Judee Sill is a criminally unknown songwriter from the early-1970s who also tragically died before the end of that decade. In an interview, she once said that her musical influences were Pythagoras, J. S. Bach, and Ray Charles. Her songs combine the naive and the knowing, the spiritual and the secular in a sophisticated style that seems to have sprung fully formed. We have tantalizingly few clues about her musical formation except that she did play piano and organ while in a reform school as a teenager. She was also a pretty damn good guitar player.

I’ve said before that in the music of Bruce Springsteen, you can hear the disintegration of a certain kind of American Dream. “Born to Run,” to take just one famous example, sounds like the ragged but exhilarated ghost of a Phil Spector or Brill Building pop song from the 1960s. The same can be said about the late-60s and early-70s works of Laura Nyro, which to my ear, contain the phantoms of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley (Listen, for example, to “Mercy on Broadway” or most of Eli & the Thirteenth Confession). Judee Sill lets such ghosts sing through her music, too, particularly in some of the arrangements which contain bits of Motown, bubblegum pop, and arguably a Bach-like (perhaps by way of the Beach Boys) delight in contrapuntal composition.

Sill released two albums in her lifetime, and both are worth owning. A posthumous collection of what should have been her third record was released in the early 2000s with a disc of demos, home recordings, and other treasures.

“The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown” typifies Sill’s style. The lyrical juxtapose the carnal and the divine as well as the innocent and the experienced. Riffing on the children’s rhyme “The Dish ran away with the Spoon,” they text forms an allegory. The Lamb—a symbol for Christ, children, and purity—absconds with the crown, which may suggest Isaiah 11:6, “The wolf also shall well with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fattling together; and a little child shall lead them.” Other references to biblical actors (the serpent, the sword, a battleground) intermingle with iridescent images of opals, glowing, and reflections. References to flying abound (ravens, cardinals, sailing through the clouds) which suggests spiritual ascension. Within the context of the poem, the speaker prepares for some sort of battle, but as she draws her sword, the lamb runs away with the crown which causes her to erupt in laughter.

Musically, Sill sets her text to a gently lilting melody and a touch of country twang both in her voice and in the guitar part. As the song continues, other instruments enter the texture, and the whole song culminates with a contrapuntal coda of Sill’s multi-tracked vocals, flute, saxophone, and guitar that owes a clear debt to the coda of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and to Laura Nyro’s  “Sweet Blindness,” “Save the Country” and “Time and Love.”

Sill died of a heroin overdose in her apartment in North Hollywood in 1979. Many of the musicians she called friends just a few years earlier had no clue where she was or that she died until many years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zp6qwM_mrI

A Voice, and Nothing More…?

Whitney Houston is dead. This is not news. For anyone who remembers the 1980s and 1990s, her passing may feel significant for the loss of a beloved sonic object. For younger fans, who remember Houston primarily as a parody of the troubled diva, she may seem, like Michael Jackson, a famous freak from another time.

Disregarding the younger listeners because, well, I’m not one of them, I’ve been thinking about Whitney and that voice. And in particular, the silencing of that voice which sounds like a singular event that occurred at death but was actually a process, one that is, ironically still happening even as sales of her albums soar in the days since her passing and existed as a constant threat for years as rumors circulated that she’d lost, ruined, or totally destroyed her voice.

Voices are tricky things that way.

So, too, are paintings, vases, and other artworks, at least since the Industrial Revolution made the mass production of decorative and artistic objects commonplace. Thank you Walter Benjamin, whose notion of “aura” and the loss of aura in various artworks through reproduction proves rather resilient to use in musical contexts—at least in the specific context of the voice. Indeed, as Jonathan Sterne tells us, the first recording devices were actually intended to preserve the voices of the living for posthumous listening—important speeches, memoirs, intimate confessions to loved ones. Sound recording was, in fact, intended to short circuit the “aura”-lity of the voice by preserving it. This has important ramifications that extend beyond visual arts, photography, and film, nor should my gloss of Benjamin indicate that he was skeptical of mass production. In fact, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” strikes me as an incredibly optimistic essay, weighted with potential for these new forms of media. At any rate, I’m not a particularly sophisticated materialist, so I’d better leave my rambling about such things at that for now.

To tie up the loose ends, though, sound recording was intended for one thing but put to rather different uses through the industrial machinery of music business, and since those first scratchy wax cylinders and phonograph records began to turn, our relationship with the voice—that aural mark of distinction, the sign (for some) of our very humanness—was forever altered.

In an oblique way, I grew up with Whitney, at least with her recorded voice. Her 1985 debut coincided with my morning commute to Jasper Elementary School, as my mom and I turned top 40 pop into duets intended to pin a little smile onto the start of each day. In fact, many of my memories of childhood and my mother are centered around singing. We loved “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” even though I was—astonishingly enough—not a girl, and “Material Girl,” as well as the music of the 60s and a wide swath of other mid-1980s pop, rock, and soul. Like Wayne Koestenbaum, D. A. Miller, Mitchell Morris, and hordes of other gay men, I took my vows and performed initiation rites into the cult of diva worship at an early age, before I even knew precisely what it was I worshipped. I distinctly remember turning on Mamas & Papas records and adjusting the levels on our stereo to block out the men’s parts (something I discovered quite accidentally) so that I could hear Cass & Michelle’s voices intertwine. I’d learn their parts, then (in an act of violence and possibly sexism but also of absolute naïve devotion), I would push the knobs in the opposite direction, excising the women’s voices from the recording. When I’d made a sonic space for myself, I would belt out Cass’s lines in my 12-year old squeaky soprano. Later, I’d grab a hairbrush or my mom’s curling iron and wail along with Bette Midler’s “Stay with Me” from The Rose until I saw my dad’s truck pull down the driveway as he returned home from work. The intrusion of the outside world—in particular men from out there—knocked over my fragile temples to women whose voice I adored. The next day, after school, I would rebuild them, and this process continued well into college for me, though emboldened by a little more musical training, I tended to draw an audience rather than run from them. But that’s another story entirely…

The point, if indeed there is a singular point to all of this, is that voice in the twentieth century began to mean something quite separate from what they had previously meant. Thanks to a specific technology, individual voices became multiples of themselves and also became efficiently portable and accessible in ways that individual singers—especially the ones singled out for worship—are not. None of this is my idea, of course, but the concept certainly articulates much of my existence to this day. I want certain voices. I want to possess them and be possessed by and of them. I have a closet filled with CDs and LPs inscribed with the voices of women—Joni, Carole, Bonnie, Carmen, Carly, Joan, Barbra, Liza, Judy, Bette, Nina, Aretha, Laura, Judee, Adele, Dionne, Indigo Girls, Whitney…the pantheon is familiar to anyone who knows me (or knows many gay men). I own these voices yet they are more than possessions, more than things, more than voices.

