In The Dunes Of The Cape

Let’s get this thing started with a categorical statement: there is no such thing as inherently good or inherently bad music. In fact, the concept of music itself is up for grabs. What music is is ultimately impossible to completely define.

These two concepts ought to cement my ever-thickening position into the pantheon of the reviled - or at least the pantheon of the ridiculed - but I still stand by them. So now let’s get on with the deliberations, and we’ll just see what happens.

Let’s start with the second idea first. What is music? Well, generally it is a sound created for the purpose of enjoyment. In fact, this is the Webster’s Riverside Dictionary definition of music in their most basic terms: An aesthetically pleasing or harmonious sound. Now, I sometimes find the sound of someone crying to be aesthetically pleasing in a peculiar way, maybe even harmonious, but I don’t think of it necessarily as music. By the same token, most people would find Coltrane’s Meditations to be something akin to atonal noise, but to me it is not only musical, it is profoundly musical. And then there is the fact that deaf people may arguably be able to enjoy music in a wholly other fashion. They are able to physically detect the sensations of vibration and to interpret them in an aesthetic manner. So sound is not an imperative.

So where does music come from? What is the zero point, and is there even such a clearly defined phenomenon as a zero point? Does music start with the vibrations of the sub-atomic microverse? Is music a vestigial element of the Big Bang, or can we trace the birth of music to the pulse of the heart? Perhaps on all accounts. Perhaps there is no zero point, perhaps music drifted into being in a non-linear fashion. And better still, perhaps there is no such thing as music. Maybe it is all a figment of our imaginations. I mean it is borne from our imaginations, right? Does that make it real?

I know that there are those who believe that music is an external quality, an absolute that has been imbued into humanity from the creator. I find this idea attractive, but I simply don’t believe it (which leads into another discussion all together, and one I won’t get into). Maybe to those of theological faith, being is a form of music. I’ll bet someone somewhere believes this.

So how do I define music? Usually I narrowly define it within the commonly accepted terms without even thinking about it. I usually stick within the confines of the standard definition. But over my life I have learned to expand my views on things to the point of trying to conceptualize the possibility of anything, and I want to apply this to music now if I could.

To me, I think that music is always open to interpretation, as in: what is good, what is bad, and ultimately what music is at all. If you played some Merzbow for every person on the planet, I know that overwhelmingly you would find agreement that it is not music. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t actually music, just that the consensus is that his material is tortuous noise and nothing else. You probably get the gist of what I’m saying. Generally speaking, we need to label things to give them meaning, to flesh out their ethereal, insubstantial fields. As Ramon puts it, “you have to name it so you can kill it.” So it’s not only safe to use a working definition of music as sound that is aesthetically pleasing, it’s also advantageous for adapting and developing our deeper understanding of the limitless possibilities of what music can be. Because ultimately you can’t get anywhere if you have no fucking clue where you are to begin with, no? But for the sake of complete understanding, try to think of music as being in total flux and firmly rooted at the same time, okay? That way, both, either, and neither are all equally viable options available to us to use and grow and to hire for the benefit of seeing the truth as being as crushingly beautiful as it always is. That’s the kind of thing that makes grown men cry.

So it shouldn’t be too hard to guess where I’m heading when I try and define good/bad music, now should it? If we call for a show of hands to help us find out who here thinks some sort of music makes them want to openly challenge Ted Bundy for a murder contest, would any hand stay down? Nope. And that’s including my own. We’ve made short work of Celine, the Police, the Eagles, mainstream rap, and countless others whose music has made one, some, or all of us cringe at some point in our lives, and we have all thought that something we’ve heard was simply terrible and needs to go the way of Barbaro the horse. But the thing is, who here, by show of hands, hasn’t also changed their mind on some band or musician that eventually caused you to redefine what you used to find dear? So it is subjective. But guess what? Some music is bad. Bad in the sense that if the elevator doesn’t get there soon, this John Tesh track is going to spur you to paint the walls with the offal of yuppies. But that’s cool, because maybe your shitlicker boss has an epileptic seizure every time he hears the same Tesh tidbit. So which CD will you be buying tomorrow? Guess what’s good now?

