How to Sing a Hymn

Two things happened today. Well, if you're into minutiae then 162 things happened today. But in short, I went to a Mormon church service (seeking curiosities), and I went to the laundromat (seeking clean socks).

Instead of spending my wash cycle time walking out for a sweet tea or gazing numbly at the socks rolling around in the drum, I thought about the musical directions in the Mormon hymn book I sang from this morning. I've seen plain English directions in hymn books before, at my grandma's church.  The book at her church gives directions like "joyfully" or "slowly," sometimes casting commentary on the meaning but not much. In the Mormon book, however, all the musical directions are commentary on the essence of the song, and how the singer should feel about it.

While this may be a good way to indicate what kind of voice we should sing in, and maybe an indicator of how we should interpret the song, it doesn't help us understand what the tempo should be, or how the notes should be read. Isn't the main aim of directions like andante and allegro to give an idea of the tempo and the rhythm of the song?  Okay maybe it's silly to expect everyone to learn Italian words, but even rock sheet music has helpful (rather than emotional and confusing) plain-English directions, like "moderate rock" or "a little faster" or "ballad."

Yet now that I rethink it, ballads and shuffles, and whatever else might be included in the directions in my Jethro Tull songbook, are examples of a vocabulary shared by rock musicians (although the musician who transcribed Anderson's flute solos uses presto and allegro too).  Maybe the vocabulary of hymnals has to match the shared vocabulary of church?  So, there must not be any better way to describe how to sing a hymn, than with words like these:

Actual examples from the Mormon hymn book

With reverence

Prayerfully

With conviction

Fervently

Solemnly

Thoughtfully

These are so funny, because they attempt to be so specific and end up being so vague.  Prayerfully?  WTF, Mormons? Much can be said about musical directions as a means of shutting down a faithful one's (or a musician's) personal interpretation of a song, but there is just as much to be said about these lamentable word choices.  So then, still at the laundromat, I got to thinking, why don't they just take it all the way, and get all religulous with the hymnal commands?

Possible Mormon (or any evangelical church) Hymn Directions

With the Spurit

Shamefully

Guiltily

With clean thoughts

Zealously ( ♩ = 116 )

As if you are about to explode ( ♩ = 162 )

Like it's your Baptism-day!

Like the devil's got you by the balls

Piercingly

In tongues


And still at the laundromat, I thought, Why not have the alternate atheist/agnostic/apostate version?

Apostate Hymnal Directions

With frustration ( ♩ = 42)

Without grace

Facetiously

Ironically

With agony

With apathy ( ♩ = whatever )

Out of the side of your mouth

With goat voice 

That should do it. Have you seen any strange, confusing, or plain silly musical directions? Can you add any to my alternate lists?

Translating Flute

I am learning to play the flute.

Why the hell would a 32-year-old woman try to learn to play a new instrument? Or any instrument at all for that matter?  (These are the things my fellow soccer moms wonder.)  Because this is the kind of shit I do.  That and ballet classes, and self-portraits, and grad school, and translating Old English poetry, and a lot of other things mothers don't typically even think about, or suspect that their neighbors are up to.  Take that suburbia.

I played saxophone and french horn in school, and I got especially good at the sax.  I was emulating Lisa Simpson then.  Outcast nerd with saxophone who hates the school band music (the vegetarianism waited until I grew up). But instead of jazz like Lisa I wanted to play rock sax.  I'd listen to the radio and play the solos by ear.  And in the early nineties, there were plenty of sax solos wafting o'er the airwaves.  Like a river flowin' into the ocean...

Now my inspiration and instrumental role model is Ian Anderson.  (Who else? Well, Peter Gabriel plays the flute, but it's not quite the same.) I've been into Jethro Tull for about ten years, and all through my 20s I dreamed of being in a rock band.  I always pictured myself playing rock flute in that band, and singing in a folksy voice.  Always doing a Tull cover or two.

So a few years ago I got my chance to play in a cover band, and I became the lead singer.  And I sang bluesy, not folksy.  And the Tull in our catalog was null.  I was instrumental to the band line-up, yet even with all my multi-talented influences I remained ironically non-instrumental.  I honed my vocal craft for four years, but always felt terribly lacking.  I didn't have anything to hold.  Sometimes I had hand percussion.  Other times, just idle hands. I'd pick up a tambourine and shake it lightly enough that it was inaudible, just to have something to do.  Most of the time I just danced wildly.  The few times I offered my saxophone abilities during practice discussions, the band was skeptical. 

That venture has ended, so as a singer I've been longing to perform in some way or another. I loved the rush of being up front, the euphoria of getting lost in my own sound-making.  But I don't have a band now, and no one is impressed by just singing. Everyone has a voice. You have to be able to do something.  ENTER: FLUTE!

 

Despite the flute having the same fingering as the sax, and despite my early, demonstrated ability to merrily meld with woodwinds (maybe "graft" would be a more woody metaphor...but the flute is silver anyway), many told me "You can't do it!"  No one said "You're too old to learn new music stuffs," but it may have been implied.  They did say, most pointedly, that I wouldn't be able to muster the wind for a flute.  Wait! -- I belted out "White Rabbit" and "Sweet Child of Mine" at earbone-jarring volumes, always garnering that cute comment from one or two in the audience, "Such a big voice for such a little girl!" I think I can manage to blow some good air into this thing with the holes on it.

So I've been working on it for about a month and a half.  My basic music reading came back at two weeks.  My sight reading came back at four. The fingering came back at four weeks too.  Then the simple Yiddish song "Tumbalalaika" committed itself to my memory, allowing me to practice embellishment without slowing down to fiddle with my tangled, confused digits.

I still can't keep time when I learn a new song.  That will come, I'm sure.  I still forget notes when there are flats and sharps not in the key signature. I think the memorization of tunes will come better once I'm not using so much brain power to get my fingers over the right and proper holes and to tell B from D on the staff, and so much muscle power to keep the flute from flying out of my grasp whenever I play C sharp. (You have to let go of all but one pinky key, and that key depresses forward. TweeeeeetfllubbupwhoAAH!)

Let it float...

Maybe the problem there is that I think of my flute as something I need to grasp? It's like learning to ride a dirt bike.  You grip too hard over the jumps and get sore arms because you're so afraid of falling off.  I'm afraid of falling off the flute, and my hands start to cramp from the effort of keeping it close. What should I do with it?  Let it sort of float there? Someday...

Too much grasping.

So after six or seven weeks of practice (with 1/2 hr lessons most of those weeks, with a gal who is happy I want to learn rock flute), putting a few folks songs in the vault, and reading Amazon reviews that said "My fifteen-year-old daughter sight read it and played it right off the bat!" I bought my first Jethro Tull flute solo book.  It will be here Monday.  I can't wait. 

In fact, I couldn't wait so much that I looked up Bourée and started playing it. It actually is easy to pick up right away!  And I'm not even fifteen!  All the trick is in the timing and the embellishments.  There are still some symbols I have to figure out, but I can feel where the trills should be, and I know the movement of the song even if I don't properly interpret all the lines and dots.  I have the notes, I have my Tull records, I have my woodwinded mind -- I think I am set.

The title for this post came from overly philosophical thoughts I began to have while playing a Tull song for the first time.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.  There's a line in The Sun Also Rises about an American woman speaking French and being surprised at it coming out French.  And then talking too much just to hear herself magically talk French.  That's what it felt like. 

Then tonight I thought about having to relearn to read music, and then to add in all the other info on the page besides just the notes (notes on notes, paratexts...), then interpret it for myself to make it sound agreeable, and like actual music. I thought about the acts of reading, writing, and translation.  I think my knack for Old English translation, silly as this may sound, has been helped along by my learning to play the flute. I began the two endeavors together this semester -- translating OE, "translating" flute -- and they are remarkably complementary.

I was Bourée-ing after I put the kids to bed tonight.  It was great to hear my 8-year-old son call down to me, "Hey, I can hear the song now! Doo doo DEE, doo dee DOO, doo dee DOO, doo doo DEE..."

(And then after a few clinkers he called down "Mama, would it help if you just put on the record?")

