Nostalgia for a Time Yet to Come

By Liz Przybylski (Liz.przybylski@ucr.edu)

Maybe you’ve had this experience, once or many times, when a song moves you into a different time. Compelling research already exists on music and memory, how it triggers recall much more profoundly than trying to remember without sensory details. I like to revisit the moment from the movie CoCo when the title character’s dementia clears and she can recall her father, thanks to the strummed guitar melody “Remember Me.” In my listening, I’m so struck by how a set of songs by T-Rhyme trigger my memories that I want to invite you into that series of synapses, because they don’t just make me remember the past, they make me nostalgic for the future.

Hear me out.

Memory is fickle. And I can only really hear through my own ears, though you and I and we can play with different ways to listen if we really reflect on how what we bring to listening influences what we hear, and open ourselves to hearing how other people listen to the same music.  In this post, I’ll work between my experiences as a listener and interviews I got to do with rapper T-Rhyme. By listening to both of our perspectives, I want you to get to feel my future nostalgia, and hear where it comes from.

Rewind

Even though I’ve placed my music purchases from Bandcamp in my larger digital music library on my laptop, sometimes I still like to go through the platform’s “my collection” page. I get a trace of the feeling that I used to get in the days when I would flip through my CD cases, the album artwork reminding me of when I bought a particular title and inviting me in for another listen. When I look at the digital image cover for T-Rhyme’s Diary of a Mad Red Woman, its tactility appeals to me, especially because of the distance a screen can create.  

The sketched eyes on the rhyme notebook stare right at me. Torn scraps of notebook paper show rhymes that were kept, or balled up and thrown away. Those tiny torn holes from spiral binding take me back to my own youth of writing and discarding, little flecks of paper ending up on the carpet or the classroom floor when I ripped out a page to start afresh. When I listen, T-Rhyme’s first track takes me back, too. “First Entry” sets up the album, and also invites me to ask, as the rapper does, “what is it you’d like to say to your inner child?” As I listen to the digital playback, the spoken voice urges, “just let it all out.”

This album from 2016 looks backward, and it does more than that: it connects those memories into the future tense. The rapper takes time to recount challenges she faced in her teens and twenties on the song “Start Over,” linking these experiences to feelings and subsequent actions. Then the storyteller’s lyrics share how she heard a voice asking, “Do you want a fresh start”?  Throughout the chorus, the rapper narrates a present that builds from the past and is moving into new music and a future of possibility, repeating, “Once was lost, but now I’m found /Pray to my creator, get me out this ground/ Cause I’m a start over, let the world go round/ Focus all my energy into fantastic sounds.” Like the lines that were kept in the spiral-bound journal, some words, feelings, and ideas, come along into the present and will stick around for the future.

As I keep listening, I pay attention to the rapper. Maybe it’s the notebook that focuses me more on her words then on the fitting beat, which on this song is produced by Mils. I open my ears to let in T-Rhyme’s story and follow her across the arc of this song, and the album. She raps, “Got so many layers, I peel them back slow.” What are those layers? What happens as they peel back? I hear them as layers of memory, stories upon stories, inviting the listener to pay attention to what each piece adds to the whole.

Memory

The music videos add still more layers for Diary of a Mad Red Woman. Here’s what I see: The strong black and white imagery of the album cover, with pops of red, continues through the video for the second song on the album. I watch the music video for “Kill H.E.R.” and feel memory flicking back and forth: a cityscape appears in black and white, as does the rapper herself, shifting rapidly between a realistic monochrome image and the eerie opposite coloration of a film negative. At each chorus T-Rhyme repeats, “If only I knew then just what I know now/ I swear I would never let the light burn out.”

Different times overlap through the song, which the music video helps to show through this play with color, black and white, and the fuzzy haze of memory. The rapper looks to her past and tell us she has learned something in the present, while another woman appears and disappears on the screen. If this is a younger version of the narrator’s self, she acts out the memories that have taught hard-won lessons, a presence who fades though her impact remains.

“Fade out the track, I rewrote her song,” T-Rhyme raps. And yes, music can do this. It can bring a story back over and over, or we can nudge the notes up or down, rewrite the beat, and it feels changed, it becomes different. This is what I love about a musical loop: it focuses my mind on the most minute of changes, or when the rhythms, pitches, timbres, and lyrics stay exactly the same, then I focus on feeling what alters in me with every repetition.  “Bloodshot eyes, hip hop is dead,” T-Rhyme raps, then the chorus returns, the same but not the same.

Poetry returns in the final verse, and both women meet. This time the chorus can say what the rapper knows now, that not only is hip hop not dead, but it saves stories, it saves lives.

Listening in Conversation

I was left with lingering questions about how these songs connect to memories, and think forward into lessons learned, so I talked with T-Rhyme about her creative process. She explained to me that for her, music can be a way to work through things, and invite listeners to connect in vulnerability. This is especially the case for “Kill H.E.R.,” which tells a story of how music saves its makers.

And the women who connect across time in the music video? Yes, the one acting opposite T-Rhyme stands in for her younger self, T-Rhyme explained, and is also the rapper Valkyrie putting her own spin on things through her presence, as she does in the cypher Tribe Called Queenz.

I spend a lot of time thinking about cyphers, listening or watching or experiencing, feeling ways that circles of rappers or breakers and audiences connect in and through them. I’ve listened to reflections on what made Tribe Called Queenz special. On one reel in my brain, I hear the rappers performing, and on another T-Rhyme’s narration of the process and sound. The reels come together like two film projectors aiming at a single screen.

For me, listening is never just about a single song or a single album. One brings to mind another, and I chain them together in my own playlist, connected through a shared artist or lyric or sample. The collaboration between Valkyrie and T-Rhyme on “Kill H.E.R.” makes me think of their work with Pooky G and Jaide on Tribe Called Queenz.

As T-Rhyme narrates it, Pooky G is “very much about street knowledge as well as one of the best at storytelling, and hard spitters that I know… She gives me Foxy Brown vibes, Lady of Rage vibes, she really has a super strong presence.”

When I listen to Pooky G in this video, her references to movies and music take me back to my own earlier years. I listen to her rap the lyrics “a league of their own” and unapologetically take up sonic space, just as she gets right up into the camera’s face and takes center screen. As her verse continues, she raps that she might be misunderstood. I hear this as “M!ssundaztood” like Pink, but like the rocker, it seems to me that Pooky G is taking her own creative control. These pop culture moments, a movie about women taking up space in the world of professional sports on their own terms, of a pop musician working to land her own alt-rock artistic voice at the dawn of the 21st century: these were moments of my childhood and adolescence where something better for girls seemed possible.

I hear that possibility in Jaide’s verse, too. From the start, Jaide kicks off her verse nodding to her collaborators, saying “let’s get it, ladies.”

Why don’t I listen to more rappers who speak to their experiences of motherhood, of being minimized as female parents, and of what they do to be taken seriously in this world? I listen to the music as Jaide raps, “I came into the game, gave ‘em something unexpected/ Thought I was gone ‘cause I gave birth, but I resurrected.” Her rap style is rapid fire. A quick reference to Al Capone shows her staying power, and she layers on meaning as she reminds listeners “I never dumb it down just to get more love.”

As a kid, I was hungry for smart, forward-thinking storytelling. The heroes I followed were girls who had been dismissed as inconsequential, too young or too poor or too female to have anything important to offer; how much more exciting, then, when they used their voices and their whole bodies to do their thing in spite of naysayers. Sometimes, the word “ladies” can feel dismissive, but here I perceive it hearkening to “Ladies First,” which I’ve heard Queen Latifah and Monie Love rap more times than I can count. Though I came to it after its original release, that line, “Stereotypes, they got to go,” was something I was rallying for. What would it have been like to follow Queen Latifah into that future, the one in which her teenage self takes the mic, and people love it, and there’s room for more and more musicians behind her? She raps, “I break into a lyrical freestyle/ Grab the mic, look into the crowd and see smiles/ Cause they see a woman standing up on her own two/ Sloppy slouching is something I won't do.” Ladies first indeed.

