Potpourri

By Robbie on March 25, 2009

Some great responses on the "guilty indifference" theme (below).  Thanks, everyone. "Why disallow guilt for music you do like but allow it for music you don't get?"  Very reasonable, and all I can say is that I'm confessing an attitude, not trying to justify it. A year ago I was having dinner with several people, all smart and successful and educated, who without much fuss were dismissing "The Great Gatsby" as a great or even very good book.  Though I don't side with the dismissers, to be able to buck a long-established elite consensus so cavalierly strikes me as an admirable trait.  For a small-town guy who was formed in the pre-cable days of monolithic liberal orthodoxy, such casual, self-assured independent-mindedness is slightly shocking.  There are some opinions I instinctively decline to expose for fear of not being invited to the next smart-people dinner.

Speaking of liberal orthodoxy, a reporter from the New York Times (hey, how do you italicize in a blog?) was interviewing me once for a piece fleshing out my take on country music with some personal data.  His started his questions by asking what films I liked, and my first thought was that I should not say anything very pretentious. (Even the word "films" seemed to lead the way to disaster.)  So I replied that, actually, I liked Adam Sandler's work very much.  The writer paused, pen midair, beheld me gently, and said: "I'm going to do you a favor and not use that." Okay, I thought.  We'll go with that, and say nice things only.  The New York Times plays to a kind of audience, and it wants what it wants -- don't argue.  But I was interested to see, when the piece came out, that my answer to the question "What book are you currently reading?" was framed as "He claims to be reading Jacques Barzun's 'From Dawn to Decadence'." Now, that book, like everything else Jacques Barzun has written, is for a general reader, not a way-out intellectual.  The "claims," in other words, is uncalled for.  Plenty of country musicians are interested in Erasmus and 17th-century politics in Venice and so on, but aren't steeped in it enough to slog through a work of primary scholarship.  That's nothing that should choke the average reader on his morning coffee.

Jacques Barzun and the New York Times are two faces of the disappearing American middlebrow.  One face says: The knowledge of your civilization is your patrimony, requiring a little effort but no special genius to unlock.  The other says: Stick to the script.  A kind of script is in either case presumed, endorsed, and embodied, a cultural "official version," the idea of which, as I say, seems to be fading in our time -- a cause for celebration and concern, if you ask me.  It's all to the good to have a fresh look at Gatsby, and if the vanishing of stuffy old newspapers presages an age in which readers don't demand information tidily packaged to fit with their prejudices and outlooks, great.  But I think that for us animals with our modest frontal lobes, it's a case not of razing the old structures to open up an Edenic meadow, but rather, which prejudices, what leaders, "who whom."  And is there at some point an unavoidable conflict between the unfixing of official merit from human works and merit itself as a category?  Is there more gain in the freedom that allows everyone to decide for himself what paintings and books and music are best, or in the settled common-sense order that refuses to grant every plumber the right to give a thumbs-up or -down to Picasso? 

A respondent brings up the situational nature of musical appreciation, and another mentions Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue."  This reminds me of something interesting I picked up on recently, that not only age and experience inform your reaction to music, but what you are looking at at the moment. The songs on "Kind of Blue" sounded fresh and memorable to me when I first heard them -- but the second time, I was driving at dusk through an industrial neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, and that's when it occurred to me that this music was brilliantly designed so as to encapsulate and sharpen a living world.  Who knows, maybe eating a baked potato would help even more.  Wasn't there a Peter DeVries narrator who made for himself an ideal sensory experience -- sexual intercourse with Verdi playing, cherries in the mouth, rose petals flying though the air, and a fabulous blonde arrayed beneath him...?

I don't see much to argue with or object to in the statement that a high-schooler in 1980 is moved by this music and a Bavarian prince from 1780 prefers that, and therefore we need not pretend at propping up spurious universals.  Still, one whose practical everyday business is making music blanches at completely accepting that the sum of its power is determined by the consumers -- what they happen to know, what their blind spots are, what they ate before the show, what their first wife forced them to listen to, etc.  I sit here making songs for some sort of ideal listener I've never met; and I perform with the idea that I can communicate with anyone at all, anyone not too deep into some dilemma like drunkenness or retardation.  You might say that to appreciate my music most fully you should have a college degree, an American citizenship if not an Appalachian heritage, a bottle of cheap beer, and a passing knowledge of midcentury folk music, and I would say, ha ha, that would probably help, and doesn't that go some ways in accounting for my obscure status, ha ha.  Sincerely, though, if I thought the worth of my music was that dependent on demography, I think I would throw my badge into the sea and walk away.

Last, to the man who wanted WAV files of my new MP3-only record for reasons of fidelity -- you are correct, of course, and I do care about my listeners and about offering good-sounding recordings.  In fact, it's always disappointed me that I can't offer my stuff in the best-sounding format of all, vinyl.  The record companies deem it too extravagant, and they are right.  A collection of MP3's is in this case what I came up with, and that's all it is, for now.  If you don't do MP3's, hang on.  I suspect that the best of the "50-vc. Doberman" songs (as determined by a team of professional plumbers after a meal of sturgeon and firewater) will appear down the road, mastered and in higher resolution and, in some cases perhaps, re-performed.  As I've mentioned, there's a hedge deliberately built into the product -- its size, cost, format, and selling platform -- that says "not quite official -- what do you think of all this?"