Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3t3ua68Qg

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."  — Brian Eno

This is a song in which something terrible has happened.

Saturday Come Slow — Massive Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnE8dxbonDQ

Massive Attack has this wonderful control over their tone and timbre — they are a band that could make me believe in magic, I think. It's hyperbole, but it's all I've got to describe the sound, immersive and full of quiet, subtle power, bass and strings and swells and releases. The lyrics are a mystery, unpredictable and full, warm and cool and breathless, about things bigger and more important that human love and hate, and yet inextricably tied to them. I love it so much, but I don't know what it's about. The lyrics are poetry, to be felt and heard, not understood.

Skinny Love — Bon Iver

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdgFoHLwnk

I don't care about the lore around this album. Well, obviously I must, I'm talking about it. Legend has it that Bon Iver, following a breakup (what a perfect origin story for a teenage indie idol) sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods in upstate somewhere, chopping wood and hunting for food and recording a slow, delicate album of emotional betrayal. Isn't that perfect wish-fulfillment? Isn't that just masturbatory? Except that it's true — Justin Vernon, sick with mono recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in a cabin in Medford, Wisconsin.

Which makes it worse.

I love this song on a musical level — it's well-recorded and well-sung and the lyrics are fine and expressive and hardly whiny — the instrumentation is powerful and shiny, drab as it needs to be; he does a whole lot, and he's the only one on the record, multitracked into oblivion. It is great music.

But I don't like to listen to it. Where I am in my life, I need to use prescriptive music, not descriptive music. I've written about it twice, here and here. Perhaps I should make it clearer.

Descriptive music is music to listen to that shows how you feel. If you're happy, listen to happy music. If you're sad, dig your teeth in and listen to sad music. It feels great to be mad as hell and listen to punk music, or to feel confused and listen to strange muddled pop, or to be sleepy and listen to quiet, slow music. And, for the most part, this is fine.

Except that, when I'm sad or angry, I don't want to feel that way for very long. It's not a great feeling, and I don't want to keep it. So there's Prescriptive music, music designed to transition you from one state to another. Music that is a vector, pointing firm towards one headspace. And this song isn't that.

Which is no fault of its own. But it's why I stopped listening.

Lovecraft in Brooklyn — The Mountain Goats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHgZRGLgo0

The second Mountain Goats I ever heard, and the first I ever heard knowingly. A school play used Your Belgian Things in a scene, and I remember it vividly, but it doesn't count. This song was a song I heard of choice, knowingly and in full control; and yet the song takes so much of that away. This is a song I like and understand and relate to, despite its inherent refusal to be understood and related to.

In short, it is a man in Brooklyn for whom Lovecraftian Horror is at first a metaphor for, and then a real description of, his personal anxieties. It plays a bait-and-switch; what is first analogy becomes very real; the music goes buck wild, flailing and screaming and whining as the ocean rises over his head, crossing galaxies to tie the incoming alien invasion of winged monster-demons to the man's own fear at walking on the street, or having people over for dinner, or ordering coffee. And, as such, of course I'd love it.

Kate — Ben Folds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7BUG8LOd8A

I've written before about Ben Folds; once overwhelmingly positively, and once less so. This song, Kate, is less tainted for me, so to speak. It's not as emotionally immature. If we move past the idea that it's a 31-year-old man (well, at the time) singing about having a crush, it spoke directly to me when I listened to it in 2009, nearly twelve years later. Scary to think it's been four years.

I could talk musically about this — it has some funny tricks with counterpoint and meter; a rhythm section with cowbell I really like; fuzzy guitar and sharp high piano; call-and-response; harmonies and dynamics, clever composition and clever arrangement. But I'm afraid on re-listen it doesn't hold up for me — the lyrics seem shallow, in comparison. Perhaps it's because everything I've listened to after (with the exception of Maroon 5, maybe) has been more lyrically complex (look at any of the other songs on this site). But I think Ben Folds knows about this weakness.

One of my favorite albums of all time, without exception, is his fake leak to Way to Normal. The story goes, he decided on a whim to record a fake version of the album with the same track names but different, terrible music and lyrics, and release it for free as a leak of the real thing on torrent sites. His band got together and recorded the album in a few hours — the lyrics are dumb and repetitive and sung with the voice and intentions of a middle-schooler; the music is simple and poppy and dumb. But somehow it all comes together to be satisfying in the way that only pop can be — he screams and simpers and the piano is dumber and poppier than ever, but it's hilarious and poignant and a good reminder of what it's like to be in middle school, where that sort of feeling seemed like all there was.

Wayne Shorter Quartet: Footprints

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyGBNKlrPI

 

Don't you feel so gifted to be able to watch what is clearly a moment of revelation for these people?

Don't you feel so gifted to live in a world where there are people who can do this five nights a week, two sets each night, for their entire lives?

After Hours — A Tribe Called Quest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG8OyVN0wQA

A Tribe Called Quest is one of those hip-hop groups from the late 80s and 90s that embodies the most false nostalgia for me. It's such an overwhelmingly positive, cheerful tone; lyrically positive, musically tenacious, complex and simple and truly great songwriting. I wasn't alive in the 80s and 90s, but if I were, this is what I would've listened to, I'd like to think. Moreover, it samples, heavily: but the samples aren't immediately recognizable. The modern trend in sampling is to use the background for an entire song and to perhaps use another song for the chorus; Quest uses bits and pieces of other songs, chopped up and put together and truly composing with the samples, not just laying them under the verses. They weren't the first, but they emulate a tone I really like — the low-key, simple, relaxed smooth-jazz tones, but with the churning, pounding rhythms that hip-hop needs.