Tag Archives: music

Are we Done Collecting?

Capture digital sampleOwnership of the thing itself—an urgency that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a fading passion.

I wonder about the future of the personal library: those numerous shelves lined with books and music that still line the walls of many of our homes. Owning a physical copy of the work of a writer or performer was, until recently, a sometimes obsessive pursuit for devoted listeners and readers. For many these displays of neatly organized works are a badge of honor, meant in part to suggest membership in certain aesthetic tribes within the culture.

I’m writing in a room cluttered with stuffed bookcases.  It’s the same in other parts of the house, where CD cases sit on table tops and stand upright on shelves.  We are clearly vestiges of the Edison past. In the early days of recording the idea of capturing sound was completely engrossing. Thomas Edison was as much in awe of the idea as everyone else. Add in the possibility of owning a disk of a performance that could be played at will, and the nation collectively swooned at the chance. Shellac cylinders and flat disks soon became their own fetishized possessions. Every middle class parlor had a record player and a growing collection of relatively expensive 78 r.p.m. records. Jump ahead several generations well into the 1990s and teens were still heirs to this passion of record collecting. British novelist Nick Hornby enshrined three clearly recognizable obsessives in his wonderful 1995 book, (and, later, a film) High Fidelity.  In our own ways we were Jack Black:  voracious readers of album liner-notes, and dead-certain of what to display with pride and what to hide.

Ownership is its own reward: something many of us still feel as we purchase a book we will read and perhaps re-read at a later time.

The personalized library has been memorialized by the wealthy with its own room in turn-of-the-century mansions. The rest of us starting  out as impoverished students usually exercised the less baroque option of bookcases made from bricks and boards. In either case books were considered intellectual and decorating necessities.  Their presence meant that you were a serious collector.  Robert Pirsig on one shelf and Miles Davis on another conferred status.

Now the tide has receded. To more younger consumers in most places (except Japan, with its continuing love of CDs) these music and print libraries seem to be an anachronism, like the player-piano rolls I remember as a child collecting dust in a corner of my grandmother’s lace-curtained living room. Digital “natives” are just as happy essentially leasing access to commercial libraries, such as those offered by Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple and others.  Even the e-book, which is sold as the digital equivalent of a hard copy, is never quite the owner’s in the ways that the paper version is.  It can’t be easily loaned or resold because its storage is usually in a proprietary “cloud.”  Digital “immigrants” used to owning works are not quite convinced that we will have access to the work in perpetuity. A cloud-based purchase of an author’s book or a composer’s symphony seems less permanent.

Communication scholar Joshua Meyrowitz partly explains what has changed in his use of the phrase, “the Association factor.”  When we own a hard copy of another’s work—when it is in our physical possession—we more readily identify ourselves with it.  It’s an artifact tied to our identity, an outward representation of our place on the human map.  So if I am carrying around a copy of a particular novel or have a copy of music cd sitting in the living room, I’m probably prepared to defend its presence in my space.  I’ve “associated” myself with it. By contrast, a person may feel no responsibility to defend a song that presents itself to houseguests on Spotify. The lease of a channel of media content seems less personal than outright ownership, even though custom music sources have the advantage of opening our ears to much larger libraries.

My own adult children are mostly consumers of these digital services, and just as passionate in their own ways about their music and books as earlier generations. But ownership of the thing itself—a fact that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a passing signifier of the avid appreciator. No doubt that for many modern consumers walls of CDs and books look archaic. Why hold “hard” copies if they are all available in digitized files?  Perhaps the only answer is that some books and performances are too precious to not hold in one’s hands.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

Through a Vale of Tears: The Story-Song

Joni Mitchell in 1974 Wikipedia.org
Joni Mitchell in 1974  
               Wikipedia.org

To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself more accessible to others. Perhaps this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Are there spheres of communication that have a perfect form?  Are there ways to express the nearly inexpressible? These are grand but interesting questions with at least a partial answer. One plausible way to adding meaning to a message is to carry its burdens in two dimensions: for example, in words and images, or in words and music.  Sometimes it seems like the world increasingly prefers the first option.  We have seemingly insatiable appetites for even bad video and film, with even worse sound.  But I keep coming back to the revelatory power of the other pairing centered on the aural: words and music. The combination can suddenly make apparent what cannot be made visible or represented in language alone.

