some music that sounds good, and why does it?

By Robbie on December 4, 2010

Last night I was flipping channels on my barn-door-size flatscreen TV and saw a middle-aged rock band playing. Sounded good at first, then better, and I kept with it for a good 40 minutes. Turns out it was R.E.M., the Georgia quartet, augmented by two other players. No kidding! If you look in here at my site very often, you must know that rock music, or whatever it's called -- American commercial youth music -- is not my thing. In fact I have come to despise it with a wide, open heart. There are broadly speaking three reasons people are attracted to music enough to come to a performance. They like the sound of it, they like the people playing it, or they like the thought of themselves being at the performance. Rock music, almost by definition, because it's marketed so relentlessly, thrives on the third and silliest appeal. The event-ness of a show in a venue of several thousand seats and upwards, the quasi-religious sensations aroused by being a tiny violin in a massed orchestra of coordinated human emotion, are impossible to discount. Like evangelists, rock musicians need almost superhuman strength to avoid degrading themselves and their craft. The situation is naturally criminogenic.

You can't quite tune this stuff out, another breeding ground for contempt. (The rareness and antiquated ring of the phrase "rock music" make one index of its pervasiveness. Jazz and country and classical musicians go through their days with an adjective hanging from their necks. The Arctic Monkeys and U2 play "music.") In the early 1980s, when I was in my early 20s, I never bought an R.E.M. record, or saw them play, or spent very much time listening to the radio formats that promoted music like theirs; and yet I know a good half-dozen of their songs pretty well, and have probably consumed semi-attentively and second-hand (via sidemen in the van, guitar students, and girlfriends -- what dastardly hypnosis R.E.M. practiced on girlfriends!) all of their LPs. Certainly I heard enough of the stuff to have confidence in my verdict, which was, "Not too bad, but not for me."

Well, having something shoved in your face perhaps brings you to one conclusion, and happening on it on the flatscreen 25 years later, another. I found last night's show strangely enchanting, and I say "strangely" because the more I watched the more I found myself mulling the source of the performance's appeal, the uniqueness. (Nerdy, and probably counterproductive, but true.) I tried imagining the music with the vocal removed, because the singing, its timbre and thickness and tunefulness, was instantly pleasing, and seemed the clear trademark of the group sound. Without it, I think most but not all of the uniqueness would be gone. It would be hard to tell the guitar progressions on which the songs were founded from, for instance, a Roger McGuinn song, and it would be hard to identify these particular players in a large sample of musicians rendering guitar rock music accurately but very unflashily. Is Peter Buck as crucial to the impact and flavor of a particular R.E.M. record as John McLaughlin was to Bitches Brew, or Maybelle Carter to "You Are My Flower"? I doubt it.

But there was undeniable, analysis-resistant magic in the interplay of men who had been doing music together for most of their lives. Michael Stipe, the singer, had a graceful set of gestures that worked to express ease, joy, and humor. Ease was really a loud quality all around; in their relaxed playing and physical attitudes, everyone in the group was impressively not working to impress, blissfully tossing off small-canvas figures and acknowledging the onlookers minimally. Thinking about it this morning, maybe one of rock's particular strengths is that its presumption (relative to jazz etc.) against training and technique allow us to appreciate the role of simple attitude in creating art. You hate to say out loud that a blithe spirit and a transcendent mental detachment are key creative virtues, because the next thing you know a pack of no-talents and narcissists are grabbing the mike, and next you have, um, the modern world. But I put it out there. Another rock-specific virtue is that it permits the existence of a wealthy class of musicians whose success is tied to their group identity. The music made by a small group who has played together intensely and continually for decades is be yond the realm of creativity and into the mysterious realm of nature, a little like a tree or a marriage. Not that these lifelong groupings can't occur in non-affluent music genres or societies -- they do -- but affluence makes them easy to happen, and capitalist logic and a large ready audience with surplus dollars almost compel them to.

This week I also spent a happy morning re-immersing myself, via youtube, in the wonderful world of Ricky Skaggs. I haven't met a country musician that doesn't hold Ricky in the highest esteem, and, as Pauline Kael once said of moviegoers immune to the charms of Last Tango in Paris, I wouldn't care to meet one. His gift is so crazy and shocking. I started looking at various clips of his latter-day bluegrass group, Kentucky Thunder -- try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8bLjIMX3bE -- and before I knew it two hours had snuck past me. It makes for an interesting contrast with R.E.M. Check out the attitudes of these players. They're similarly averse to striking asinine poses, but "relaxed" is not the word that leaps to mind. That's not only because the culture this music comes out of doesn't value guys that stand around sneering in backward baseball caps; it's also because it's so difficult to play skillfully at these tempos that brain wattage that might be spent rolling your eyeballs around ecstatically in your skull or checking out ladies in the front row is entirely consumed. With mechanics as precise as Ricky's, Jim Mills's, Paul Brewster's and Cody Kilby's, the analytical challenge becomes inverse to R.E.M.s -- locate the magic behind the technique -- but it's there. Ricky's persona, like Michael Stipe's, conveys natural inner reserves of intelligence and wit.

The desired thing, engaging music, is reached by sharply divergent paths. I think this serves as a useful reminder not to bloviate too much about universal musical values.