"problems" in pop music and the poss. need for a formalist criticism (your suggestions here!)

jess: re. harper's, etc.: not quite. there are unfortunate deficits in film criticism as well. but it's unfortunate that so many magazines (and schools) have no space for pop music! (although sasha's new yorker column is a def. advance on that front, if it lasts.)

when is started this thread i was thinking less about the real-world problems with the viability of such a criticism (owing to commerce, etc.) than hoping for examples of how it could be useful. but we can talk about both.

(x-post)

MORE EXAMPLES PLS!!

"less exclusively technical" is what i meant to write

(i felt rushed by the onslaught of xposts)

one possible thing that could happen as a result of a practiced formal criticism is bringing the art of criticism and the art of making music a bit closer together. it could even potentially help diminish the skepticism that many musicians feel toward criticism (though a lot of that skepticism is probably inevitable, not for the best reasons). i think a good formal criticism would be very informed by an understanding of the sort of choices artists in a given genre make (sometimes half-unconsciously?!) when creating music.

i think musical training is probably a prerequisite, but it would have to be a *modified* or *nuanced* classical training, since the same tools are not used for pop music (or even different genres of pop music) as for classical music.

I mean - so what if diamanda or any pop singer used this or that technique, you know.

One way to do this is to look at the pre-existing metaphors and rationales that pop up in music reviews, but apart from the mythic aspect of some of the problems with these are that they're usually hobbled together cliches with no real explanatory power, or they're based on some concept external to music (eg. critics who treat songwriting like literature), or they're unknowingly discriminatory, veiling a "best practice" standard of which all other music is merely an inferior derivation.

Of course I think most critical concepts are going to suffer from this veiled best practice thing (whether the idol is real or imagined) because we use critical concepts to say something about the qualitative value of the music we're looking at. But I think it's important to allow for an endless multiplicity of critical models to explain this strategy of effectiveness, to allow the music we're looking at to determine the nature of the critical concept we use along an ascending model of analysis rather than a descending model of analysis. Indeed there can be no one model to explain this interaction between the music and the listener, because inherent to the success of a "strategy" is its novel combination of tactics, its element of surprise.

... and of course many of you are familiar with it since you posted there as well.

more later.

The next question I want to ask though is "for what reasons or under what conditions would the listener *want* a tight groove". I don't think you can rest on the technical explanation of the tightness of the groove as an explanation of the music's quality because that assumes that tightness (in grooves) is universally desirable.

ok i really gotta leave now....

i should add that between the music's creation and the "demands of the marketplace" there are even more proximate factors like the cost of a session, new dance crazes, james brown's bass player being fired on thursday, etc.

Rachel Stevens' "Some Girls" can be explained technically by breaking down its discrete sonic and musical components, but that doesn't explain the wealth of associations, the interlinks between sonics and contexts (most obviously the schaffel-pop groove, whose resonance will be utterly different depending on whether the listener can "place" it or not).

Regarding the tightness of the groove: rhythmic regularity is significant in making people want to dance. That's how drum machines and Kraftwerk can be "funky." If you could show, graphically, how the members of James Brown's band's articulations are all constantly right on the beats (or on the upbeats or wherever they're supposed to go), and that the tempo stays very constant, that would be significant.

xpost with tim

personally, i want to feel it, not think it.

another "problem": explain exactly which set of music proclivities induce people to call steely dan "slick"

Which is my point, sorta. Whether you’re getting all musicologically formalist, or using deconstruction-y and/or heavy theory means to address the music at hand, you’re gonna leave some people going Wha?, or risk adopting an exposition heavy lecture on readers who will rightly despise you for it, or seem a self-satisfied prick.

Then there’s the problem/challenge of subjectivity, which I think no reviewer can be humble about enough, and, for me, is the most odious thing in music writing, except when it works. (I’m thinking James Baldwin’s essays on film, Mikal Gilmore’s "Night Music", or Andrew Vachss’ first-person in-novel odes to Judy Henske.)

To me, the main villain is word count, which superimposing a style right off, most often characterized by pushing the language/reference envelope at all times to create a sort of expressionistic sense of the musical piece, but most often at the expense of conveying basic considerations like, Dude, does this suck or what?

Which, in the extreme, leaves you with writing for academia or Maxim.

