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doshmanziari · 3 years

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Musical Offerings for the New Year || What is “Radical Music” in 2021?

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.

I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.

The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²

As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.

I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future -- as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.” Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?

It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.

Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:

For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.

The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”

Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.

The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and -- instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally -- only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.

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¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.

² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.

#music analysis #radicalism #digital fusion

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notbecauseofvictories · 5 years

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hi sarah! you'd been talking a lot about the history of blues/bluegrass a few months ago and i just remembered it so i was wondering if you have any book/article recommendations for the history of those genres?

Absolutely! My research has tended to focus on the history prior to the 1960s, since by that point both blues and bluegrass had mostly settled into the genres we recognize today.

BLUES is technically older, and the creation of black Americans, based on a Southern threading together of spiritual music (itself with deeper, trans-Atlantic African roots), slave working songs, and uniquely African-American folk ballad traditions. It encompasses an incredible amount of regional variation, as well as religiosity, and a slide into sub-genres like dirty blues and its euphemistic cousin, hokum blues. (If you want to hear the difference, listen to Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘em Dry” versus Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl”.)

Sources for the Blues:

Samuel Charters’ “The Country Blues” was published in 1959 and is considered the groundbreaking history of the genre. The book has some failings and errors (it definitely over-romanticizes black life) but it really was the first of its kind and ignited all the study afterwards. Charters’ recordings of the blues artists he spoke with and interviewed has also been made into an album of the same name by Smithsonian Folkways.

There’s no way I can talk about the blues without referencing Alan Lomax—an ethnomusicologist and director of the American Archive of Folk Culture, who, when the Library of Congress stopped funding folk music recordings, went on collecting them independently. “The Land Where Blues Began” is both the title of his account of finding those recordings, and the documentary he directed and narrated for PBS.

For more of a straightforward history, I recommend "Deep Blues“ by Robert Palmer or “Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music” by Ted Gioia. They’re both good “big picture” histories.

A lot of blues histories are written by white historians and critics—with the exception of LeRoi Jones’ “Blues People” (since publication, Jones has changed his name to Amiri Baraka). It’s less a history than a theoretical project, an ethnography and sociological history of the people blues came from and why black people could make the blues in the first place. Still, it’s a great read and deserves to be on this list.

I’ll also give a shout out to “The Black Musician and the White City” by Amy Absher, which is all about the music scene in Chicago—the chapter I’ve linked here is a fascinating picture of what the music scene looked like, as the Delta blues branched off into Chicago blues and black musicians struggled to make inroads into a highly segregated profession (also, a look at the tension between largely-white unions and black communities in Chicago that continues to inform city politics).

If you’re looking for introductory reading….

I found this article on African-American Song from the Library of Congress a good starting place—it’s only partly about the blues, but I think it’s good to understand the context of blues, and the various other styles that were co-evolving with it. Blues, string-band, vaudeville, gospel….all these genres were talking to one another, and understanding that gives you a better grounding for the actual history of the thing.

Though less formal, PBS actually created “The Blues - Classroom” in 2003, which is a repository of lesson plans and essays to accompany the seven-part film series of the same name. It’s a great, quick resource, if you’re just getting started.

BLUEGRASS is much younger, if you’re going by when Earl Scruggs invented the particular picking style every banjo player since has imitated—or co-equally created, based on old-time string band music and what Al Hopkins in the 1920s called “hillbilly music.” You’ll often see the genre referred to as “bluegrass and old-time music” as a way of referencing both the pre-WWII folk/hillbilly music that gave rise to the genre as well as all the followed after Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. (Though the debate as to what “counts” as bluegrass is so ubiquitous that the International Bluegrass Music Association message boards gave it an acronym: WIBA, short for “What Is Bluegrass Anyway?”)