With her fellow rappers, the world Jaide speaks into existence here is one in which she easily rises above being hollered at in the club, where “The woman that you see/ Speaks intelligently/ With her own cash and her own car/ Earned independently.” And to take this just one step further, what if this self-made rapper never had to defend herself against unwanted attention when she went out at all? This is a future that I miss.

T-Rhyme listens for this lyricism in her own way. She explains of Jaide, “She's deep. She has really clever wordplay.” With praise for this rapper as well, T-Rhyme details, “Jaide’s cadence is crazy. The way that she's able to spit. And she has a really dope singing voice, too.”

On her verse, Valkyrie’s internal rhymes land like drum beats to my ears, “mimic,” “gimmick, “image,” “vivid.” When I listen again, I hear her rapped lyrics weave together images from a courtroom scene, “witness,” “case closed,” “locking up,” as well as an extended metaphor for killing it, lyrically and otherwise.

Across these lyrics, I hear Valkyire rap about a space where “the sickest women in this business” rhyme together, and people listen. Imagine that for musicians, and for audiences. This is a music scene I feel nostalgia for, one I would have been excited to grow into.

Nostalgia for the Future

T-Rhyme has effusively supportive words for each of these rappers, and spends much time praising Valkyire for her skills as a “really good storyteller. T-Rhyme applauds Valkyrie’s intelligence, calling her “genius when it comes to cracking jokes, or diss lines.” Listening back now, T-Rhyme reflects that Valkyrie gave a strong performance in this video, and “she's just been absolutely killing it ever since.”

I have to ask a couple times to get T-Rhyme to elaborate as much about her own rapping as she does about her collaborators’ styles. She does identify some of her own professional strengths, which I appreciate. She says, “I like to think that I'm clever too. I come up with some pretty good metaphors.”

When T-Rhyme says this, I agree and think of a line of hers from the song “Would You”: “Comprehend my metaphors/ Hip hop forever more/ Give me TLC/ I’m diggin’ on you like a record store.” And she does. She punches “De La Soul” to the same rhythm as “C’est la vie.” She shouts out the Wu Tang Clan and Mary J. Blige, and takes me back to the middle school notebook in my mind: “Keepin’ it true until the end of time/ I write your name before the plus and follow it with mine.”

Coming back to “Tribe Called Queenz,” I am struck by how the rappers support each other, walk together, back each other up, and end up together in the radio station studio, vibing as a group.

This could have been what I was looking forward to.

At the same time that I recall the tactility of music listening from my middle school and teenage years, that I feel the scratch of plastic CD cases on my fingers and hear the click of that case opening, I recall the pleasure of writing with a new brightly colored pen on a page of notebook paper, and I yearn for a future that wasn’t, or wasn’t yet.

Taken together, these songs open up a space of connection. The cypher offers a promise of sorority without malice, support for each other even when delivered with the sharp attitude of hip hop wit. These spaces are too few and too fleeting, at least in my life experience so far.

And on T-Rhyme’s Diary, I appreciate that the rapper tells her inner child what she needed to hear and perhaps didn’t at the time.

Over years, I’ve had countless conversations with friends and fellow musicians, where people have told me some version of the story that they are providing the environment for pop music learning they wish they had been able to have as students. I get that: we make what we wish we’d had, and hope that folks we offer it to now can find some value in it.

What would it have been like if more kids of my generation had been able to launch from notebooks of poems into a supportive cypher like Tribe Called Queenz and then from that cypher into a music industry that valued women as much those rappers valued each other?

What could it mean, as I stretch my memory back through the materiality of a musical adolescence, tapes lost, CDs scratched, Nike high tops worn out and notebooks relegated to the recycling bin, that the future my friends and I craved still has yet to arrive? And what work can we do to make that future we longed for then into something that might yet come to pass?

Tomorrow's Unknown Known Life: What Live-Evil Means To Me

By Sean Steele

---

There is a phenomenon that occurs when driving through farmland. Passing rows of crops while in motion on a highway provides a series of lines and patterns that shift as you pass. The road provides a forward motion, a direction, and the parallel lines spread outward to the horizon. In my 20s I spent several summers travelling across North America, and whenever I recall these trips there seems to be a firm connection between driving in the country and listening to Miles Davis' 1971 album Live-Evil. It must have been while gazing out a car window watching rows of corn or a slowly fading sunset that I first heard this unique and incredible record.

Sunset in the American Southwest, Summer 2010. Photo by Sean Steele.

The record is a fusion of a live album and a carefully constructed series of compositions. Live-Evil blends the excitement of live improvisation and exploration with the editing and splicing made possible in a recording studio. Live-Evil strikes a compelling balance between free-form exploration and studio manipulation. It widened my sense of what it was possible to do with music, combining many of my favourite aspects of jazz, funk and psychedelic rock. Between the edited sections of Davis and his band playing free-form psychedelic jazz-rock are additional compositions by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal, and these dream-like renditions were an early personal introduction to ambient music, a genre that has since come to occupy a central place in my life.

Here is one such example of these ambient interludes:

Music connects to memory. There are songs and albums that can transport me to another time and place, and, more importantly, to another version of myself. Certain music has the ability to send me back to outgrown patterns of thought and earlier phases of my self-identity. Live-Evil reconnects me to road trips. Over the course of several summers I criss-crossed the continent five times. There is a transiency to travel that reflects an exciting restlessness I hear in Miles Davis and his band. They seem to be searching in sound for something, some elusive downbeat, a funky momentary collision of rhythm and melody. I was searching for many things as friends and I drove from one end of America to the other. I went in search of an imaginary era I gradually realized could not be found because it never existed in the first place. In my musical life, I was also searching for a kind of radical freedom through improvisation – a telepathic connection between musicians who can swoop and turn, rising and falling in a collective expression of sonic freedom and communication. Through my North American wanderings, I sought an ever-renewing sense of novelty, and to me there is a kind of parallel sense of discovery that is apparent every time I listen to Live-Evil.

Road trips and Live-Evil are parallels in my mind because they both make me think of searching. Whether the search is for some imaginary vision of America or my belief that the improvisations on the album were unedited examples of some extraordinary musical telepathy, the excitement of discovery was enough to get back in the car or pick up the guitar once again. There is always the next note, the next melodic idea, just as there is always the next small town, the next big city, the next highway. And just as Live-Evil is not a genuine live album, but a studio reconstruction, so too were my trips never an authentic journey into the heart of a place, but rather shallow impressions of a place seen in motion. With both improvisational music and travel, there is a nascent sense of promise, a suggestion that something impossible is, perhaps, possible. Live-Evil is not an untouched live album, and this realization subverted my original vision of magical musical telepathy. While driving across America, the discovery of any real place always subverted the vision I had prior to arriving. Both my road trips and Live-Evil reside in this space between the real and the imaginary.

Driving through New Mexico, Summer 2010. Photo by Sean Steele.

This album opened up entirely new sonic landscapes for my young ears for several reasons. One, it strengthened my artistic sense, into something approaching conviction, that improvisational music was the music for me. There was something uniquely thrilling to me about the fearless sense of exploration in sound occurring on these recordings.

The second way that Live-Evil expanded my musical consciousness was through its unique existence as both a live record and a meticulously crafted studio album. Initially I had been under the false impression that the hairpin turns made by the band on the lengthy live tracks were proof that these musicians possessed the ability to move as a unit and turn on a musical dime. Not so. Or, at least, not quite to the extent that we hear on Live-Evil. Instead, these live recordings were edited, spliced, and re-mixed by producer Teo Macero.

