Is Our Popular Culture Sick? (a.k.a. Elliot Smith, Part II)

[inverseroom]

Like everybody on this board, I was deeply saddened by Elliot Smith's death. I didn't know him, but loved his songs and copied his recording ideas, and felt a terrible loss when I learned he was gone. But later last night, when I went out to get a video to watch with my wife, I had a sort of mini-epiphany, which I thought I'd share with you all.

On the way to the video store, I put on the local AOR classic-rock station. Mostly what was playing was 70's and 80's stuff, with a little Pearl Jam thrown in--that sort of thing. Good old wholesome American rock and roll. But I couldn't help noticing that two out of every three songs was about one of two things: fucking, or kicking ass. Sometimes both. Lots of menace and swagger, and lots of baby do it all night long. If I had put on the rap station, there would have been more of both, and even if I had put on the light rock station, it would have been, at the very least, a lot of fucking. When I got to the video store I looked at all the new releases, and what was there? Sex and violence, basically. Wiseguys, heists, serial killers. Women with big boobs making kissy-faces or grabbing guys in suits by the necktie. Nazis. Evil spirits. Etc., etc.

Now, let me tell you--I'm no arch-conservative, nor do I shy from uncomfortable material. I love "Blood Simple" and "Matewan," and I think a lot of love songs are great. Sex songs, even. Though I can't think of any right now. Anyway, there is no doubt--lust and anger are vital human emotions, and we have to address them in our art.

However, if you want to fake real emotion in your art, you should have people yelling at one another, or shooting one another, or screwing one another. It is easy--way too easy--to get a visceral reaction out of viewers and listeners that way. Eminem--very clever fella. But very, very, deeply, terrifically, LAZY fella, too. Here are a few legitimate emotions you will almost never hear a song about, for instance.

1) Finding a sweater your grandmother gave you ten years after she died, which you joined some of your friends in making fun of behind her back years before.

2) Watching your son succumb to frustration and self-defeat while drawing a picture, and realizing that he has taken on your worst qualities, despite your best efforts.

3) Discovering that a manner of being you have adopted and have employed for years is actually embarrassingly stupid.

4) Escaping from a nursing home, only to find that you are completely lost and don't know who you are.

Now, many of the bands we write about on this board do indeed handle material like this. Sparklehorse, Grandaddy, Flaming Lips, etc. But they are the exception, really. And now, of course, there is one less songwriter in the world creating subtle, nuanced songs about unexamined emotions, and this is incredibly depressing.

Folks, is our popular culture sick? Are we eating ourselves from the inside with gratuitous hostility, bitterness, rage, and lust? Look: I'm not one of those people who thinks that the blame for a violent society lies with violent song lyrics. Certainly, rappers, rockers, and crooners are singing about what they see, right?

Well...maybe. And maybe our obsessive attention to a very narrow range of human emotions is, in fact, damaging, and helps to make us think that these emotions are all there is. Think about it: we are ABSOLUTELY SURROUNDED by music at all times. There is no public place, except maybe the library, where there is silence. Music isn't window dressing--we're soaking in it, 24/7. I guess the question I really want to ask--especially after the passing of somebody we all admired--is this: Do we have a responsibility to our culture, to be at the forefront of exploring emotions, themes, sounds, and images that are usually left unexamined? Or do we just do what we feel like doing, and that's that? I'm trying to make a case here for the former: that those of us who make music have a RESPONSIBILITY to make music that is for the good of all. I don't mean anti-drug songs or absintence jingles, I mean music that takes our full humanity seriously, as did Elliot Smith's, and Nick Drake's, and Kurt Cobain's, and a bunch of other miserably missing people we cared about.

John.

[fear of texas]

I'm trying to make a case here for the former: that those of us who make music have a RESPONSIBILITY to make music that is for the good of all. I don't mean anti-drug songs or absintence jingles, I mean music that takes our full humanity seriously

John.

it pretty much totally sucks ass when someone you admired and tried to emulate in one way or another passes. just recently we lost Portland's amazing Exploding Hearts, quite possibly one of the top 5 power pop bands EVER. on the other hand, i think you need to put the high horse back in the stable. i dont think most folks pick up a guitar, a mic, or a pen to fulfill an obligation to all of humanity. in fact, i would say most songwriting is a reaction to what others think is a responsibility. escapism is definitely part of the formula, whatever genre. this is just my opinion (<insert asshole line here>), but the day i try to make serious music because it's my responsibility to humanity, i hope someone smashes my 38 and rips out my vocal chords...then a kick to the nads just for me thinking i was that pivotal to the world.

