Enjoy yourself

A Happy New Year to my readers. Here is Prince Buster.

Enjoy yourself it's later than you think.
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by, as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

Which has some affinity with the poem by Horace here, no?

Too schlocky?

Not even the Maverick had the gumption to post a link to a song by Fabian Forte. Nothing too schlocky for this place, however, so here is Gonna Make You Mine.  (Filed under 'kitsch').

Thought for the day - what would you do?

It's Sunday, which is traditionally a time for reflection on higher matters, when the pub plays light jazz on the juke box instead of some awful rap music or death metal, and some folks go to church.  So here's Porter Waggoner with some philosophical reflections on Christianity and possibly the hypocrisy of Christian life.  I can't decide whether it's awful or not.  Did I mention here before that I have a weakness for country music?

What concept does 'exists' instantiate?

Maverick has a great post here. If 'some horse exists' says that the concept horse is instantiated, what concept does 'something exists' instantiate? (I have simplified his argument somewhat, without missing its force, I hope).

Actually this is all too difficult for a Saturday afternoon, so instead here is Happy Go Lively by Laurie Johnson, who also wrote the Avengers theme music. Happy Go Lively to me sounds identical to Holiday for Strings by David Rose, who also wrote The Stripper.

I first went to the States in 1971, when inside absolutely every lift and in every shopping mall they played music like Holiday for Strings. To the teenager I was then, Jimi Hendrix represented all that was true, and shopping mall music everything that was horrible. I don't know if they are playing Hendrix in shopping malls, but music has moved on since then, in some sense of 'moved on'. For example, here is Bring Me The Horizon playing something completely horrid at the Reading Festival last year. The singer has so many tattoos it seems he is infected by gangrene.

Bad performance

Sometimes just the performance can make music horrible, even though the performers are skilled, and the rendition has no obvious flaws.  Here's Guarachi Guaro by the Salvadorean band Proyecto Acústico. Compare it with the arrangement it was taken from by Cal Tjader and his quintet from 1953.  Much better, but why?

Here also is the original by Dizzy Gillespie, arranged by Gerald Wilson. Only 276 views, though superior to the others. Love the wind up gramophone.  I have one of these in the attic, I may take it out for a 'spin' some day.

Bad music: you are on hold

I searched YouTube for examples of the sort of music you hear when you are put 'on hold' but could find nothing much except this spoof.  In any case, well worth it for a laugh and the music is an authentic example of the genre.

Voicemail music is the purest example of music that is essentially and per se bad.  It's not merely indifferent music to which naff words have been set.  Nor is it music which has been made extra bad by a horrible video.  Nor essentially good music which has been contaminated by the setting or arrangement (Barry Manilow's arrangement and setting of Chopin's Prelude XX for example).  No, it is music which is essentially horrible.   If there is a Platonic heaven that contains the uncontaminated essence of the Beautiful, there must also be a Platonic musical hell in which this stuff all goes.

I have no answers, as usual, to the philosophical and musicological question of why voicemail is bad, or even the particular tonal or harmonic features that make it instantly recognisable as being 'on hold'.  Over to the experts.

Bad music: steel guitars

If you have ever listened to country music, you have probably heard a steel guitar.  Here's Hank Williams and his band, with steel guitar briefly at 1:03.  But where did the steel guitar come from?

Supposedly it was invented in Hawaii. The story goes that in the mid 1890's Joseph Kekuku, a Hawaiian schoolboy, was strolling by the railway with his guitar.  He picked up a metal bolt lying by the track, and slid it along the strings of the guitar.  And so the steel guitar was born. There are a number of different stories about this, of course, so probably one of them is true.

Hawaiian guitar music become popular in America in the 1930s, and I used to have a lot of 78s of it.  I still have some Felix Mendelssohn in the attic somewhere.  Mendelssohn (a descendent of the more illustrious classical composer of the same name) recorded many jazz 'standards' Hawaiian style.  Here he is with 'I got rhythm', recorded 28 Oct. 1940.  His Teddy Wilson-ish piano break is very nice, coming in at 1:10, followed shortly by the steel guitar at 1:43.  Here he is again with Hawaiian war chant.

The sound found its way into country music via Alvino Rey, who is credited as the father of the pedal steel, a steel guitar played flat on its back using pedals that increase the range of the instrument. Here he is playing 'St Louis Blues', which features a talking steel guitar. Another pioneer was Herb Remington. Here he is playing Goodbye Liza Jane, and (at the age of 83) Remington Ride.  Finally, Leon McAuliffe and his Western Swing Band play Panhandle Rag (January 1949).

In more recent times we have the Junior Brown. He is famous for the excellent Highway Patrol, of which my wife has a visceral and extreme dislike.  She only heard it once, many years ago, but still remembers it with hatred.  Sometimes I mention its existence simply to annoy her.

Brown is also notable for Guit steel blues, although this owes more the slide guitar tradition that originated in the Mississipi delta, than to Hawaii.

Bad music night: Jazz rock

There is much to say here, and  little time.  I suggested in last week's post that the 'freedom' and 'individuality' of free jazz was merely ornamental: a cadence around a standardised musical form.  It fools us into thinking we are free, rather than oppressed and alienated by the capitalist system.

This freedom was taken to its extremes in the late 1950s and 60s and beyond, leading to stuff like this, the Sun Ra Arkestra, which is really horrible, or the Soft Machine at the Proms, which is horrible in a different way. The Proms piece has all the hallmarks of 'free' improvisation around a standard form.  The standard form is little more than a modulation between two harmonic states.  The complex construction of 'All the things you are' has been lost altogether.  But that's as it should be.  Complex harmonisation and progression and sophisticated orchestration and arrangement takes time and genius.  An individual performer has no time, and he (or she) probably little genius, otherwise they would have been composers or arrangers instead of honking on a crappy saxophone.

People whose formative years were not in the late 1960s and early 1970s have no idea what it was like, and the horrors we had to sit through in the name of free jazz.  Hours and hours of it.  And the jumped up intellectual types who would rave about it and look at you like a piece of dirt of you merely hinted that it was awful.  Those times are long gone, at least I hope so.  As a final reminder, here are the wonderful Spinal Tap.

Music night: free jazz

In an earlier post I mentioned standardisation, the first of the two features which characterise popular music, according to Adorno.  All popular music is written to a stock formula which never varies in its essentials, although individual pieces may differ by various accidents. The second feature, which is a corollary of the first, is what he calls pseudo-individualization. This is a way of imparting a fake individuality to mass produced music, thus imbuing it with a 'halo of free choice'.  Standardisation is a form of mind control that does the listening for the consumer.  Pseudo-individualization makes them forget that what they are listening to is 'pre-digested'. 

Thus the popular interest in popular music is a form of false consciousness.  It makes the masses forget that they are oppressed and exploited by the capitalist-consumerist system. Worse than that, it gives them the illusion of free choice: it makes them the unwitting architects of their own subjugation.

Adorno says that jazz improvisation is the most extreme example of this. 

Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys") — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.

This is in marked contrast to the view of jazz in the 1940s that Kerouac gives us, through the eyes and ears of his protagonist Dean Moriarty, in his seminal On the Road.

It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people's heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy women wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars — wine and whisky. The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from "EE-yah!" to a crazier "EE-de-lee-yah!" and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn't give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man's hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, "Ee! ee! ee!"

We don't know exactly what the tenorman was playing, but it was certainly a form of the be-bop idiom that emerged in the 1940s.  For example, in another part, Kerouac mentions 'Congo Blues' which I discuss here. Very little music was actually composed by be-bop artists.  They would take a 'standard' number, written in the standardised form of 1930s jazz that Adorno mentions, and would 'improvise freely' around it.  A favourite subject was "All the things you are", a show tune written by Jerome Kern.  Here is Richard Tauber singing it, and here is Joan Morris.  Both versions appear utterly unlike any form of be-bop.  By contrast, here is the renowned version by Gillespie, Parker, Stewart and Cole.  Somewhat later there is the Sonny Rollins version. 

The first two are awkward and stilted and old-fashioned, the second two seem progressive and, from the point of view of the 1940s and 50s, modernist.  Or so it seems: but was Moriarty just a victim of the false individualisation that Adorno despises?  Is there any real improvisation, given that the harmonic structure is identical in all versions?  Is the freedom that excited Kerouac, the 'wonderfully free idea', merely an illusion, a melodic circumscription, nothing more than a cadence?

Indeed: is the story of popular music in the 20th and 21st century no more than a form of false consciousness?  Be-bop gave way to completely free jazz, when absolutely nothing remained but the cadence.  Pop music gave way to 'progressive music' in the late1960s and 70s.  In the 1980s there was 'Indie', short for 'independent' music.  The 1990s saw the massive growth in popularity of rap and hip-hop and gangsta music, still dominating the charts. Are all these 'progressive' versions of popular music simply a vehicle for Adorno's standardised forms, painting a halo of free-choice and individualism, but nothing more than a form of mind control that make us the instrument of our own distraction from our oppression and ultimate alienation from the means of production?  A way of forgetting that we are not free?

Bad music night: cod gaelic

It's Friday and bad music is with us again!!!  This week, cods scots and cod irish music.  Plenty to choose from, but we'll start with Killarney, by Michael William Balfe (1808-1870), sung by John McCormack.  Of Balfe, the wonderful Oxford Companion to Music rather back-handedly says he had "an instinct for easy-flowing melody, unembarrassed by any subtleties of harmony or orchestration".  See what you think.  I think it's absolutely hideous, as is Roamin' in the Gloamin', in this version by Harry Lauder.  Billy Connolly is very rude about this ('singing shortbread tins'), somewhat unfairly given that Lauder really was Scots, although he soon moved to London (and lived in our road for a bit) to make his fortune.  (Also what is this thing about 'the Blue Misty Hills of Tyree?' at 1:30? A Google search reveals only Connolly's version. Was there ever really such a song?)

Nor must we omit the awful and hideous Donald where's your troosers.  And finally, something slightly (but only slightly) more authentic, some Jimmy Shand.  I saw a pile of Jimmy Shand 78s in a junk shop years ago, and always regret not buying them.

Bad music night: La Gasolina

My previous examples of bad music were mostly things I have a soft spot for.  It is very difficult to find examples of really bad music.  Here is an exception: Daddy Yankee- La Gasolina.  I really hate this.  I hate it beyond hate itself. The female members of my family insist on playing it in the car.  I tell them it is forbidden and that the patriarch should have authority in the family, but they do not listen.  They do not understand how very awful it is. 

The words are bad - the whole song appears to be the words 'I love petrol' uttered in Spanish, first by a guy, and then by the chicks in the backing band.  But the words are immaterial: the whole point of this series was to find music that is without any possibility of salvation.  Imagine this music without the words, as it would be if there existed a Karaoke backing version (hopefully not).  Exactly.  It is unembarrassed by any modulation, any harmonic shift, any progression to different tonal environment.  It is simply horrible beyond words. 

The badness of this is fundamentally similar to the badness of 'modern jazz', about which I have been meaning to talk for a while. Perhaps more next week.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Music night

For Sarah, who is getting better, I hope. Variations for the Healing of Arinushka by Arvo Pärt.

So farewell September

Vallicella links to Dinah Washington here. But surely Peggy Lee's version is better. A voice like no other, and the little piano break at 1:13 is exquisite.

Bad music: unreasonable music

As it's been a bit of a New Age week here at Beyond Necessity, and because it's Friday, when we venture into the world of strange and bad music, here is some music people were simply too wasted to get anything right*. We'll start with the 13th Floor Elevators, 60s psychedelic band and stoner heroes.