For me, the voices of a host of specifically women singers are over-invested with meaning. They have sonically shaped the person I am today. They articulated feelings  from the mundane to the profound, and in singing with them—in intimate, late night duets in my bedroom or hearing the phantom of their voices as I plunk the chords of favorite tunes and sing at the piano—they gave me a voice. Taught me to sing in every sense of the word.

And sadly, although I/we own these voices on record, we do not own the diva. In many ways, the relationship is doomed from the start. Joni Mitchell once quipped that “No one ever asked Van Gaugh to paint ‘A Starry Night’ again,” and in that moment—ironically/iconically captured on her 1973 live album Miles of Aisles—she highlights the fundamental tension between celebrities and fans and anticipated her own diva-demise in just a few short years. We are drawn to our favorite celebrities—in my case, divas—because something immediately grabs us: the voice, a gesture, a dress, a fleeting expression, the over-the-topness of a live show, her command of the gaze and her irresistible to-be-looked-at-ness. Joni Mitchell sunk her teeth (an allusion to a song lyric in “For the Roses,” not a sexist portrayal of women as dangerous, ravenous, out of control, or even hungry) into my hand, err, ear with the first lines of “All I Want” (from Blue) because I, too, found myself “on a lonely road…travelling, travelling, looking for something…” and wondering, “what can it be?” That moment, for me, was the fall of 1997, my freshman year of college. This was my first moment of what my friends and I lovingly called DSP—Diva Sensory Perception. And I never listened to a voice the same way again.

Admittedly, I am not the world’s biggest Whitney fan. In fact, in the days since her death, I have only listened to a few isolated tracks and watched a handful of youtube clips, trying to listen to her late-style voice in much the same way that I do that of Liza Minnelli or Judy Garland (or even Janis Joplin, who made late-style her only style)—listening through the surface, the grain, of the voice for something else—something Barthes and all the people who latched onto that little speck of a theoretical concept missed. The grain of the voice may be “the materialist of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance” (Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”), but that isn’t what I hear when I listen to the voices of my diva pantheon. Certainly, the encounter between language, melody, and voice is an important concern, and as a self-confessed “lyrics” person, I delight in the infinite ways in which an artful singer assaults language through pitch, bending, breaking, warping, distorting, and in some cases actually destroying syntax and meaning for something else. But these are almost unconscious reactions. When I listen to a diva sing, most of the time, I am singing along, so I do not hear the materiality of her body in the voice—I sense the immediacy of my own body, the swell of my stupid lungs, the precise flex of abdominal muscles, the trained release of tension in my upper body, the exact placement of my tongue—and all of these become, for those who sing with divas, indicators—imprecise and impressionistic—of what and how she feels when she sings. This sets into motion a cycle of internal and external identification I am not yet in a position to articulate. But one that gets beyond a grain or a speck of voice and becomes total, spiritual (says the atheist), visceral…In the moments I sing with my divas, I do not—like D. A. Miller and Wayne Koestenbaum—wonder if I am that diva. I am something else. I am her vocal peer. Her sonic twin. Simultaneously her and me, we and us, hers and my voice.

Yet the relationship is doomed for failure. Even in the age of auto-repeat functions, the song ends, and whether there’s the cold silence of a digital soundfile or the warm hiss of a tape or the (for me) comforting scratch of the curve of the needle, in the space of that breath, as I anticipate the next song, the next key, the next syllable, I am reminded that I am only and always just me. And in that moment, I despise my most beloved diva because she reveals a humiliating truth about me. I will never overcome my own stupid body. I am always just a promiscuous ventriloquist’s dummy getting sung up and out sung by every new diva.

On the other end, our divas fail us, too. They change—musical style, behavior, manner of dress, political affiliation. Sometimes they stop touring or recording, and they say it is because they are tired, bored, uninspired, lonely, and human. This comes as a shock because we love them. How can they be lonely when we love them so passionately?  How dare they be human? And sometimes—inevitably, should we live long enough—our divas die.

And that brings me back to Whitney. Admittedly, she is only a second string goddess in my particular pantheon. But her music does come immediately to mind when I think about who I was in 1985, 1986, 1987, and in 1992. Like Aretha and Barbra, her voice is an icon—that funny word we use to describe objects of religious and cultural devotion. And although she has died, her voice is not silent. Glory be to mechanical reproduction! We have her albums, videos, concerts, films, television appearances. Yes, she will never sing again. Yes, the we are now poised on the verge of a comeback that will never happen. Yes, she was somebody’s daughter and mother and will be bitterly missed. Yes, she was some gay man’s secret diva—as she was the not-so-secret diva of many others. And yes, the last decade of her life played out like a (very long) comeback story in the making: tumultuous marriage, children, drugs, rumors of eating disorders, erratic behavior, but always the sound, the sound, the sound of that voice—what she and it had been and the heavy potential for what she and it might be again.

So, I mourn Whitney Houston, not as a personal-musical loss but through a process of identification and solidarity, for what I know through my own convoluted musical coming out process that she meant to so many other queer men out there (not to mention the straight ones, lesbians, and straight women).

When any diva passes, we remember the transcendence of her voice and the arc of her life, yet the mundane fact of her mortality reminds us of the banality of life that her voice helps us escape.

Today, I went shopping with my friend Sean, and as we drove hither and yon, Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, Under the Pink, and Little Earthquakes were punctuated with the sounds of passing traffic, parking the car, opening/closing doors, etc. Of all Tori’s albums, this one has the same tension between god and the devil, between too much costume jewelry, too much affect, too much rouge and the refinement and sophistication of minimal gems and a perfect black dress. That’s a pretty stupid metaphor, and I admit, it’s not especially original but it encompasses all the elements that make Pele Tori’s loveletter to criminally under-rated singer-songwriter, Laura Nyro, who died of ovarian cancer in April 1997.