The song–from folk to opera–is potentially expression times three: words laid within the “hooks” of melodies, modulated in attention-getting  triads within major or minor keys, and sometimes set literally to the rhythm of the heart. The effect is both poetic and disclosive, nudging the voice into a registers that seem to make the soul more transparent. To sing is to have the self confidence to make oneself  more accessible emotionally. I’d like to think this is what Augustine meant when he said that “the person who sings prays twice.”

Story-songs are a special case. Lately they’ve been celebrated in feature films such as the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), as well as popular documentaries such as Laura Archibald’s Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation (2013).  And while it’s hard to avoid being hopelessly reductive when discussing music, it’s relentless pull on our attention  still manages to bait us into the effort. Bears have honey.  We have music.

Narrative ideas are sometimes worked out in so-called “concept albums.” Cabaret singer Nancy Lamott’s My Foolish Heart (1993) has a string of pieces that start with a couple’s first infatuation (The Best is Yet to Come) and ends 10 songs later in a relationship that is spent, the broken couple dividing up their books as they prepare to move on (Where do you Start?).  

The story-song goes even further to construct its own three act play, often in very personal terms.  And if there’s not always a full third act, there is at least the expressive power bound in a sequence of events cast in the prose of personal biography. Few working in this more intimate  style settle for the kinds of statements of sheer romantic bliss that iconic writers of the Great American Songbook took as their norm. Instead, the best are individualized narratives that still manage to tap feelings we already know. The story-song offers a para-history:  partly someone else’s biography and–because of the empathy  a fragment of sentiment evokes–partly ours as well. The effect can be transformative. The mingling of words and music in three or four chords can be more precious to its listeners than multi-million dollar films that often squander their mandates to tell a compelling story.

Identifying classics of this form will always be an idiosyncratic exercise. Story songs have obviously sprung from everywhere, including Southern Appalachia (Iris DeMent’s Our Town), the folk revivals of the 1960s and 70s (Bob Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D), Nashville (Taylor Swift’s Love Story), and even suburbia (Richard Shindell’s Hazel’s House).

There are so many songs that could be called iconic.  Everybody’s playlist is different and not to be dismissed. Consider a small sample:

For a full three-act narrative there’s Marty Robbins’ 1959 ballad, El Paso. To say that it got its share of airplay in its time is an understatement.  Robbins wrote it for his Gunfighter Ballads, album, doing in four minutes what the popular horse operas of the day spread over 90.  It retains the same masculine form emphasizing action over feelings as Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976). Lightfoot put to music the widely known drama of a Great Lakes freighter lost in a fierce Lake Superior storm.

Sometimes story-songs seem take us very close to a writer’s past, such as Dar Williams After all (2000), It recounts a family in disarray, and her subsequent bouts of depression as a younger woman.  Some of the same kind of despair exists in The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York (1987), where the alcohol-induced meltdown of the Irish group seems to be happening during the recording.

Kris Kristofferson once said to Joni Mitchell that she was maybe too biographical in her music: “Oh Joni – save something of yourself,” he cautioned after hearing one of her sets decades ago.  Her Night Ride Home (1991) avoids the darker cast of so much of her output. It it she simply celebrates the freedom of heading out with her friends in the band after a successful performance.  No cares or phones.

Two story-songs deserve special mention for the sheer beauty of their visions. One is Shindell’s, Wisteria.  If ever a song catches an adult’s wistful sense of a place he once knew, this might be it.  And there is also Michael Peter Smith’s The Dutchman (1968), an earnest folk song in the tradition of its era, and a surprisingly touching story of an aging couple trying to hold on. Woods Tea Company found the perfect venue to record it, using the kind of coffee house intimacy the ballad demands.

Story-songs usually have a melancholy cast. Ironically, they give pleasure by taking us through endless cycles of suffering and release.  In our world they are perhaps the closest counterpart to “the vale of tears” a Christian is said to pass through on the path to a better life.

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Thanks to my daughter, Hilary Woodward, for introducing some of these songs to me.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu