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Authors: Marvin Lin
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compelling as its non-racist counterparts? Why do so many “world music” fans often overlook culturaldifferences and make aesthetic judgments by Western standards? Where do we draw the lines?
What’s interesting to me is not when someone decides to “identify” with country or Tropicália, but how one goes about understanding musics whose traditions and signifiers either lack blatant ties to geography/social identity or function as intentional subversions of them. I’m talking about the avant-garde, that ever-nebulous term (and appropriately so). Of course,
all
musics, including the avant-garde, have geographical/social implications, but the semiotic ambiguity of its sonics (for instance, white noise and sine waves clearly lack the defined “meanings” of a major or minor triad) whittles down taste and value to questions with more temporal weight. For example: while there’s a lot to be said about who, what, when, and where we are listening, what about for how long are we listening? And how many times? I love knowing that a puzzling album might eventually be pieced together the more I listen to it, that critical consensus will always be in flux, that my future kids will eventually deride my old-man-with-a-cane tastes, that so-called “forward-thinking” artists will inevitably (hopefully) get their dues. I love knowing that, if given time, albums like
Kid A
could potentially convert even the most conservative listeners.
I’m not saying all music gets better over time — a lot of music gets worse, in my opinion — but listeners who stick it out for the more challenging hiccups can reap rewards and make connections that they otherwisedidn’t know were possible. This of course depends on your disposition. Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that sounds even remotely different — namely, because anything too difficult becomes work, not entertainment. They want music that conjures up feelings of nostalgia — a first kiss, an early-childhood road trip — or music that functions as a situational complement (Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” being the sexiest example). Other people like to be straight-up fucked with. It’s so rare to feel challenged nowadays that some listeners actively seek out musics that sound
new
and
weird
and
disorienting
, music that’s so foreign it needs to be more aggressively reconciled with their current value set for it to even begin to make sense. Listening to music one might call “challenging” — which can be anything from the strangeness of Tom Waits’ voice to a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition — provides the potential for growth, both aesthetically and socially.
While Radiohead didn’t necessarily intend to challenge our ears with
Kid A
, many of us were confronted with a dashing new musical vocabulary anyway, and in order to find appreciation in these sounds we had to either normalize its timbres or internalize the cultural values associated with them. That is, we had to spend time with the sounds. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
The Gay Science
,
[One] has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as aseparate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity.
In other words, we had to “get used to”
Kid A
, to make the album “ours.” We weren’t simply engaging in a static process of trying to “get it,” as if we could extract meaning whenever and however we pleased. We were adapting to its sonics and the surrounding cultural contexts, trying to hear the music through more tenable perspectives. We were adapting to Radiohead’s decision to utilize these particular songs through specific methodologies. We were adapting to sounds that didn’t exist solely to bolster the power structures that prop up music listening as a one-way process.
Sure,
Kid
What’s interesting to me is not when someone decides to “identify” with country or Tropicália, but how one goes about understanding musics whose traditions and signifiers either lack blatant ties to geography/social identity or function as intentional subversions of them. I’m talking about the avant-garde, that ever-nebulous term (and appropriately so). Of course,
all
musics, including the avant-garde, have geographical/social implications, but the semiotic ambiguity of its sonics (for instance, white noise and sine waves clearly lack the defined “meanings” of a major or minor triad) whittles down taste and value to questions with more temporal weight. For example: while there’s a lot to be said about who, what, when, and where we are listening, what about for how long are we listening? And how many times? I love knowing that a puzzling album might eventually be pieced together the more I listen to it, that critical consensus will always be in flux, that my future kids will eventually deride my old-man-with-a-cane tastes, that so-called “forward-thinking” artists will inevitably (hopefully) get their dues. I love knowing that, if given time, albums like
Kid A
could potentially convert even the most conservative listeners.
I’m not saying all music gets better over time — a lot of music gets worse, in my opinion — but listeners who stick it out for the more challenging hiccups can reap rewards and make connections that they otherwisedidn’t know were possible. This of course depends on your disposition. Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that sounds even remotely different — namely, because anything too difficult becomes work, not entertainment. They want music that conjures up feelings of nostalgia — a first kiss, an early-childhood road trip — or music that functions as a situational complement (Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” being the sexiest example). Other people like to be straight-up fucked with. It’s so rare to feel challenged nowadays that some listeners actively seek out musics that sound
new
and
weird
and
disorienting
, music that’s so foreign it needs to be more aggressively reconciled with their current value set for it to even begin to make sense. Listening to music one might call “challenging” — which can be anything from the strangeness of Tom Waits’ voice to a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition — provides the potential for growth, both aesthetically and socially.
While Radiohead didn’t necessarily intend to challenge our ears with
Kid A
, many of us were confronted with a dashing new musical vocabulary anyway, and in order to find appreciation in these sounds we had to either normalize its timbres or internalize the cultural values associated with them. That is, we had to spend time with the sounds. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
The Gay Science
,
[One] has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as aseparate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity.
In other words, we had to “get used to”
Kid A
, to make the album “ours.” We weren’t simply engaging in a static process of trying to “get it,” as if we could extract meaning whenever and however we pleased. We were adapting to its sonics and the surrounding cultural contexts, trying to hear the music through more tenable perspectives. We were adapting to Radiohead’s decision to utilize these particular songs through specific methodologies. We were adapting to sounds that didn’t exist solely to bolster the power structures that prop up music listening as a one-way process.
Sure,
Kid
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