Nyro was enigmatic and elusive, a fiery diva, a soulful singer with a massive voice that flirts with Judy Garland and Maria Callas without irony, sweeping from whisper to shout in a grandiose operatic gesture, building a single riff (like the coda of “Save the Country”) into a religious fervor through sheer insistence and repetition. Later in her career, her melodic lines became flatter in terms of actual intervallic content, but like Joni Mitchell’s post-Hejira (1976) work, that doesn’t mean it became less interesting. Adopting a less acrobatic melodic style enables both women to hone a conversational style that is incredibly well-suited to their later lyrics, which tend to focus on the development and exploration of single-issues (particularly for both, environmental causes) but also character sketches [Nyro’s “Mr. Blue” from Nested (1978) and Mitchell’s “Face Lift” from Taming the Tiger (1998)]. While topical albums starting in the late-70s may have sold less well, they represent some of Nyro’s most beautiful music. Nested and Mother’s Spiritual have both recently been released on CD for the first time in the US and are definitely worth checking out.

As a pianist, Nyro stripped pop, broadway, and gospel styles to bare bones chords built of open fifths, clusters build of 9ths and 13ths above the bass, and a near-pervasive shuffle that manages to land a cheeky jaunt in almost every tune. Her harmonic language is interesting from the perspective of a lot of pop music and is particularly exposed on New York Tendaberry (1969), but she never pushed herself harmonically the way that, say, Joni Mitchell did with her incessant experiments with alternate guitar tunings (Lloyd Whitesell has an excellent book about Mitchell’s harmonic style, among other things). This might seem to indicate a flaccid or dull quality in Nyro’s music, but her lyrics and gift for grafting melodies on the perfect lyric insure that each song sounds like a spontaneous musical declaration even when the same material is recycled between songs (evidenced in the IV-Maj7 iii-Maj7-ii7-V7-I cadence that opens “Wedding Bell Blues” and which also occurs in literally every song she recorded in some capacity or another or the bonus tracks included on the re-release of Smile (1976) when you hear the same piano riff used in several different songs, “Get Me My Hat” and  but eventually released on the album as “The Cat Song.”

Nyro loathed the spotlight but at a point in the late-1960s outsold the Beatles and every major artist, from Peter, Paul, and Mary to Barbra Streisand, from Three Dog Night to Blood, Sweat, and Tears covered her songs. She retired several times during her career, and actively re-wrote or exaggerated particular successes and failures (the most notorious is her being “booed” off stage at Monterey which, according to archival footage discovered decades after the release of Pennebaker’s 1967 concert film, did not happen. In fact, she crowd is chanting “beautiful!” after her performance of “Poverty Train.”

From a structural point of view, her songs fall into the category of brilliant polished pop gems that stems from Carole King’s Brill Building perfection back to the heyday of American songwriting. She tags on unexpected codas, slides between meters with a single accented note, and possesses a subtle sense of rhythm and timing that enables her elastic plays with tempo to feel completely, I hate to use this word, organic. All of this playfulness with the surface of the music breathes a freshness and a sense of danger into strophic, AABA, and verse-chorus structures that, while perfect, might otherwise seem dull.

I love Laura Nyro’s music. Her voice appeals to that part of me that rhymes with Wayne Koestenbaums and D. A. Miller’s opera and theater queens. I could, and frequently have, listened to her music for days at a time. It breaks my heart that more people don’t know her music now, and if you’re reading this, I really encourage you to pick up Eli & the Thirteenth Confession, New York Tendaberry, Gonna Take a Miracle, Nested, or Mother’s Spiritual.

It still never ceases to amaze me that I’m doing what I’m doing. Ok, off the bat, it’s not curing cancer or AIDS; it’s not humanitarian work in the sense that I joined the Peace Corps; it’s not even doing work for the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, or some other local agency that makes what some people might call immediate impacts in the lives of others. I readily admit that pursuing academics involves a higher-than-average degree of naval gazing, and that most of us end up doing work, well, for our rather insular community rather than the “real” world.But, seriously, on a daily basis, I walk around this University and marvel at the fact that I’ve come from a little town in rural North Georgia where the only things higher than the high-school dropout rate are teen pregnancy and meth use to a PhD program at UVA.

I guess I’m troubled by a few things, though. First, for years, I’ve been excusing my pursuit of a degree in musicology on grounds that it’s selfish, self-interested, and for the most part useless since I started my masters in 2005. I’ve also been known to say that “there is nothing more egotistical than writing a dissertation.” Second, I’ve often given in to a stereotyped academic persona that is out of touch with the world outside the university, thus re-inscribing an old prejudicial battle line between academics and the rest of the world.

As far as the first goes, I don’t believe that a PhD in the humanities is any more or less self-serving or self-sacrificing than a decision to go into medicine, the sciences, K-12 education, or any other pursuit for that matter. Those who continue into higher-higher education get to choose a field that challenges and stimulates us, and yes, there is a selfish component to that. As I recently told my continually-supportive parents, though, it’s basically teacher training on steroids. Instead of teaching middle schoolers how to sing, I’m learning to teach university students to think. This doesn’t mean I’m next in line for sainthood. There is a careful balance of selfish/less components in going to med school, law school, or getting an MBA because you’ll score big bucks or find that miracle cure or invent a lifesaving device. There’s also little glamorous about the enormous student loan I and many other humanities folks face, coupled with an ever-diminishing job market, increased competition between scholars for fewer jobs, and all sorts of pressures that seem alien, as if the academy has been invaded by corporate America!

It’s a lie some of us guilt-ridden humanities folks tell ourselves that all doctors are out to change the world for the better; that all scientists are in hot pursuit of greener sources of energy and renewable resources, cures for terrible illnesses, or other noble pursuits, and that all academics are useless.  At the same time, those folks are deceiving themselves if they think for a minute that academics aren’t grabbin’ and snatchin’, competing, playing dirty, and trying to scramble up the whitewashed ladder to the top. It seems to me that going into the humanities doesn’t leave you more or less vulnerable to assholery than any other pursuit. Maybe I’m wrong, but I know assholes in every discipline, in every field, in ever career.  And there are also wonderful people, doing important work, everywhere.

As for the second, I’ve been lucky enough in what I modestly call an academic career (really as an academic-in-training) to work alongside some pretty amazing people who manage to keep their feet on that whitewashed ladder while stretching a hand back down to the ground, lifting as they climb to borrow a phrase from African-American Civil Rights parlance. People like Chris Cuomo at UGA, a brilliant, witty, and warm feminist philosopher who channels her energy and her fury into collecting the wisdom of indigenous people affected by climate change, or Susan Thomas to whom I am indebted for the rest of my life for encouraging me to jump the fence and pursue ethno/musicology with gusto and whose stories about the exchanges of knowledge and daily necessities during her work with Cuban musicians remind me that, even in music, our presence not only impacts our scholarly byproducts but more importantly, takes on a life for both sides of the endeavor.

