Song

Maybe it's just me, who peers out periodically from the citadel of "high art" music into popular culture, but I am eternally amazed by the musical sophistication displayed by the better pop and rock groups. There are exceptions, of course, in which the ideal is a total lack of sophistication and "artifice" (by which they seem to mean that for an artist to actually create a work of art is somehow selling out).

I've been listening, as you probably know if you're following my jottings at all, to Nickelback. Mostly All the Right Reasons, which is probably their best album to date, but also more recently Silver Side Up, which I believe was my introduction to their music some years ago. (Yeah, well, it was one of those "sitting in a bar and this good song came on the jukebox, and I went over to check it out" sort of things. I think it was that disc, but don't quote me on it -- I was pretty foggy at that point.)

You have to be prepared to listen, I mean really listen, and you have to be prepared to take it seriously. One of the downsides of music-as-context, as opposed to music-as-event, is that it's a given, and we tend not to pay much attention to it. It's always there, and most of it's of indifferent quality. (Sturgeon's Law, again.)



And so over the past couple of years I've been struck by the sheer amazing musical inventiveness and sophistication of such groups as Depeche Mode, Icehouse, Journey, and now Nickelback. (A note: I had no idea how popular they were when I encountered them. I didn't care -- hell, John Tavener isn't "popular" in that sense, and I love his music. I still don't have a good handle on it, except I understand that Depeche Mode and Journey are megabands, Icehouse pretty much ignored, and Nickelback resented -- at least, that's what it seems like.)

Beethoven can make me cry. Picture this -- a concert many years ago by the Fine Arts Quartet, a series for which we had tickets, and that night's program included the fifteenth quartet, the Op. 132, which is one of the most affecting pieces of music I've ever heard. Boyfriend is sitting there rapt and glances over to his boyfriend (that would be me) during the "Heilige Dankgesang." He got all worried because I was sitting there with tears streaming down my face -- I'm talking floods here, an effing tidal wave. That damned piece just destroyed me. Gods, it was so honest and so beautiful!

Something like "How You Remind Me" or "Savin' Me" can do the same thing -- maybe not the tears, but the same emotional state, the involvement, the complete submersion in what's going on in the song. It's the honesty, I think, and there's a misunderstanding that so many young artists act on: you don't have to be artless to be honest. That's why making good art is so damned hard. It's too easy to get lost in the effects, to move into the worship of form over substance (one of my main objections to Minimalism and Deconstructivism), and to lose the genuine impulse that caused the whole thing to begin with, to forget why you're doing it, but you have to walk that edge or you're just making noise. Emotion without craft is just acting out.

I should also note that I have no patience with "cool." At least, not in the realm of art. (Maybe that's why I don't like jazz very much -- it just strikes me as cold and intellectual, and I look for hot and passionate. Yes, I can reconcile Depeche Mode with that -- that kind of irony requires engagement, but expressing it needs distance -- you can't have the one without the other, after all.) That's probably another reason I like Nickelback: they are not "cool" at all. They are warm and yeasty and unruly. And amazing craftsmen.

This has been another installment of "what to write about when the political news is too much 'same old'."