I've always been a pretentious snobbish bugger and my taste in music has mostly reflected that. My older brother's ex's Yes greatest hits cassette got me into prog at eleven or twelve years old (said brother's sage wisdom on the subject: "The big three prog bands were Yes, Kansas and Genesis, but I don't know why people considered Genesis prog.") I liked that it was more complex than, idk, Pearl Jam or whatever, and more theatrical (and, though I wouldn't've phrased it this way at the time, less hypermasculine and just more abstractly aesthetically appealing), but still not actually demanding or in any way reminiscent of the experience of listening to actual classical music, which still requires me to be in a certain rarefied headspace to 'preesh. I was pretentious - it was pretentious - we were made for each other. Eventually my love of clarinets, my love of prog and my love of Pitchfork combined and left me at Dominique Leone's door, squealing "take me! take me!" (full disclosure: I thought Dominique Leone was a woman for at least three years for no other reason that the spelling of his name.) And Henry Cow and Magma tickled my fancy even more than Yes and Gentle Giant did because they were, respectively, a notch or two to the left on the Avant-Garde-O-Meter and a notch or two to the left on the Weird-O-Meter. And I was such a "Smart" White Teenage Thing that I ate that up and, worse, started really internalizing the belief that there was an inherent pseudo-ethical superiority not just to "complex" art (the Tool fallacy? Nah, the fallacy with Tool is thinking they're not literally Nickleback) but that cheap contrarianism and self-conscious "weird"ness were a talisman against being a bad person or whatever I worried about back then - being low class? I guess it was probably being "anti-intellectual," which from the perspective of 27 years on Earth is so cringey I can barely type it. At least the R.I.O. movement had some Red Cred but that was lost in most of the bands' music (especially the further away you get from the original core of groups - the ones that actually played at the festival.) And besides,unless my chronology is hopelessly wrong, I got into R.I.O. in the same year (or one off) that I stood for four hours to get Sean Hannity to sign a book for me, so I wasn't exactly ready for the commie elements, anyway. But still, just as prog was somehow more moral than grunge, avant-prog maintained for years an air of being gooder than any other form of rock - for pseudo-musical reasons as much as pseudo-political reasons.
I guess I'm posting this because I'm still working through these issues, or related ones. The biggest music-related fallacy in my life is that my taste in music does not only matter in some concrete way but it is, in fact, the most important thing about me - the only thing of interest about me! Excepting perhaps my gender and being trans is more passe than being an Exuma fan. You know, cool once, but played out? See, I really unironically think like that - and a lot of it is being so detached from labor, and other people. The big debate currently going on in my head is basically how to put materialism to work for defining my relationship to music and culture and taste - I realized recently (too recently) that I am incapable of transcending my White American-ness through absorbing massive amounts of non-White American media Yeah, revelation, mind blown, PCHOW, right? Talk about erudite. Because I was raised by a white dad who likes the Beatles and a white mom who likes Simon and Garfunkel alongside a white brother who likes Metallica and my earliest musical memories involve Fanny Crosby, "Come As You Are" as played on piano (thought it was Mozart for years) and "Shiny Happy People" as sung by monster puppets on Sesame Street. Those thing didn't make me white and had I been able to change Nirvana to 2Pac and keep everything else I'd still be white and it's not like people judge whether I'm white or not by how whether, when they say "Arrested Development," my first thought is "Gob Bluth!" or "Zingalamaduni!" And it's not like I'm not completely culturally detached from all of the music I listen to - I don't go to bodegas, I don't go to basement bashment shows or sambadromes. I blogspot. I Spotify. I SoulSeek, or I useta. I'll download 17 filmi soundtracks and five LPs of Muezzin...ry (?) and then go listen to KRS-One and Caravan. I'll listen to nine Kumar Gandharva albums over three days, give two of them 4.5 stars and then can't remember his name or the instrument he plays a week later. AT HOME I FEEL LIKE A TOURIST I FILL MY HEAD WITH CULTURE I GIVE MYSELF AN ULCER
I used to believe that my Taste in MusicTM was this abstract, idealized, metaphysical, floating, manifested, transcendent thing that came from me and which I controlled but which was greater than me and had a life of its own and the ultimate goal in life was to Transcend My Earthly Predicament (Having been into Arcade Fire and the Decemberists in high school) and become a being of Pure Taste, untethered to worldly concerns, far beyond "world music," existing as a beacon of hope to all those (crackers) who wish to transcend the Rock weighing them down and just listen to Namibian third stream acid soca. Wow what a crock of unmitigated putrid rotten offal.
what prompted all this is Mats & Morgan - they're touted pretty highly as a modern avant-prog band, or at least their live album is a herkyjerky 5-star but I started with Trends and Other Diseases and ugh like do I need to say anything beyond that title? How smug, how try-hard, how neckbeard! It's like a Disco Sucks record burning organized by a dude in a Rush shirt. With wolves. It's a furry Rush with Geddy Lee as a timberwolf and there are probably green glow skulls. UGH, Album's fairly wretched, too. And the herkjetk-approved live album that's supposed to be a scorcher or summat? It's just wank it's all just wank.
I wish I'd gotten into happy hardcore or eurobeat as a t(w)een.
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