Other people, like Fred Maus, use discourse and language to introduce surprising (sub)alternate perspectives into the scholarly record. Asserting not only that we are here, but also that we are working, musicking, writing, contributing to the field of music on every level.  And Bonnie Gordon blows my mind at least twice a month with her combination of fierce intellect, motherly adroitness, and genuine friendship and whose ability to manage three children, a marriage, write a book, and make hilarious observations on a blog stands as an example of multi-tasking to which I desperately aspire. Recently, I met Tim Miller whose performance art, writing, and generosity reminds me that art and scholarship do matter and they can—contrary to my own appraisal of the humanities—save lives.

I guess coming to the end of my comps and stepping on the last step of degree-seeking status leaves me a little nostalgic and, dare I say, sentimental! But as I brace myself for the results of my comp exams (and all this name dropping is in no way an attempt to butter anyone up!!!) and draft a prospectus, I think it’s important to remember that what we do matters, to us, to our colleagues, and though we may not always see it or hear about it, I think it matters to everyone who listens to music, plays an instrument, watches American Idol, or hell, even sings in the shower.

 Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it, and neither would they.

In related news, Diana Ross is going to be on Oprah Monday!

Someone Southern once said “I’d rather walk on my lips than criticize anybody,” and while I generally adhere to that rule in my day to day interactions, my life as a person with strong investments in thinking and writing about music necessitates that I speak out against Lady GaGa.

A friend recently asked me what it meant for a “gay icon to finally explicitly make music for her LGBT fans and call them out in a song.” He did not specifically mention GaGa’s single—coincidentally, he asked me on the day “Born This Way” was released—so I am performing a bit of speculative work. Whether he had Lady G in mind or not, I still stand by what follows.

I want to think seriously about what it means for a heterosexual, fabulously wealthy, highly publicized, internationally recognized recording artist to “call out” her gay fans in a song.

I quote from the song’s spoken introduction: it doesn’t matter if you love him or capital H I M, just put your paws up ‘cause you were born this way, baby.

A few things strike me immediately. First, GaGa is being biologically deterministic regarding both him and HIM, which I can only means loving a flesh-and-blood man or some kind of spiritual deity—it is pretty common in many contemporary Christian contexts to use “capital H I M” to refer to Jesus or God. Regardless, people who love various manifestations of “him” are locked into this situation by virtue of biology alone. This type of argument sounds like liberation for LGBTQ individuals, but that’s not the only perspective. Some people—prominent queer theorists like Judith Butler and Foucault among them—would argue that sexuality and gender are influenced by  more than biology alone. Butler’s (in)famous assertion that gender is a set of “bodily acts” and Foucault’s insistence on discourse as shaping sexuality are just the starting points for more complex arguments that I will not rehearse here.

Second, GaGa both dehumanizes and infantalizes the person/people she’s addressing by referring to their “paws” instead of hands and calling them “baby.” Janet Jackson said it best when she said, “No, my first name ain’t baby…” Fans of Lady will remind me that they are her “little monsters” and find a certain degree of empowerment in her freak chic attitude and the fact that she “cares so much for her fans.” I am not a GaGa fan in the least, so it’s entirely possible that I’m just missing the point in her theatrics. I suggest she over-performs this pseudo-maternal “I love my fans” bullshit precisely to capitalize on and exploit her fans, many of whom may approach her music with a barrage of family issues and dramas related to being gay in a homophobic world. However, I think it’s dangerous to adopt a celebrity as surrogate mother, and personally, I don’t think GaGa would be the ideal substitute mother, were I on the market to replace mine with a caricature or theatrical character, but I digress…

I return to the lyrics:

My mama told me when I was young
We are all born superstars
She rolled my hair and put my lipstick on
In the glass of her boudoir

“There’s nothin’ wrong with lovin’ who you are”
She said, “‘Cause He made you perfect, babe”
“So hold your head up, girl and you you’ll go far,
Listen to me when I say”

I’m beautiful in my way,
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way

At a meta-level, I don’t have a problem with GaGa’s message of loving yourself. What bothers me is that this supposed paean to her gay fans—it’s suggested that this is the new gay anthem all over the internet; for evidence, check out the comments section on youtube—is that Lady G’s message of queer liberation is framed in terms of a conventional, heterosexual mother-daughter moment. Mom hands down sage advice and beauty tips to her heterosexual daughter. How many of GaGa’s gay male fans had similar experiences with their mothers or fathers? I wish I could say that all of us were reared in this maternal idyll, but the sad truth is that many of us were not. She’s feeding us fantasy and asking that we delight in her own narcissism.

And to be brutally honest, we’re not all born superstars. In fact, almost none of us are, myself included.

Later in the song, the Lady decrees that her fans shouldn’t be a drag, just be a queen and in the process reinforces a type of standardization that oppresses gay folks to begin with. We’re supposed to be happy, glittery, fabulous queens without somber, serious, or negative thoughts. Gay people come in more than one variety, hell, we even come in more than one strain of fabulous. Some of us want to be queens; some of us want to be a drag; some of us want to be ordinary.

Personally, I’m more than prepared to be a drag if that means rejecting the anesthetic party and focusing on the fact that I live in a country where I’m treated like a second class citizen, even if I was “born this way.” Her attitude is condescending, and her dictates (they are always formed as imperatives) makes her fans subjects to the Cult of GaGa, a mindless herd chanting “born this way” in a packed arena, blinded by all that glitter from the harsh fact that the US denies basic rights to a tax-paying constituency, that hate crimes, hate speech, and homophobic bullyingare a reality that many of her fans have to endure once the GaGa Sideshow packs up and leaves town. I’m starting to sound like Adorno.

“Born This Way” is just one more example of a celebrity, who breathes a rarefied air and stands in a position of cultural power and as a result relative safety,  exercising her garbage truck ego by assuming she can speak for her gay fans, “call them out” or name them, as if gay people cannot name or speak for ourselves. She’s just reinscribing the heteronormative and homophobic tendencies of the recording industry under the guise of progressive action.

A more forgiving interpretation might say that she is recognizing her gay fans and including them in the broader sphere of her celebrity, but the end result of this is really just the exploitation of a gay consumer niche market who, fueled by the illusion of agency through this problematic “naming” process, will buy her cds, concert tickets, and other paraphernalia thereby increasing this celebrity’s cultural power, fortune, and “safety” but doing nothing to dismantle the apparatus of oppression.