Not Quite Classic

A long time ago I wrote about the word "modern," how many meanings it can have, how confusing it is to keep those meanings straight and how they often overlap. I had become frustrated by it while studying "early modern" philosophers.

A much less lofty area of "study" has struck me today with the abuse and confusion it afflicts by having appropriated the word "classic." Classic rock is what got me to thinking about all that's Classic. And not so Classic.

Classic has been used to refer to several kinds and periods of philosophers, and then you've got your classical, which is best known because of classical music (mostly unrelated to rock music, unless you're Ian Andersen, and completely unrelated to classical civilizations), but then you've also got your classical influences in art, your Neo-Classical art, and those classical civilizations (also referred to as "antiquity") which are really just your ancient Greeks and Romans and no one else. Sheesh!

Now I wish I had the resources and the genius to prove to you that there should be a Classic Rock canon (like the Western canon, complete with dead and aging white dudes, only it would totally rock), but I may never get there. Other people have probably attempted to set the rules for one. Of course this assumes that there should be canons of anything, at all. Well I, for one, believe there should be, so we can skip over that argument (for now) and just be left with the wondering about how we would go about selecting the rock canon.

If we're going to canonize, then we might as well periodize. Periodizing is far trickier than it sounds. You can't just cut things up by date. Art, literature, rock music, whatever have you, is categorized by style as well as roughly by date. These two considerations (and often location as well, which isn't as important with rock music since it's mostly an American/British hodge-podge) go into the making of a period. Notice we don't refer to "late 19th century writers" as much as we do to "Victorian novelists," nor do we talk much about "early seventeenth century literature" but rather "Elizabethan drama." Same goes for those I already mentioned, "modern poets," or more snazzily, "the moderns." We don't call them "early twentieth century writers from both Britain and America." The period or, more realistically, the category we put the literature into gets a loaded name (i.e. Romantic) that means so much more than a period or a genre or a location. The style and influence of the thing in question is probably the most important factor in how it is categorized. Yet, we can't look past the time factor completely. If something in a particular style is separated by many years from its influences, it becomes a "Neo-" this or that, or gets its own shiny new period name.

The point of that last paragraph (it started to get away from me I tell you) was that Classic Rock is something of a rock period name, and it is a confusing one. Rock is more commonly (than literature) classified almost completely by style when we want to get specific, even though the people who know the styles know they come from certain periods. Motown, Doo Wop, Jazz Fusion, Heavy Metal etc. The term Classic Rock, by contrast, sounds as if it is seeking to classify rock by a time period -- but Classic Rock also refers to a certain broad style, even if that's not apparent in the "period" name. And of course, within that period there are many, many types of styles or maybe rock genres that we can name. For instance, arena rock, folk rock, the rock opera, Southern rock, and (perhaps paradoxically) progressive rock, are all Classic.

But that kind of variation is to be expected when you classify by time period -- within what everyone calls Enlightenment philosophy, there are different schools sharing some basic aims, i.e. Rationalists and Empiricists, yet there are contemporary philosophies that no one would ever call "Enlightened" even though they happened at the same time. Similarly, not all popular music contemporary with what we call Classic Rock earns that illustrious label. Sometimes because of style (The Cars are "Classic," Depeche Mode is not), sometimes because it just sucks (or gets overlooked) and doesn't ever get played again. Just like with literature, where not everything makes it into the classroom or even the library, not everything will make it onto the radio (our rock classroom) or into the record store (our rock library). So since it refers to a period, but not everything in that period, and since it keeps stretching that period as it sees fit, the word "classic" has become almost as confusing as the word "modern"! Especially when I start to hear fucking Red Hot Chili Peppers on my go-to Classic Rock station. I adamantly exclude them from the canon.

So I'm going to say this -- Classic rock is a period/style of rock. It is not a never-ending moving-wall time period, and it is not just anything with guitars in it that's started to collect some dust. You can call your car classic when it's 25 years old, no matter what kind of jallopy it is. (The rock stations are not even waiting that long to effectually canonize the jallopy music of the 1990s!) So someday somebody's Chevy Tahoe will be classic. That's okay, a GM product is not really art. But "Classic," with a capital "C" as applied to rock music, should come to mean that fixed but blurry-edged period of rock (mid-sixties to mid-eighties perhaps?) when it was gelling, developing, experimenting, doing its best, throughout its golden and silver ages (which some rock scholars and DJs will define). Most of it deals with simple subjects, uses simple instruments (at least for the core of the band), and appeals to the same parts of the brain/crotch. Some of the later stuff (and progressive rock, as the name suggests) is more complex, and makes attempts at reflecting on itself and the world. This is the end of it, as it was with the end of classic visual art. Self-awareness, once achieved, ushers in new eras and disconnects the artist from what's become tradition. The Police are a good example of this I think. (And "Classic" Sting is my favorite English teacher turned rock star. Are there more I wonder?)

They're here to warn us about the dangers of standing too close to older men,
and to let us know we should try to get out of Suburbia before some Scottish
dude gets eaten by a loch-monster.

So Classic Rock rose from artistic striving, through oblivion and self-indulgence, into self-awareness and subsequent self-destruction. Rock after the 80s became over-indulgent once again, but in a trite way. We get our Grunge, our Alternative (to what?) music. I listened to all of that stuff, having been a "tween" and early teen in the early '90s. It was good to me, but I knew it wasn't the same thing as Led Zeppelin or The Who. After a few years of that grungy stuff (some of which is played once in a great while on my station, and I forgive them for some of it) I stopped listening to new rock music altogether, unless you count weird shit that would never be on the radio. Many serious rock folk agree that the end of all decent popular rock music happened around 1996 or 1997. The recognition of that date might be what has caused the 60s-70s-80s stations to start including the early '90s in their line-up. If Nirvana's the end of an era doesn't that make it Classic? I don't think it does. Maybe we can call it Post-Classic. And now we're in a Dark Age!

Anyhow I need to do the work to make a more complete case for this if we are ever to decide on a basic Classic Rock canon. Until then (whenever then might be) I will continue to be offended when U2 or REM interrupt my listening with their whiny, unclassic, tunes, (whining seems to be big thing post-1980s) and I think I still may write a nasty letter asking for the removal of the Chili Peppers from those hallowed airwaves vibrating at 97.1MHz, those imagined wavy lines who usually carry to my waiting ears some groovin' bass line or some soaring tenor vocals. Scrub them clean of the filth of Anthony Keidis!

Today on The Drive (the aforementioned 97.1 FM) the DJ told a story of The Kinks' Ray Davies having to fly back to London from New York right after recording Lola, because the BBC was making them dub over "Coca-Cola" with "cherry cola." Today the studio (if there was any studio involved) would text him on his cell, he would go to the hotel and sing the new line into his iBook, then email it to London to be digitally patched over, leveled out, and anti-aliased all to hell to cover up any noticeable change in quality. But Davies had to fly back to London to re-record a tiny piece of magnetically stored sound so the engineers could carefully splice and tape it back together, all to ensure that the rock n' roll was not audibly tainted by capitalism. Now that's Classic.

"Give me the business all night long": Layers in the Lyrics of Rock

Most of us don't expect much out of our classic rock n' roll lyrics. The most sophisticated devices we usually find there are some sarcasm or some overtly sexual double entendres. If we want our rock to have depth and meaning, we usually turn to folkier sorts of rockers, the ones who take up causes and provide scathing social commentaries. The Neil Youngs, the Joni Mitchells, and even sometimes the John Fogertys of acoustic- and vocal-driven rock wrote lyrics that were meant to be heard, and that delivered messages on several levels, between which they hoped their listeners would uncover layers of sometimes paradoxical meaning -- patriotism mixed with suspicion of the government, or naive nostalgia mixed with the wisdom of "there's no going back." But when we want to just rock out, we don't want the meaning to distract us. Arena rock, the best selling rock of the '70s and '80s, gives us that Dionysian escape through soaring vocals and repetitive driving hooks.