So I clearly tend to operate with a subjective view of what makes certain pieces of music good and others shitty. Some things will persevere with me in what could pass as a habitual pleasure. Certain signposts, be they emotional or auditory, or as triggers that when pulled affect the sense of contentment that we return to repeatedly throughout an otherwise utterly chaotic life. And there is something rather quaint about this sort of joy, a comfort in feeling a continuity that comes from without. Most constants in our lives are those that we carry inside, things like our ever-changing sense of identity. Part of the magic of humanity is our ability to weave a thread that draws itself through our mythic retelling of our life experience. And yet under careful examination, things begin to fall apart quite dramatically. There’s really nothing quite like the sense of the dissolution of identity that occurs when I micro-analyze what it is that makes me me. So when I do the same thing with music – which is to say – when I take a certain song for instance and I carry it through the web of my history from the moment of my first hearing it up until now, what I find is that I can’t pin down a ton of substance in what it means to me anymore than I can pin down my sense of self. It is a fine example of a gossamer thread. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that what I am saying is that there is no thread, because something somehow always manages to carry through. It’s just that when you try and locate what that is it pervades it can get a tad elusive.

And we certainly should never try and kid ourselves into thinking that we aren’t living a narrative, since it would appear as though this is the very best way for us to maintain our lunacy.

Being a lifelong slut for music means that you will be bound to having music follow you through every moment of your life. For me I have an almost constant stream of music that plays in the background of my consciousness every waking moment. It’s like the voices that hound the minds of schizophrenics. Often, when I am really tired, or under monstrous amounts of stress, I will be haunted by a certain song, or a melody, or a passage of some piece of music that I just can’t shake for what can sometimes be literally days. I will actually alter my walking rhythm just to synchronize it with the tune I am hearing in my head. Most often the music that plagues me is something that I may not be entirely fond of, but even if I am, the mere fact that it is lodged firmly in the back of my brain like some sort of virus will reduce even the best riff to a pile of horrible rubble. I have been the victim of things as bizarre as the truly horrific Piña Colada song. As has often been the case, I will catch the flu and then spend the better part of the following week hovering at death’s door while in my brain is an eternal loop of “if you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain,” and it just goes on and on until I begin to go on the mend.

The cognitive scientist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker gave a speech in 1997 during which he posited that music has absolutely no evolutionary value whatsoever. He claimed that music is simply an artifact of our linguistic development that is basically hitching a ride on the coattails of language. He goes on to refer to music as “auditory cheesecake” which to him is something akin to the joys of eating heavily fatty and sugary foods. Our taste for these foods developed, so the story goes, because of their relatively short supply in the early years of human development. Since at the time, in moderate amounts these foods were actually beneficial to our diet, we developed a biological taste for their consumption. Over time we have come to lean too heavily on the taste of these foods, and thanks to their pervasive availability, have become unhealthy in the process. So while there was at one time a biologically feasible reason to crave these foods, you could almost refer to our continuing obsession with eating them as being practically vestigial. To Pinker, the origin and pervasive presence of music provides nothing whatsoever to the continued survival of our species and in fact, in the complete absence of music from our lives, all other things remaining the same, we would not suffer for it in any way.

That he gave this speech as the keynote address before a panel of cognitive scientists whose forte was the field of music is not only audacious, it borders on pure antagonism. But what he really did was effectively throw down the gauntlet to the cog-sci folks. Pinker forced them to face an argument that had never really been presented before. And in the process they were off to the races working to debunk Pinker as quickly as possible and in the process reinforce their own studies on the meaning of music and the mind. Present at the conference was Daniel Levitin, a cognitive scientist who went on to write a book about the effects of music on the human brain, and our perception of music itself. In the last chapter, titled “The Music Instinct” (and a clear reference to Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,”) Levitin goes about addressing Pinker’s infamous claims. To Levitin, the basis for his refutation of Pinker’s theory is the idea that music was an evolutionary adaptation developed for the purpose of ritualized mating. Basically he states that music developed – prior to the development of language, and not as a sort of outgrowth from the development of language – as a way of getting the attention of the opposite sex with the obvious goal of procreating. He uses a person like Mick Jagger as an example of someone who, in the absence of physical beauty (Levitin’s words) has managed to be attractive to women merely through his involvement in popular, sexually provocative music.

I find all of this fascinating for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the way in which it dovetails with my previous blog about the cave people and their mating rituals. Not that I was going for anything vaguely close to a scientific theory by any stretch, but just that I was in effect considering the very same idea in my own caveman-like way. I won’t go batshit crazy trying to solve the argument either and mostly because I don’t really have a theory either way, though I tend to lean towards Levitin; I only wanted to show that this is a topic that is central to the understanding of what makes music so much a part of my life, and that music is probably more than just an obsession in our history but an essential element in what makes us human.

So while the origin and ultimate purpose of music is up for grabs, and the very indefinable objective quality of music in general is also impossible to pin down, what is left? Well, for me what is left is a world full of endlessly amazing music of all sorts that covers every imaginable emotion and thought and idea as clearly and as beautifully as anyone could ever dream. And if you simply take the time to begin to really listen to that which is around you at all times, you just might find, you get what you need. Oh yeah.