Me, I’d love to write about music from a sort of psycho-acoustic pathology POV, but I doubt I’m gonna find many buyers that way. It would be formalistic tho.

sorry ian not ignoring your post--will post more later

OTM OTM OTM OTM OTM

I imagine some musicologists would say this has already happened, at least in theory (npi). In practice, because classical western music theory is so ingrained in academia and so 'known', it will still be taught generally whereas any other systems (like what?) will only be taught via specialization. Maybe time and a poetics of pop can/will change this.

i do not think the future of music should be all nirvana play-it-by-ear, but i do think microacoustics (not glitch so much as more complex scales. why can't i think of his name... jackson, j-ugh. i can't even think of the name of the scales he was foxing with) and indian/gamalan (sp) (TRITE!) ideas aren't necessarily primitive, and dance music was a result of phillip glass, who obv uses an arpegiator. yeah, i'm getting a little uppity.

but then doesn't everyone review pop formally?

boulez analyzes classical music using a method of formal analysis appropriate to classical music, so a pop equivalent of orientations would analyze pop music using a method of formal analysis appropriate to pop music (developing such a method is itself part of the "project" i'd like to see). my comparison was less about the specific methodology employed by boulez as about the rigor and precision of his thinking, the clarity of his rhetoric, and the ambitiousness of his project, i.e. breaking down a piece of music into all its constituent elements and finding out how it "works." i imagine this could be done for a pop record as well as a symphony.

as i've noted a few times upthread, music theory has already been adapted/revised/rebuilt for the purposes of analyzing different styles of music. the few examples of a precise music criticism that i've mentioned so far (franklin bruno etc.) themselves do this, in a somewhat casual fashion.

We could carve up the domain of historical poetics in still other ways. Following R. S. Crane, we could distinguish studies of precompositional factors (sources, influences, cliches, received forms) from compositional ones (normalized principles of combination and transformation within works) and from postcompositional ones (effects, reception, varying responses in different contexts). For example, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer treats Japanese cinema as the legatee of stylistic practices from earlier centuries, while Vance Kepley's In the Service of the State, using a different precompositional focus, traces more proximate influences on Dovzhenko's films. The work of Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and Andre Gaudreault has demonstrated that pre-1915 films obey coherent compositional norms. And recent work in reception by Janet Staiger has revealed how audiences' varying construals of the same film presuppose historically variable viewing conventions. In my own studies of Dreyer and Ozu, I have tried to relate the three domains by suggesting historically determinate gaps among them. In the works of Ozu, for instance, source material and contemporary conventions are transformed by specific compositional procedures, but the results have been appropriated differently by various audiences.

Recognizing that linguistic analogies are notoriously shaky in film studies, I will risk one more mapping of the field. Like linguistics, film poetics has its "semantics," the study of how meaning is produced. It has its "syntactics," the study of rules for selecting and combining units (with respect to style, Raymond Bellour's micro-analyses; with respect to compositional form, Thierry Kuntzel's study of openings, Peter Wollen's applications of Propp, or Rick Altman's "dual-focus" narrative). And poetics has its "pragmatics," the study of how relations between viewer and text develop in the process of the film's unfolding (e.g., accounts of narration or of filmic "enunciation"). Meaning, structure, and process--these three aspects of any representational system are also central to poetics.

These equable mappings of the terrain conceal, of course, how much territory is in dispute. I have already suggested several issues about which poeticians wrangle; two more divergences seem to me worth brief discussion.

Across history, poetics has had to steer a course between strictly "immanent" accounts and strictly "subsumptive" ones. Few poeticians have been willing to accept the consequences of an utterly intrinsic account of constructional processes; even Wolfflin, mistakenly treated as the model of the pure formalist, explained changes in artistic styles partly by changes in a culture's visual habits. On the other side, very few poeticians have sought to account for every phenomenon by appeal to processes in other social domains; even the Zhdanovite recognizes some special quality in art. For most poeticians, the constructional principles studied are not self-sealed, but they are also not in every respect subsumable to other principles.

Assuming that the escape hatch of "relative autonomy" is of no help, we can distinguish two tendencies within poetics. One tendency hypothesizes that the phenomenon we study has a considerable degree of self-regulated coherence. The early Shklvosky seems to hold this view; he seeks to explain the laws of fairy tale composition by purely poetic principles like repetition, retardation, and so forth. He gives theoretical priority to such factors. In film poetics, perhaps Burch's Theory of Film Practice approaches this position. The second tendency, articulated by the later Russian Formalists and the Prague Structuralists, gives immanent factors only a methodological priority. For example, as Tynianov and Jakobson point out, even if the immanent evolution of literature can explain the direction of change, it cannot explain timing, which must be governed by extraliterary causes. A comparable position is taken by Staiger, Thompson, and myself in studying the history of the classical Hollywood cinema. Here the analyst looks first to the "immanent" factors that might be the most proximate and pertinent causal factors but also assumes that virtually every explanatory task will require moving to those mediations that lie in "adjacent" domains.