Teo Macero and Miles Davis outside Columbia Recording Studios, New York, 1971. (Creative Commons)

Live-Evil redefined my understanding of the relationship between live and recorded music. I began to hear the potentials of a medium that (to borrow Brian Eno's phrase) allows musicians, producers and engineers to “paint with sound.” Tape was a canvas upon which Miles Davis (trumpet), Gary Bartz (soprano saxophone, flute), John McLaughlin (electric guitar), Keith Jarrett (electric piano, organ), Michael Henderson (electric bass), Jack DeJonnette (drums) and Airto Moreira (percussion) painted. Equally important to the performances of these musicians, I realized, were the audio engineers capturing these sounds, and the producer who spliced together magic moments of musical exploration into a coherent whole.

Mile Davis at the Cellar Door, Washington DC, 1970. Source: http://dailyjazz.blogspot.com/2006/01/cellar-door-sessions-again.html?m=0

The record combines live recordings made at the Cellar Door in Washington DC with additional sessions at the Columbia B studio in New York. The bulk of Live-Evil is a series of edits and splices of the live recordings, with the New York sessions providing the ambient pieces that bridge the longer jams. Macero's bold edits create unique sonic fusions that highlight the band's exploratory powers. What results is a kind of sonic juxtaposition that connects Davis' earlier cool sounds of the 1950s (the ambient pieces recall the smooth composed sounds of 1960's Sketches of Spain) with his rhythmically based rock-funk-jazz fusion experimentations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. What I had begun to realize through delving into the creation of Live-Evil was the collaborative potentials of working with people who were differently talented but equally passionate about trying new things, about experimenting and always pushing ahead to try and find unexplored territory – as if through the manipulation of recorded sound a kind of hidden desert highway could be discovered.

The song “Funky Tonk” is comprised of seven edits made to music performed during the third set at the Cellar Door on December 19, 1970. Listen here:

Through juxtaposition, sudden turns, and dramatic shifts in dynamics, Macero created compelling narratives out of free-form improvisation. Macero used recording technology to assemblage a collage that modified the actual concert, re-forming it like metal melted down and repurposed. What emerged was a new musical invention that, to my ears, combines some of the most exciting qualities of live improvisational performance with the malleability of recorded sound. Tapes can be edited, spliced, cut, sped up, slowed down, processed with effects, and mixed to sound much different that than it might have sounded for audience members present at the live performance. The combination is innovative because it takes a non-malleable sonic situation and reforms it, through technology, into something that both highlights the organic communication of these musicians and the malleability of sound made possible by the recording studio.

Live-Evil lives somewhere between the studio and the club, between the excitement of discovery and the craft of the audio engineer. To me it is a beautiful synthesis of the planned and the unplanned. The album exists as a series of parallels in motion, with the spontaneous and arranged co-existing. The title of the record itself is a parallel, a reversal of meaning through the use of opposites. The live sets were reformed into new improvisational compositions, just as corn rows are formed and reformed while in motion. Patterns and inversions create meaning through juxtaposition, whether through the combination of studio/live or the phenomenon of motion/stillness while driving past static objects. The album cover, by French painter Mati Klarwein, is a surreal representation of parallels and reversals, dreams and nightmares.

Live-Evil album cover painting by Mari Klarwein.

The live inverts into evil, turning in on itself as a live album to become a bastardization, an evil twin to the untouched recording of a live performance. Both the cover and the music present a mythological realm of contrasts, a balance of forces. The beautiful inverts into the grotesque, its monstrous opposite. The music is alternatively beastly and gentle, subterranean and ethereal. The record oscillates between ferocious funk, futuristic fusion, and serene contemplation. But Live-Evil also subverts these binaries by combining them. The live and the artificial are integrated into new forms of recorded sound.

Travel takes imaginary places and real places to create fusions of fantasy and fact. My memories of driving across America are filtered through my present state, creating a synthesis of lived experience and romantic visions of another time in my life. The balance of these forces of memory create my sense of America in ways that parallel the way I hear a balance of the composed and the improvised in Live-Evil. Many privilege the raw excitement and ephemeral qualities of live music and the pure record of the unique event over a crafted studio album. Teo Macero and Miles Davis seem to be seeking a new ways to think through this live/studio distinction, and to me their attempt resulted in a sleight of hand (a sleight of ear?) that presents the illusion of the live through the edited.

As with the yin-yang symbol, contrast provides the forward motion to life, pushing us onward through the cyclical journey of time. The music of Live-Evil is full of forward motion, full of contrasting sounds and moods, and this forward motion will always remind me of road trips. Some searching quality of the music offers parallels to my own search, my own private desire for balance between the beautiful and the grotesque, the spontaneous and the arranged. Whether driving down a desert highway or travelling along corridors of sound while listening to this album, Live-Evil continues to inspire me to seek some elusive balance between the real and the imaginary.

---

Sean Steele is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. He holds an MA in the Humanities from York University, a BA in Philosophy and History from Concordia University in Montreal, and a diploma in music (jazz studies) from VIU (Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, BC. Sean's dissertation explores intersections between popular music, religion and culture, with a focus on popular music performance events as sites of secular forms of the sacred. Sean is also a musician and a writer. He performs in the rock band Zuffalo and records his own music under the name Mareotis. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Journal for Unschooling and Alternative Education, Rock Music Studies, The Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, and online through the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, including a previous auto-musicology. His poetry has appeared in the Toronto literary publication Sewer Lid.

Steel in the Age of Angels: Flying to the Future with Goodbye to Language

By Sarah Chodos

---

I have been listening to an especially beautiful instrumental album titled Goodbye to Language (2016). It is a collaboration between Daniel Lanois and Rocco DeLuca. There are only two instruments: DeLuca on the lap steel and Lanois on the pedal steel. What is incredible about the album is the diversity of sound created by two instruments, transcending genres and communicating, of course, without words.

Now I am listening to as much of Rocco DeLuca’s work as I can, but I was already familiar with Daniel Lanois’s work; it has been very important to me throughout my life. Lanois is a musician and record maker who has seamlessly blended languages and genres in his work and has a very thoughtful and dynamic approach to the technological reproduction of music.

From his bio, Soul Mining: A Musical Life (2010), we know that Daniel Lanois spoke only French until age 10, when his parents separated and his mother moved him and his siblings from Quebec to Ontario. The move meant not only learning a new language but also being exposed to radio from Buffalo and Detroit where he became fascinated with the soul and Motown scenes in those cities and with the very concept of recorded music. Prior to moving, most of the music he had heard was traditional French-Canadian music played by his family members. 

I want to look more closely at three interdependent factors which have influenced Lanois's life and work: technology, language, and the merging of and creation of new genres of music. These factors are interdependent, on both a specific and a general level: technology created a more connected world which would merge languages and genres of music (and create new genres). These factors are also interesting in light of the work of three European philosophers: Walter Benjamin, his colleague in the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin  expresses his concern about a Marinetti-style futurism which sees beauty in the physical destruction of the human through technology — the humans conquering nature, of which they are, ultimately, a part. But he also felt that art would connect with its true nature through technology’s ability to free it from its own mechanisms, the rituals from which art developed. The tragedy of the human and art becomes the dialectic of flesh and machine, to play on the name of the album preceding Goodbye to Language.

Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) was inspired by Benjamin’s work but had a different view on the changing role of art in society. Adorno felt that art’s separation from ritual was not new; in fact, that is what makes art what it is. Adorno felt the concern lay in the new genres of music that were emerging as a result of both connectivity and technological reproduction. Adorno saw jazz, in particular, as more structured than classical. Hence, the subjectivity of the artist and the subjectivity with which the art would speak were diminished.

Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966) spoke not so much about music as about language. He believed that once languages moved towards unity, they would lose their objectivity and take on a subjectivity of their own. This would then diminish the human’s subjectivity in relation to an objective way of thinking, understanding, and relating to the world.

When we are accustomed to speaking one language, that language gives us means of thinking, understanding, and relating to the world. When we become aware of other languages, we not only acquire the ability to communicate with more people, but we also become aware of the existence of slightly different frameworks for understanding the world — and of the very concept of language.

Adorno and Foucault both deal in matters of objectivity and subjectivity: the structures around and within which we exist and our relation to those structures. Are they fixed and inanimate or do they allow for movement and change? Adorno’s perspective seems a bit funny, in retrospect, that classical music is less structured than any other, but that was the music with which Adorno was familiar, so the structure seemed objective.  Music, like language, was moving towards unity and taking on its own subjectivity. And the unity was made possible with technology. New technology was facilitating people hearing different genres of music as well as different languages, and this made apparent that different genres of music, like different languages, have different structures.

Both Adorno and Benjamin send the message that the art we create is bigger than us and potentially dangerous when it runs out of our control. Foucault sends the message that what seems to be bigger than us is really of our creation.

Foucault, whose career began a few decades after those of Benjamin and Adorno, believed post-enlightenment Europe had developed some ideas about what a human was and that this conception of the human was neither inherent nor innocuous, that it both perpetuated and was perpetuated by violence. 

The events in Europe in and around the World Wars facilitated the Frankfurt writers in seeing the evil in Europe’s “enlightened” systems of thought, but they could not completely see outside of those systems. Whereas the direction art was taking seemed to represent the epitome of enlightenment, it was also the beginning of the end.

Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) speaks of the conflicting relationship of art to changes in society at the time:

“The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its ‘attitude to objectivity’ toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art, it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it.”

In passing through an evolving Marxist perspective and into a Foucaultian one, the revolt of the human becomes the revolt against the human. If what Adorno and Benjamin said was true — that the art we create can transcend our sense of subjectivity as well as its dependence on us, its creators, and that we can see beauty in our own destruction — then art will be fine; the human, not so much. But where do we go from here?

Several decades later, across the ocean, Lanois also speaks of the transcendent nature of art in recollecting a conversation he had with Billy Bob Thornton (Soul Mining, 2010):

“As much as we are driven by the wonderful vehicles of music and film, we are still only trying to burn out the anger…”

Here Lanois is separating the drive to create art from the drive to burn out anger. In this manner, art is not so much a revolt against anything as a drive towards something else, though Lanois still gives credit to the anger as a driving force, too. Although this art must seem to be a product of the anger, anger stemming from within the human, it transcends that anger.

The specifics of his anger may differ from that of Foucault or the Frankfurt writers, but the drive away from an unacceptable past is shared.

I am reminded of a passage from another Benjamin essay, “On the Concept of History.” Here Benjamin talks about Klee's “Angel” painting, which he sees as a metaphor for history:

“An angel is depicted there who looks as though he is about to distance himself from something he is staring at...he would like to pause for a moment so fair (...) to awaken the dead, and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them.”

The anger, the unacceptability of the past, is the storm blowing in, but, in Lanois’ case, music and film, the very forms of art that Benjamin spoke of, constitute another driving force, so the angel of history faces forward and looks to the future.

Not to say there is a silver lining to pain and anger or that people need to "move on," but it is on everyone to learn from the collective pain of the past and work towards a different future. This can mean questioning who we are and how we relate to the world. With art, this process can be beautiful.

On his album with The Burden, Mercy, Rocco DeLuca sings, "A father can give you his words, but words are just symbols for things, and after he's gone, that's when you learn how to sing."

I listened to Goodbye to Language and then went back to listen to what was probably my introduction to Lanois when I was a small child, his pedal steel playing on Raffi's “Listen to the Horses” (1977). In understanding the importance of the pedal steel to Lanois, I read his discussion of taking pedal steel lessons from Bob Lucier as a teenager:

“He was kind and wise and I felt a fatherly embrace in his guidance. When you don’t grow up with a father around, you notice these fatherly moments, even from strangers”

As a child who did not lose contact with either of her parents except when we all do (such as when they went were to working or went to sleeping) I remember finding “Listen to the Horses” to be very comforting (particularly in those times of separation, but other times, too).

Basically, a momentary parental embrace from a wandering stranger from the future who reminds you that the world is moving but that this is OK. I realize now that I have taken this with me throughout my life. 

I dropped out of high school and moved to Toronto to pursue a career as a punk musician. While there, I made many friends who had built meaningful artistic connections through various post-secondary schools, so I decided to try that route. I studied psychology and fine arts cultural studies at York, but not until I was very heavy with my first child. I took some detours to other schools and other disciplines, eventually working as a counsellor in shelters and social service agencies while still trying to have a creative project on the go here and there.

For me there was no division between right and wrong, us and them, social service workers and social service users, social science and art. 

I have little use for the idea that we can completely "know" the human condition through science and develop one formula to "help" everyone, that you can ever help anyone without looking inward at yourself, or that people who know certain truths of how society functions because of lived experience are the ones who need the most help, rather than being the most knowledgeable. Looking to the future will mean looking outside of our subjectivity in relation to the perceived objectivity of anyone else, or the world. 

In The Making of Le Noise: the new album from Neil Young, Daniel Lanois says, “I'm trying to find ways to enter the future with sonics...I want to build new sounds for the future.”

In a Question and Answer video, Lanois talks about some key elements of the process of making Goodbye to Language. It is a very different album from LeNoise — as so many of Lanois’s projects are so very different from one another — but finding more new ways to enter the future is a connecting theme:

“And the deeper we got into this steel guitar music, I realized that it held a lot of emotion in it, what I’m talking about is this record, Goodbye to Language...my buddy Rocco DeLuca and I jumped on our instruments. This was after a European tour where we sang a lot of songs and we were happy to get back to the nest to just play and I felt at the time that we had a communication that was significant and I wanted to make sure that we captured it in the recording studio. What we did was we performed long jams, sometimes I called out chords, and it meant that everything was fresh and there was some kind of courage at the basis of it.”

Some important elements of this process are discussed here. The album contained no language and, as such, reached a deeper level of communication unhindered by the structure of language. While the album’s press release appropriately praised it for “compositional rigour,” the two musicians also just let the process evolve — Lanois states they initially did not even set out to make an album, they were just jamming. And they certainly did not set out to make an album of a particular genre. This method, of facing forward, of not being constrained by narrative, permitted this courage to show itself. Finally, while the process might seem, deceptively, to be low-tech, it is important to remember that it is technology that has allowed them to invite anyone who is interested into the receiving end of the communication process. How will we respond?

I return to “Listen to the Horses.” The words seem almost to be an afterthought, as Raffi’s vocals are minimal. But they do offer a direction and it is important: “listen.”

---

Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses (1966), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Order of Things, Alan Sheridan (trans.), New York: Vintage, 1973.

Lanois, Daniel, and Keisha Kalfin. Soul Mining: A Musical Life. New York, Faber and Faber Inc., 2010.

Raffi. "Listen to the Horses." More Singable Songs, Troubadour, 1977. 

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to 27Transmissions for their support during the early stages of this piece.

---

Sarah Chodos is a former independent musician, currently working as a freelance writer and editor. She has also worked for over a decade as a counsellor and outreach worker, which she still does part-time.

