[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In eighteenth century Europe,there was the parlor recital.In the pre-Civil War South,there was the field holler and the ring shout; later camerural blues, country brass bands, and the spiritual.Thesemusical genres were steeped in first-hand experience, ifnot in fact full-fledged collective participation.Any non-performance-based conception of music, like “the musicof the spheres,” was purely metaphorical, and was recog-nized as such, in a world that Walker Percy might arguewe’ve fallen from.Then the radio age arrived.Where you would haveonce attended a concert, listening to the performancewith maybe a libretto in your lap to refer to, now yousat at home in front of a radio or a phonograph.Electricitychanged music in the twentieth century the same way theprinting press changed the spoken word in the fifteenthcentury.The advent of plastics and the long-playing al-bum began to objectify our conception of music, trans-forming it from real experience to a document ofexperience.Music became object-oriented, something in-scribed on a surface that you could buy and own and• 108 •MURMURmove from one place to another—essentially, another textto be read.Though rock obviously has its antecedents in “folk”(i.e., performative, spoken-word) traditions, rock is alsothe first musical genre born to the age of music-as-text,where its experience is always at varying levels of removefrom its point of creation; in fact, defined by these levelsof remove, in many ways.It’s virtually impossible to talkabout even the earliest days of rock and roll without alsotalking about its media, be it the vinyl record or the radio.This crucial shift—brought on by recording technol-ogy—in the necessity to apprehend musical performanceas a first-person observer, also gave rise to a subtle kindof doubt.A lot more people had access to rock music, ascompared to any other single musical movement in his-tory, but this cultural mobility also made rock second-hand from the get-go, always a degree of separation fromthe performance (or other communicative act) at its core.It’s still happening.When we go to check out a bandthat has piqued our curiosity, performing at the localindie-rock beer dive, they’re more often than not judgedin relation to how we first heard them on a recording.Conversely, if we encounter a previously unfamiliar bandthrough an amazing live show, but are then let downupon hearing their record, not only does the recordedversion of the band have equal value in our estimation,the recording might cast our opinion of them as a crappyband, despite our first-hand experience.2The structural distance that’s endemic to our experi-ence of rock is then, perplexingly, part of the measure ofits authenticity.What was once a mere analog of theaesthetic as Plato or Aristotle would have conceived of it• 109 •J.NIIMIis not only an aesthetic in and of itself now, it’s the moreimportant one, the real one.This is pop music’s distance, the fountainhead of its weirdness.Then language furthercomplicates things by populating the landscape of thisabyss with voices in song that seem to speak as muchagainst this distance as from it.With that said, the distance in Murmur’s language isa slightly different animal, deeper than with most popbands, yet somehow more engaging for its unfamiliarity.Murmur has a particularly warm distance that differs from other pop albums of its time, vacuum-formed pop baublesthat are nevertheless sung by a specific person to a specific person with a specific person in mind to hear it and make it all “real” in the end, on the other side of theabyss.you.If distance is implicit in pop music’s phe-nomenology, then there’s something else to Murmur’ssongs, a kind of tension outside of the divorce betweenartist and audience.It’s the tension in hearing a song sungand not really knowing whose song it is—the singer’s, thesubject’s, yours? Someone, or something, else’s? Thistension is as familiar as the distance, a part of the distance, but it’s more at home in the realms of literature and reallife than it is in a rock song, and it’s what gives Murmur’s communicative powers their extraliterary aura [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]