the thing to shoot for as an artist.

And, for what it's worth, your chances of being astonishing are probably inversely related to how reliably you can play "all of these notes again in the same sequence."

(Whoops! I said I wasn't going to be petulant, didn't I? Sorry.)

Kiss me, I'm Irish

- Brother Jimmy, said Joey the Lips. - I'm worried. - About Dean.

- Wha' abou' Dean?

- He told me he's been listening to jazz.

- What's wrong with tha'? Jimmy wanted to know.

- Everything, said Joey the Lips. - Jazz is the antithesis of soul.

- I beg your fuckin' pardon!

- I'll go along with Joey there, said Mickah.

- See, said Joey the Lips. - Soul is the people's music. Ordinary people making music for ordinary people. - Simple music. Any Brother can play it. The Motown sound, it's simple. Thump-thump-thump-thump. - That's straight time. Thump-thump-thump-thump. - See? Soul is democratic, Jimmy. Anyone with a bin lid can play it. - It's the people's music.

- Yeh don't need anny honours in your Inter to play soul, isn't tha' wha' you're gettin' at, Joey?

- That's right, brother Michael.

- Mickah.

- Brother Mickah. That's right. You don't need a doctorate to be a doctor of soul.

- Nice one.

- An' what's wrong with jazz? Jimmy asked.

- Intellectual music, said Joey the Lips. - It's anti-people music. It's abstract.

- It's cold an' emotionless, amn't I righ'? said Mickah.

- You are. - It's got no soul. It is sound for the sake of sound. It has no meaning. - It's musical wanking, Brother.

- Musical wankin', said Mickah. - That's good.

- Here, yeh could play tha' at the Christmas parties.

- Instead o' musical chairs.

--Roddy Doyle, The Commitments

Oh feck. Happy Lá Fhéile Pádraig, my lovely, oft-poor, oft-fun, oft-misguided people. (Hey, I can say that.)

An addendum on taste

I've been pondering, on and off, further ramifications of Carl Wilson's investigation of taste -- which I first pondered here.

(We're all about further ramifications here at JTMOUE.)

Still haven't actually gotten to the book yet.

(We're all about overscheduling here at JTMOUE.)

But check this out: bass wizard Steve Lawson recently had a cool post about a cool post about a cool post (see how this Internet thing works?), and all three tie into this topic nicely.

An excerpt from the primary document (the context is an experiment in which the trajectory of a given song's popularity could be "rewound" and tested numerous times):

In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs -- and the bottom ones -- were completely different.

For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit.

"In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says.

Why?

Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. And who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

How many of us are willing to admit that that beautiful tune we hold so dear, that authentic expression of heartfelt artistry, that potent signifier of some significant event in our lives, may actually be something we have (at least in part) been conditioned to love?

There is a lot of writing about musical likes and dislikes as if they are scientific, subject to the play of immutable laws (most musical analysis-based criticism takes this tack -- which of course is fine as far as it goes). But what if musical taste is actually a very complex kind of choice?

What if our record collections are full of things we (again, at least in part) decide to like because it suits some larger agenda about who we think we are or who we want to be?

These are silly questions, I know. I'm in a silly mood.

A terrific plumber

It's late, but I just found out about this Carl Wilson book -- (ostensibly) about Celine Dion -- which came out in December. I haven't read it yet, but after discovering this Crawdaddy interview (c/o John Mark), I really really really want to.

A few posts back, I hinted at my own internal dialogue on the question of taste (check down in the comments of this post). I swear I haven't been out searching for a book that expertly sinks its teeth into this complex issue -- no time -- but apparently I just found it.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Celine presents some special qualities: everyone agrees that what she does is at a high level of musical accomplishment, for instance, no matter how much they dislike her, so that combination was striking to me; it raises a particular puzzle. (How can music be at once good and no good? What does the word "good" really mean?)

(These are apposite questions, but I feel I should interject that there are probably few music fans who would argue that "good" means "played with technical skill." (Maybe the real question is "what is technical skill"?) It's nice when interesting musical ideas can be combined with sophisticated physical execution -- but sometimes interesting ideas don't even need that. And sometimes something as hard-to-define as attitude trumps both the quality of the ideas and the execution.)

Most of all, though, as I say in the book, I think I had more of a personal grudge against Celine, and that edge made the project more compelling to me: why did she piss me off so much?

Yes. That is a really brave question for a critic to ask.

Maybe related: in grad school I came to the conclusion that it is impossible for a writer to achieve true objectivity when discussing art -- and the simulacra of objectivity that many writers actually attained was easily confused with boredom. When it comes to music criticism, I have always preferred writers who emphasize their subjectivity (see Lester Bangs, f'r'instance) -- including their failings and idiosyncracies. That way, I feel like I at least become aware of a specific context in which a given work succeeds or fails. And learning about the contexts for art is almost as important as learning about art itself. I guess.

Crawdaddy!: In your exercise to try to change your own taste, did you come any closer to being able to define what taste is, or how we develop our sense of taste? You quote the poet Paul Valéry, who wrote: "Tastes are composed of a thousand distastes." At the end of this experiment, do you agree with that?

