Music as Catharsis: The Search to Reunify the Self

We—you, me, and everyone else—are bifurcated subjects: the subject that speaks and the subject that is spoken of, which creates a largely unknowable breach in the Self that we are all constantly attempting to define, whether we are conscious of that search or not; this breach is the unconscious, the gray fuzzy center of what we are at our core. I believe that musicians, and artists in general, attempt to rectify, to understand this gap through their chosen medium of expression: their art form. This is an extremely personal journey and people are drawn to the type of music that embodies the journey that is most like their own. This attraction is based on many factors that, I believe, stem from a certain element of alienation that is endemic of and intrinsic to contemporary culture in particular, and can partially be traced to the steaming pile of horse shit that we call the media. As like people gravitate towards like journeys, they begin to congregate, to coalesce and this is the point at which a “scene” begins to develop. To put this in the terminology preferred by Catherine Belsey, music interpellates people as they attempt to construct themselves into cohesive units, which is a variegated system of communication (both within and outside of the barriers of language) that can be diagramed as follows:

                        TRADITION – - – ARTIST- – - – MUSIC – - – - AUDIENCE.

Which is to say, an artist draws upon his/her experiences and the fundamental historicized legacies that comprise them, distills them into a song as a form of catharsis, then shares that cathartic creation with his/her audience who in turn reap the benefits of their own catharsis by identifying with that journey and being surrounded by people who are reaping the same benefits.

At a point, the authenticity of this relationship between the artist(s) and the audience is called into question. Once a band is hyped, signed to a major label, and commodified, something is lost; people begin to follow the artist(s) based not upon a genuine connection with their journey, but rather for the “coolness” factor of the associated scene. This is, consequently, the death of any meaningful extraction: it has been co-opted by popular culture and its original intention has been bastardized. Video killed the radio star. The precise location of this bastardization is difficult to pin point and, therefore, is entirely subjective. Personally, once Middle America (the red states) has picked up on an indie rock artist I tend to lose faith in its authenticity, but that’s because I’m an indie music snob.  

Monthly Mix: June

Tom Waits: “Bottom of the World”

Fleet Foxes

: “Mykonos”

Zsammy: “Your Chest Is Not Moving”

She Keeps Bees: “Stutter”

Wolf Parade: “Shine A Light”

Carlos Knight (aka Richie Cunning): “Champion of My Heart”

Introduction: Wallpaper

As always, I try to bring you, the three whole people who actually read this thing, the latest in my musical obsessions. Blahg audience, this is Wallpaper. Wallpaper, this is an underprivileged blahg audience. Now that the formal introductions have been dispensed with, here is Wallpaper’s music video for their song T-Rex:

Call me crazy, but I laughed myself senseless on this one. Equally crazy is how well this format translates to live performances; this act killed it at Bottom of the Hill. Their video blogs are also quite entertaining:

You either love ‘em, or you hate ‘em. My advice to you is: don’t be a hater; spread the love.

Music of the Now, For the Future

t’s coming on summer. Oh, yes it is. I can feel the train a comin’, and it’s fueled by restless, pensive coal leaving in its wake a trail of thick black tempestuous melodies–veritable rays of lurid, soothing aches and jives. Which is not to say the lighter fare has entirely disappeared from the landscape. No, oh no, my friends. This is the summertime, where the livin’ is easy and the musical horizons are as variegated as they are attainable, for a change. San Francisco is oozing with rhythmic temptations in the months to come:

 

•                    June 18: The Fratellis at The Fillmore
•                    June 19: The Dodos at The Independent
•                    June 20: Toy Soldiers at Bottom of the Hill (attending)
•                    June 24: Robert Francis at Cafe du Nord
•                    July 6: We Are Scientists at The Independet
•                    July 15: Citay at Cafe du Nord
•                    July 17: Ride the Blinds at Bottom of the Hill
•                    July 19: Earlimart at Cafe du Nord
•                   July 22: Grand Ole Party at Bottom of the Hill (attending)
•                   July 23: The Duke Spirit at Bottom of the Hill
•                   July 24: The Paper Sons at Cafe du Nord
•                   July 29: Rocky Votolato at Bottom of the Hill (attending)

 

Although this is clearly a mere smattering of concerts, and one obviously cannot account for the specifics of individual palates, I’ve done my best to select and suggest those which I personally savor.

In particular, if you like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but wished Karen Oh’s voice was a little smoother, less abrasive and polished with an infusion of sultry blues: Grand Ole Party is a show you shouldn’t miss; this band and their album Humanimals has found an incessant repetition on my iPod: “Look Out Young Son” is raunchy in the most delicate of ways, with it’s simple beats that keep driving you and the song forward getting under your skin in a way that will make you ache to move. Suffice to say, I saw these guys at Bottom of the Hill some months ago and they brought the house down. Plus, the lead singer is also the drummer: awesomely seductive combo.