We might think it's futile to look for any sort of depth in our arena rock, our "popular" rock, but sometimes an overproduced, wall-of-sound, stadium filler screamed out by a "pussy god" in a muscle shirt can have a surprisingly layered message.

The song that made me start thinking about the words of arena rock was Billy Squier's "The Stroke." This song is an excellent departure from the usual subjects, because it uses some clever double meanings and analogies to deliver a somewhat unique message, and also to hook the listener in before they even know what that message is. The devices in the song are in no way sophisticated -- the analogy is obvious, as well as sexual like so many of the devices in songs from that era. But Squier used his audience's keen 1980s ear for sexy language as a way to pull them into a dialog that hasn't the least bit to do with that kind of sex, but another kind of expression of ownership or prostitution.

This song is being discussed all over the internet in song meaning forums where idiot kids leave comments like "totally about spanking it!" and "it's a hookup song." The kids obviously didn't notice that the speakers in the song keep addressing each other as "boy," and they don't mention anything about the song being "gay," so their ears must be so polluted they don't hear a thing. They do however, feel quite strongly that Squier's on-stage dancing is most "gay."

On the opposite end of the argument however, a bunch of rock nerd killjoys come into those forums and say "this song has nothing to do with sex," "Squier didn't mean that AT ALL it's about the record industry and nothing else," or my favorite, "it's so obviously about transactional analysis." Squier of course knew that "stroke" was a psychological term, but I doubt he sat there thinking "Oh yes, I'm going to write a clever song based on transactional analysis." TA is a post-Freudian type of analysis developed by Eric Berne, a guy who loved him some Freud (even if he disagreed with him and had to invent a new type of analysis because of it). No matter the origins of "the stroke," it's hard to avoid thinking about the term like a Freudian, that is, seeing it as a sexual metaphor applied to the psyche or ego. Whether this is valid or not, Squier knew people would initially hear it that way (along with the other sexual lyrics) and get pulled into the song -- hopefully hearing his real message by the end. Really, if it was all about a cool argument against the exploitation of musicians, would we have women rhythmically chanting "stroke!" a hundred times over?

Squier uses the girls chanting "stroke!" and the suggestive "stroke me" lines as a hook, but the lyrics to the verses and the ad lib in between the lines of the choruses use the sexual metaphors as more than just a marketing tool. (Ok, now you can start shaking your head every time I write "tool," "device," etc.) Once the transaction begins (firm handshakes and accusations of spreading "ear pollution"), the record exec gives the musician the once over and tells him he can "move quite well." Mm hmm. (More on that later.) After the first chorus of sarcastically asking for some strokes, the musician calls the record exec a "sinner." A strong word for someone who's merely a cheat or a scheister. It implies something a little more carnal, a cardinal sin. I think the most telling lyric comes in the second verse with "First you try to bed me/You make my backbone slide." Ok, "bed me" is a pretty obvious metaphor. "Bend over and sign this contract," is pretty much what the exec is saying. "Backbone slide" comes from an expression for losing your courage or giving into something (selling out in this case) but it has also been used to describe dancing, something the men are doing metaphorically during the transaction, and something the exec wants the musician to do quite literally, in order to earn his money. My absolute favorite line in this song, delivered in a tinglingly coy mix of disgust and seduction: "Give me the bus-i-ness all night long."

Who is speaking and who is being addressed in this song seems to shift around. It leads in with an announcement for the audience ("Have you heard?") and then describes the processes of the music business, and ends what could be another address to the audience, or another exchange between the musician and exec. But the overall meaning is not much altered if you aren't sure who's doing the stroking at any given time, or who is being sarcastically encouraged to participate. It's a two way street, with the record execs wooing the musicians and the musicians prostituting themselves with the help of some powerful pimps. Strokes are probably passed back and forth. Squier is disgusted with the record industry, but also with the musicians who allow it to dominate them.

It's also interesting to note that the album "The Stroke" comes from is called Don't Say No. Don't say no to signing me for this record? Don't say no to buying concert tickets? Who knows. But the message of "The Stroke" seems to be that, as far as record companies are concerned, even if musicians say "no" they always mean "yes." Please, yes!

I said I'd mention Squier's dancing, since the kids' "gay-dar" started bleeping when they watched the video. He doesn't look gay. He looks like a nerd who worked hard and made it onto the stage. (He's still a nerd. He works in public gardens and supports "native planting" efforts.) Well, the ladies certainly didn't find his "fancy dances" a turnoff. Sometimes he's a little Freddy Mercury-esque in his strutting, and sometimes he just looks like a silly Robert Plant imitation. But no girl would have anything bad to say about that hair of his, or his (sometimes pink) muscle shirts, or those 80s fit Levis. I was surprised to find he's already 31 years old in that video. Makes me feel pretty darn good about turning 30!

(I didn't launch into this post because of Billy's pelvic moves -- I've thought he was the shit since long before I knew what he looked like. I love Robert Plant's voice, and I always thought Squier had a similar sound but more masculine, and totally American. Plant, as great as he is, is like some kind of English folkloric nymph . Squier is a dude. I'd only seen one or two photos of him, so I watched his videos for the first time ever in order to write this! I was happy to find him a whole package deal of rock n'roll goodies. Im sorry, am I objectifying a man?)

So while most of the arena rock we listen to might not have anything interesting to say, I'm going to start keeping my ears open for little lyrical efforts on the part of the tight-pants-wearing, luxurious-hair-sporting musicians. Some of them are true artists, even if their album covers and concert ticket sales seem to somehow prove them otherwise. Someone was probably just stroking them "quite well."

Billy turns 60 on May 12.

"Lean on brick wall while holding guitar" must have
been the only executive-approved pose for his photo shoots.

"The Stroke" on YouTube

Rockin' the Sexisms

My tolerance for sexism in rock n'roll music is pretty high, especially when the music is good. This is strange, considering I have almost no tolerance for sexism in advertising (chocolate commercials make me throw things), a low tolerance for sexism in humor (sitcom wife/mothers keep me away from most television), and I heartily appreciate all angles of feminist criticism (part of which is looking for sexist or "phallogocentric" language) when it comes to literature. And of course, real life sexists can eat it.

Today at the gym, while the 80s music blasted, I got to thinking about why so much rock n'roll, despite its sometimes campy sexism, its sometimes blatant misogyny, is music to my ears, while other rock music -- modern rock in particular -- pisses me off as much as the Yoplait commercial where the guy thinks his perpetually dieting wife is going to beat him with bars of soap as punishment for eating her yogurts.

Here's the shortlist of who doesn't bother me at all, and a song or two by each in case you can't think of anything sexist (kind of impossible with Van Halen):

Van Halen (Hot for Teacher, Beautiful Girls, the list would fill the screen...)
Steely Dan (Can't Buy a Thrill, Haitian Divorce, My Old School)
Robert Palmer (Addicted to Love esp. the video, Bad Case of Lovin' You)
The Guess Who (American Woman)

...and many more, whom I will never knock no matter how highly they rate a woman's knockers over her personality.

Before I get to the songs I hate -- the mostly modern rock, whiny, youth-composed anthems to all kinds of sexist views -- I'll explain why I enjoy Van Halen and Steely Dan and their ilk, and even tolerate some of their weakly sexist inferiors.

Don't tell me you take these guys seriously...

Van Halen's songs are so cheesy they can't possibly be serious. The David Lee Roth era produced some stupid yet funny songs and videos that seamlessly merge the sexist humor of their approach with the male urge to look at boobs, hair, and high-cut 80s bikini bottoms. "Hot for Teacher" is about a young boy's impotence as much as his objectification of his teacher. "Beautiful Girls" throws sex out there as something to be desired by men and women alike ("She looks to me like she'd like to fool around"), not something women have forced on them. So, even if these songs and videos express Roth's or any of the Van Halens' real-life attitudes toward women, there is nothing threatening or deeply insulting about them. They would just be the jackasses who make lewd comments, the jackasses who don't get your number. They don't really offend women, or they shouldn't anyway. They are sexy and superficial about women as much as they are about themselves. We can laugh at them, and even pity them. And when the music is fun (Van Halen is hardly my favorite kind of rock, but they are a good option if "the 80s" is all that's on the table) it just makes the lyrics extra funny. "I like the way the line runs up the back of the stocking." That's literally nothing to get your panties in a bunch about.

