Parlor Game

According to Roland Barthes, virtually all music criticism “is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective” (Image-Music-Text, p. 179). Seeking to find a new way to listen to music and a new way to write about what he hears, Barthes says about typical music criticism:

Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. (179)

For Barthes, adjectival music criticism—or what he later calls “predicative interpretation”—is the most common (“institutional”) form of critical writing about music. Predicative criticism typically perceives a piece of music as being simply a codified form of expression, to which the critic is obliged to ascribe an ethos (qualities and traits, i.e., adjectives).

Having picked up at the bookstore yesterday a remaindered copy ($3.98) of the hardcover edition of The New Rolling Stone Album Guide: Completely Revised And Updated Fourth Edition (2004), I thought I would test Barthes’ theory whether predicative interpretation inevitably resorts to the epithet. Since the potent tome purports to represent “three years of work by more than 70 writers and editors”—a declaration which I assume means a selected group of writers and editors—I think the book would qualify as a good indicator of common, or institutional, popular music criticism at the present time. Below I have reproduced a few passages from the book, on a particular musician, band, or album, which I think is illustrative of Barthes’ observations about music criticism’s penchant for the epithet. I have also selected few statements that I think are illustrative of how the critic seeks to identify an underlying ethos (traits, rendered as adjectives) in an individual piece of music.

On The Beatles:
It [Revolver] contains their prettiest music (“Here, There, and Everywhere”), their bitchiest (“And Your Bird Can Sing”), their friendliest (“I Want to Tell You”), and their scariest (the screaming-seagull acid-nightmare “Tomorrow Never Knows”). (53)

On Fleetwood Mac:
After striking such a perfect balance between self-expression and commercial appeal, Fleetwood Mac succumbed to studio artiness. The double-disc Tusk reveals Buckingham’s secret fixation: to become Brian Wilson with a touch of Brian Eno thrown in. (304)

On Daryl Hall & John Oates:
But it [Voices] did have “Kiss on My List,” a slick, bouncy #1 synth-pop smooch that taught Hall & Oates the way to make rock girls, disco girls, and new-wave girls scream together. (359)

On Kiss:
Kiss’ early albums are thin, cruddy-sounding hard rock recorded on the cheap, with only occasional lapses into catchiness. . . . (461)

On Led Zeppelin:
The [cover] image [of the band’s first album] did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe, and things blowing up. (479)

On Midnight Oil:
…The Oils’ U. S. debut, 10, 9, 8 is a stunning, sunbaked answer to London Calling. Midnight Oil’s ferocious jeremiad against corporate greed and American military imperialism is powered by the apocalyptic delivery of bald singing colossus Peter Garrett and the twin-guitar assault of Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey. (541)

On Ted Nugent:
“Journey to the Center of the Mind” (1968) would be just another pleasant psychedelic excursion without that lead guitar: Nugent makes the instrument snarl and stutter like a Harley-Davidson in low gear, shifting into a high-pressure whoosh on the solo breaks. (594)

On Neutral Milk Hotel:
Although psychedelic retro-pop and neohippie experimentalism defined the cadre of affiliated bands known as Elephant 6 . . . Jeff Magnum’s Neutral Milk Hotel stands out as the unique, even visionary, one of the collective—and the most enigmatic. (579)

On Ratt:
Ratt may be the platonic ideal of ‘80s pop metal/hard rock. (679)

On Patti Smith:
Teeming with ambition, primitivism, anybody-can-do-this chutzpah, and casual androgyny, Horses demands a reaction. (751)

On Warren Zevon:
With a head filled with ideas lifted from “cyber-punk” paperbacks and an imposing synthesizer arsenal, Zevon [with the album Transverse City] set out to do for art rock what he had done for the singer/songwriter movement—kick it in the ass. (905)

Let’s play a game: Try to revise each of the above epithets without employing any adjective at all or without the various traits attributed to the individual piece of music, and also without the various conceptually elusive taxonomies (e.g., “'80s pop metal/hard rock,” “psychedelic retro-pop,” “neohippie experimentalism”), and see what you’re left with.