 

Moving on, Rocky Votolato is the man who set my feet to the pavement; he’s the man who inspired me to correlate the music in my head to the abstracted hues in front of my eyes at the very tip of my fingertips and nose. There’s something modestly epic about the banal, emotional topics he sings about. Yes, his music is melancholic sometimes to its own detriment, but this neo-folk genre has its time and its place, and Votolato inhabits his musical space admirably. Although I haven’t seen him live yet (and his youtube posts leave me a bit skeptical about the strength of his vocals on stage), I’ve heard nothing but good reviews from my people who have previously attended: we will see come July.

In brief, some bands to look up in your spare wanderings on Facebook and Myspace are the following:

Peck the Town Crier, “Underwear”: this is a white boy’s version of Sir Mix Alot’s “I Like Big Butts;” Goes down smooth with a bottle of Corona and shrimp tacos.

Texacala, “Skull Mountain”: fuck yes. That’s all I have to say. This is a strangely arousing, bad-ass broad. Thank you, Texas.

Thao Nguyen: if this girl gets some air time, she’s gonna hit and imbed herself in the car stereos of teenage girls all over this big rock-candy country. She’s got the chops, she’s got the pith: bubbly with a little bit of Hawaiian soul.

The Dodos: they’re just plain good. Plus, they offer you a chance to see how many instruments your attuned ear can actually identify. Although not the most intellectual in the lyric department (not un-intellectual, mind you), this is music that is arranged in an interestingly intelligent way. Go see their show in San Francisco; from my experience, this is the kind of music that translates well to a live format.

From the Clay: two words–good, free downloads. Not to discourage you from buying their album (which I highly recommend), but it’s rare to find a group who will put up decent songs for free. They’re quirky. They’re music is so beautiful it’s almost ugly, precisely because they don’t go for the obvious melodies and rhymes. Magnificent. This is one of my current obsessions: a little bit country, a little bit rock n’ roll, a little bit blues.

Toy Soldiers: go see this band at Bottom of the Hill. There is a movement afoot in music: all the best are coming out of the middle of the country–Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.– not necessarily the coasts that have dominated for so long–Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco. Maybe isolation is key here, or perhaps their distance from the soothing waves of the ocean. Frankly, I don’t know but hopefully I’ll see you at the concert.

Concrete Jungles: Psychogeography

What we have in this city, in this life, is a series of doors. Each choice which leads to a door becomes the seed of a tree that branches outward and encases our personal interpretations of a city in individuated, uniquely variegated vines. The physical manifestations of these journeyed choices are sidewalks, and the ones we choose to tread–our vines–lead us to specified doors, which are the locations we find ourselves in, and “the seed,” the birthing place exists in the precise coordinates of where we stand at the beginning of our journey–our home base; or “the seed” can be fragmented out and expanded by allowing an inclusion of our daily beginnings all the way up to the hourly (or even down to the minute or the second) decisions.

A city’s sidewalks are the root of a psychogeographical mapping of emotive urban landscapes; it is what we literally connect with, concrete to sole to soul the reverberations of which allow us the relational exchange that enables this project; it is what facilitates our emotive journey, and in one sense it also physically mirrors it. Sidewalks are neither perfectly straight nor free from flaws, and they are often overlooked as an accepted necessity purely a function of the logarithms of life, of the human condition–merely a cog of infrastructure. Likewise, the paths that we choose are curved or, at the very least, unevenly graded and each negative experience such as losing a first love, the passing of a friend, the emergence of a foe–the weathering elements of our existence, put cracks on the surface and sometimes the pith of our metaphysical sidewalks.

Simply put, sidewalks get us where we want to go–they’ll get us there–and yet they are also what we become as we get there.

How do we soundtrack this discourse? There are songs about traveling–songs that use apropos terminology such as ramblin’, rolling, and the like–which are easy to apply since they explicitly address movement.; obvious connections, however, are not what concerns me: any schmuck can correlate Dean Martin with the Italian enclave in North Beach. In lieu of the obvious, approaching the notion of personalized sidewalks and the scenery they take us past through the lens of Erik Satie provides us with the correct tempo and the appropriate mind frame for psychogeographical intellection; these songs act as a kind of metronome to our remapping experience. 

Janne Mertanen plays Satie, Gnosienne No. 3

 

Satie, Gymnopedie No. 1

Music About Our Moment

youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0zjuxVAj9w]

This is a song by Simple Kid called “Average Man.” As a nation that seems to specialize in mediocrity, a ballad about the average seems to be an interesting dissection of identity. Highly underrated artist.