The words of men don't always bother me, and oftentimes neither do the images they make. I have plenty of words and images too.

So I think what's going on here is that Van Halen mostly lacks any kind of threat or hint of violence (read: rape), which is one real concern when it comes to determining whether the sexism exhibited by some form of art is actually damaging or dangerous. I did argue long ago that there may be some suggestion of violence in "Hot For Teacher," but I was comparing it to The Police's "Don't Stand so Close to Me" which is a much more two sided (but not completely), more carefully treated example of teacher-student romance. The little boys at the end of the "Teacher" video, the "future gang rapists" I think I called them, were probably not permanently altered by a couple days of shooting in pimp costumes and watching grown women do a lingerie show on desktops. It was probably fun for them, and for the women -- who got to work with little boys (who we all love, in their Oedipal innocence) instead of possibly stinky men. And it was all probably very silly.

Steely Dan is a tougher nut to crack when it comes to explaining away my deaf-ear turning and sometimes even appreciation for what some critics have called outright misogyny. I may like Van Halen, despite all their offenses, but I am enamored of the Dan. Since the first time I heard them and knew what I was listening to (it was "Josie"), I started to bounce and couldn't stop. It was like exceedingly excellent porn music, a catchy TV jingle, and a smooth jazz fusion all in one. The mid-catalog Dan is my favorite. The earliest stuff sounds too predictable, too much like rock with some extra instruments thrown in. Once they get into the funkier beats and had the constant high-hat going is where I really start to like it.

There was once much talk of Steely Dan's lyrics, because of the "perversities" their characters indulge in, and the supposed irony with which many of their lines are delivered, whether they are singing about women, drugs, or some "scene." The Yacht Rock series explains it all, if you are interested (It takes a lot of arm twisting to get good music fans to watch this show, but believe me it's worth it! My own arm was twisted into watching it a couple years back -- I resisted for months -- and I'm so glad I gave in.) Or there's this vintage '70s review of Aja that I treated a while back, wherein the Dan's misogyny is labeled downright "violent" and the author goes so far as to point out all the phalluses on the album. At any rate, the lyrics and the music go well together, but the lyrics and the music are two very distinct topics for discussion when it comes to what makes Steely Dan awesome (or awful. I think they're a love-it or hate-it thing). As for any violence that might lurk in Dan-land, I think it's the characters' and not the musicians'. The review I linked to explores the connection between the men and their madmen.

So I don't have a good excuse for them or myself. It was the '70s. I am entertained by the lyrics. I am moved (or at least my butt is moved) by the music. It's the Dionysian effect! I'm outside of myself and don't need any explanation. Or maybe, for me, it's Steely Dan's being pretty intelligent compared to their peers -- it's been called pussy rock (pertaining to both the wimpy listeners and the female subjects I guess), dork rock, etc. because of its appeal to some segment of smart people. The Eagles (mainstream, not incredibly bright) wanted to kick Fagen and Becker's dork asses. There was a feud. So exciting. Maybe this is why I like it. The stories.

I would defend some other rockers in a similar fashion to how I defend Van Halen. It's rock music -- it's not serious. Sometimes it sounds a little serious, but in many cases the male rockers are just acknowledging women's power over them, and their own impotence and helplessness when faced with a certain kind of "mama." By the 80s, I think a men's movement had begun.

Some more bits of not-so-bad and a-little-worse sexism... There are some classic rock artists who bother me, but they don't really make me angry. I think they are just not intelligent or creatively gifted enough to work properly with the sexisms they are trying to pull off. Three of them, Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Seger, create an ugly trifecta of burly American motorcylcing rock jerks in my book. I'll run'em down quickly.

John Mellencamp needs a lover that won't drive him crazy (don't get me started on people who purposefully use "that" instead of "who" to refer to other human beings), and his desperate cry for that lover, a cry with which we are supposed to empathize, is backed up by anthemic female voices and a wailing guitar riff that's supposed to stick with you, and either make you agree with Mellencamp or acquiesce to becoming someone's very agreeable doormat. The closing line of the chorus says it all for Mellencamps red-blooded outlook. He needs "Some girl who knows the meaning of/'Hey hit the highway!'" I think Mellencamp got caught up in copying The Boss's undying anthem approach to music, and accidentally used it for a song about something that should really be sung a little more coyly or tongue-in-cheek.

I could never figure out if Bob Seger is singing about prostitutes or just loose women in "The Fire Down Below." He finds her in the street every time, so we can probably assume the worst. I think this song might have been meant to make us aware of the problems of sex workers, but it comes off as sounding like they really want to be sex workers because they too have "got the fire down below." The message is unclear, the "they" is always unclear, and I worry that he wants us to feel sorry for the men who pay for sex. Second on Bob's list of shame is "Roll Me Away," where he picks up a girl, carries her halfway across the country and dumps her somewhere because she starts crying too much. No one can contain him, or his motorcycle. Grunt! I think Seger's sexism is kind of innocent, and he's trying to make us aware of situations that come up in American life, in cities and on the road (like he does successfully in "Turn the Page") but he's just not very adept at telling a woman's side of the story.

The Boss has the worst musical offense of the three motorcycle jerks I think. "Born to Run" is a pretty awful song. It's not purposely charged with sexism (at least his blind lust is aimed at a specific female target), but it's pretty tasteless. Maybe that's these guys problem -- no taste. From "Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims/And strap your hands 'cross my engines" to the juvenile attempts at Kerouac-like descriptions of life in the street (that make for a most rambling, monotone line delivery with moans and grinding teeth in between), it's just bad.

You can read my nasty remarks about Jimmy Buffet's offense, "Fins," here.

And then there was Kiss. I do hate Gene Simmons, and I won't make excuses for him like I did for the other American boys who just lack a little taste or intellect. Simmons is a first class dick. And he would interpret that as a compliment. So let's call him a jackass instead. If you have any doubts, here's an NPR interview he tried to suppress.

There are also a lot of classic songs that put me on the fence, but the silliness of the messages in them (if that's what they're supposed to be) make me like them anyway and sing along in a mocking voice. They are not part of substantial catalogs, so they don't necessitate any rearranging of the rock canon or anything. "Don't Fall in Love" is a good example of this kind of song that's so bad and inconsequential that it's OK. I mean who really needs to sing to his friend (or himself?) about why he shouldn't love a stripper? "If ya do yal find out sh'don't love yooo!" Hilarity. Also The Outfield's hit "Your Love" makes me wonder, with that line "I like my girls just a little bit older." Does he date young ones to keep up appearances and then sneak around with the older ones who can show him a trick or two? I guess it's ok, 'cause his girlfriend Josie is away having her own fun. She's back in Steely Dan's neighborhood being a raw flame and a livewire.

So now that I've either defended or waved away the sexisms of classic rock into the 1980s, I have to explain why I think there is no excuse for the sexisms of today's rock.

Nickelback: Take us seriously or we'll fuck you up, and then whine about it.

One of the disturbing things about today's music is the youth, and consequential lack of tact or forethought, of its lyric writers. Maybe some of our classic favorites were young when they wrote their first songs, but being 19 years old in the 1970s was a far different stage of life from being 19 years old in the 2000s. Our adolescence has grown sickeningly long, and I don't mean by that that I think everyone needs to grow up fast. I'm not even grown up. But I do know how to be independent. I think part of the problem with "these kids today" is they have their asses wiped for them, so when they get hurt they think they can say whatever they want about women (or men). They're not used to not getting their way. I think a couple generations back, young people not only got pushed around a little more and had to make their own way more often, but they were paradoxically more idealistic and had a healthier (even if it wasn't always optimistic) outlook despite their trials. I think of Neil Young writing "Sugar Mountain" at the turn of 20. You don't get that kind of thought and sincerity from young people's music today.

Another factor in the proliferation of rock sexisms is our desensitization. Now that the hip hop scene has made all kinds of sexisms mainstream, the rockers have carte blanche to do the same thing, only they put their tongues in their cheeks a little so we don't question their motives or accuse them of actually believing what they sing.