Ex-bandsman Tommy Hall is on the right, a 66 year old who has spent most of his life dropping acid. "We were trying to get into the results of acid," he says, "to get into the results of the universe." So he made it a rule to drop acid every time someone picked up an instrument. As the  interview says, "it's challenging to comprehend everything he's saying". Why would that be. Hall wrote the sleeve notes for The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, their 1966 album, urging everyone to get away from that boring and narrow old Aristotelian logic.

Actually some of their music does anticipate the music of the 1970s, but not Don't Fall Down, which sounds terrible even if you are very stoned.  This is proof that 'psychedelic drugs' damage the rational parts of the mind.

Moving, on here is Journey by Gentle People, which actually managed 21,000 views.  The original is actually 15 minutes long but that wouldn't fit onto YouTube, which is just as well.  I already pointed out that marijuana destroys the short-term memory, which has a bad effect on logic, but also music, where you get stuck at the repeat bar :|| for ages, similar to driving round Swindon.

Finally something more modern and rappy.  "5 weed songs", of which I only got past the first, and Cypress Hill performing Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk.  Note the endless repetition of the initial motif, supposedly sampled from Grant Green's Down on the Ground, which is also very bad.

*Yes there is something wrong with that sentence.

Bad music: so boot if at all

Not that bad, actually, but a necessarily preliminary if we are to tackle the difficult subject of jazz rock.  Here is Kahimi Karie singing Good Morning World.  I first heard this in 1995 somewhere over the Atlantic, and was intrigued by the sampling from 1960s Soft Machine.

Friday night is bad music night

Following the unexpected success of my last music post, I investigated the attic and found enough vinyl and shellac to justify a regular weekly slot.  That is, bad music.  Maverick has a slot for good music.  Why discriminate?

Some ground rules.  We should try and avoid the obvious, for too much has been written about that.  E.g. one commenter wrote last week "in my personal view there is no aspect of this song which is not bad", and he (or she) is absolutely right.  But a little too obvious.  Likewise, practically anything from the Eurovision song contest.  Or this, which is infamously bad, but not in a way that is news to anyone.

No.  We must explore music which has seeds of badness, or which is clearly bad, but whose toxic characterisation eludes us.  We must explore the world of Youtube of 200 views or less, or (better) the world of music that has not even reached Youtube. 

We must explore even the fantastically popular, and I want to start with the other one our commenter suggested was much better, namely this. 65 million people watched it.

Is it bad?  If it is bad, why?  I don't know. It is manifest that something is badly wrong with it.  I had forgotten, or never noticed, it was the Black Eyed Peas who made it, and now I think of them differently.  In the way that, when someone years ago suggested that all wine tastes faintly of vinegar, I realised that all wine really does taste faintly of vinegar.

For more vinegar, here is Alanis' version which gets us closer to why it is horrible, but without any precise, definitive answer that would be philosophically satisfying.

Can any music be really bad?

I have a broad musical taste and there is no music that I entirely dislike.  Often I have wondered whether there is any really bad, irredeemably bad music. Particularly when I found myself watching Last Night of the Proms yesterday evening.  But even there, is it irredeemable?

Remember that music exists to create certain thoughts and emotions in us, thoughts and emotions that would not necessarily be there without it.  Just as sexual desire is in some way beyond our control, in the way that Augustine complained about, so is the emotion created by music.  I cannot listen to this, for example, without emotion.  Yet what is it saying?  That God once visited England, and that we should fight both mentally and physically, with a sword, to establish some weird vision of England in this country? The thoughts are strange, but the music conspires with the words to make them temporarily acceptable.  (Also disturbing is the sight of Victoria Beckham struggling with the words, but that is something else).  If we have a problem with this, we have a problem with all music.  And since we don't have a problem with all music, clearly not, we don't have a problem with this.  Ergo, no music is totally problematic.

Last week I was wondering whether Mickey Gilley's version of "It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels" had finally got us there.  It is exceptionally bad, in fact so bad that there is no version of it on YouTube (ponder that for a moment).  But then the original version by Kitty Wells is tolerable, and the version by Patsy Cline brings us close to the sublime.

So forget the words - songs are just bad poetry redeemed by music.  Is there any music that is simply too bad to be saved?