The Use of Popularity

In November 1968, the Beatles released their ninth studio album, known as the White Album. Alongside an assortment of different musical items and styles, it included a piece of musique concrète entitled Revolution 9, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and largely put together by John Lennon, George Harrison and Yoko Ono.

Critics and fans have been divided on this track ever since. Many fans regard it as the worst track the Beatles ever made. Following a line of enquiry that can be traced back to a remark by George Martin himself, the vlogger David Bennett recently suggested pruning the White Album, dropping most of the more experimental tracks including Revolution 9, and retaining only the more aesthetically pleasing ones.

But what is the point of being the most popular band in the world, if you merely pander to conventional expectations and production values?

Fifteen years later, the Police released the Synchronicity album, containing another track that divided critics and fans - Mother, written and sung by Andy Summers. A range of critical opinions can be found on this archive page http://www.thepolice.com/discography/album/synchronicity-23441

• quite out of context (Henry Everingham, Sidney Morning Herald)
• revelation ... part-spoof, part-manic (Robin Denselow, The Guardian)
• wild card (People)
• foolish Psycho scenario set to obvious programmatic music (Richard Cook, NME)
• Guitarist Andy Summers' corrosively funny 'Mother' inverts John Lennon's romantic maternal attachment into a grim dadaist joke (Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone)
• spritely 7/4 timing (Adam Sweeting, Melody Maker)
• novelty song (Richard C Walls, Creem)
• blast of pure primal scream in 7/4 time, the sarcastic cut of his Freudian recitation intensified by a brute rhythm attack recalling Robert Fripp's experiments with spoken words and white rock noise on 'Exposure' (David Fricke, Musician)
  

 

Until the mid 1960s, pop albums were merely collections of songs from the same artist in a similar style, often including songs that were not good or commercial enough to be released as singles. Then some groups started to produce so-called concept albums: Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), Freak Out (Mothers of Invention) and Face to Face (Kinks) all appeared in 1966, and Sgt Pepper (Beatles) followed in 1967. Labelling something as a concept album implied that the album needed to be experienced and evaluated as a whole rather than as a random collection of songs. The best-known examples of concept albums are from groups that were already popular, which obviously helped to build an audience for something unexpected. And Revolution 9 was certainly that.

The ways that people consume music have changed several times since then. Once upon a time, people used to curate collections of their favourite songs onto cassette tapes, for themselves or their friends. Then other devices emerged, such as the iPod and its successors, allowing people to listen to their playlists in an apparently random sequence. Nowadays, most people consume music via downloads or streaming services such as iTunes or Spotify.

Perhaps tracks like Revolution 9 or Mother may not appear on many popular playlists. But that's not going to worry extremely popular bands like the Beatles or the Police. It's not just that they can afford to have a few unpopular tracks, it's that the demands of creativity and innovation produces tracks that their fans don't always love.

Hopefully it's not only these groups that can afford to take these creative risks, or to take a stand against what Adorno called Atomized Listening. Dorian Lynskey argues that the concept album is back. Threatened with redundancy in the digital era, albums have fought back by becoming more album-like. And as Adorno said in praise of Beethoven, serious music achieves excellence when its whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Meanwhile the curious thing about both Sgt Pepper and the White Album is that nobody was quite sure what the concepts were. Perhaps this is what enables David Bennett to apply his own concept?

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Theodor Adorno, Political Protest and Popular Music (3sat 1968). Video available on archive.org and YouTube. See also commentary by Josh Jones, Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement (Open Culture, 3 December 2014)

Theodor Adorno and Peter von Haselberg, On the historical adequacy of consciousness (Akzente 1965, Telos 1983). I found an extract in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Polity 2005) p 420

Mark Athitakis, A Beatles Reflection: What the White Album says about us (HUMANITIES 34/5, September/October 2013)

David Bennett, Should The White Album have not been a double album? (YouTube, 25 November 2021)

Georgie Born, Listening, Mediation, Event (Journal of the Royal Musical Assocation, 135/1, 2010)

Dorian Lynskey, Why everyone from Beyonce to Daft Punk is releasing a concept album (GQ 13 July 2015)

Related post Shuffle (June 2005)

For Whom The Saw

In a comment to my previous post For Whom The Bell, someone kindly drew my attention to a comment by a New York busker called Natalia Paruz, who goes under the sobriquet of SawLady because (you've guessed it perhaps) she plays the musical saw. I get the impression from her website that she appears regularly in both subways and concert halls. (If you visit her site, be prepared for some delightful examples of her work.) She asks Is Joshua Bell a good busker? and decides, on the whole, that he is not. 

