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.

Furr — Blitzen Trapper

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

It's an awful thing that all the folk I know is modern folk; my concept of a genre rooted firmly in the past is, itself, rooted firmly in the present. I know about old folk: Dylan and Wainwright and such; I also know modern folk, like The Decemberists, Andrew Bird, Band Of Horses, Bon Iver, even R.E.M.

What defines this genre? It's about nature and its effect on the human psyche: how rural living is, what it's like to live subject to the seasons; a past-oriented culture, rather than the present, hedonistic suburban culture or the modern, forward-facing industrial culture. It's about and set in the country; it uses naturalistic imagery, but it is nostalgic, a return to the past. As such, 60s folk has no greater claim; after all, real folk music is indigenous. The music of my great-great-grandparents, Polish folk songs and shanties and such. Bob Dylan has no more claim to it than Bon Iver.

So why am I ashamed?