Venturing in the Slipstream: Why Van Morrison's Astral Weeks Will Always Be a Part of My Life

By Sean Steele

---

“And I will stroll the merry way and jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear clean water for to quench my thirst”

— Van Morrison, Astral Weeks (1968)

I can still picture it: sitting on the roof of a hotel in Rishikesh overlooking the Ganges snaking by below as the sun sets behind the foothills of the Himalayas. I am sitting with my guitar, a purple imitation Fender I bought in a music shop in Jaipur several weeks prior, and I am playing and singing. Gazing down at the blue-green waters, I must have played a dozen songs while the sun set and dusk settled over the landscape. But the only song I clearly remember singing is “Ballerina.” It's the penultimate song on Van Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks, and one of the few musical constants in my life. At many profound moments of my life, I have turned to the sonic world painted by Van Morrison and the group of musicians that created it.

I discovered Astral Weeks as a teenager growing up in Nanaimo, BC, and it remains one of the few albums from that personal era that can still move me to tears. Many other records I listened to then retain a nostalgic value, but they fail to move me, and, most importantly, most of them are no longer relevant for the version of myself I currently inhabit. Astral Weeks, on the other hand, seems to move and change with me, offering a kind of musical companionship that I have found in few other recordings. Of course, I am not alone in admiring this record. Amongst many others, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Martin Scorsese have quoted from it, praised it or cited it as an inspiration.

Van Morrison inhabits a unique corner of popular music, and Astral Weeks inhabits a unique corner of his discography. Recorded in New York on September 25th, October 1st and 15th 1968, the album features Morrison backed by a series of A-list session musicians, many of whose primary genre was jazz. In a rare interview about recording the album, Morrison had this to say:

You have to understand something...A lot of this...there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn't have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do.

(Gleason 2009)

The pragmatism imbued in this statement, and the overall approach to the album, has provided me with a perpetual source of inspiration. There is a special brand of admiration I hold for artists who, working within strict limitations, create something like Astral Weeks. These limitations need not hamper the creative process, but can rather enhance the ability to express within a narrow frame. That such beauty and sonic exploration resulted from what Morrison calls a “pure survival level” will always spurn my own artistic endeavours. It reminds me of the Zen Buddhist approach to sumi-e, the ink wash style of painting, where an artist takes time to prepare canvas, brush and ink, sits and meditates in order to clear his or her mind, and then, in a rapid burst of creative expression, paints. Similarly, Morrison once stated in an interview that many of the songs were written over a period of several years, only to be recorded in a matter of days.

One of the few photographs from the Astral Weeks recording sessions.

Besides being a scholar of popular music, I am also a musician and a writer. My musical trajectory has taken me down disparate pathways, but all of these roads share a love for improvisation and openness. Music of an improvisational nature has always held my attention. Not only is it the music I most love to create, it's also the music that excites me most, both in its live and recorded iterations. That being said, I am also fascinated with the craft of song writing, and find inspiration in the diversity of voices that can express themselves through the use of a few guitar chords and simple melodies. Being a writer and an avid reader (two things that nearly always seem to go together), I am drawn to lyrics of a poetic nature, favouring the ambiguous, the visionary, and the metaphoric realms. Within such lyrical worlds I can incorporate my own experiences, and the result is a feeling that these are, in a bizarre way, somehow partially my songs. As if, impossibly, I had a share in their creation.

Astral Weeks is an album that combines poetic lyrics, improvisation, and, as far as I'm concerned, great song writing. The song arrangements are simple, but within these sonic structures the musicians and Morrison's inimitable voice glide, growl and soar. It's as if everyone involved were trying to take these simple chord structures and perceive them from every angle, turning chords and melodies inside out as if performing a kind of musical cubism. The result is an album made by a group of musicians searching together in sound, taking barely rehearsed songs and exploring possibilities within them. To my ears, what resulted from such experimentation is an evocative recording that continues to inspire me as a musician, an improviser, and a songwriter, acting like a kind of improvisational cognitive aide.

I am inevitably attracted to any work of art that defies an easy explanation. Drawn to the vague and the ambiguous, I thrive in that space where no straightforward interpretation satisfies; where the artwork continually seems to withhold secrets that might reveal it in its entirety. I adore artworks that seem to simultaneously disclose and occlude something profound but just out of reach. Whether this is due to a quality of the artwork, or to some mixture of conjecture and delusion on my part, will likely remain equally mysterious. I place Astral Weeks in this category because its impressionistic nature—both lyrically and musically—provides that promise of some clandestine doorway forever hiding behind a hedge or around the next bend in the labyrinth. Van Morrison is singing about the fragmentary essence of memory, invoking a person-in-mosaic to appear among the raindrops and hallways of an Ireland that may or may not have existed. Like the short stories of Dylan Thomas, Morrison's songs provide blurry snapshots of mundane moments that nevertheless provide the setting and springboard into the sublime, the profound, and the infinite.

When I finished my undergraduate degree I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life, so I bought a one-way ticket to India. I ended up in the foothills of the Himalayas, and there, on the other side of the world, far from the familiarity of home, I found solace in the chords and words of 'Ballerina'. It seems unlikely that Astral Weeks will cease to inspire, amaze, and mystify me. As for what it all means, I defer to legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, who once wrote that "you're in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means" (Marcus, 1996).

Whenever I put the record on I find that it has the power to send me kaleidoscopic images from my past. These images remind of the person that I was, giving me clues as to the person I may one day become. So when I see photographs of previous selves, like the one below, I cannot help but see myself as someone who, for better or worse, and never fully understanding why, is committed to continue venturing in the slipstream.

A photograph of me in the Himalayas circa 2012.

---

Josh Gleason. (28 February 2009). Van Morrison: 'Astral Weeks' Revisited [Radio Program]. Weekend Edition Saturday. Washington, DC: NPR.

Greil Marcus, ed. (1996). Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. New York: Da Capo Press, 178-187.

---

Sean Steele is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities at York University (Toronto). He holds a diploma in music (jazz studies) from VIU (Vancouver Island University), a BA in Philosophy and History from Concordia University, and an MA in the Humanities from York. Sean explores intersections between art, religion and popular culture, with a focus on popular music subcultures as alternative spiritual communities. Sean is also a musician and a writer. He performs in the rock and roll band Zuffalo, and records his own music under the name Mareotis. His poetry has appeared in the Toronto literary publication Sewer Lid.

https://zuffalo.ca/  
https://zuffalo.bandcamp.com/album/zuffalo
https://mareotis.bandcamp.com/album/admiral-nelson-mandala

To submit your own AutoMusicology, please email iaspmcanada@gmail.com. More information can be found here.

The More you Change the More you Feel: Music, Memory, and the Infinite Affect(ion)

By Brian Fauteux

---

“I used to be a little boy.”

In September of last year I turned thirty-five. Two days after my birthday, I saw the Smashing Pumpkins on their (partial) reunion tour of three-plus-hour sets of the hits, the favourites, the classics. I had low expectations heading into the show, having largely ignored the band for nearly two decades; my disinterest due to Billy Corgan’s insufferable public persona, which often eclipsed both the band’s ongoing output as well as the songs that were close to me during major formative years in the 1990s. But as Corgan took the stage to perform “Disarm” on his own, up against a towering screen that displayed a selection of his childhood photos, I was overcome with emotion and nostalgia beyond that which I’d experienced at a concert at any time prior. The juxtaposition of young and old, flesh and image, was poignant as I had been thinking a lot about age and change in the weeks leading up to my birthday.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995) and Siamese Dream (1993) were absolutely influential on the years during which I first found autonomy and identity with the help of music. Over the years, my awareness of how important these albums were to me had waned but the live show brought it all back. As the band played through many songs off of these two albums, I was drawn not only to my own adolescence but to reflect on a first year as a parent, one unfolding through a young face, body, and personality that transforms notably each day (transformations I watched as a young Corgan aged on screen). What challenges and changes might my child face and what songs will be there to offer support? The Smashing Pumpkins had my full attention and for a few wonderful hours I moved between the past, present, and future in ways that only music seems to effectively facilitate.