Obviously playing in the subway calls for a different kind of musicianship. Comments to Natalia's blog debate whether or not Bell is capable of playing in a more "popular" style, and chose not for the purposes of the experiment. Obviously Bell was not exactly driven by the same financial motives as most other buskers, so he could afford to play how he wanted, rather than to please the crowd. 

But before musicians get all snooty about classical music and popular music, remember one thing. Much of the music Joshua Bell plays for a living was not written for the concert hall, let alone for the recording studio. The concert hall emerged in the nineteenth century, and recorded music in the twentieth. Mozart's music was written to entertain chattering aristocrats, not for solemn middle class audiences in fancy auditoriums (and certainly not to improve the brainpower of unborn children). 

How would Mozart have survived in the Washington subway? I like to think he would have done better than Joshua Bell. Gidon Kremer, are you up for a challenge?

For Whom The Bell

World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station, almost no one stops to listen

Original story (with video) Washington Post April 8th 2007 Commentary: Gene Weingarten, Seth Godin 

What's the purpose of a stunt like this? To show that people don't pay attention to street musicians? That although they are prepared to pay a hundred dollars for the cheapest seats when Joshua Bell is playing in a respectable auditorium, they aren't willing to stop and listen to him on the way to work. 

What's the effect? People who went past, or were in the area, are kicking themselves for the missed opportunity. People who weren't there admitting they would have been among those who rushed past and paid no attention. So what are they going to do next time? What will you do when you hear a busker on the way to work? 

Many people don't hear buskers at all. Many use personal devices - Walkman, iPod, mobile phone - as a way of disengaging from their immediate surroundings. (See my post on i-Phone or wii-Phone.) And many just don't pay attention until they are prompted by the context. 

When Bell plays in concert halls and recording studios, he is reinforcing a musical agenda that promotes famous musicians like him at the expense of the thousands of musicians that are nearly as talented as him and not nearly as fortunate. When he plays in the subway, he is subverting this agenda a little. 

Let's hope the effect of this story is that some people pay more attention to the live music in their environment. Not every violinist is as good as Joshua Bell, but there are thousands nobody has ever heard of that are nearly as good. You can appreciate good music anywhere. 

And therefore never send to know for whom the busker plays, he plays for you.

Update

Guy Kawasaki draws the following eloquent lessons from the story:

• Don’t let the absence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is bad.
• Don’t let the presence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is good.
• Don’t pass by life much less let life pass you by.

See also my sequel to this post: For Whom The Saw.

Barry Manilow

According to the BBC (June 5th, 2006),

"Barry Manilow has been enlisted to fight anti-social behaviour in Sydney, where his music will be piped into a car park to disperse youths".

Classical music is often used as a form of social control: for example in Durham, Luton, Worthing, and in parts of Northern Ireland. And loud rock music has been used as a form of torture (Disco Inferno, via Pedraum), as well as a way of ending sieges. President Bush the First tried in vain to use rock music (Psywarrior via Marginal Utility) to force General Noriega out of the Vatican embassy in Panama after Operation Just Cause. (Psywarrior also reports the theory that the loud music was intended as a sound barrier: "to mask sensitive negotiations between General Cisneros and Monsignor Laboa".)

I saw the film Clockwork Orange when it first came out, and was disturbed by the several different kinds of violence portrayed in the film - first inflicted by Alex and then inflicted upon Alex - associated with the music of Beethoven. In a horrible way, classical music becomes part of the violence. (So much for soothing the savage breast!)

Music produces a wide range of effects (including sex and shopping) and is therefore used (and abused) for all sorts of purposes. But what we see happening in Australia is more complex and cross-purposed - playing one style of music against another. As Ken writes on the Marginal Utility blog, quoting from Meatloaf, Everything Louder Than Everything Else.

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