After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Night By Night" by Steely Dan
I first realized it was okay to criticize a movie during the Christmas of 1979, back in the days when my Dad would pony up the dough to take the whole family out the movies roughly twice a year: once over the summer, and once over the holidays. After a lucky string of post-Jaws blockbusters—Star Wars, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Superman—we made our semi-annual cinema outing to see the Disney sci-fi extravaganza The Black Hole. And we were all bored out of our skulls. As we walked back to the car, no one said much, because we didn't have a lot of money in those days, and we'd been taught to be appreciative of whatever we were given. But then Dad broke the silence by muttering, "Well, that was a bomb," and we all proceeded to rip The Black Hole a… well, a new black hole.
Shortly after seeing The Black Hole, I started watching Sneak Previews on PBS, and began to grapple with the idea that two experts could disagree on whether a given movie was any good. It's a notion I had trouble with for years. When I was 13, I borrowed a copy of the first Rolling Stone Record Guide—the one co-edited by the cranky Dave Marsh—and I took the opinions within it as something akin to gospel. The book seemed so definitive, with its star ratings and authoritative tone, and since I was just starting to read up on rock history, I assumed the Rolling Stone reviews were correct, and that anyone who disagreed was wrong.
But there was one problem: Marsh hated Steely Dan.
At the time, I didn't have any especially strong opinions on Steely Dan, though I thought I liked them. I knew "Hey Nineteen," "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," "Do It Again," "Time Out Of Mind" and "Reelin' In The Years" from the radio, and my parents had recently begun playing Aja on long car trips—and we took a lot of long car trips—so I had that album pretty well memorized. But after reading the Rolling Stone guide's fairly pissy dismantling of Steely Dan's studio-bound slickness and aloof evocation of cocaine culture, I had a hard time defending any pleasure that Steely Dan had previously brought me. I figured that my tastes just hadn't matured yet. So I stopped actively listening to Steely Dan for about the next eight years
I returned to Steely Dan as I approached my college graduation, because I always tend to get nostalgic as I near personal milestones, and I wanted to be that boy in the backseat of my parents' car again. The more I listened, the more I heard something a little deeper than merely catchy soft-rock. Steely Dan's slick production supported arrangements of almost unfathomable depth, and the aloofness of Donald Fagen's lyrics seemed as much a commentary on the self-absorbed and spiritually lost as a sop to them. (I later had a similar revelation about Woody Allen's Manhattan, a movie I initially found annoying until I realized it was about people who were annoying.)
By the time I started delving into Steely Dan, I'd become a regularly published rock critic, though I was still in thrall to the notion of consensus, and not yet inclined to trust my own taste enough to swim against the tide. I was still reading the rock critics who were in some ways the founders of the rock canon: Dave Marsh, with his precise, passionate prose and at-times-frustrating moral rigor; Greil Marcus, with his ambitious, unexpected analysis; and Lester Bangs, who showed that the deeply faithful make the best cynics. Then, shortly after I turned 20, I was browsing the "arts and entertainment" section of a used bookstore, and came across collections by two critics who changed the way I view matters of personal taste: Pauline Kael and Robert Christgau.
Kael was notorious among cineastes for steering the critical conversation about movies to wherever she felt it should be, whether that meant debunking the auteur theory, snorting at Bergman and Fellini, or explaining why critics who didn't get Bonnie & Clyde or Brian De Palma should get the hell out of the business. And Christgau, in the pared-down capsule reviews of his Village Voice "Consumer Guides," clearly bore some of Kael's influence in the way he'd so casually shove aside sacred cows and in the way he'd stand up for music he loved even when his colleagues didn't. (And whaddaya know? Christgau loved Steely Dan, praising the band's jazz chops and complicated grasp of irony.) Between Kael and Christgau, I began to grasp the idea that while art had objective qualities—readily able to be evaluated—reasonable people could disagree about the extent to which those objective qualities mattered. Is rawness always better than smoothness? Realism better than abstraction? Pragmatism better than idealism? Or is it counter-productive to obsess over those kind of distinctions?
I also learned that there's another aspect to the critical conversation that goes beyond what's good and what's bad. There's also the matter of what gets rated in the first place. I stumbled across The Trouser Press Record Guide in the public library when I was in high school, and in its various incarnations it became a valuable resource whenever I wanted to learn more about music that the big-name critics weren't covering. Dave Marsh, as fine a critic as he is, has long held that if pop musicians are any good at their jobs, then they should be popular—meaning they should be trying to make hit records. And while his peers tended to be less didactic on the subject, Rolling Stone and even Spin in its early years tended to look at musicians on indie labels as amateurs, only worth writing about once they landed on a major label.
That mindset started to change in the late '80s and early '90s, with the emergence of grunge and a whole alterna-culture that had grown up on trash TV, album-rock radio and Xeroxed fanzines. The new breed had a different set of heroes. Take Sonic Youth, for example. Even more than their efforts to combine elements of New York's art scene and punk scene, Sonic Youth was radical for what else they embraced, whether they were recording a whole album as a tribute to Madonna, or exploring a fascination with serial killer kitsch. In their video for "Teenage Riot," Sonic Youth declared allegiance to Patti Smith, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, Harvey Pekar, Paris, Texas, The Fall, Kiss, Sun Ra, Neil Young, Daniel Johnston, The Beastie Boys, Mike Watt, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits, among others. They were rewriting the canon for people serious about popular culture.