I also have to note that Lady G is a straight ally, and I don’t begrudge her that at all. We need hetero help to achieve equity, to reduce stigma, to erase hate, in short to achieve the variety of resistances necessary to defeat homophobia in all its forms. GaGa—as much as I hate to admit it—even does her share of activism, performing and speaking out at LGBTQ organizations, rallies, etc.

At issue here for me is discourse and control, that Foucaultdian power struggle. Who has the right to interpolate the Other? GaGa is calling out her gay fans, affirming their right to be, but she herself is not L, G, B, T, or Q. My point is this: she is operating from a position of heterosexual power, and in making such a racket, she’s actually silencing other voices—other queer voices who’ve been speaking out on their own behalf for decades.

Counterargument: GaGa is using her celebrity status to draw attention to the gay community. That may be true, but she’s also co-opting queer culture in much the same way that Madonna “borrowed” black dance culture for her “vogue” success a few decades ago. It’s problematic, it’s a form of cultural imperialism, and it pisses me off.

Again, I don’t disagree with her message of loving yourself and accepting yourself, no matter what your shape, color, sexuality, gender, class, race, religion, or any other attribute. In fact, I think we all need a lot more of that. And we need straight allies, without a doubt, but I find it a particularly bitter pill to swallow when a straight woman stands up, “calls me out” as if I’ve been waiting in the subjectivity antechamber for 32 years for a gay icon to interpolate me, as if she has the solution to all the social ills, bigotry, hate, and forms of insidious disenfranchisement that I live with on a daily basis and that my liberation takes the form of an imperative: Don’t be a drag, Just dance!

Close Encounters of the Blue Kind

Diva worship is symptomatic of contemporary homosexuality.

I say “contemporary” homosexuality to indicate homosexuality since the twentieth century, and I say homosexuality because that is the term, first printed in 1869, to describe certain members of particular sexual subcommunities who share a general attraction to members of their own sex. Of course, the cartography of sexual identity is far more complex than this regrettably reductive single term, and in general, I prefer the umbrella term “queer” when referring to the constellation of identities that depart from the heteronormative ideal. Over time, homosexuality has accrued a specific gender referent: it suggests men. And diva worship is rampant among, at least, the gay men I know personally and those whose histories I’ve encountered in various works by D.A. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mitch Miller, George Chauncy, among others.

To underestimate the power and prevalence of divadentification is a mistake. Rumor has it that the death of Judy Garland and the emotional upset gay men in New York felt at the untimely loss of a hallowed diva contributed to the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the beginnings of a new wave of gay activism.

D. A. Miller’s experiences listening to original cast albums deep in the basement of his family home are typical of the 1950s. In this secret space, really the bowels of the home, he is free to lip synch, sing, and choreograph his emerging homosexual identity to the sound of music from Broadway’s golden era. Isolated from the rest of the family, not to mention the outside world, his diva loving ways become a source of shame. A dirty secret. Later, he finds a gay piano bar in which the rejects from the gay community (older, overweight, bald men with grotesque features, it seems) experience jouissance and transient beauty (in Miller’s eyes) as their overwrought features suddenly match the emotions expressed in the music they sing, gathered around a piano, sloshing their drinks, and losing themselves in sound.

Wayne Koestenbaum gushes over opera divas like Maria Callas, their larger than life personae, their dramatic—especially when flawed—voices. Like Miller, he consumes many of his divas via recordings, and a particularly rare or hard to find album might be better than…well, ok. Maybe not better than sex, but pretty dam close.  The diva’s voice on record is better than a backstage pass for “opera records bring us closer to the singer’s mouth than we would ordinarily be allowed to stand; bring us to the microphone…feeding us information, “(81).

My own brand of diva worship started early, though I did not know it as such then. As a kid, my favorite movies were Mommie Dearest and a televised (HBO, perhaps?) production of Sweeny Todd starring Angela Lansbury. Mom and I used to sing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” in the car en route to school each morning. The first music I bought with my own money was a 45 record of Madonna’s “Material Girl” (backed with the tragically overlooked “Pretender”), and for a short period in the early 1990s, I came home from school every afternoon and spent the hour and a half before my dad came home from work, lipsynching to Bette Midler’s Joplinesque performances in The Rose and singing Mama Cass Elliot’s parts in the songs of The Mamas and the Papas or imagining myself in the spot occupied by Mary in a folksinging trio: Peter, Paul, and Mattie. If, as Koestenbaum writes, “the singer staring into the mirror, practicing for a career, occupies a dubious, unsanctioned, pathologized position: the narcissist,” (168) what of the teenage lipsynching queer in a small rural town? Every musical utterance contains bits of narcissism; to perform is to be ok with—to desire—to-be-looked-at-ness. But to lipsynch, in the living room or the basement or the bathroom, to imagine the stage, to respond to the applause on a concert recording as if they were your own, this is not quite narcissism. Desire. Fantasy. Escapism. To riff on Ru Paul, I lipsynched for my life, to unshackle myself from an oppressive, rural, fundamentalist environment that taught me to despise myself, no matter how loving my family, no matter how supportive my friends. Growing up gay in the rural south, marked as Other in so many visible ways: weak, four-eyed, musical, queer. It’s a miracle any of us make it out alive.

It’s 1997, and I am a freshman at Berry College in rural West Georgia. I live on the third floor of Dana Hall with  my boyfriend, Jonathan (there’s a story there, for later). Our mutual friend and fellow music major, La, gives me a CD that I absolutely must listen to, so I bring it down from the Music Castle (seriously, look at the Berry website) to our room. Without thinking, I open the case and put the disc into the player (I’m feeling rather nostalgic in the Mp3 age). I am completely unprepared for what I hear.

“I am on a lonely road, and I am traveling…looking for something. What can it be?”

The first sound is an unassuming strum across some sort of string instrument, a short intro, and these words, that voice. In a single phrase, this woman summarized every feeling I’ve experienced in eighteen years. She knows me. She understands how I feel; she sings my experiences. I’ve found my diva. I’m a Joni Junkie for life.

Contextualizing Blue

1971 is a pivotal year in the history of singer-songwriters. A brief list of genre-defining albums from that year includes Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor, eponymous debuts by Judee Sill,  Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and Carly Simon, Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat, Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, John Lennon’s Imagine, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?, and Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey.