“With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all.”

Years ago, I found it strange and misguided that Corgan placed blame on “the Britneys of the world” for the Pumpkins breaking up (and, sure, I still do). His  protest would be one of rockism’s dying breaths as the turn of century brought a turn to poptimism. Still, another take might highlight the indispensability of youth when it comes to the sort of mass appeal and success that the Pumpkins enjoyed in the 90s. Perhaps the band was aging out of the ever sought after youth demographic of the culture industry’s desire. If music is standardized and routinized for easy consumption does it also have an expiry date?

In 2011 Corgan said: “The Pumpkins won’t be a nostalgia act, we refuse to be. That would be the true death of the Smashing Pumpkins.” But here we are. When one is out of the spotlight, is there pleasure in giving in to nostalgia, in giving the fans those cherished songs that they know and love? Is a nostalgia tour more complicated than simply assuming the band is cashing in on their old catalogue rather than working to introduce and perform new songs?

The prevalence of youth on the association of music and memory is all too common but certainly understandable. As Tia DeNora writes, music reminds us of who we were at a certain time and helps “to recapture the aesthetic agency [we] possessed...Reliving experience through music is also (re)constituting past experience; it is making manifest within memory what may have been latent or even absent the first time” (2006, 143). Andy Bennett questions the assumption that pop music is for the young, claiming, “Where once rigid social divisions were drawn between adolescence, early adulthood, middle age, and later life, in late modernity such divisions are much less evident as the lifestyles of people at each of these stages of life become more similar.” He adds, “A further problem with popular representations of aging music audiences is the tendency to equate middle-aged music fandom with a nostalgic harking back to the time of one’s youth” (2013, 14).

In 1979 Billy Corgan was twelve years old, an age cemented in the band’s highest charting single, “1979.” When I was twelve, I unwrapped my first double CD at Christmas: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. “1979” is an exceptional song on its own but one made even better by its video, a text that introduced me to the idea of nostalgia before I was old enough to experience it myself. Relating the everyday lives of suburban teenagers passing the time, the camera grants us a variety of perspectives: close quarters at a crowded house party, a bird’s eye view of the Dodge Charger that is essential for navigating this particular time and place, and an uncharacteristic smile on a close up of Corgan’s face. (Spike Jonze nearly directed the video but would later direct a very similar one steeped in suburb-centric-nostalgia with Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” right down to band members playing as cops. Only with “The Suburbs,” we move from the joyful aimlessness of “1979”  to a dystopian police state).

View fullsize

Jimmy Chamberlin, “1979,” 1996

View fullsize

Butler and Chassagne, “The Suburbs,” 2010

View fullsize

“1979” music video, 1996

View fullsize

Cover art photo shoot, The Suburbs, 2010

The video for “1979” taught me that music would accompany memorable moments, both good and bad, and that it would be a means for reliving the past. On the cusp of becoming a teenager, I felt the need to make the sort of memories that would be worthy of such a song.

“Time is never time at all.”

In a lot of mid-90s alternative rock I found angst and apathy but in the music of the Smashing Pumpkins I found escape. The video for “Tonight, Tonight” was a surreal dreamscape within which one could curl up and imagine new worlds yet to come. I felt less like answering the call to drop out (one posed by numerous grunge songs) but ready to opt in to something new, something that wasn’t already evident.  

Music doesn’t only accompany memories and enable us to to experience the past. It can soundtrack ideas about the type of reality one might wish to inhabit. As much as I have songs and albums that facilitate reflection, there are those I cherish for accompanying moments of becoming. Such songs can guide and advise affective moments and movements in our lives. Beyond finding value in the familiar there is value in feeling of something outside of the familiar. There is an assumption that we tend to rely on our already established tastes as we age out of the culture industry’s most coveted youth demographic. Take, for example, the claim that people stop listening to new music at the age of thirty-three (one based on streaming music data and one arguably flawed). But is it possible that the pursuit of new goals, dreams, and aspirations, of new realities, welcomes new songs and new affinities for them? Perhaps it's not so much about the fact that some people give up on listening to new music but more about conceding to one version of reality, however comfortable it might seem.

---

Brian Fauteux is Assistant Professor in Popular Music and Media Studies at the University of Alberta. 

Twitter: @brianfauteux

Web: brianfauteux.com

A Reason to Believe: Wilson Phillips and 90s Poptimism

By Melissa Avdeeff

---

My poptimism started early. Or, in reflecting on established expectations, I failed to “grow out” of my poptimism as I aged through adolescence and into adulthood. Instead, I made a vocation out of it, devoting my time to advocating for the most popular, to critiquing and drawing attention to that which has the widest cultural influence, and using my platform to make sense of why it matters.

I don’t know where the cassette came from, or how I, in particular, acquired it, but I have strong memories of being in my childhood bedroom, probably about eight years old, listening to the Wilson Phillip’s eponymous album on repeat. I played it on my dad’s Sony Walkman; one of the original versions made out of metal, chosen for its capacity as a skiing companion for my dad. My parents put tape over the volume knob so I wouldn’t wreck my hearing. But I found a way around that tape, and look who’s laughing now.

Wilson Phillips (1990)

This was before Spice Girls. Before I knew anything about 60s Girl Groups. And definitely before Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé. But it was through the all-girl trio, the Wilson Phillips, that I discovered the strength of women’s voices, even in their breathiness, and the power of pop music. Not that those are intrinsically connected categories – the pop and the feminine – but nonetheless they guided my early tastes in music, and how I came to understand pop music as industry.

I only remember having two cassettes at this stage in my musical development: the Wilson Phillips (1990) one, and Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986). As diverse as these albums are, that diversity itself remains a part of my eclecticism in both my tastes, and research interests. From the Wilson Phillips I found my first inklings of feminist thought. And from Paul Simon I first experienced the intrigue of intercultural music making. I was captivated primarily by the songs that feature Ladysmith Black Mambazo, with sound aesthetics quite foreign to me as someone growing up in a small town on the West Coast of Canada.

I continue to lecture on the issues of cultural appropriation vs. appreciation that have plagued Graceland, and others, and how these songs relate to wider systems of power that I was not yet attuned to as a child. Through IASPM, I had the opportunity to visit South Africa in 2011, and see the lasting effects of Apartheid in person.

For many people, the Wilson Philips are a one-hit wonder, a group to feel nostalgic about when you watch Bridesmaids. Although I came to know the girl group before the music of their famous parents, others may consider them a product of celebrity nepotism, and trivialise them as such. The group is not so easy to write-off, though, as they also learned great songwriting from their respective parents – Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas – and honed those skills into early 90s pop excellence. With a little help from Glen Ballard. A timely blend of tight harmonies, soaring synth, and hints of adult contemporary rock, a term that seemed to die with the 90s, only to be rejuvenated (in spirit) once those 90s children became “Millennial” adults.

As those at the upper end of that contested Millennial generation, myself included, will no doubt have noticed – the sounds that epitomize the Wilson Phillips are re-emerging. With groups like HAIM, the retro-early-90s WP vibes are undeniable: close sisterly harmonies, light rock, and punchy electro beats that sounds like the entire thing is overlaid with a glossy Instagram filter. Other music critics have picked up on this as well, which you can find here and here. It’s difficult to know whether HAIM came to these sounds on their own, or as influenced by the listening practices of their family. Regardless, it points to the reality that, as youth we often want to distance ourselves from the music of our parents, but HAIM are a great example of what happens when you embrace the familiar and the familial, repurposing it for a new generation.