As I've mentioned before, much of what we think of as our own personal critical discernment is often influenced by external factors, such as who and where we were in our lives when we saw a certain movie or heard a certain song. Were we in love? Had we recently lost a job? Had we even heard or seen enough to judge the piece properly? And another factor, less easily acknowledged: Had someone told us it was okay to like it?
It's odd how defensive people get when they mention certain bands or movies, like, "I know people will jump on me for this, but I really like Groundhog Day," or "I hate to admit it, but The Bee Gees have some good songs." There's an assumption being made, that the world at large has agreed that some things are meant to be taken seriously, while others are "guilty pleasures" (or just plain "suck"). But in fact it all depends on what audience you're talking to. Groundhog Day may be a gimmicky comedy, but it's actually beloved by audiences and many critics. The Bee Gees are maligned in some critical quarters, but hailed in others. As someone who's spent a large chunk of my life gauging the critical temperature on movies and music, I understand the impulse to assume something is widely hated or widely loved, and to not know whether you can contradict the prevailing opinion without getting your head ripped off. But if the Internet has proven anything, it's that there will always be people out there who share your views, so you shouldn't be so quick to assume you're alone.
Also, of course, tastes change. A lot of my music-loving friends have rolled their eyes at me over the years when they've noticed all the Steely Dan in my collection, and I've seen that even among some of my colleagues, Steely Dan represents all that's loathsome about the California soft-rock scene of the mid-'70s, with its assortment of studio rats and smug poseurs. But one of the most satisfying moments of my life came a few years back, when a friend of mine who'd always listed Steely Dan among his most-despised bands, had an epiphany after hearing "My Old School" on the radio and briefly thinking it was a song by Bruce Springsteen—one of his heroes. He took a chance and bought an anthology. Now in his 30s, no longer writing about music on a daily basis, and with less of a need to satisfy any punk or root-hog's idea of what was cool, he felt free to hear beneath the surfaces. And so he called me up, a few weeks later, eager to talk with someone he knew would understand what he was going through.
"Uh, Noel," he said. "You were right about Steely Dan."
*****************
Pieces Of The Puzzle
Sonic Youth
Years Of Operation 1981-present
Fits Between Glenn Branca and Pussy Galore
"The Sprawl" by Sonic Youth
Personal Correspondence Before the advent of MTV's 120 Minutes, SoundScan, on-line shopping, and the other key contributors to the alternative-ication of American popular music, Sonic Youth existed mostly as rumor, written about in music magazines available in places where the band's records were hard to find. Though I'd never heard a note of Sonic Youth, I rolled the dice and bought EVOL and Sister when I stumbled across them at one of Nashville's first indie record stores, and was promptly inaugurated into their unwavering sound: snatches of amp-on-fire distortion, tuneless speak-singing, and an emphasis on guitar texture that includes amplifying each individually plucked string in a strum. Even back in the days of EVOL, what set Sonic Youth apart from their hardcore and post-hardcore peers was an innate sense of sophistication that had them surrounding aggressive noise with lyrical washes of sound. The technique reached its peak on 1988's Daydream Nation, a double-album that encapsulated Sonic Youth's fascination with the grubby side streets that connect the affluent avenues of modern metropolises. But while I loved Daydream Nation (and pieces of Sister and EVOL), I had qualms about Sonic Youth in the '80s and '90s. Maybe I was just bearing a grudge because on the Daydream Nation tour they put on one of the worst shows I've ever seen (with long breaks between songs so they could de-tune their guitars just so, and an encore that consisted of them hiding behind the amps while "Providence" played over the loudspeaker), but to me, the output of Sonic Youth's first two decades was fun to read about, but not as entertaining to hear. Conceptually, the New York art-punks' concoction of bratty pop culture references and avant-garde noisemaking has always been brilliantly colorful, but in practice it often comes out a featureless metallic gray. Still, the key Sonic Youth songs do carry the resonance of an intimate practice space, the pent-up frustrations of the day, and the beautiful fragility of a fleeting moment. At their best, Sonic Youth generated instant art: personal and transitory.
Enduring presence? After a brief flirtation with the mainstream in the early '90s, Sonic Youth were mired in irrelevancy and fans-only specialty releases until a few years back, when the band put out the relatively focused, Jim O'Rourke-aided Murray Street, and reminded scenesters how they became legendary in the first place. The most significant change in Sonic Youth's recent work is a move away from abrasion for its own sake. Over the last few albums they've been getting into that old folks' habit of finding a comfortable groove in which to do what they already know how to do. Drummer Steve Shelley clicks and rattles while guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo—who in the past had been known to indulge some tuneless scraping between verses—weave a tight, tuneful pattern around Kim Gordon's rumbling bass. Then they drift smoothly into intricate guitar breaks that build instead of destroy, and are almost hippie-friendly in their mellowness. Though they're no longer as innovative or revelatory, the Sonic Youth of the '00s is much more open than the provocateurs who stormed out of the New York art scene 20 years ago—and in some ways, that openness is actually more daring than the layered damage of the Youth's youth.
- Comments