Also release in 1971, Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, holds a place of esteem among many enduring records from that year. Recorded during a time of emotional upheaval for the singer-composer, Blue is perhaps Mitchell’s best known and widely revered album. It is also one of her most emotionally charged and musically rich works. A well-worn anecdote recounted in countless sources including the documentary Woman of Heart & Mind (Susan Lacy, 2003), finds Kris Kristofferson listening to the album; as it ends, he urges Mitchell to “save something for yourself.”

The song cycle is a queer genre, difficult to describe, analyze. There are no hard and fast rules. Some, Schubert’s Winterreise and Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -Leben are subject to much scholarly discussion in terms of traditional musical analysis as well as from perspectives inspired by gender studies. These three are intimate affairs, initially intended for salon performance. By contrast, the cycles of Mahler, Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Das Lied von der Erde achieve symphonic proportions. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire fuses German cabaret with early-twentieth-century avant-gardism. While each of these song cycles achieves its own sort of internal cohesion, whether through musical, lyrical, or other means, generalization across song cycles are difficult to make. Thus, it is almost necessary to deal with each on its own terms ad hoc.

 In popular music, the term “concept album” frequently acts as stunt double for “song cycle,” and the concept album, too, is a frustratingly inconsistent term. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is often cited as a major concept album, but in truth, the “concept” disappears after the second track, “With a Little Help From My Friends” and makes an obligatory return at the end in a reprise of the title track, but the efficacy of the reprise is undermined by the transition into “A Day in the Life.” The album is, unquestionably, a milestone in popular music, but its conceptual foundation—that is, its status as a “concept” album—is pretty shaky. The “white” album suffers from a similar lack of consistency, though some people want it to be fall into the “concept” genre as well. Other examples, Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1982) or The Who’s Tommy  (1969) fit more neatly into the rock opera genre as they are dramatic works with a discernible plot, cast of characters, and dare I say, symphonic musical forces. The song cycle might be narrative/plot focused with discernible developments in character, or it may be thematic, a collection of works around a central theme or idea. The song cycle/concept album is necessarily an intimate affair, what used to be called chamber or parlor music. Like the Schubert and Schumann examples, there is typically a single protagonist/performer, and the songs reflect on his/her emotional state. There is a strong connection between the voice and accompanying instrument(s), and the effect of such cycles is often that of eavesdropping or invading one’s privacy, hearing their diary sung aloud.

Musicology and music theory—at least some corners of the disciplines—privilege cohesion and unity. At the level of lyric, Blue achieves a consistency with its pursuit of the titular color. Furthermore, its lyrics cover a narrative arch, from the giggly beginning of romance undercut with self-doubt to the closing scene of a woman sitting in the alone in the dark corner of a café. Between these two poles, Mitchell travels across the country and around the globe fleeing the blues only to find that wherever she travels, her dissatisfaction follows close behind. Thematically, then, Blue may be thought of as more than just a collection of songs.

In this, it stands out from many of its 1971 peers. For instance, Tapestry, perhaps the best selling singer-songwriter album, is a collection of amazing Carole King tunes, but it does not possess (or aspire to possess) the thematic/narrative cohesion of a song cycle or concept album. What’s Going On? emphasizes issues of social injustice, poverty, and racism in the African American community and utilizes harmonic, lyrical/thematic, and some melodic repetition to maintain cohesion. Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry (1969) seems an obvious predecessor for Blue, as does Mitchell’s third album, Ladies of the Canyon (1970), which focuses on experiences in Los Angeles.

Lest it appear that I personally value cohesion as the mark of interesting or valuable music, let me note that I am not positing cohesion as a musical virtue. It just happens to characterize Blue and some of the other concept albums. However, other non-cohesive albums (Tapestry for example) are brilliant for other reasons. Blue happens to emphasize blue in both lyrics and some musical gestures, and that is part of what makes it an interesting album. However, it is discontinuous in other ways. The progression of key areas [a term I use because much of Mitchell’s music is modal in a variety of ways. For a discussion of this, see Whitesell’s The Music of Joni Mitchell] does not follow any sort of expected tonal pattern, though this expectation may be a relic of art music rather than a characteristic of the song cycle or popular music. Nor does there seem to be any particular consistency in the ensemble makeup of each track. The album opens buoyantly with “All I Want,” with Mitchell on dulcimer and James Taylor on guitar and features the only multi-tracking on the entire album (a brief chorus of Jonis in the final verse). Three tracks later, Stephen Sills adds bass and guitar to Mitchell’s dulcimer on “Carey,” and three tracks after that, on “This Flight Tonight.” The remaining songs feature Mitchell accompanying herself with guitar, dulcimer, or piano. So, consistency of ensemble is not necessarily a contributing factor.

The title is ambiguous: blue. A color, a state of mind, a musical genre, a period in Picasso’s career, sadness. The cover art, a close up of Mitchell’s face saturated in deep indigo offers no specifics, only the visual manifestation of this small word with so many meanings. In some ways, the album is an exercise in just how blue Blue can be. Blue recurs as a sort of motif in the lyrics to many of the songs:

“All I Want,” : then we both get so blue

“My Old Man,”: keeping away my blues…but when he’s gone, me and them lonesome blues                                             collide

“Little Green,”: So, you write him a letter and say, “Her eyes are blue”

“Blue,” : Blue, songs are like tattoos….Blue, here is a song for you…Blue, I love you

“California,” : All the news at home you read just gives you the blues

“A Case of You,”: The blue TV screen light

In other places, blue is present by its conspicuous absence. A song like “River,” about feeling blue, abounds with cool winter imagery: a frozen landscape, loneliness at the holidays, escape.   “The Last Time I Saw Richard” is saturated in the same blue TV screen light that first appears in the hotel bar in “A Case of You.”  The action in “This Flight Tonight” is set against the inky darkness of the midnight (blue) sky, and “Carey” dances beside the brilliant blue sea on the coast of Matalla. More obliquely, blue is evoked through juxtaposition with other colors: it is an ingredient required to make “Little Green,” a counterpart to the bright red devil of “Carey.” 

I should also note that the colors blue and green make appearances on a number of tracks by singer-songwriters during this era. In “Your Song,” Elton John/Bernie Taupin ask us to “excuse me forgetting, but these things I do, you see I’ve forgotten if they’re green or they’re blue.” A little later in the decade, the speaker in Janis Ian’s “Jesse” has recently cleaned all her blues and her greens. The two colors are buried in the title song, “Blue,” and “Little Green.” There are other 1970s examples of lyrical references to blue and green, though at the moment, I have no idea what these colors might mean in that historical moment.