Sources for Bluegrass & Old-Time:

A pretty foundational text in this area is Neil V. Rosenberg’s “History of Bluegrass”—Rosenberg almost exclusively studied bluegrass in the US, and had a column in Bluegrass Unlimited (the “bible of bluegrass”) for years. If you want just a taste, there are a number of his articles on jstor. Personally, I recommend “From Sound to Style: The Emergence of Bluegrass.” (He tends to be overly partial to Bill Monroe, but it is a heavy-hitter book in the area.)

There are a number of personal accounts that I could list here—for instance, Bill Monroe (the ‘father of bluegrass’) has a biography that’s supposedly pretty good, and Butch Robins, who later played banjo for the Blue Grass Boys, has a video series where he talks about bluegrass and his experience as a musician. However, I don’t know if these are actually enjoyable resources for anyone except the true devotee.

“What is bluegrass anyway? Category formation, debate and the framing of musical genre” by Joti Rockwell, from Popular Music. I love a good categorical debate!

Some of my favorite post-1960s bluegrass comes out of what I would call “folk resistance music”—figures like Pete and Mike Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, all wielded the particular sound of bluegrass, but in a way that made it ideologically more similar to blues or traditional folk music. As someone who watched Harlan County, USA at a tender point in her life, I have a particular affection for Hazel Dickens, and I did enjoy her biography “Working Girl Blues.”

If you’re looking for introductory reading…

The Library of Congress entry on bluegrass music is a good place to start.

The Journal of American Folklore did an entire issue on hillbilly music and its influence on bluegrass. You can find it digitized on jstor here, including a very instructive article called “Introduction to Bluegrass” by L. Mayne Smith, himself a musician of the folk music revival.

……..as a final note, I also want to point out that though it’s tempting to think of blues as distinct from bluegrass/hillbilly/old-time, as well as easily separated out from folk, gospel, jazz, ragtime, vaudeville, and traditional English/Irish/French/West African/etc. sounds, it’s simply not true. Talking about these musical trends as separate and distinct ignores the fact that many were happening at the same time, evolving concurrently and together, borrowing extensively from one another as musicians swapped techniques, styles, and dirty tricks.

By way of example, the “blue” in “bluegrass” comes from the addition of blue notes, which is also where you get “the blues.” Bluegrass definitely borrowed them from the African-American artists who had been blending blue notes and various styles of gospel music for decades by that point. But blue/bent notes are popular in Irish and English folk music as well, particularly on various types of mouth harps and pipes (…in America, mouth pipes became the diatonic harmonica, which, along with the banjo—itself evolved from West African gourd instruments—gave birth to cowboy blues. It’s all a huge, weird, mess of people making noise.)

Nevertheless, there are intense politics wrapped up in who each genre “belongs” to. As Lil’ Nas X’s “Old Town Road” recently demonstrated, music genres often serve to keep “black” music and “white” music as distinguishable as possible—even when the sound is the same. This has been true since the origin of record labels, when recordings of black artists were “race records,” or “string-band” and white artists made “hillbilly” or “old-time.” (They sound very similar and frequently borrowed instrumental techniques from one another.) It doesn’t help that bluegrass rose to prominence with an all-white band, at a time of intense racial tension and as many Civil Rights activists and black historians were reclaiming the blues as a distinctly African-American sound. More recently, Joe Thompson and Tony Thomas (a fiddler and a banjo player, respectively) have spoken out about their experiences as black musicians in a musical subculture that is often designated for-and-by white people.

I bring this up not to invalidate the sources I’ve listed above, but to point out that the story of blues and bluegrass and the space between them is complicated—there’s not just one story to tell. The 1960s’ blues fetishism has been equally damaging and helpful; the idea that bluegrass is “white” music is in a sense correct, but also a gatekeeping mechanism to keep black artists out of music they have always participated in and influenced. Much like every other aspect of American history, there is a dense and complex interplay between race, class, and self-made mythology that historians are still unpicking.

But goddamn, the music is cool.

#long post for ts #history #thehazardsolove #the devil went down to georgia (and then went down on johnny)#from the bookshelf

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