One more factor in these songs' disturbingness is that they get personal. Van Halen, for instance, addresses women. A woman, an individual, can shake that off. The motorcycle dudes address idealized women in their stupid innocent way. A modern rocker douche sings to a specific girl about the specific offenses she's supposedly perpetrated against him, and sometimes about the specific punishments he'll administer. It's creepy. We have come far enough, women, that blanket statements slide right off. Personal, directed violence will probably always be offensive and disturbing to us, and rightly so.

I was getting my hair cut the other night and I heard "Girls Like Cars and Money" by Good Charlotte. The song, if you listen real close at the end, it supposedly lamenting the fact that so many girls like cars and money("losing their souls in a material world"-- we've heard it all before, whiny Charlotte), but by the time you get that far the damage is done. Good Charlotte just told a whole lot of girls they're only good girls if they like cars and money. They sing it like it's truth. Maybe the reason girls like those things is because everyone's telling them to? Even the "rock" music, which is supposed to rock the boat.

There are plenty more where that came from, but then their are also all the break-up songs nowadays that call women (girls, at their age) bitches in so many words, and mask the violence of their lyrics by whining away so poignantly to muffled, bass-heavy, digitally compressed guitar churning. Puddle of Mudd has continual hits with songs where the speaker is "drowning in a pool of misery" where "she fucking hates me," or "she's fucking someone else." In one gem off their 2003 album some girl is told "you better shut it...or you'll be sorry." We have to wonder what this guy does to all these women that they so often sleep with other people and leave him quickly enough that he can write ten or more songs about their successive abandonments (he really wants us to feel sorry for him) to fill up an album every year or so. I first saw a video of theirs in 2001, and I knew some bad shit was going to rain down. (Why, it's not mudd at all! It's sewage!)

Nickelback will be my last specific example (just turn on the radio -- I don't want to keep looking up the horrible lyrics to these things). They have a huge fan following among those impressionable teenaged girls. I know they are impressionable because I was one once. Only my '90s heroes were too depressed to constantly hate on women, and while they may have contributed to my tail-end-of-GenX cynicism, they didn't make me want boys with cars or destroy my feminine self-worth like these jerks nowadays seem to want to do to their female audience. The Cobains, the Staleys, the lot of them, had bigger problems.

So then there was Nickelback. I think their mainstream, radio-friendly songs have been crafted to draw attention away from some of the filth they hide in their deep tracks. Filth about burning buildings and vandalizing places while getting shitfaced. And there's no humor to it, or social message even. The Ramones could sing the same thing and have it be funny or commentary. But wait, that's not about sex -- here we go. Nickelback has a song (I didn't bother to keep looking once I found this putrid thing) called "Figured You Out" that says it all for what we are to believe (some) young men expect from (all?) young women today. I won't put any of it here, you can click on it, and shudder away. Maybe today's rockers (the Nickelbackers are getting up there in age) have figured the young ladies out so well because they told them how to act in the first place. Leaving men isn't good -- Puddle of Mudd details the consequences. So I guess girls are supposed to stick around, get "figured out," and...wait...are they supposed to like the cars or will they get in trouble for that too? Shit!

I was just relieved to find this article on people not taking Nickelback seriously.

In my band I sing "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" back to back with "I Hate Myself for Lovin' You" and I introduce it as our feminist rock block. These come off as our best songs because, yeah, I get into them. I don't put notches in any lipstick case, but that line always brings out the feisty in me ("Put me in my place, muthafucka!" Haha.). The energy from Benatar's lyrics rolls right into the grunts in between the verses of the Joan Jett number (I heard that at the gym today too, and I think I like my extra bitchy version better -- we've permanently change the lyrics to "can't break free from that SHIT that you do"). These women were reacting to the sexisms they heard and experienced in the 1980s. If they could write those songs over today, I bet there would be a lot more anger there. Jett and Benatar's songs (as they are) seem like a healthy, measured reaction to dummy '80s boys being boys, and I don't feel like a she-sexist when I use their music as the same kind of reactionary outlet.

A final question. Where are the reactionary songs from today's lady rockers? Perhaps they're all too busy looking good and singing nonsense, or being good, by singing very quietly.

The Language and Experience of Listening: A Framed Thought Bubble

There are no cupholders on the Metra train. And I'm always drinking something. I've grown accustomed to transcribing scrawls from tea-stained, curly-edged pages.

This spring -- out of the institution, eager for the institution -- I'm sitting in on a special topics in philosophy class at my old school -- not every day but once every couple of weeks. It's a class in sound art, specifically the aesthetics of sound and the phenomenology of listening. My former professor asked me to come by once in a while to help facilitate good discussions. I guess I came in handy in that German Romantic Aesthetics class last year (I was all about the Schlegel), and maybe he fears a dead room in this half-term class. They are a large assortment of mainstream-looking students. I'd be fearful too. And I hope I'm not the only "student" who does the reading.

The reading list, and of course, the listening list, is exciting. I'm definitely going to read along with the class, and I even want to make a listening journal like the kids are required to do. (I wouldn't be so inclined to call them kids if it weren't for their outrageous hairstyles and destroyed jeans.) I thought of turning my Twitter account into a listening journal, exclusively. "A micro-blog of experiential learning through sound." What a tagline. I'd probably get more followers than I'd know what to do with. Gawd, I'm starting to think of my own online presence as a social marketing experiment. It's bad. But the real social marketing experiments I'm working on (for clients, for money) put shoes on my feet and put bacon in the boy's belly. So I can't remove that thinking model from my brain completely. (Train just arrived in Chicago. I'm here for an email marketing seminar!) So while I cannot fully lobotomize the marketing out of my brain just yet, I will at least make some attempt to keep'em separated. (In this paragraph, the frame intrudes on the thought bubble.)

Back to the good stuff. Wait. I'm realizing how weird I dress. Jeans (oops), 1940s looking heels, pearls (I look up to Lisa Simpson I guess) and a light blue shirt I just picked up that looks like the past and the future at the same time. A short tunic with 1960s Star Trek shoulders. The kind of thing some princess on a planet of advanced peoples was always wearing, reminiscent of the classical heights of Earth civilization, but with some geometric embellishment to prove her technological futuristicness. I, with my pointy shoulders, am the interloper here. I come from the planet BATAVIA. Look at our picture! We used to have the largest particle accelerator in the galaxy (it is true, friend), until the Swiss outdid us. They still send us their particle data for our expert analyses. So I, citizen of BATAVIA, Planet of Energy, am still quite superior to all of you. Now, teach me this skill you call "email marketing," earthlings. (See what happens to my brain when I have a regular job?)

BATAVIA and the edge of the Particle Accelerator's Cooling Ring

Ok, now back to the good stuff. The stuff of philosophy, which (if we trust our etymologies) is love and knowledge. I am loving to know about:

A) How we experience sound and sound-as-art, i.e. the phenomenology of listening

B) How we articulate the experience of sound and sound art, specifically how this language (really, all language) is so founded in the visual, so that some qualities of sound and the experience of sound might get lost in translation. Is this loss of understanding, or this "misreading" of sound inevitable? Can we bypass our seemingly visually oriented hard-wiring by simply creating a new aural lexicon?

The funny thing is, speech is aural. Maybe we were always trying to communicate what we were looking at (eventually, what we were thinking about) instead of what we were hearing. Onomatopoeia is good enough for that. We can make some good noises.