Mitchell’s melodies are punctuated with expressive blue notes, graceful melismatic filigree, and bluesy seventh chords. The album’s stark textures, frequently just Mitchell accompanied by her own guitar or piano, contribute to the album’s sense of blue melancholy. The icy accompaniment of “River,” skins a familiar Christmas carol to a frozen ostinato over a series of descending left-hand arpeggios that sink and settle into a decidedly blue mood, and the moody piano prelude of “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” act almost synesthesially, grumbling like the figure described in the final stanza, sitting alone with “nobody coming over to my table. I got nothing to talk to anybody about.” The punchy dulcimer playing which accompanies her loves sick letter home, “California,” throws her melancholy into further relief. The Picardy third at the end of the title is a futile smile pinned onto a Dear John letter carefully written in indigo.

Regardless of whether or not the album coheres in any sort of musicological/music-theoretical way, I have adored this album for a bit more than a decade now. I’m a lyrics person without a doubt, and the poetry on Blue is simple, direct, and frequently breathtaking. In “My Old Man,” Mitchell looks around her empty house, feeling the absence of her lover in ever crevasse, “the bed’s too big; the frying pan’s too wide.” The final word is subject to a bit of painting, as Mitchell’s vibrato gently broadens. “A Case of You” is an exercise in contrasts. In the first verse, she sings a heartbreaking story of love so intoxicating it turns toxic with a stunned and almost cold voice until the final punch line, “if you want me, I’ll be in the bar.” And “All I Want” abounds with the contradictions of love: I hate you some; I love you some when I forget about me; I wanna talk to you. I wanna shampoo you. I wanna renew you again and again.” Every song offers another example, so I’ll stop there as I think I’ve heaped enough praises on an already-canonical album.

Each time I put it on Blue, I am transported back to that third floor dorm room in Rome, Georgia, to the moment when an album, recorded almost a decade before I was born, revealed something about myself to me. As I accrue experiences, love & loss, joy & sorrow, this record continues to reveal new depths. From the moody basement of despair to a brilliant springtime sky, listening to this record makes me feel so Blue, but I don’t mind….

a musicologist-in-training in its natural habitat

Reflections on going home for the holidays

Once upon time, there was a family held together by invisible threads, thin and irritable as nerve endings. Not one could, or would, acknowledge these fragile tethers, so each pulled greedily on them, taking for granted the sharp tug, like a needle in the eye, and the inevitable snap. Then came a strange season of pain and of glass, a barrow full of stones, and the synaptic clusters of biology began to tear apart, not gently and not (yet) completely. Some died; others scattered; others yet remained exactly where they were, stopped the clocks and the motors at precisely the moment when…..

My mother communicates in obituaries, her voice a feathered intensity, her eyes serious and sad. We are sitting in a newly constructed chain restaurant in my rural North Georgia hometown which hasn’t been “home” for more than a decade. Every visit inevitably leads to this litany of losses, some hers, some ours, others not. All remote to me, like names lost in an historic cataclysm or the faces of my peers, Class of ‘97 grown unrecognizable to me now through meth or childbirth. I think, “If I hear the phrase ‘things will never be the same again’ again, I’ll stab this fork in my eye just to change the fucking subject,” but I never do it.  The places in my past I’ve eradicated with a thick black marker. Self-censorship. A major difference between us: she feels each loss. I forget them.

Christmas, 2010. the first christmas snow in a north georgia a century. my parents, too, are frozen. the only point on which my brother and i are in accord, though we dispute the particulars. Sometimes I feel like a brotherless child. Most of the time, I have a past-tense brother, ten years senior. he is alive but dead to me. we see past, not through, one another, for seeing through implies an intimacy that penetrates like an airport scanner, through the outer layers to something inside. I look at my past-tense brother and see a shadow, a faded human being, a negative against which i’ve judged my actions for most of my life: he did X, i’ll do its opposite. I am an only child to most people. I do not know what he sees if he sees me. We are brothers in biology only. We have no special inside.

I have cousins I never speak to; I have cousins I cannot speak to. They are malicious, indifferent, and some simply do not know me nor I them. I have a cousin exactly my age whose child was born near Christmas day, and I had no idea she was pregnant. I have a cousin whose mouth makes me hate her. I have  a cousin with whom I spent one awkward summer trying to befriend; in high school, he gave me a ride to school, though I cannot remember why. Except at a funeral, that was the last time we spoke. I have cousins my anti-brother’s age who probably have no idea I finished high school, finished college, finished grad school, and am in line to finish a PhD. I have cousins who probably do not know what grad school is or understand why I would hitch myself to something as ridiculous as a PhD anymore than I understand their various decisions, miseries, and joys. Sometimes, i understand their disbelief.

Inside everyone who escapes the terrible gravity of a small southern town is a fear. i hear it in the voices of my friends, the ones I only speak to on special occasions (their wedding; the graduation; an impromptu reunion in Atlanta). We seldom speak of home and introduce one another to CurrentLife Friends as “someone i’ve known forever” or “someone from Georgia” but never “my friend from that same delicious hell hole from which we clamored-till-our-fingernails-splintered to escape and never looked back.” We are mirrors of one another. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe they refer to me as their high school friend. I should talk to one of them and find out.

Inside every gay someone who escapes the terrible gravity of a small southern town is fear-tempered jubilation. I hear it in their voices, and I see it in their faces, even through the perfectly posed Facebook shots. Though i feel a kinship with them, I am also bitter. Sometimes, I hate them. For not being out. For not being there. For not being as stupid-or-brave as I was. Sometimes, I feel superior because I was out in that damn small town, and I faced the jeers and the taunts and the occasional threats of physical danger and managed to keep my glasses square on my face, intact, and I know that’s where I learned to be indifferent. That’s when I started building the switch that could immediately turn off my warmest affections. That’s when I learned to be a stone cold bitch. That’s when I first tried to commit emotional suicide, something I still manage to roll out a few times a year. There were, in my hometownhell, me, E, D, S, B, J, S (now reformed), C (now deceased), and probably M-though-unconfirmed and now living in a conspicuous mid-western city. I do not doubt others, too, but in a high school of less than 500, that seems like a lot. Or it does in retrospect. One Christmas, in about 1999, I got an email from B saying he was out, living in Atlanta, gay-as-hell, and “thank you for your courage. I am only now beginning to understand.” I’ve managed to migrate that email from every account I’ve ever had since then. I have a printed copy stashed in a yearbook, and though it probably seems self-congratulatory, I memorized that last part. It meant something to me. I guess it still does.

