At the GRAMMYs on Sunday night, ALICIA KEYS received the DR. DRE Global Impact Award. During her speech, she mentioned how she “always had to fight for a certain level of respect as a songwriter, composer, and especially a producer. It’s strange that we don’t think of women as producers like Quincy, or Dre, or Swizzy. But, female producers have always powered the industry: Patrice Rushen, Missy Elliott, Linda Perry, Grimes, Solange, and so many more.” With a small qualification, you could add to that list Susan Rogers, a co-author of this text, as she was previously the engineer of the PRINCE albums “Purple Rain,” “Sign o’ the Times,” “Parade,” and others. (She has said that her credit on “One Week” by BARENAKED LADIES paid for her kids to go to college.) So, she is an engineer, not a producer, but was still intimately involved in some incredibly important music. Our concern today is the book she co-authored with Ogi Ogas and how it can help you better understand why you like the music you like.
You’ve probably seen books like this one before. You are someone who is indebted to music for your lifestyle, personality, or joy, and so you get to a point where you want to understand it better. I’ve read at least two books like this one (This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin and Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty by Ben Ratliff) and this is easily the most engaging and informative of the three.
For one, there are not a lot of moving parts here. Rogers and Ogas list just seven aspects of music that we can analyze to determine our tastes: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, rhythm, lyrics, and timbre. The first three have little to do with music itself and can be applied to any human creative endeavor really. The last four are purely the domain of music. They do not require much explanation either—the concepts are easily understood. Compare this manageable list with the 20 ideas Ratliff enumerates in his text, which include simple ideas such as speed, repetition, and loudness, but also more esoteric ones such as wasteful authority, discrepancy, and quiet / silence / intimacy (as distinct from another idea—closeness).
It was cool to learn that Ratliff had seen D.R.I. at CB’s in like 1984 and was maybe familiar with JERRY’S KIDS and the inimitable drum fills of Brian Betzger. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t make for a strong book. Rogers and Ogas may not have a passing familiarity with first wave American hardcore, but they do know how to command my attention. There is a reference to seeing a “hardcore show at the Middle East club in Cambridge” that involved a “brutal mosh pit,” though (p. 64). Later on in the book, it’s implied that this might have been a CONVERGE show or similar. So, does that count as hardcore to you? It did to teenage Tall Rob. But these days… Still, when I mentioned this to someone who lived in Boston around that time, he told me “There is at least one notoriously violent CONVERGE show from the Middle East where... Jake threw a body bag into the crowd and said he wanted to see it filled.” So maybe the authors were there that night?
In the chapter on novelty, Rogers and Ogas take up the idea of inventiveness within constraints. It was at this point that I couldn’t put the book down. They explain how there are “records that advance traditional genres [and] aim to present a controlled degree of surprise within the reliable confines of familiarity” (p. 69). They continue with a comparison to basketball, arguing that “What makes a new game enjoyable to a fan is the drama and suspense of reaching the outcome, which is dependent on the execution of well-established plays and strategies by extremely proficient players” (p. 69). So both formulaic hardcore songs on my favorite records and expertly executed BLOBS and SLOBS in a basketball game both appeal to the part of my brain that likes things to be well-organized and in just the right spot. (This is most of my brain, tbqh.) Having someone explain to me why I like what I like in a simple way with a relevant analogy to go along with it also pleases me.
In the chapter on realism, Rogers and Ogas ask you to consider what you visualize when you listen to a song. They compare the experience of listening to CCR’s “Born on the Bayou,” where you might imagine the band playing in the song live, or even the bayous and byways they sing about, and the experience of listening to a DAFT PUNK song from the Tron soundtrack, where you might have some abstract colors and images in mind as they conjure a world from synths and keys (p. 36). The authors go on to explain that what you visualize has to do with the instruments used to make the music and that most people visualize one of the above ideas or the band playing the song live, or even you, the listener, singing or playing the song live.
This immediately called to mind something Pat West wrote in an issue of Change zine. He explains how “Just like back in public high school, I keep thinking everyone else must be having a great time while I sit here in my small room listening to punk hardcore, lip-synching to BAD BRAINS, CRO-MAGS, and GOVERNMENT ISSUE. If I hadn’t recently started pretending to be the lead singer of LIFETIME or SPAZZ, not much in my life would have changed since 1987” (Change, issue #11, 1998). So yeah, I think hardcore lends itself to visualizing yourself singing along to the songs or moshing along in the imagined pit. Rarely do I imagine the studio situation that led to my favorite hardcore recordings. It’s the live experience, through and through. I’m grateful for being able to better understand that part of my listening practices as a result of reading this book.
(The final six paragraphs of this review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:
FUCKED UP "Disabuse" b/w "Self-Driving Man"
No comments:
Post a Comment