At the same time, the fact that these sounds are now “retro,” fills me with a great sense of existential anxiety. Once the cyclical nature of pop culture comes full circle, does that signal the close of one’s youth? I wonder what happens once you see that circle close the second, and even third, time. The postmodern cycle of pop is speeding up, as the long tail is coming into full effect. The postdigital era of pop is upon us, and retro is quickly becoming meaningless.

It’s not only the sounds that have re-emerged. The cultural issues surrounding that album have only become amplified in recent years. As a child spending ample time reading and re-reading the cassette leaflet, I admired the diversity of female body representation afforded in even those three women. Yes, they were all attractive, white, women of a particular level of privilege – but at the same time it was rare to see a plus size woman achieve a high degree of success in pop music. I identified with Carnie Wilson, and looked to her as an example of succeeding in spite of hegemonic conventions.

While the concept of intersectional feminism existed much earlier, it was only a year before Wilson Phillips that the term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. More recently, the ideas surrounding intersectionality have expanded to account for issues of body positivity. It’s a bit problematic to connect the girl group to intersectional feminism in this way, as their whiteness is counter to the original aims of the term. But it draws attention to current trends whereby young artists are challenging issues of representation, not only in terms of body size, but also traditional expectations of gender performance. For many, the 90s, as re-imagined in 2018, is also a throwback to gender neutrality, through a non-binary lens, in a way that is simultaneously political and laissez-faire.

In writing this piece, I was a bit disheartened to see that the Wilson Phillips’ fan engagement is something that has not translated well to current practices. In an era where impact is measured in likes and followers, the group is pretty low-stakes with just under 14k Twitter followers. But in discovering Carnie Wilson’s Instagram page, I found new inspirations for body positivity. Her feed is full of no-makeup selfies. Not the typical GenZ influencer ones, with their unmasked youthfulness, but those of a strong woman navigating an ageing female body. Her visibility is striking, and her positivity inspiring.

Instagram: @carnie68

I continue to embrace and love pop music. I share my passion with my students and beyond, as we use it as a vehicle for exploring cultural issues, and self-reflecting on the construction of subjectivities. It’s never just about the music, but the music is that important mediating moment for nostalgia, identity, sociability, and embodiment.

---

Melissa Avdeeff is a Senior Lecturer in Communication, Culture, and Media at Coventry University. Follow her at @avdeeff.

---

To submit your own AutoMusicology, please email iaspmcanada@gmail.com. More information can be found here.

Faster, Louder, Snottier: Discovering Green Day in the 1990s

"At thirteen years old, we had been swayed to the proverbial dark side and were determined to do things our way"

In this episode of AutoMusicologies Ty Hall recounts how his first rock concert sparked a passion for music.

---

In the summer of 1994, I was twelve years old and heading into grade seven at a new school in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario. My friends and I would spend our days riding homemade skateboard ramps before gathering around the television to consume hours of music videos on MuchMusic. The charts of the day included a mix of artists such as Soundgarden, Coolio, Smashing Pumpkins, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Ace of Bass, and Aerosmith among many others from a wide range of styles and genres. I remember the first time I saw the "Basket Case" video from Green Day’s breakout album Dookie (1994). A paranoid-looking Billie Joe Armstrong appeared on the screen and belted out the first line of the intro, “Do you have the time to listen to me whine.” I was instantly mesmerized by the vaguely familiar harmonic progression that was essentially "Pachelbel’s Canon" on speed. It was this moment that sparked a new enthusiasm for music and would lead to one of the most memorable experiences of my young life – my first rock concert.

Green Day appealed to my adolescent sensibilities on multiple levels. First of all, the power trio didn’t take themselves too seriously. Their brand of playful in-your-face punk rock revival contrasted the dark, introspective grunge of the early 90s in a way that made music look like a lot of fun. Furthermore, the DIY punk ethic that came across in their general aesthetic made the music accessible and inspired us to pick up instruments and make music of our own. There were no virtuosic instrumental solos, the music was fast and loud, and the lyrics resonated with our coming-of-age anxieties while tapping into our new-found fascinations with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll rebellion. As Dave Grohl once said, “When you're thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.” We pooled our money together, bought some second-hand instruments and spent the next year in my friend James’ garage blasting out tunes by Green Day, Rancid, NOFX and Bad Religion. These middle school years were marked with many milestones as we began the first chapter of our young musical careers, taking every opportunity we had to perform at school assemblies and birthday parties. As juvenile aspiring rockstars, we tried our best to play the part while dreaming of one day catching our heroes live on stage.

In the fall of 1995, Green Day was planning to release their fourth studio album titled Insomniac and announced a world tour that, as luck would have it, included a stop in Ottawa. I’m not sure exactly how my friends and I convinced our parents to let us go to this concert, but we were very resourceful in devising a plan full of half-truths and clever manipulation tactics. At the end of the day, we were able to attain a batch of general admission tickets to the show scheduled for October 29th, 1995 at the Ottawa Civic Centre. I do know that our parents were under the impression that we would be supervised and seated a safe distance from the stage for our first rock concert, but at thirteen years old, we had been swayed to the proverbial dark side and were determined to do things our way.

Ty Hall and friends, circa 1995

When the day of the show arrived, five of us arrived early to sit in the parking lot passing around Gatorade bottles filled with jungle juice as we discussed the songs we hoped to hear that evening. Upon entering the building, it soon became clear that we were out of our element, but we threw caution to the wind and stormed the floor through a sea of the city’s rowdiest young hooligans. In his review of the concert, Ottawa Citizen music writer Norman Provencher described the majority of attendees quite accurately as “tiny little mallrats in tour t-shirts that fit like granny dresses," noting how promoters had decided not to sell alcohol three hours before the show upon realizing the demographics of the early arrivals.

"tiny little mallrats in tour t-shirts that fit like granny dresses"

Norman Provencher, Ottawa Citizen, 1995

Standing roughly a head shorter than most of the concert goers, when The Riverdales hit the stage to open the show, we decided to b-line it towards the mosh pit for a better view, and this is where I literally ran into and bounced off of one of the scariest looking individuals I had ever encountered. The towering, tattooed giant who looked to me like a professional wrestler spun around with a scowl that quickly turned into a look of confusion as he was clearly taken aback by the spiky-haired brat who thought he could muscle past him. He chuckled and introduced himself as "Chronic." Realizing my dilemma, he offered to help me out, “You wanna go up?” he asked pointing toward the rafters. Before I could answer, he lifted me over his head and tossed me atop the crowd like a rag doll where I surfed through the pit in the best seat in the house. My friend Adrian was next in line, but he would not be so lucky. He demonstrated what can go wrong while attempting to crowd surf and found himself on the way to the hospital with a fractured arm before the headlining act. The rest of us did not take this as a learning experience.

Credit: Norman Provencher, "Green Day Puts Thrill Back in Rock," The Ottawa Citizen, 1995

When Green Day finally hit the stage, we were somewhat shocked to realize that this was not the tame version of the band that we were used to watching on Much Music. The stage banter between Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool was full of vulgar obscenities as they tried their best to incite debauchery among the receptive crowd announcing, “We’re only touring Canada, fuck the United States!” At one point, the band invited a young audience member on stage, ordering him to chug a beer and then stage dive back into the crowd, ignoring the panicked pleas from the helpless security personnel. Later in the show, Billie Joe became irritated with a heckler in the front row who had been flipping him off. Armstrong proceeded to drop trou and engage in what Provencher’s review would describe as “weenie-waggling” as he laced into the individual with some “serious verbal abuse.” At this moment, I sympathized with my school chums in the soft seats with their parents but was relieved that I was not in such an awkward position myself. The band blazed through seventeen of their best tunes in a concert that was as thrilling as it was shocking. By the time the night was through, my buddy Reg had become the second casualty of the violent mosh pit and ended up at the hospital with a concussion. At the time, I didn’t have anything to compare this experience to, but in the almost twenty-three years since, I have attended hundreds of concerts with this one topping the list as the most berserk. Green Day dished out a serving of high-energy raucous punk rock to a frenzied crowd, and we ate it up.