In  spite of this, I am not brave and do not consider myself remarkable for having been out there. It was not a decision based on bravery, politics, or a desire to see positive change in an oppressive environment. It happened through naivety. Though I found out later that my parents were staunchly anti-gay, they’d never discussed it with me until I came out to them. They’ve never been particularly happy about it, and since about 2000, we simply do. not. mention. it. Ever. They’ve met boyfriends and utilized every euphemism in the lexicon to justify my unseemly attraction to the wrong sex. I am thirty-two.

During a season of pain, everyone dies, and the living are charged with, well, exactly that: living. Grief becomes selfish when it atrophies the heart. The dead want us to continue living. Instead, the parents of this ragged family skate razor loops around the cemetery, bloodying their feet to stumps; their once benevolent faces strain as each step slices, bleeds, and never heals.

I don’t like new music. There. I said it. I do not like new music. At thirty-two, I am a dinosaur patrolling a canon that I enshrined during my formative years based on music of the 70s and 80s. We become what we hate, and I’ve become a snob.
Now, that’s out of the way.

While watching the 2010 American Music Awards (AMAs) a while back, I ran into some old acquaintances, namely my pronounced bias against many things that fall under the category of “new.” Though I am committed to the project of understanding and articulating my likes and dislikes as they pertain to music—the sign of a musicologist!—I am also prone to dismiss entire corners of “new” music because, to put it simply, they get on my nerves. Much in the avant-garde, electronic, and indie worlds, for example, gets swept out of the cluttered space in which I’ve constructed my own canon of mostly women-with-various instruments writing in what I cringe to hear classified as a “confessional” style. Nonetheless, people like Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Carly Simon, their peers, progeny, and imitators are frequently subject to such descriptions, and I have acquiesced to this misnomer to a certain degree. Some battles are not worth waging. Or at least not yet.

So, during the AMA ceremony, I came (their) voice to (my) ear with a lot of music I personally dislike: Katie Perry, Justin Bieber, Usher, Ke$ha (though I do love certain aspects of her persona, and “Tik Tok,” destined to be classic, will forever remind me of 2010), Taylor Swift, and The Black Eyed Peas to name just a few. The entire AMA broadcast was, to put it baldly, a shit show of epic proportions. Thrown in a shaky vocal performance by hair-metal icon Bon Jovi and a homoerotic, trans-generational NKOTBSB meta-boyband finale in which the New Kids proved that the stakes of boy band choreography have evolved considerably since the early 1990s and the BSBoys proved that all you need to make it is a (once) pretty face, and you have a recipe for everything that I, Adorno, and generations of skeptics would say is wrong with popular music. I kept waiting for someone to pull a Milli-Vanilli/Ashlee Simpson and bring the whole façade down in a lipsynch-gone-wrong that would make headlines this morning. Alas, my catastrophic reverie remained a cruel fantasy.

Though I find myself struggling to say something positive about the AMAs (and a lot of “new” music not represented last night), I am someone who takes popular music—which takes as its object what is, in some historical context, always “new”—seriously.

So, I must being the important business of asking myself, “Self, what is it about ‘new’ music that you don’t like? Indeed, is it the fact that it is, well, new?”
 Merriam-Webster defines new as follows:

• Having recently come into existence

• Having been seen, used, or known for only a short time

• Having been in a relationship or condition for short time

• Beginning as the resumption or repetition of a previous act or thing

• Different from one of the same category that existed before

Contrary to my own assertion, I can cross (1) off this list. There is a surprising amount of recently-released music that I actually love: Diane Birch, Nicole Atkins, Passion Pit, Florence and the Machine, and Josh Ritter come immediately to mind as people whose music I more than tolerate. Furthermore, many artists whose careers began before I was born continue to release music that I listen to incessantly: Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading, Bob Dylan, Hall & Oates, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Liza Minnelli, and a host of others that anyone who knows me will already know.

Category (2) encompasses a lot of older music that is, like a used car, “new to me.” So, it seems useful in a way that tugs against my condemnation of the new. Similarly, (3) could be stretched around the “new to me” category, rendering it part of my aesthetic arsenal. The final categories (4) and (5) suggest innovations, new iterations, or performances like the new production of Wagner’s Ring at the Met, and I definitely don’t’ find this type of newness egregious or offensive. So, what is it about “new” that I dislike?

In the world of art music, there is a category of “new” music which is generally applied to music composed between the twentieth century into the present. Doubtless, some of my composer and musicologist friends will disagree with my deployment of the word “new,” but I’ll stand by this definition. Much of the music in this necessarily broad category is stereotyped as “difficult,” non-melodic, ugly, elitist, and academic. While I’d hate to toss out some pieces and composers I love with the musicological bathwater (Berg, Webern, Strauss, Cage, Glass, Oliveros, Tower to throw out a few), there’s an awful lot of this sort of “new” music that I (a) don’t understand, (b) don’t like, or (c) gets on my fucking nerves.

Still, I keep running into something that irks me: the inability to articulate something I dislike. Well, I suppose I could lump most of those wretched AMA performances into a general “dance/pop” category; throw boy bands (NKOTB notwithstanding) Britney, Jessica, Mandy, Rhiana, and GaGa in there, and I’ve pretty much defined defined Thing I Dislike 1 through examples. Though, I suppose the category needs a timestamp, too, because I love dance pop from the 70s and 80s, and since I came of age during the Clinton Era, I have a soft spot for a lot of music, pre-1997 (the year I started college, met Blue, and totally foresook my generational soundtrack).

Thing I Dislike 2: Electronic music. This covers electronic art music, musique concrete, computer music, most indie dance music, most mainstream club music (house, trance, trip-hop) and anything that might fall under the “noise” rubric (with the notable exception of “quiet noise,” of the sort practiced by some of my colleage Wendy Hsu’s improv groups).This one is a little easier to explain. By and large, most of the time, I simply prefer the sound of acoustic instruments or electric ones played sans distortion or manipulation (60s psychedelic rock, noted exception).

So Thing 1 and Thing 2 are pretty general contours, and I’m sure you could pilfer my CD collection (or yours) and find evidence to refute my claim. I’ll go ahead and admit that I have Mandy Moore’s Coverage. I could justify it by saying I collect Joni Mitchell covers, but you’d say I was just using that as a convenient excuse. and who knows, you might be right!