In class we listened to sound art of the genus musique concrete -- embers burning, doors squeaking, and a symphony of forest floor sounds. Also some garbled and flipped recordings of Blue Suede Shoes that were more like sampling. I took notes, to begin my listening journal, and I found myself describing the pieces in visual terms. Not only in vulgar visual terms, but in terms from the study of art. As an erstwhile art student I couldn't help but make analogies to various art movements and plastic media for each piece. Henry's "...pour une porte" is a ready-made-aided. Tenney's Elvis inspired "Collage #1," well it really is a collage. Xenakis' embers I likened to some kind of found object art, which can be said of most musique concrete. M...'s (don't have my notes, I'll fill the name in at home) piece, a harmonious composition (but with no melody) played by humans on instruments, I called a colorfield. This kind of categorization helps me to remember the sounds, and to more clearly analyze the elements of them. But even though I have a personal reason to be so grounded in the visual, I don't think I'm unique for it. The other students were not exactly visual in their descriptions, but they were very sucked into the concreteness of them, and re-expressed the sounds in worldy terms -- images conjured by the sounds-- like falling rain and creaking rocking chairs. Any non-painting sort of images I saw were filmic, timed and edited to the sounds. That kind of image is a little more in line with sound I suppose, since film is a temporal medium. The embers sounded like a psychological break, the Blue Suede Shoes like someone who wished to speak but couldn't make any intelligible noise.

So how can we listen without seeing images? Do we even want to do that? You know, we look at things without hearing them every day.

Lunch Break. Crazy city tea shop. "Tea Bites." Muffin shaped croissants with aromatic ingredients like Earl Grey tea leaves and pesto salmon (none of them are "Tuscan" thank goodness), bubble tea (coconut with red tea) wherein the bubbles are actually cubes. It must be from the future. Even in BATAVIA, bubbles are round.

Some kind of representation is the aim of much art, whether it is figurative and literal or not. It's very easy to see representation. Listening for it is a little more subtle. Language in all its arbitrariness is no practice at listening for representation. Music is practice at listening for representation. With mainstream aural art (such as music), representation is still quite accessible. We hear joy, despair, tension, speed -- well we sort of feel these things almost directly, without mediating them much (at least not very consciously). But music also represents, for instance, pastoral landscapes. The end to the musical means, in the case of say Vivaldi, seems to be almost completely visual, even if we are reminded of some real-life sounds on the way to the pasture. Many sound impressions become just as visual once we intend ourselves toward them. Industrial sounds are common in music, and they act a little like musique concrete in that they are real sounds of industry. But don't we end up with an image of a factory in our heads by the time a piece is through?

Some music, like Vivaldi's, was probably meant to put the pictures in our minds. Other composers probably cringe at the thought of their sounds being mediated into images. Some of the greats may have been capable of "music language immerision" and did not need any visual aid either to listen or to compose. But they must know that most of us do! Even the good, careful listeners. But anyhow, what poor deaf Beethoven wanted us to hear is none of our concern.

More on this very soon. I'm being kicked out of Chicago, and it's time for band practice. I will try not to envision anything at all as I sing.

No more pictures, of course. Just enjoy BATAVIA.

Video Dating and Radio Timelessness

No, I don't mean some web-cam assisted dating service.

Today I was thinking about the way songs get ruined by their awful, dated music videos. Some even get ruined by good music videos. And songs pre-music video can sometimes get ruined by their album cover art. So why is the visual so dating and the aural so timeless?

Music styles change dramatically over time, just like what color schemes are popular (avocado and harvest gold...), what kind of jean wash is coolest (acid or stone?), or what kind of mythology we currently happen to favor in our popular culture (vampires?). Every music lover can tell new sounds from the old, and those of us who wear out the grooves in the vinyl can tell you what year a technique came into use, what kinds of influences were coming back to the fore, and a few musical anecdotes from that year.

So we can hear all the changes in our music, but they don't bother us. We don't think (unless we're 16 years old maybe) "Ugh! This sounds so seventies!" or anything like that. If someone tried to imitate the old sounds, and did it successfully, we'd probably like it.

I think before I go further I have to set the earlier seventies aside, because they're far enough removed that they're cool, in style and color and dress and everything. The later seventies are when some embarrassing things start to happen, like terrible clothes, the debut of spandex being a particularly troubling example. Album covers started to get shiny and sport space-ships and other futuristic stuff. By the eighties, they were spray-painted with graffiti, showed off red lips and roller skates, or worse. Looking at some of these albums you wonder how what's inside the package came from the same culture as what's on the outside.

The '80s also had a few new waves of music that we can place very easily in their '80s time slot. Some of it can be annoying, and like any decade there was plenty of bad to go with the good. But the good stuff, however over-synthesized or over-guitar-soloed it may be, could never make us cringe the way squiggly lines and triangles moving to the beat can.

So yeah, along came the music video, which makes this problem especially bad for the eighties. Some songs that will never live their videos down are Devo's "Whip It," Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," and The Police's "Don't Stand so Close to Me."

"Sledgehammer" defined and influenced the '80s special-effects video look and won a million awards. But the video is too goddamn literal! I think Peter Gabriel is great at times, and I really try to listen to this song when it comes on the radio. I can't hear it though, because I just see claymation clouds floating across his face and claymation hammers smashing other clay junk. I can't separate the video from the song, and the music is less enjoyable because of that. This is a unique example of the problem since "Sledgehammer" is the most played music video of all time, but there's no denying how terribly '80s and dated it looks, and that this has an effect on how we hear the song.

"Whip It" doesn't really work at all without the visual, but it's an example of music catering to the video industry rather than the other way round.

"Don't Stand so Close to Me," despite all the juicy shots of Sting, is also way too literal for a video, and naturally those images get plugged right in as I hear the lyrics, making the song harder to enjoy. Of course this song is mostly meant to be taken literally, but some things are better left to the imagination. The teacher we're supposed to be hot for (confusing, since we should be angry with him right?), is very '80s conventional good-looking and all the high schoolers' hairdos are out of this world '80s yearbook photoesque. I try to just think of Sting. 1980 Sting.

Another example of dating problems I have had (haha) with '80s tunes was my initial fear of Talking Heads. I didn't want to like them, because they just seemed so "then." What fixed me? I watched a live DVD of them that was basically unplaceable in time. In "Stop Making Sense," no one wears any clothing that is dateable. There are no funky video effects. It's just the band playing and doing what they do. So then I started liking Talking Heads.

So why are these visual indicators of time so distasteful to us, while the musical indicators of time are not only tolerated but often welcome and exhilarating? When we look back at the '80s and decide we like something -- a color scheme or a hairdo -- we like it for the kitsch. But if we like an '80s song it's because we truly like it!

The same is true even with the '70s. I genuinely love the '70s, but some people just like them because it's funny to like them. They even had their own show. But the one thing they didn't make fun of on that show was the music.

I don't think video killed the radio star, but it sure made it a lot more complicated to appreciate the radio star without thinking about what he/she was wearing or what kinds of squigglies and special effects his or her video directors were into.

I just watched the video for Bowie's "Modern Love," because I'd never seen it. Big mistake.

Addicted to "Addicted to Love"

I'm gonna have to face it. I'm not addicted to love. I'm addicted to the song.

I recently changed my facebook "music" info to include: "My current guilty pleasure is Robert Palmer." It was important (or intense) enough that I make that change.

My passion is the 1970s. I love sloppy rocking Zepplin. I adore smooth ironic Dan. I go head over heels for over-commercial Boston and their ilk. However, the seventies, no matter where you start, are still so deep!

Sometimes (only sometimes) when I'm station surfing -- because I think the radio is the best way to hear tunes if you've got good stations in your area -- I have a dilemma on my hands (or on my finger). I toggle between some seventies ballad or another on station one and two, and lately, unavoidably, station three offers up some eighties treat that I just can't resist. The draw of the drum machine and the superficial coked-up messages are the exciting alternative to those old seventies tunes that always seem to want to talk about our "relationship."

Maybe I've been spending too much time and effort on the seventies. Maybe we need a breather. No, that can't be! I just need a little eighties action on the side once in a while.

The '80s don't require any effort or thought. The drum machines do the work for me. The synthesizers, now aided by something almost like a computer, punch at just the right time. It's easy and it feels good, so why put all that work into whoever's on the other station?

Robert Palmer knows he is talking to you, and he doesn't care that much about the message he's sending. The keyboard doesn't care whether it's making a pleasing sound. It flatly introduces a soulful voice fronting a "one-track mind." Palmer, always aloof, doesn't admit he's got a personal role in the song until the second verse. It sounds like a condemnation or advice to a friend -- until he mentions "you'll be mine." He's addicted too. That's when things heat up, and someone starts craving "oblivion." Pretty intense for this song. But then we're back to the comfort of synth and completely detached and careless ooooh yeahs. Bridge. WHACK. More detached oooh yeahs. And ride it out on the repetition of that fucking sexy hook!

I don't think I'm going to stop thinking about it (or listening to it) anytime soon. At least not for...a week or so. See 70s? You've really got nothing to worry about! This? Ha, this. It doesn't mean anything.

I admit I can't draw a solid line where the "real" music ends and the cheap thrills begin. There are some '80s outliers that still inspire that '70s romanticism despite their synth-heavy compositions and staccato back-beats. The Talking Heads have immense depth, with an '80s sheen on their ripply surface. The Cars are hangers-on; decade straddlers. These bands fall in line with my true loves of yore. They just look a little blinged out by comparison.

Robert Palmer, however, is the prime example of the kind of eighties music that gives the best of the cheap thrills. There is nothing to be said for his music's depth or lyrical qualities, at least nothing positive about life-changing or society-commentating or otherwise moving capabilities in any of it. The only thing it moves are asses. It snags some unthinking, addictive! part of the brain, that silly part alerts the whole, always-addictive body, and you're stuck listening to repetitive but somehow brilliantly empty music, maybe even for a whole summer.

Ahhh, yeah.

Comfortably, Wordsworth

While doing some menial task at work -- a spreadsheet I think -- and listening to some music on headphones, I was stunned into consciousness by an unexpected association between what I was hearing and what I'd been reading.

"Comfortably Numb" had lulled me into this place of (perceived) clarity when, suddenly, during the second chorus, as Waters sang "When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse" I heard an echo of Wordsworth's question: "Whither has fled that visionary gleam?" It didn't seem a coincidence or a loose association. I thought there must be a reason for it.

After comparing the lyrics to "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," I decided that the themes of "Numb" and "Ode" are but one theme. It is not a theme that hasn't been repeated elsewhere, nor was Wordsworth the first to explore it. But parallels in the lyrics and the poem still seemed significant.

Wordsworth's observations about the "prison-house" and "yoke" of adulthood reflect an early sort of cynicism, which would be fully developed by the time rock musicians were writing reflectively. Wordsworth's little bit of jadedness, however, is tempered throughout the poem by his period fascination with the positive effects of nature on the soul, and nearly sentimental (but never giving over completely to sentimentality in Wordsworth) dwelling on the joys of youth. Pink Floyd carries out the life-cynicism without as much of an attempt to overcome it (Wordsworth repeatedly calls himself back to the beauty of the day, and chides himself for disgracing it with sadness) -- we don't expect Wordsworth's positivity in post-modernity, even with qualifications.

To further the association, Wordsworth's romantically rhythmic and rhymed lines seemed to match the cadence and mood of "Numb." In other well-known poems he often employed a blank verse that trailed on in natural speech patterns ("Tintern Abbey," The Prelude), instead of this anisometric verse with varied line lengths. The choice to use rhyme in "Ode" lends a song-like quality to it. In fact it was set to music several times before Waters and Gilmour got the idea (Waters actually wrote the lyrics and gave Gilmour feedback on the music).

Before I get into the line by line comparisons, I want to note one major difference between the poem and the song. Waters uses a sort of dialog to unfold the story. The first voice we hear, the semi-whispering deceptively friendly voice, is the antagonist (a doctor?) and the second voice -- high and mellow, accompanied by synth strings -- that begins with the first chorus is our speaker. The doctor (society? adulthood?) interviews the speaker who has begun to feel the emptiness of life ("Hello, is there anybody in there?") and of forgetting. When asked "where it hurts" and the speaker realizes he does not actually have any pain, just a numbness (the same thing?), the doctor ensures that the numbness will continue, and at a level where no doubts or memories can creep to the surface. As the doctor does his work ("Ok. Just a little pinprick.") the speaker desperately tries to remember what childhood meant to him, and who he was before the numbness set in, but he "can't explain it" and the doctor "would not understand" anyway. The speaker, unable to express himself, gives up and gives over to the comfort of numbness, and the song ends with his pain never having been felt ("There is no pain") and his exploration of the origins of his numbness incomplete. He is an ironic tragic hero, who faces an end very different from death, and faces it without anything like valiance.

I know "doctor" is too literal of an explication for what's going on in these lyrics but for the sake of explaining the dialog, I cast a person for the part.

Wordsworth does not carry on a dialog with anyone but himself. He also does not necessarily lay the blame for the "forgetting" outside of himself. For Wordsworth, the forgetting is a natural process and a spiritual maturing that is to be expected. The "trailing clouds of glory"(line 65) we bring with us from heaven are sure to dissolve as the sun rises on adulthood, and though youth's "vision splendid" (line 74) will "fade to the common light of day" (line 77), it brings a sadness and a loss, but not tragedy. Wordsworth ends the poem on a somewhat optimistic (but still poignant) note in fact, because, as he suggests throughout the ode, a child is the "best philosopher," but the wisdom of adulthood brings out a new sort of philosopher in the man, a "philosophic mind" (line 191) (rather than soul?) with a new view "that looks through death" (line 190), and can appreciate the beauty and ephemerality of everything the joy-drinking child takes for granted.

Despite this difference in format, the thematic similarities remain, as well as some very close textual similarities. Some lines I found strikingly close (Wordsworth in green, Floyd in pink, of course) are listed here with explanation. Some are repeated, as Waters' much shorter lyrics match up with several lines in the long "Ode," and sometimes, conversely, whole "stanzas" of the song are explorations of a line in the poem.

These are the lines that woke me from work-stupor:

"Where is it now the glory and the dream?" (line 59)
"The child is grown, the dream is gone."

The above lines encapsulate the theme the two works share. I scribbled on a yellow legal pad "Comfortably Numb....Intimations!?"

The below lines show Waters elaborating on an idea that Wordsworth danced around.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting" (line 59)
and "The things which I have seen I now can see no more." (line 9)
"When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now."

The forgetting seems to be an important notion, but it fades away in the poem. Waters' speaker seems to struggle with this more than Wordsworth does. He desperately tries to recall the vision, to articulate what has gone missing. The message of the "Ode" is the same as the message of "Numb," insofar as the vision is something the child takes for granted or never looks at full-on. Once he gains the self-consciousness to look for the source of the vision, it moves away from him. But Wordsworth shows the ramifications of all this indirectly, and keeps calling his own attention back to the May day, making himself delight in the children he is observing rather than deal with his loss and forgetting on a personal level.

I picture Wordsworth on a green hill shaking his head at the view and the kids. "Mmm-mmm. Isn't that something. You can never go back to it." I picture Waters' speaker on a cold metal table waffling between misery and acceptance, desperate to cry out but muted by forgetfulness and an inability to articulate what there are no words for (though Wordsworth did his best to find substitutes) in the language of Man. The word I keep returning to for "Numb" is "desperate." Wordsworth is not desperate, only contemplative. Or if he is desperate, he hides it well.

"The homely nurse doth all she can/To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man/Forget the glories he hath known" (lines 82-4)
"Well I can ease your pain, get you on your feet again."
and all the doctoring lines about fixing him up

The above lines make reference to the forces and niceties of the Earth that keep us in line, keep us accepting of the numbness and of the trappings of adulthood. This is a far bigger fish to fry for Waters' twentieth century speaker than it was for Wordsworth, who was lulled into numbness by the "meanest" things in nature! This bigger conflict for Waters' speaker would explain the dialogic framework (them v. me) of the Pink Floyd song and the locus of the pain/numbess being outside of the Man.

"To me alone there came a thought of grief" (line 22)
"Now I've got that feeling once again...I can't explain, you would not understand."

The above lines show that both speakers are outsiders. They are alone in their feeling grief at this situation that faces every man. Wordsworth is sure no one else beholding that pastoral scene has any unrest in his heart. Waters' speaker is sure the doctor could not understand what he is yearning for, even if he could explain it.