Wilson: I think that tastes are composed of a thousand misunderstandings. And about half of those are wonderful misunderstandings, in which someone's imperfect expression of their sense of what it's like to be alive manages to squish itself into the tunnels of our own sense of what it's like to be alive, and we mistake their experience for ours, because music and pictures and words and so on have the power to simulate the experience of other minds, even though I suspect we're never really hearing what the maker thinks we're hearing. It's like taking things the wrong way the right way.

An interesting analysis, to say the least. And it raises the question of whether "communication" -- at least as it's understood within a language-based framework -- ever really happens in music. To put it another way: is "musical meaning" possible? (And if so, what is it? And if not, how do we determine musical "value"?)

And the other half of those are lousy misunderstandings, in which we take things the wrong way the wrong way, and imagine that another set of music and pictures and words represents an assault against us, that it's the manifestation of everything that makes our lives difficult. It has to do with how much code we share with the makers, to some degree, but also what pleasure we respect and what pleasure we don't. All artists, good or bad, are trying to build little machines that express meaning and give pleasure. What I've discovered, I think, is that this is very seldom done in bad faith -- or that, at least, whether it's in good faith or bad faith is generally irrelevant to our liking for it. I think Celine makes her music in as much good faith as, say, Ghostface Killah does. That I like what Ghostface does and not so much what Celine does has to do with a lot of social meaning and positioning that is implied by the trappings around each of them, and maybe with how successfully and creatively they do it, but it doesn't imply that there are bad intentions behind one and not the other. Maybe Ghostface is in his room laughing at his fans' gullibility. I'll never know. So taste is not moral in the way that much of the discourse around it implies. Art is always manipulative and taste is always a choice of collusions.

I do think that when you like something for being "not like" the mainstream, for being "not like" what people you don't like prefer, you're playing a status game and thinking very shallowly about art.

I love that metaphor of artists building "little machines that express meaning and give pleasure" -- though with all the "misunderstanding" referenced above, one wonders, again, how much meaning is really conveyed. (My own trajectory as an artist -- over the last ten years or so -- has been very much about becoming as interested in musical pleasure as I used to be solely in musical meaning.)

Amen as well to the bit about intentions. I guess we're into the issue of morality here; but if intentions don't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the music, is "bad music" immoral? (Sometimes it sure feels like it is...)

Obviously I'm asking a lot of pompous, over-broad questions tonight. Sorry.

Anyway, if not intentions, then what about context (again)?

However, we're all aware that we need to be decent to people we don't necessarily love; that we don't need to love everyone in order to respect them. So I think what the book calls for is a bit of a renewal of the golden rule on an aesthetic level: you can say Rascal Flatts aren't your cup of tea, but you can still think, well, they're beloved of a lot of people who'd probably be extremely nice to me if I came into their house for dinner. And if we were eating some fried chicken and peas and chatting and they put on a Rascal Flatts record, maybe I'd have fun listening to it while I was talking to them. So there's a tone of contempt that we adopt about what we consider inferior music that I think is contextual: "This music doesn't make sense within my life." And maybe that does mean it's second-rate, or maybe it means that it'd be first-rate within another kind of life. The background sense that what we're debating is ways of living might make us slow down a bit in our snap judgments. It's probably not a way any of us can think all of the time, but like any sort of moral thinking, it can be a check upon our worst instincts.

So musical taste is a kind of social tool that can be used (to connect) or abused (to discriminate and divide)?

Note how the "digital revolution" has a tendency to make the social context of music much more visible than it has ever been. Aside from the obvious example of the blogosphere (where people are constantly confessing and sharing their tastes), software like iTunes (f'r'instance) keeps a running tab on the number of times a listener has played a given song -- and that history can then be recorded into a last.fm or Mog.com account (say), where it goes on display for anyone who wants to view it. Genres may split and subdivide, but, more and more, patterns of taste are represented, albeit imperfectly.

I ended up feeling that this is where criticism needs to go, really; that arid and witty dissections of culture aren't what I want to read —- whether it's reportage or reflection, I want to hear about what life is like for other people, and art is a vehicle for that exchange. It's more than just that, of course: I like to read technical and historical analyses, too. But critics who are merely trying to fix a numerical value to artworks, like a Consumer's Report on car tires, only help to kill the whole enterprise. (Although that ratings game can be a good subterfuge, the way that someone like Robert Christgau uses it as bait on his intellectual hook.)

I remember too many things about high school, but one of the less-pleasant memories is of watching a fellow student getting cut down (verbally, of course) by a peer, over the fact that the former was wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. At hand was a question of whether the LZ-garbed student was an "authentic fan" of the band -- or whether he was wearing the shirt simply because he wanted to be perceived as such (so as to garner whatever dubious status that might earn him). You know, the whole "poser" debate.

Is the state of music criticism an example of the high school status dynamic writ large? A culture of "one-upsmanship"?

Related questions, none of which are new: why does music (more obviously, I think, than, say, dancing, or visual art, or literature) help to mark social status? Why is it so essential to identity?

Crawdaddy!: Was the book an outgrowth of wanting to become more democratic in your taste, or did writing the book cause you to become more democratic in your taste?

Wilson: Both. Mainly it was a concentrated period of trying to figure out what "democratic" means. I think it's a glorious paradox. It doesn't mean populism and majority rule. It means something closer to being vulnerable enough, brave enough, to listen to other people without interrupting. And then to give your own point of view just as patiently. It means looking for the lucky misunderstandings and not losing your head over the injurious ones.

Ah -- patience! What a beautiful concept.