Pop Quiz

I’ve noticed pop-ups consisting of “IQ Tests” seem to have become ubiquitous on the web lately, an interesting phenomenon that I cannot let go unremarked. For behind every pop-up window (every advertisement) there’s a product pleading for an avid consumer, inviting him or her to participate in a process that Louis Althusser called interpellation, the process by and through which individuals are constructed as “subjects” when they are forced to respond to the solicitations of ideology: “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection.” Pop-up windows frequently contain requests for individuals to respond to a question or questions, that is, they contain a quiz (a form of entertainment based on questions and answers). Quizzes function “phatically,” to use linguist Roman Jakobson’s term, by which he meant a type of (verbal) communication that implies nothing more than a simple willingness to converse (for instance, talking about the weather with your neighbor). Hence quizzes select, establish, and ultimately decide the kinds of knowledge (“bodies of knowledge”) that any particular culture, or subculture, considers “important,” marginalizing as irrelevant other kinds of knowledge. Determinations of importance, in turn, enable people to perform comfortably culturally symbolic gestures such as the expression of (preferred) taste; in turn, preferred tastes serve to enable (support and encourage) consumption and consumptive patterns—watch HGTV sometime. Or better yet, open the pages of any popular music publication. You are likely to find within its pages a quiz—which serves the same interpellative function as a pop-up window. Hence the quiz and the pop-up window are parts of the same communicative network that channels communication into consumption. Quizzes are simply pop-ups in disguise.

Bathroom Humor

Jacques Lacan observed that public life in the Western world, rather like the majority of primitive communities, is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. The bathroom serves the function of sorting society into men and women. Ludwig Wittgenstein once told a few of his students that one of his strongest childhood memories was the bathroom of his parents’ house, in which on the wall there was a discolored patch of broken plaster that suggested a sort of terrifying duck. No wonder, then, that he was attracted to the theory of the “duck-rabbit”: he wished to transform that demonic duck into a friendly rabbit. And perhaps the most influential work of the twentieth century is Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal.

Today’s date should remind us that in the history of rock the principle of urinary segregation led to one of its more celebrated episodes, one that took place in England at a roadside petrol station on Stratford’s Romford Road. In the late evening hours of 18 March 1965, a Daimler carrying Rolling Stones’ members Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, and Brian Jones, their chauffeur and various others, pulled up to the station. Bill Wyman got out and asked the manager, Charles Keeley, for permission to use the toilet. Wyman was told by Mr. Keeley that the public toilet was out of order, and he wasn’t about to let the long-haired Wyman and the rest of the motley crew use the staff bathroom. The need to urinate being rather severe, Wyman, Jagger and Jones out of necessity relieved themselves against a nearby wall, violating Mr. Keeley’s sense of public decorum. At a hearing the following July, the three Rolling Stones were each fined 5 pounds, roughly equivalent at the time to about 8 dollars. Subsequently, the toilet contributed to the rock community sorting itself out into rival camps: there was the Beatles camp (clean and wholesome), and the Rolling Stones camp (dirty and dangerous).

Of course, the toilet has always figured highly in both the formation of rock culture (urinary segregation as a consequence of racial segregation in the South in which Elvis grew up; Elvis would later die in his bathroom) and in its depiction (George Michael being charged with “lewd conduct” in a public toilet in Los Angeles in 1998). In order to commemorate March 18 as the day which acknowledges our social practice of urinary segregation, I have assembled the following playlist, to be listened to, of course, in addition to the Rolling Stones’ album Beggars Banquet (1968; pictured).

Ten Songs Of The Commode:
She Came In Through the Bathroom Window – The Beatles
Norwegian Wood (“I . . . crawled off to sleep in the bath”) – The Beatles
Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room – Brownsville Station
God’s Own Drunk (“I wasn’t . . . commode huggin’ drunk”) – Jimmy Buffett
Mirror in the Bathroom – The English Beat
Bathroom Wall – Faster Pussycat
Rockstar (“And a bathroom I can play baseball in”) – Nickelback
Rock ‘n’ Roll Toilet – The Soft Boys
867-5309/Jenny – Tommy Tutone
Why Does It Hurt when I Pee? (“I got it from the toilet seat”) – Frank Zappa

Update (3/18/09, 4:25 p.m. DST) – Subterranean outhouse blues: Apparently some of Bob Dylan’s Malibu neighbors are complaining about a portable toilet that has sat for seven months on the singer-songwriter’s estate. They say at night the sea breeze delivers odors strong enough to drive people from their bedrooms; see the complete story in the L. A. Times about the ghastly smell blowin’ in the wind here.