"Life's Too Short" Music List (#2 of 2)

Around the time I turned forty I came to the realization that life is too short either to pretend you like music you don’t (but “should”) or to pretend not to like music you do (but “shouldn’t”).  In the spirit of that realization, I wrote a previous posting in which I listed some artists, genres and albums that I’m no longer willing to pretend I don’t like.  In this one, I list some that I’m no longer willing to pretend I do.

The Residents. I think I liked the Residents as a teenager because they offered a bracing sort of weirdness that helped me define myself against my peer group – a project that was very important to me when I was in high school.  Now I’m in my forties, I know who I am, and at this point the Residents sound to me like a bunch of sniggering surrealist paste-eaters.  (So why can’t I bring myself to get rid of my copies of Diskomo and Duck Stab/Buster & Glen?)

Crass (and affiliated bands). This anarcho-vegetarian-feminist-syndicalist collective (which included, at various times, Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Zounds, Conflict, etc.) strummed the over-tightened strings of my adolescent outrage for a relatively brief moment with a combination of thrillingly uncompromising politics, homemade uniforms(!), and a dangerous-looking spray-paint-and-stencil graphical style.  But holy cow – the music really was unlistenable, and I’m finally ready to admit it. Also: can someone explain to me why anarchists would wear uniforms?

Serialism. For most of my young adulthood I believed that as long as music was architecturally refined and conceptually complex, smart people should enjoy it.  I wanted to be someone who was smart enough to enjoy such music.  So on the basis of that belief and that aspiration I tried mightily to enjoy the music of Schoenberg, Webern, Babbitt, Carter, Subotnik and others of similar bent.  Then, at an embarrassingly advanced age, I came to the conclusion that just because music follows a set of ingenious mathematical rules doesn’t mean that it’s therefore “good” and you’re under some kind of intellectual obligation to like it.  Musical beauty may not always be in the ear of the listener, but I think it’s more reliably there than in the structure of a tone row, however masterfully it may be manipulated.  I’m not saying there’s no beauty in serialism – only that for me, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Pere Ubu’s second album, Dub Housing. Of all of Pere Ubu’s many albums, this is the one that makes it onto every serious critic’s “Best of” list.  But I just can’t hear what it is that’s supposed to make this one so special.  I certainly don’t find it as consistently compelling as its predecessor, The Modern Dance, which includes both “Non-Alignment Pact” and “Real World.”  But heaven help me, the shameful truth is that my favorite Pere Ubu album is Cloudland.

Skronk. A particular kind of harsh, chaotic experimental music came churning to the surface at the nexus of avant-garde rock and classical modernism in downtown New York in the 1980s, and was given this onomatopoeic designation by Robert Christgau.  I used to genuinely love skronk – or at least certain strains of it, particularly as manifest in the work of Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Christian Marclay, and No Wavers like DNA and Lydia Lunch.  I was extremely excited when DNA’s entire output was reissued on a single CD a couple of years ago.  I wangled a review copy, listened to it, and realized… that I wasn’t nineteen anymore, and that all of sudden hellacious noise just sounds like hellacious noise to me.  When I was at Ricks College I needed a certain amount of hellacious noise just to keep my head straight.  Now I seem to get all I need from my kids and my dogs.  John Zorn blowing duck calls into a bowl of water now seems surplus to requirements.

John Coltrane. I have to tread carefully here.  Many, many people whose taste I genuinely admire and before whose musical insight I unreservedly bow believe that Coltrane was a genius, and – just to reiterate – I fully acknowledge that they’re probably right.  So I mean it sincerely when I say that there must be something wrong with my ears, because when I hear Coltrane (especially as a leader, less so as a sideman) all I hear is a nasty, watery, vinegary tone, little to no harmonic development, and a real lack of melodic interest.  Again: it’s surely me, not him.   But life’s too short, so I’ll take Sonny Rollins.

Bela Bartok. As a college freshman, instead of studying for my classes I read a really great book about Bartok’s musical formation in Hungary and his declining years in New York.  I was fascinated by the ways he gathered folk tunes and songs in the field and then incorporated them into his compositions, and the combination of folk elements and forward-looking, harmonic crunchiness in his music really appealed to me in theory.  But much to my dismay, even in my most adventurous moments I’ve found just about all of his music unlistenable.  Even the string quartets, which everyone seems genuinely to love.  I’ve been trying to listen to Bartok for more than 25 years now, and I just can’t hack it.

J.S. Bach. This one is really, really hard for me to admit.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy Bach, it’s just that I rarely enjoy him as much as I really think I should.  Often I find his chromaticism tiresomely academic; sometimes I find his choral music a bit too overbearing.  And his organ music?  Oy.  Too much noise, too much reverberation hiding the objectively brilliant counterpoint. There’s a ton of Bach in my CD collection, but when I’m in the mood for baroque music I almost always turn to Telemann or Rameau first – or to one of Bach’s sons, especially C.P.E. or the more classically-inclined J.C.  That said, I do love the sound of Bach on the piano and could listen to Peter Serkin or Glenn Gould play the two- and three-part inventions all day.

Sinead O’Connor. I used to think she was a tormented musical genius with an amazing voice.  Now she strikes me as a pathologically self-indulgent narcissist who would really benefit from a voice lesson or two. (Sinead. Baby.  Listen to me: sometimes pitch matters more than intensity.)  Again, I don’t know whether she changed or I did.  Or both.

Bob Dylan. See, here’s the thing: BOB DYLAN CANNOT SING.  Or at the very least he chooses not to, and no matter what the Baby Boomers say, the fact that he can’t/won’t sing adequately is not a silly non-issue to be waved away in the interest of the Greater Good. Not in light of the fact that Bob Dylan makes his living as, you know, A SINGER. OK, granted: he doesn’t really make his living as a singer, he makes his living as a royalty collector, and more power to him – he’s certainly a fine songwriter, and I’ll freely acknowledge that forty years ago he mattered as much as it is possible for a pop music artist to matter. But it seems to me that as soon as you start asserting the Greater Significance of a pop music artist, you’re maybe beginning to miss the point of pop music. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” still hits hard in spite of the fact that it mattered in 1969, not because of it. It hits hard because it’s a good song, and it would actually be a far better one if it were less the product of such a narrow time, place and mindset, and if it didn’t wear its affectations (“A-changin’”? Really?) so proudly. “Like a Rolling Stone,” on the other hand, still hits hard precisely because it’s a great song that was written from a perspective outside of those limitations.  And both are much, much better songs when someone other than Dylan sings them. Yeah, I said it.