The Rambler

London is swarming with Gothie-Indie-kiddies tonight. More dyed locks and black jeans than three-piece suits. I’m guessing they’re all heading for Earl’s Court and Radiohead. I say this because tomorrow evening I’ll be headed that way too, although I’ll be dressed more antipopper than t-shirt noir.

Radiohead are a curious beast. Milady and I argue about their merits (or not) more than almost any other single subject, so expect some comments from that quarter by the end of the week… While I couldn’t call myself a fan, and I would make a strong case for a different album of the ’90s to the Pitchfork choice (readers need only scroll down a few posts to see a strong candidate for my vote), it is also hard to disagree with their reasoning. I particularly like the idea that OK Computer is one of the last albums as albums, which relates to what I want to say.

When it comes down to it, the debate around Radiohead (are they the greatest thing since sausages/are they just a pile of fat and gristle?) follows two paths. 1) They’re basically U2, and play for grown-up ex-indie kids who should know better, frankly. Well, this is hardly their fault. The Clash used to have the same problem. And 2) They’re not as innovative or clever as they arrogantly suppose they are.

Which is usually the side I come down on. But, tonight, I want to play devil’s advocate, so here goes.

The thing is, as I’ve said before round these parts, the whole idea of Rock is built around musicianly ideas of innovation and expertise. Pop, on the other hand, say the rockists, is hackneyed, cyclical and facile. When in actual fact, a case can be made for exactly the reverse. The guitar/bass/drums/vox line-up is so fixed, and so much of what Rock actually is, that any ‘innovation’ must necessarily be built upon tradition. Take away too much of that tradition – the guitars, say – and you no longer have rock.* Composers writing string quartets have exactly the same issues: it’s impossible to avoid the heritage (and responsibility) that Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók lay upon you. Even when Stockhausen added helicopters and video relays to the mix, it’s not difficult to see the grand romanticised tradition he’s building on and expanding outwards. (And Stockhausen is nothing if not a grand romanticist, Wagner’s truest heir.)

Rock, you see, is conventional. It is made out of conventions.

If Radiohead do anything at all, it is that they recognise this more acutely, I think, than many other Rock acts. They are not, for example, The-bloody-Darkness, whose fans claim they are the Holy Grail of originality and innovation, when they’re nothing of the sort. Radiohead, on the other hand, while not really making such claims (these sorts of claims are always made by fans anyway, as far as I can tell), are prepared to – knowingly, even ironically – test the edges of those conventions.

Kid A is, by most standards, not an extraordinary addition to the electronica canon. When Thom Yorke and the boys go into the studio, they do not suddenly become Richard James, Susumu Yokota or Jan Jelinek. But it does pick up the nervy, twitchy, fractured sounds of recent glitch and electronica, recognise its emotive potential, its correspondence with decades of guitar riffs and drum fills, and turn it to very specific, Rockist, song-based (album-based) ends. And this is something. It doesn’t sound like the great, radical step forward that it is sometimes believed to be, because actually it sounds remarkably consistent with a lot of what they’ve done up to that point. Which, again, is something.

I have to admit that when OK Computer came out, it was a wonderful album. My student years were not soundtracked to it, but one summer at least was. And though it has weakened, I think, with time, for a few months at least it said a lot and it said it well. I talk below about Goldie’s production on Timeless bursting the seams of his samples so that you can feel the pressure within every sound. From the opening drum track of ‘Airbag’, that same quality of sound is here too – production pushed just past the edges. Along with its orgiastic, cathartic opposite, the grunge guitar, these two sonic fields were probably the musical signatures of the Nineties. Neuroses and self-indulgence. Looking inward, kicking outward. And between ‘Airbag’ and ‘Lucky’ (unarguably a great, great track) you have the spectrum between both. It’s all reined in, it’s all a little restrained, apologetic, guilty, cowering. But it carries on regardless. And in these terms it has to be, I suppose, if not the best album of the nineties, still the only album of the nineties. From a cool analytical distance, it carries more of the mood of the nineties than pretty much any other record on the Pitchfork list (although, I’ve not heard them all, so I may be wrong…).

And OK Computer does have a beautiful arc to it. As the nagging, understated, infuriating inoffensiveness of it winds you up and up, three-quarters of the way in, there is ‘No Surprises’, in context an achingly beautiful song. Its easiness sucks you into the belief that actually a comfortable life with ‘no alarms and no surprises’ wouldn’t be so bad after all. Which is exactly the trick that the whole album’s thesis would like you to believe. Because that comfort, that relief is exactly what Radiohead want you to resist, it’s what Thom-Yorke-of-Radiohead finds so distasteful. It’s an effective ploy, and one that only works because the band push all the appropriate buttons developed within rock’s conventions (from the inlay art to the music itself) to create this grand thesis. Radiohead use all the established signifiers (and a few of their own invention) to draw you in, to create this seductive world, only to turn it on its head. It’s deliberate and it’s knowing, and it is skillfully done.