To continue the geographical metaphor, poetics is less a field with distinct boundaries than a kind of Alsace-Lorraine constantly being claimed by interested neighbors. On one side is Aesthetics, which, in the eighteenth century, replaced the study of poetic praxis with a concern for the philosophical problems involved in the creation and appreciation of beauty. On another side lies Semiotics, which seeks to subsume poetics into a general theory of the production of meaning. Interestingly, poeticians have been drafted into both camps. Aristotle, the Russian Formalists, and the Prague Structuralists can play roles in the history of aesthetics, as in Beardsley's survey history, or they can be promoted to the rank of proto-semioticians, as Peter Steiner does.

In my view, the tension between semiotics and aesthetics has been immensely fruitful. There remains, however, a core of questions and issues that cannot be wholly absorbed into the adjacent areas. It is useful to differentiate between the practical theory of an art and the philosophy of it. The "practical theory" of music or poetry, for instance rests upon a posteriori questions, involving empirical generalizations about conventions and practices in these arts. From this perspective, film poetics is a systematizing of theoretical inquiry into cinematic practices as they have existed. The philosophy of an art, on the other hand, inquires into the a priori aspects of it; it involves conceptual analysis of its logical nature and functions. On the whole, aesthetics concentrates upon such matters. As for semiotics, it concentrates on matters of meaning, which is only part of the effects for which a poetics seeks to account; on the other hand, if semiotics seeks to explain "the life of signs in society," it encompasses far more than any poetics can. Yet one should not discourage border crossings; if Barthes' S/Z offers a semiotics and Goodman's Languages of Art offers an aesthetics, both are splendid contributions to poetics.

(apologies if you have)...

This was an interesting thread.

Except the actual answer was Lionel Hampton.

It's possible that "Cathy's Clown" is the source of the Beatles vocal wiggle even if no Beatles song ever had the precise notes of the Cathy wiggle.

is this what's meant by "leaving yrself wiggle room"??

This is an interesting thread. I guess the stuff I've been doing on production / compression / sound is related to this; it's certainly an attempt to engage with music on a physical / technical level as well as a cultural / personal one. I'm not really interested in just saying "this record sounds bad", but rather "this record sounds bad because..." and then trying to extrapolate reasons for decisions in the process of production.

It's difficult though because I know for every one person who understands it, there are 100 who don't, and not because they can't, but because they don't think they're not bothered.

Gordon Brown's probably not bothered about it at the moment.

I'm not really interested in just saying "this record sounds bad", but rather "this record sounds bad because..." and then trying to extrapolate reasons for decisions in the process of production IT WAS OVERCOMPRESSED

amirite?

Not quite. WHY WAS IT OVERCOMPRESSED? is the question.

Thrusting Thatcherkids always need a bigger sonic hit.

"Wrongly compressed" might be more apposite here than "overcompressed" since many of the best records of the sixties benefited markedly from the latter.

Aye, I'd go along with that. If XTRMNTR was uncompressed it'd sound daft.

i like this paragraph from the wikipedia page on usher's climax:

"Climax" is a quiet storm slow jam set in common time.[6][7][8] It is written in the key of C minor, and Usher's voice ranges from B♭3 to G5.[8] The music is built around a haunting riff, complemented by sparse drum machine and some musical accompaniment.[9] Its varying soundscape incorporates electronic effects such as clicks, hisses, whooshes, and low-frequency synths,[6][10] as well as subtle strings and scattered piano notes.[7] Music writers have noted Diplo's production as uncharacteristically reserved and understated.[9][10][11][12]
The song's musical structure is characterized by intervals in which the music builds to a potential break, but softly decrescendos instead.[11] As each verse concludes, the song's snapping, electronic rhythm track gradually softens and rippling synth chords repeat throughout the song.[7] Marc Hogan of Spin writes that Diplo "teases us with the sort of wubba-wubba subwoofer noises that have become inescapable in the past year or so of pop radio. But he never actually gives in with the full dubstep drop [...] the song keeps swelling to one big wave after another, without ever really reaching a single, song-stopping crescendo."[7] Hogan cites the bridge at around the three-minute mark as "the closest thing to a climax" on the song, "when the track gets as quiet as it ever has before becoming as lush as it ever gets."[7] Pitchfork Media's Carrie Battan calls the song "an exercise in the power of restraint", commenting that "Diplo shows uncharacteristic subtlety behind Usher's sentiment, with a beat that seems to hang suspended in midair."[11]

i mean that isn't exactly what i had in mind when i started this thread but it was kind of refreshing to read in a wikipedia entry.