[loudmusic]

I hear you. I just think you are taking it a bit far. Everything is as it has always been give or take a few degrees.

I also don't think everyone/anyone has a "responsibility" to anyone. Music means something different to everybody. I am always freaked out by people I know are smart that listen to the worst crap. Their brains are wired different from mine. They don't go to a song to teach them, or challenge them, or whatever reason I do.

Yes, we are soaking in music (bad bad music at that).... and I do think it will have a dramatic affect on our society. That said... this is something that you or I can not change. The world is just like that right now. There is nothing particularly wrong with it. It is just kind of new to us... and so it scares us a bit. Future generations will not notice it. Sure, it DOES represent a huge change in society, but IT IS NATURAL. Mankind is alive. It changes just as your own body and mind does. Would it be healthy for a person to worry that he is not the same being he was when he was ten? NO. Worrying about shifts in culture and society are the same thing. Relax, baby.

We all love you here.
Martin

[wing]

i forget where i read this, but it was on some theremin site a long time ago:

If you drop the brainwashing by all the ads you have seen... Clothes become an expressive necessity rather than an expensive religion. Words you speak are quickly devoid of advertiser invented slang like "Mickey D's". You realize that youre not really having a "big mac attack" and that you actually arent hungry at all. You find that the new car you bought this year is not much different than the car you drove in high school, the body just looks different. You quickly disassociate beer from athletic heroes and half-naked women and more appropriately associate it with drunkenness, loss of self-control, hangovers, liver damage, and vomiting. You start to look for music to listen to that isn't bound only by the subject of love and sex. You realize that famous people are no different than you and deserve no more homage than your neighbor. You will be free from the manipulation that you didn't even realize was there all along.

i think the author put it all just right. that's true about music, in pop culture and mainstream music, a lot of songs are about love and sex, and yea i'd even agree some good deal anger/fighting. let's not forget drugs.

but when you step out of what's heard on the radio, i think you'll be surprised to find the number of "exceptions"... and if it seems wacky enough, The Decemberists write songs all about living in the 1800s around the Civil War.

I'd say there's lots of music out there about so many different things. But on a mainstream radio MTV level, i'd say to find songs about anything else will be a lot harder.

[inverseroom]

i think you need to put the high horse back in the stable.

Hmm...I thought I heard some whinnying while I was typing.

Seriously--I know that I'm going over the top here, but I'm thinking more along the lines of aiming high, rather than presciptive theme-peddling.

[Meriphew]

I think most people like music that is either way out there (escapism), or something that they can totally relate to (oh baby I love you so much). On the other hand, maybe alot of songs aren't too unrealistic or ficticious, seeing as how violent and sex filled our culture has become.

[signorMars]

Folks, is our popular culture sick? Are we eating ourselves from the inside with gratuitous hostility, bitterness, rage, and lust? Look: I'm not one of those people who thinks that the blame for a violent society lies with violent song lyrics. Certainly, rappers, rockers, and crooners are singing about what they see, right?

You hear this stuff on the radio because listeners, especially young teens, a huge market for music, want to hear something they identify with. They don't want to listen to a song and say "the music feel of this song reflects my mood" or "This story about the sweater this guy's grandma gave him reminds me of when my uncle tried to teach me to swim"... they want to scream "Party hard" or "Fuck you I won't do what you told me" or listen to simple plan sing through autotuners about how they can't be perfect. Those people who are interested enough in music to look for other themes and artists will find them, but these artists will have a hard time reaching mainstream success if 16 year olds can't blast their music with the windows down on their way to the football game thinking "Finally someone who understands me."

plus... i dont think our culture is any more violent or sex based than it used to be... we're just in one of many periods of history where people are more open about it.

[gone]

...

[bobbydj]

The paradoxical thing I'm getting from this thread is that on the one hand it seems best to conclude that, no, things actually are not any 'worse' (i.e. more evil, crooked, fucked) than at other points in history.

Why's it best to conlude this? 'Cos if you adopt the opposite position (that things are oh-so-much-worse-today) you head off down a reactionary route. To wit, what's needed is much stronger repressive state apparatus - more electric chairs, more enforced abortions for the poor, etc. etc.

So that's usually why I conclude that things are pretty much how they've always been. To opt otherwise is to buy into conservative ideological shite - a propos of the inauguration of a tougher regime.

And yet.

