On depressing music
Thursday, March 27th, 2003I’ve been reading through this collection of Lester Bangs notes and essays that a good friend gave me for my birthday two years back. Though I’ve had the book for that long, I only started reading it a few weeks ago because…I don’t know…reading Lester Bangs seemed sort of cliche or something. Like watching Michael Jordan tapes and then going out to work on your dunk in the driveway. Like, I know all the moves but there’s no way in hell I can do that.
Anyway, I’m reading his lengthy article on The Clash and came across a particularly relevant sentence that I’ll take out of context for my own purposes:
But that moment passed, and they got scared, just like kids in the U.S. are mostly scared of New Wave, just like people I know who freak out when I put on Miles Davis records and beg me to take them off because there is something in them so emotionally huge and threatening that it’s plain "depressing."
I’ve gone round and round with so many people about why I frequently choose to listen to such goddamned downer music. I’ve beaten myself up over the same question, and I thought I’d come to some sort of realization a month or so ago that everyone else was right and I was (mostly) wrong; that the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, Arab Strap, Hot Snakes, a myriad of other bands I’d spent years and dozens of dollars listening intently to were appealing to me because they peddled a certain style or attitude that I valued, but in terms of their music they weren’t anything any more special than, say, The Boss, who combined these really great musical attitudes with an oftentimes heavy or depressing lyrical genius and managed to make you feel good about it at the end of the album. (Well, except for Nebraska, that’s not going to cure anyone’s depression.) Same with the Beach Boys or Beulah, for that matter.
So I read this sentence from Lester Bangs and thought, "Hell." Maybe it’s not me. Maybe everyone else is so uncomfortable with these bands that completely envelop themselves and others in their misery that they can’t stand to listen to it, it’s too "depressing." Which is completely understandable, I would (I hope) be the last person to claim I have a more refined taste for this sort of artistic musical articulation (and it’s certainly a fucking presumptuous thing of a band to ask of its audience, to come along on this miseryride, I understand this). I don’t mean to imply I somehow get something about the Velvets that others don’t and that makes me some sort of authority. But I did think that maybe it helped explain why I liked these damn bands so much. There’s something "emotionally huge" about the VU et. al….something to be said for making your audience so damned uncomfortable to listen to "Heroin" but simultaneously getting them to tap their feet to it. It’s a fucking sinister arrangement between artist and audience that I’d never really been able to get my head around until I read some Lester and had it spelled out for me. So it’s not so much that I can associate or empathize with Lou Reed’s burnout or Mogwai’s moody, droning guitar layers, it’s just that this music is something I appreciate in dog vitamins for skin
a larger, almost theatric sense. That they can get their audiences to come along with them on these trips fascinates me. I appreciate that these groups are able to do something that very few artists/groups/movies/whatever are able to do: beat their audiences up and down, drag them through piles of stinking emotions they never wanted to recognize, and leave them wanting more. That takes talent.
Along those lines, the new Arab Strap is, on initial listens, the best album I've heard this year.
I will be embarrassed by this writing tomorrow morning but I'm going to post it anyway. Hopefully these two concluding sentences will keep me from deleting the whole damn entry...