Didn't find a direct match in Wordsworth, but this line kills me!
"When I was a child I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons."

There are quite a few lines in "Ode" having to do with the child's light-infused vision of the world, his fresh and dazzling perspective on sunsets, lambs, mothers, everything. I think the word "fever" catches my eye in the Floyd line; the fever being the altered vision, the heat and energy of youth. It could be both Wordsworth's fever and an actual childhood fever, giving it a place in Water's speaker's mind where it would be vividly remembered, so that it calls him back to his childlike way of seeing. The balloons are hard to figure -- but I think they are a distinctly child-like interpretation of a physical sensation. Also, it is a comforting thing for a feverish child to have such happy thoughts -- his perception of his body's changes in sickness remind him of balloons, rather than frightening him. All he has to judge the situation by are "fragment[s] of his dream of human life" (line 92).

"The little actor cons another part" (line 103)
"As if his whole vocation/Were endless imitation." (lines 107-8)
"Both of them speak of something that is gone" (line 54)
"This is not how I am."

The above lines show the speakers struggling with who they are at that moment. Waters' speaker remembers his childhood self, and denies the man he has become. Wordsworth, lost in brief reflection on trees and flowers, is brought back to his speculations in line 54 because of he way a tree and a field refuse to interact with him the same as they had in his youth. He is in limbo between his selves. Lines 103 and 107-8 are Wordsworth's description of a child growing up, as he learns by imitation. However, many critics have wondered at this entire stanza on the child growing up, and some call it superfluous (See Cleanth Brooks, "Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination"). These last lines add ambiguity to the poem, because the adult-making process is described differently than elsewhere. Could it be that the little boy who learns to play his part becomes a man who is always merely playing? Wordsworth wonders what Waters' speaker states without question: "IS this how I am?"

"Whither has fled that visionary gleam?" (line 58)
"And custom lie upon thee [me] with a weight/Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!" (132-3)
"At length the Man perceives it die away/And fade into the light of common day." (lines 76-7)
"I have become comfortably numb."

The above Wordsworth lines and many, many more can be summed up by Waters' ingenious title-giving phrase, "comfortably numb."

Perhaps, is the below line the key to Wordsworth's actual suffering, which he manages to hide better than Waters' speaker?

"A timely utterance gave that thought [of grief] relief,/And again I am strong." (lines 23-4)
"Just a little pinprick...I do believe it's working, good. That'll keep you going for the show."

Whereas this renewed strength may be a kind of denial for Wordsworth, Waters acknowledges the pain/numbness as something he has succumbed to, and that the pure numbness he gets a shot of is (like Wordsworth's shot of strength from a jangling tambor) merely to keep him operating as a human. Despite his doubts and fears, the show must go on. Again Waters presents a far more cynical approach to "the show" than Wordsworth many have even been capable of. The angriest Wordsworth gets at society is when he complains of "custom."

The above lines also call us back to the aforementioned lines about the "little actor."

Finally, there is no direct and meaningful correllation here, but I find the below lines to be imagistically similar.

"Though far inland we be/Our souls have sight of that Immortal sea...And see the children sport upon the shore/And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." (lines 167-172)
"A distant ship's smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves. You lips move but I can't hear what you're saying."

Wordsworth has inspired two centuries of poets and artists, and I think we can count Pink Floyd among them. It is not only amazing to see what Waters may have borrowed from this epic theme done Wordsworth style, but to see how the song can even illuminate a poem that was written over 170 years before anyone ever got stoned to The Wall.

P.S. In case you thought I missed a line, I'll tell you I could probably write a whole new entry just on "You are receding." But I'll save that for later. (That's why I didn't open that can of worms during the comparison.)

In Defense of Rockin': Part 1

I'm listening to Pandora radio and trying to train her to my tastes. She's trying real hard, but she doesn't quite get me yet. She's got The Clash on now so I'll get started. It's in this mood that I'd like to draft a proposal or brain dump for a paper I've wanted to write for some time -- a defense of rock n' roll.

Let me preface the dump by saying I really have been mulling this over for about a semester now. I'm taking a philosophy of aesthetics class and I have managed to bring up rock music and successfully include it in serious discussions of mostly august (some crazy) philosophers and their various art theories. My professor, who is sort of my go-to guy for testing theories, has let me get away with my arguments for complex music such as Jethro Tull being held up as examples of what an artwork should aspire to, or of what art can do to/for us.

While Freebird has also come up several times, the prof. is not as accommodating to my exaltation of less orchestral and less overtly classically influenced bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin (who I think are very classically influenced), and Credence Clearwater Revival. I have not even considered bringing up that even lower category of bands which give me quick and easy pleasure like Boston, REO Speedwagon, Journey, or Styx. Those would get shut down immediately.

This professor likes rock music, to be sure (as Pandora puts on the Zep, "Rock and Roll"), but even though he genuinely enjoys it, I think he keeps it separated from his high culture musical tastes. We all do this to some extent. But there is something about rock music, for me, that lets it transcend being marginalized or pushed out of the way by high art merely because it is popular. The first weak argument that came to mind for me was that we like so much popular music, all of us do, and everyone with an artist's soul takes some of this music seriously -- even people with Ph.Ds and opera subscriptions. Other art forms are not like this. Popular movies are only taken seriously by fame-obsessed folk, and there is really no such thing today as popular plastic arts (i.e. painting, sculpture, etc) except for things that are made only for buying and selling (IKEA) -- hence the exploded "design" industry.

Pandora dug some Velvet Underground out of her box for me. (Ha! There's a sentence for the psychoanalysis bunch.)

Anyhow, the above weak argument was answered with "Well, everyone likes fast food too, but it's not good is it?" I don't think that's a sufficient rebuttal, even though I know my thinking is full of holes. I think what I need to make clear is that rock music -- the CANON of rock music, because I really think there is one -- transcends being degraded by its associations with the popular, or by its tendency to be commodified by soulless record execs. There is bad popular music. If we're talking about today's music, most of it is nauseating to me, to be honest. But the musical rut we're in (I think it's the malaise of post-modernism and music just took longer to get there than the rest of the arts) is a totally different topic.

Pandora is playing me way too much Beatles. That's another topic too.

I don't intend to defend rock as something totally literary. I'm looking at this from a philosophical perspective, but yeah, I'm obviously going to be influenced by my literature leanings. I think music needs its own categories. Rock would be like the beat poetry of music, of course. Not everyone would dig it. But the rock canon's locus is definitely in the "real "music canon. There needs to be a term for what makes music the stuff of studies and contemplations in the first place, like "literary" says what is worth studying and contemplating when it comes to words.

Speaking of literary, Pandora just turned on "Moby Dick." Instrumentals are more conducive to thinking.

So we all know what rock music does for us and to us -- it carries us away, it makes us move, it transfixes us, and paralyzes us (wonderfully!). When a popular film or nicely designed doohickey does this, it only works once or twice, and only for a moment or two. Good rock can do this again and again, no matter how well we know it, no matter if we've learned all its tricks, no matter if we know it's meant to be ironic or trying to tell us something we don't want to hear.

I have so much more to say (especially about Nietzsche and music!) but I want to wrap up the thoughts for today. So I'll make this "Part 1." And I'm going to keep bothering my professor about this as long as he allows it. Since he likes the rock, he can empathize with me. But he's also coming from a slightly "higher-art" place than I am. (He's got scores of classical CDs and probably has an opera subscription...I have one JS Bach CD in my car, and last night, after some deliberation, I chose Mr. Bungle instead and put Bach back.) So it's nice to have a place to go where I know I'll get some of these arguments immediately wasted; which will save me some time when this is someday presented to the real snobs out there.

One last note: I have noticed even lowly television series condemning any attempt at "scholarizing" rock music. I think it was Law & Order that had an episode where the "perp" was a guy doing a (floundering) dissertation on Bob Dylan. He was in his tenth year and everyone made fun of him. Coming from a TV writer (ACK! GAG!) that hurts, man. That really hurts. I'm gonna fix this.

Now to let Ian Anderson tell me about "The Secret Language of Birds." I think Pandora is finally getting to know me. Good girl.