What're some of the implications of concluding that things haven't changed? That 'moral', 'ethical', practices have not altered much at all in the longue duree?

Well, in a nutshell, it seems to imply that there's no agency, that try as we might we can't make conditions better for ourselves.

And, paradoxically, that initself has a very similar reactionary and conservative rhetorical force as the first position, which maintains that things have changed for the worse.

[black mariah]

Rock and roll has ALWAYS been about guns, drugs, and hot jungle love in the backseat of a Pontiac. Things haven't changed. Sure, they're a bit more... LITERAL now but so effin what?

Who says that violent, drug-addled, sex-crazed music DOESN'T add to our society? Take Ministry for example. One guy might see them as a bunch of psycho degenerates bent on the destruction of all that is good and wholesome, while I think that anyone that doesn't have the living shit scared out of them by "Just One Fix" is so fucked they're beyond help. Songs mean many different things to many people. Something like Patty Griffin's "Blue Sky" could be taken on the surface as a sappy love song, while to me it's about escaping whatever crappy situation you happen to be in at the time. It's all up to the listener.

Not all emotions are good ones, and a lot of music uses this to good effect. Burning Witch, Khanate, and other doom bands have a very dark, very depressing, very OPPRESSIVE sound that pounds the living shit out of your skull and leaves you ready to put a bullet in your head. Is this good or bad? Think twice before you answer. The Beatles could EASILY do the same thing. "She's Leaving Home" is one of the most depressing songs I've ever heard.

The more overbearing issue isn't about emotion. It's one of TRUTH. It's one of REAL. Britney Spears, N'Sync, whoever else... they are not REAL bands. They are not REAL musicians with REAL emotion in their songs. They are overly processed, cleaned up, milquetoast version of REAL music. They are the Cheez-Whiz of music. So completely cleansed of all trace of reality in order to assure good sales. Ignore them.

The REAL music is made by the people that travel from state to state in a van, carting their tools from town to town just for 45 minutes on a stage in front of people they don't know and most likely will never see again. It's made by the shitty punk bands at high school keggers, the 70 year old black guy that sings hymns as he bags groceries at the store, the twentysomethings that have lived in the middle of the suburbs for way too fucking long with no future to look for and no fights to call their own and have decided to put all of their anger and frustration into three chords and a lot of volume. THAT is the real music. THAT is the real emotion, no matter what that emotion may be. It's not the prepackaged bullshit you hear on the radio.

Ummm... I THINK that was on-topic.

The only responsibility we as musicians and engineers have to society is to do what we can to make REAL, HONEST music. Whether it's Eddie Vedder's story of a child that learns the person he called Dad wasn't actually his father, or High on Fire's tales of fantasy beast warriors from Surrounded by Thieves, it's music that was made because it HAD to be made by those that made it. That is our responsibility. To make the music we HAVE to make. The people that need to hear it WILL hear it. All we have to do is make it.

Was that all philosophical enough and stuff for everyone?

Damn, I gotta go play some guitar.

[KingOlaf]

Since most pop music is made by people in their twenties for people who are the same age or younger, I don't expect it to be too deep. Nor am I sure I want it to be. Happily, there are enough exception to keep things interesting.

If you really want songs about grandma's sweater branch out and go look in the folk section.

[bobbydj]

If you really want songs about grandma's sweater branch out and go look in the folk section.

Or else hear 'Autumn Sweater' off YLT's "ICHtHBAO". And while you're there listen to 'Shadows' too - because it's the most beautiful melody (with just enough slant and fragility) ever recorded. Maybe not RAWK, but certainly NOT yoghurt-weaving hey-nonny-nay, finger-in-the-ear foke neither.

Also is it just me or is that Mariah kind of sexy. Phwooh. More o'that vitriol, evil American person.

[black mariah]

Watch it. I'm a guy. I'm neither black nor named mariah. A black mariah is a big truck used to transport prisoners. Just go listen to Tom Waits' "Big Black Mariah".

[bobbydj]

I'm a guy.

...and your point is?

But seriously now - that sig. Do you lot over there (by which I mean Americans) really say 'arse'? I thought it was always 'ass' or better yet 'fanny'. RE the latter - this slang term tends to denote a different part of the anatomy in the UK. Heheh. Lots of potential for some (perhaps rather painful) confusion on this matter.

Now then. Where's my soldering iron?!

Yes - it does, doesn't it!

*ba-da-bish*

[I'm Painting Again]

They are the Cheez-Whiz of music

awesome analogy.




just follow your heart and thats all you should do.