(A story milady likes to tell: It used to be quite common to see Thom Yorke in pubs around Oxford, drinking on his own, looking miserable as hell. So miserable no one dared go up to him to say hi. So was he miserable because he’s Thom Yorke and that’s What He Does, or was he miserable because he’s Thom Yorke, and he still has to drink alone when he’s in his home town?)

Radiohead, for better or for worse, play the game as well as Springsteen, Kylie or Madonna. The biggest problem they all have is that it’s hard to get everyone else to play along with you. But that’s another story…

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* (You have drum and bass, boom boom!)

A really interesting post from Kyle Gann, on the conflict between system and inspiration in modern composition. It’s an old chestnut, and Gann has some notable points to make on the way, observing that many (student) composers see the failure of theory to explain what is happening in a piece of Charles Ives, say, as a victory for the composer. I think the composers’ argument is a specious one for either side to take up – theory and practice are not opponents: any musical work is an act of composition and reception, and without one or the other it is unfinished. But at the same time, theory can never pretend to tell you everything about a work, it can only mark one way of approaching it, here, now, and by me. Composers really only get upset when theorists try to reduce their compositions to crossword puzzles, shouting Eureka! when they think they’ve found the solution. Academic musicology has only recently grown-up to this self-evident fact, and a lot of this attitude still persists within certain circles who can’t see beyond puzzle-solving.

To be honest, I don’t know what Bartók would have made of Lendvai’s analyses of his music, had he lived to see them. Probably amusement. Lendvai’s work is, after all, a classic, beautifully realised crossword solution. What is interesting, however, in his work is not the question of whether Bartók worked to an all-encompassing system, built around Fibonnacci numbers and Golden Section proportions (according to Lendvai, these series permeate every aspect of Bartók’s music, from note-to-note interval selection to large-scale form), but rather the influence this construction of Bartók’s music had on others.

In 1955, when the West European musical world was doing backflips over total serial organisation (Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître had just been completed, and Stockhausen had begun work on Gruppen), Lendvai’s first books on Bartók (An Introduction to the Analysis of Bartók’s Works and Bartók’s Style) were published in Hungary. As news of musical developments in Western Europe were trickling through to Hungarian composers, coupled with the gradual, and welcome, establishment of Bartók’s reputation as one of the century’s greatest musicians, it must have been tempting to see within Lendvai’s analyses a way of connecting the great Hungarian master with the dominant trends of systemised composition in the West. There is no doubt that Bartók’s influence on his successors was immense, but it is intriguing to trace the influence of the Lendvai-mediated Bartók upon those successors. In Hungarian composition since the late 1950s, be it Kurtág, Eötvös or even Germany-based Ligeti, there are traces of a conscious, deliberate employment of the compositional strategies Lendvai claimed to have extracted from Bartók – mirror forms, Golden Sections, key intervals and harmonies built on segments of the Fibonnacci series and so on. Was this an attempt to induct Bartók, and his successors, into the same canon being established amongst Stockhausen and his Darmstadt cronies? It seems to me that this is an interesting – but surely not unique – example of the symbiotic relationship between composition and theory, and an instance in which crossword puzzles could become a powerful inspiration.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading a lengthy piece by me on Lendvai’s relationship to Ligeti’s music, you could do worse than click here. There are few examples which need putting up, when I’ve got them converted to jpegs or such, but all the text is there at least. Cheers.

And ain’t that a relief.

Looks like a good thing. (Spotted via beepSNORT.

I have been alerted to a new classical blog, Symphony X, which aims to ‘reawaken the classical conversation for the 21st century”, which seems to me thoroughly laudable aim. Go and check them out – there’s a very nice post there exposing some of the nonsense that gets lazily bandied around in the name of new music journalism, which is worth a read.

Oh, and this (surely deliberate?) bit of editing from the Sunday Times today:

“37m pints of beer were consumed during the day in the 10,000 British pubs that opened early to screen the match. ‘It was a huge effort from the entire squad,’ said old brick thighs [Martin Johnson] afterwards.”

My guess is that Jason Leonard managed 7,000 of those on his own.

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a bloody relief.

And I love Rothko, y’know. The first time I visited Tate Modern, I was bowled over by the Rothko room there – obviously, I knew what Rothkos were supposed to look like, had the posters, even seen a few in Real Life, but these ones – they were a different shape. Not fuzzy rectangles floating over fields of colour, but fuzzy ‘O’s, like bits of toast with wholes cut out the middle, but red and the size of a car.

I could talk about Rothko for hours – as a painter he seems to come closest to everything I hold dear in art. I almost can’t help coming back to him, somehow. Have you ever heard Feldman’s Rothko Chapel? There’s a specially built chapel in Texas (I think) full of Rothko paintings, and Feldman wrote this piece for it, for choir, percussion and viola. And it was the most amazing thing he ever did: by his own standards its pretty short (about 15 mins, in several bits), but sounds typically Feldman – drifty choir chords, percussion droplets, that sort of thing. Then at the very end, this beautiful viola melody comes, out of nowhere, and squeezes you until you weep. It’s apparently a tune that Feldman wrote as a young boy, and for whatever reason he chose to put it in here. It’s a shocking and extraordinary moment, and there’s not much else like it.

Intriguing.