On Beauty in Ugliness or Music Major Woes

Disclaimer: If this runs off the rails, I'm sorry.  I haven't really planned this entry out well at all.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the common area of my suite, reading for class and listening to music.  The John Peel sessions recording of Pavement's "Date W/ IKEA" found on the deluxe reissue of Brighten the Corners came on.  It sounded awful.  Stephen Malkmus was playing all sorts of wrong notes in his solo.  Spiral Stairs certainly had a string on his guitar that was tuned way too sharply, and his voice was completely out of key.  The whole affair sounded completely ramshackle and reckless.  And I loved it.  And I thought I should write about it.

As a music major, and I guess in the world of classical music in general, emphasis is quite understandably placed on perfection, or I suppose, as close to perfection as is possible.  No wrong notes, everything has to be in tune, everything is formal.  My particularly cynical view (probably shared by millions of like-minded cynics) is that classical performers are expected to perform music with the efficiency and accuracy of a computer.

In the 1980s, Frank Zappa wrote a bunch of classical pieces and had the London Symphony Orchestra perform them for a studio release.  Zappa was extremely unhappy with the results of their performances and very heavily edited the recording in post-production, covering up out of tune instruments and wrong notes and whatnot.  He also simply did not enjoy working with the orchestra musicians, and so for his next set of classical compositions, he decided to do away with the orchestra entirely.  For many of his classical works after this incident, Zappa used a synclavier, an early synthesizer, as a replacement for human musicians.  His synclavier-performed album Jazz From Hell won the man a Grammy.

Now, most people, for better or worse, do not think like Frank Zappa, and the Cleveland Orchestra won't be replaced by robots anytime soon.  This is due to the powerful "human" factor, which Zappa identifies (sorry I can't pull any quotes directly from the book, I can't find my copy right now, so this is all paraphrasing) as some sort of weird notion that music should be performed by humans so that it maintains some sort of warmth or emotion or something like that.  The inherent and obvious problem with this is that humans are flawed.  Big time.  They make mistakes.  They play wrong notes.  Percussionists slowly change tempos.  Oboists squeak.  Trumpeters miss partials.  But it's all caught up in this paradox of perfection that even the greatest orchestras of the world fail to achieve much of the time.

And so, naturally and almost unnoticeably, I've been gravitating toward listening to music with glaring flaws.  Furthermore, I'll gravitate toward music that not only embraces its humanity and imperfection but tries to achieve absolute ugliness.  The whole matter has been extremely liberating, and I've learned an awful lot from it.  Music does not need to be tonal.  More music should contain squalls of deafening, piercing feedback.  Singers do not need to hit notes, nor do their lyrics need to mean something profound or even distinct.  More singers should scream non-sequiturs and obscenities in wrong keys.  Hell, musicians don't even need to know how to play their instruments.  If they've written a good song, then that's what matters.

And it's Zappa's "human" factor that makes such ugly music so appealing.  Steve Albini and Calvin Johnston and David Yow know they're imperfect.  They're not trying to be anything else.  They are going for power, for sincerity, with guts and gore and passion, and that's what matters.  This is why when I hear fellow music majors perform at recital class each week, I almost want to hear them play wrong notes, just to prove that they aren't totally automated just yet.  And so long as they can get into their performances, no matter how poorly they may perform, I can never judge them harshly.  If they've got that passion, and if the music itself is good (which is almost always is), then it's a job well done by me.  (I also can't really judge them because that would be rather hypocritical since I'm not much of a clarinet player by any means but that's a different subject for a different day that will probably never come.)  And all this is why I could never go into the classical music industry.  Oh well.

And then after hearing people try to achieve perfection for an hour, I can go back to my suite and, much to the chagrin of my suitemates (sorry), figure out new ways to make godawful noise on my guitar.  And then later on in band, I'll be one of the few to enjoy the weird, modern, kind of atonal piece just because it's a fresh break from the normal routine.  I'll gladly embrace tritones.  Minor seconds are my best friends in those moments.

Geez, have I just summed up my philosophies on music?  I sure hope not.  That was too damn easy.  I'm sure there will be glaring omissions/contradictions.

I guess my love of noise rock was inevitable.  Zappa's Varése and Stravinsky-isms worked their way into my head, and Tom Waits probably has the worst voice in rock and roll.  It was just a matter of time until feedback would have the same beautiful timbre as the vibrato of a violin.  And now, as it stands, Scratch Acid and Drive Like Jehu sound like Beethoven to me, even if to you it sounds vomit-inducing.  That No Age concert last year was something of an epiphany too, even if I only noticed it long after I left the Grog Shop.

Obviously, I'm not outright rejecting tonality, nor am I listening to the Butthole Surfers just to get a rise out of people.  Many days I need a good shot of Neil Hannon for a good balance.  As I write this, Scott Walker is crooning out of my speakers.  Early Scott Walker.  Not the weird modern atonal stuff.

But, I guess my message is that limiting yourself to preconceived notions of what music should sound like is silly, and even sillier than that is the notion that everything needs to be pitch perfect.  If it has that fervor behind it, and if you dig the composition, then that's what should matter.  Humans should embrace their imperfections and work with them.  There's an absurd amount of beauty to be found in ugliness.  You know all this already.  None of this is profound or revelatory, but maybe we all need a good reminder of all this every now and then.  Basically, if you can't get past the noise of The Birthday Party, you're missing out on a lot of fun.

So, Mr. Kannberg, keep singing out of key.  Don't you dare tune your guitar.  And then maybe, just maybe, can you get Pavement back together?  Sorry, we're all just desperate.

Next entry, I'll stop writing about myself.  It'll be a music review.