 As I reminisce on these couple of years in the mid-nineties, I can safely say that Green Day was the band that first ignited my passion for music. Since then, music has always been at the centre of my existence as a performer, spectator, and as an academic. Today, at thirty-six years old, my touring schedule has taken a back seat to my scholarly pursuits as I prepare to write my master’s thesis in the Music and Culture program at Carleton University. Reflecting on my experiences as a young music enthusiast I feel nostalgic, grateful, old, and most of all lucky to have been on the front lines of this moment in rock and roll history . As Brett Gurewitz, the founder of Epitaph Records and Bad Religion put it, “the best pop music is the kind of stuff that you grow up listening to and remembering always, whether it's The Beatles, or Elvis Costello, or you know, a record like Dookie; it's those songs that last a lifetime and stick with you.”

---

Ty Hall is a singer-songwriter, and 2nd-year master’s student in the Music and Culture program at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He has released four independent albums and maintains a steady touring schedule over the summer months. Ty’s research focuses on issues of race, gender, and class in popular music. His master’s thesis is titled “Atlanta Trap Music and the Current Directions of Afrofuturism.”

website: ty-hall.com

instagram: @tyhall.5446 

Learning to Listen: From the Car Stereo to the Soundscape

Welcome to the new Auto-Musicologies series! Our first entry is "Learning to Listen: From the Car Stereo to the Soundscape" by Vincent Andrisani.

---

Every night after work, my colleagues and I used to hang out in one of our cars, taking turns spinning whatever we were listening to at the time. Work was Drummer’s Choice, a drum store in Brampton, Ontario, where I taught private lessons from 2006 to 2009. My colleagues were in fact not just colleagues, they were some of my closest friends with whom I endlessly talked about music and drums and drums and music.

Drummer's Choice, 2008 (by Joe Iannuzzi)

I loved these post-work car hangs. They were leisure and intellectual exploration all rolled into one. Naturally, I was quite sad they came to an end (for me, anyhow) when I moved from Toronto to Vancouver in the summer of 2009, but I still carry these memories with me. In fact, as I think back on them years later, I realize that these shared moments were more than just a nightly routine: they played an integral role in shaping my career as a sound studies researcher.

During these listening sessions, I was introduced to music that has since become part of my desert island playlist. But just as important as what we listened to was how we listened to it. Through the ears of my friends, I learned to hear the subtleties of performance and production. I learned to listen to the elements that make a recording what it is. I quite literally learned to listen to music.

Joe Iannuzzi & Mike Taylor, Drummer's Choice 2006 (c/o Joe Iannuzzi)

I remember one evening, I think it was in 2003, my friend Mike Taylor brought a new release by Josh Rouse, a singer/songwriter from Nebraska. He said “man, you gotta check this album out”. It was called “1972” and the CD cover was yellow, orange and brown. A fitting colour scheme, I thought. We began by listening to the first few tunes, which eventually became the entire album.

Mike and I are not old enough to have lived through the 1970s, but we both knew the album convincingly captured the era’s sound. Drawing inspiration from troubadours like James Taylor, Carole King, and Paul Simon, Josh Rouse narrates the life of a troubled, small-town adolescent in the 1970s. But just as important as its retro theme and its somewhat relatable plot is that “1972” is, above all, a collection of really thoughtful, well-crafted pop songs.

While listening to the title track, Mike said “check this shaker part out” as he pointed toward one of the speakers. It was low in the mix and panned to the right stereo channel; a barely audible, inconspicuous part of the second verse. But once I heard it, everything clicked. In this straightforward 16th note shaker part, I heard the depth and intelligence of the composition, which brought my experience of it to life. It was a moment I will never forget.

Turning my attention toward the subtlest parts of a composition was something I began to do often. Like a detective, I would “look” (pardon the visual metaphor) for the sounds that might otherwise escape my attention. And in so doing, I realized that the essence of a composition lives not in the foreground, but in the background—in the intangibles that lurk beneath the surface. But in order to hear them, I had to train my ears to live in the nooks and crannies of a recording.

I was inspired by the idea of locating particular musical voicings and relating them to the whole of a composition. So, I began to wonder, what would happen if I turned this approach to musical listening on everyday life? What sort of encounters could I create if I could isolate discrete environmental sounds and consider their relationship to the whole of the soundscape?

In an instant (though not quite an instant since it took years before I put it into practice and even more before I could put it into words), my soundscape methodology was born. Soundscape studies is a field of study that investigates the sounds of everyday life. It asks questions not only about the relationship between sound and space, but it also explores the act of listening and its role as an integral, though often overlooked cultural practice.

As a soundscape researcher, my methodology consists of note taking, conducting interviews, field recording, and of course, attentive listening. But what exactly is attentive listening and how do we qualify it as a methodological technique? Put simply, attentive listening is a reciprocal mode of inquiry that uses sound to ask questions, while at the same time asking questions about sound.

Composer, educator, and soundscape studies pioneer R. Murray Schafer (1993) famously argued that we should “treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition” (p. 5). One would be hard pressed to find a more romantic idea. However, listening to the acoustic environment as we might listen to music is not only strategic, but I’d argue it’s also a necessary part of conducting critical soundscape research.

I put this form of listening to work in a project that I carried out in (and on) the city Havana, Cuba that I began in 2012. One of the more musical geographies in the Americas, Havana is a city in which I had the fortune of studying music as both a performer and as an anthropologist. But the sounds of the city are in no way limited to music alone. Havana’s neighbourhoods are animated by an extroverted street culture, making soundscape studies a fertile approach for conducting urban research.

View of Havana from FOCSA Building, 2012 (photo taken by author)

While in Havana, I listened in ways that encouraged me to sift through discrete sounds, moving from one to the next. At one moment I found myself attending to the rhythms of the traffic outside my apartment. At another I would tune in to the excitable chatter of children playing in the streets. And at another still, I would find myself captivated by the melodic cry of a street vendor as it reverberated through the spaces of the neighbourhood.

Without knowing it at the time, I was enacting a form of musical listening. I focused intently on each sound and asked how it fits within the whole of the soundscape, much like I did for musical voicings in the broader context of a recording. This led me on a series of intellectual journeys that offered new, and as yet untold stories about Havana. I explored the history of ice cream vending in the city, the development and decay of the city’s water supply infrastructure, and the present-day tourist economy—all through the study of sound and listening.

As I continue to reflect on this project, I can confidently say that I could not have developed it without my musical curiosity. Hearing nuance, detail, and depth, and finding its place amidst the whole of the composition or soundscape has become part of my approach as both a musical listener and an everyday listener alike. And as I think back about how and where I first learned to approach sound in this way, I realize that it’s at least in part a result of the time I spent with my friends in the car on those evenings after work.

---

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank all of my friends from Drummer’s Choice (1993-2015), a store that meant so much to everyone who walked through its doors. In particular, I want to thank Joe Iannuzzi for digging into his archive and allowing me to use these photos. At the time, we thought nothing of the media Joe captured. Today, there couldn’t be a more fitting way to remember the store.

---

Vincent Andrisani, PhD, is a term lecturer in Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. Using the everyday sounds of the city, Vincent’s research explores alternative approaches to urban development through the themes of resilience, informality, and community.

website: www.vincentandrisani.com
twitter: @soundscrunchy