I love this man. This is a song by John Frusciante called “The Past Recedes.” He is responsible for every single part of his albums; he is all things at once. At one time he was at the brink of collapse (the same old drug infused story) and it seems his solo career brought him back. Think of this song in relation to the obsessive cultural need to catch a glimpse of the celebrity minutia, and the larger focus on minutia in general, which the video addresses with different visual snippets of the home. He is a multi-faceted artist who does not get the recognition he deserves.

This is “Young Men Dead” by The Black Angels. From Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq in the 2000s; “search and destroy” to “shock and awe.” We are the makers of history and this is the soundtrack to it; who knew it would come from Austin, Texas.

Current Musical Obsessions

This is a group called Fleet Foxes who performed in San Francisco at Bottom of the Hill during the Noise Pop Music Festival, singing White Winter Hymnal. I’ve posted for you the recorded version, which is really clean, and a live version, which is a bit sloppier (as most live versions are) so you can have some visuals. The visuals are key here because I want to show those not fortunate enough to have already attended (or who may be contemplating attending) one of their shows how, given a combination of the right dosage of alcoholic beverages and a prime front row location at a small venue, can cause one to think the lead singer (with his melodious voice) is Jesus: a euphoric state sets in as even the most secular are swept up in a blissful listening experience. Also, they are remarkably good live and I believe a comparison between the two substantiates that statement.

This is Elliott Smith’s version of the song Thirteen; it’s posted because an artist never covers a song without purpose or agenda and I believe this song (and the video) speak volumes about his interior, about his exterior, about the state of the world after his departure and the state of his world before his departure. 

Because Laura Marling, this impish, less animated and coked out British version of Courtney Love, has given us a contemplative excoriation of destructive men that appealed to me, and because the Alice in Wonderland angle is also interesting.

And last but not least, Baby Dee singing Safe Inside the Day on a chapter of Black Cab Sessions (which can be found on my Music blog roll. This is the epitome of authenticity: the man himself and his music; he is what he is, and this is merely one version of a song that seems to change melodic forms upon each performance, but still manages to retain it’s impact. 

The Black Keys: An Insight into Blues and Dust

This video by The Black Keys for their song “Just Got To Be” really intrigued me in relation to my theory about the cathartic interplay between musicians and their audiences. I’ll start this by putting the lyrics in print:

When it comes to pride/And other sinful matters/You’re gonna be misled/Left there in tatters/I got to go because/Something’s on my mind/And it won’t get better/No matter how hard I try/Whoa, yeah/You just got to be/The best thing for me/Evil hides in dark places/But now I find it/In familiar faces/I got to go because/Something’s on my mind/And it won’t get better/No matter how hard I try/Whoa, yeah/You just got to be/The best thing for me.

To start with, the music video itself is filmed in muted colors: no one color, band member, or particular facet of the room they’re in or stage they’re on stands out, and the dust that’s trapped in the minimal rays of sun that are coming through evenly spaced windows is so thick the viewer almost has an allergic reaction, if one is prone to those sensitivities. This is lo-fi; this is about music and the landscape it creates; this is about the production of sound. Behind them is a bucolic mural (prosaic enough to be found in elementary school auditoriums across the nation) and in front of them is dead space, complete emptiness stirred only by the ceiling fans that are set on haul ass and a shadowy figure that darts on and off camera at the very end of the film reel.

This atmosphere creates a certain voyeuristic pleasure in the viewer; we are witnessing an intimate moment between musician and instrument in which the artist uses vibrations as a form of release, which is to say the catharsis sought in this particular film has nothing to do with the immediately tangible, corporeal audience and everything to do with the audience at home that they have purposely excluded. How a one is at home and how one is in public can, in fact, be two very different beasts; how one responds to the Seven Deadly Sins is a primary barometer for behavioral standards. The Black Keys have taken their tattered egos into the privacy of abandoned nostalgia, seen in their choice of setting, seen in their blues gyrations and parred down rock n’ roll signification; the music practically emanates from them spewing forth in a smoothly gutteral YAWP. By doing this, by mediating the music with another form of technology–the camera–another element is introduced: the loss of the aura that Walter Benjamin discussed at length. This loss is compensated for by the home audience’s construction of their own meanings; this interaction is no longer about the immediate interplay between artist and audience that viscerally occurs during a live performance, but rather about the intimate transformation that occurs as a video is watched multiple times, being synthesized and taking on new meanings that can be substituted for the fact that there is no actual exchange occurring between the two parties because one party, the artist, has been divorced from its essence.

This is unsettled ground, this is a dust-filled, sun-lit room from your childhood transported to the now and filled with your current musical obsession. The Black Keys are speaking to a necessity to be left alone, to be left in peace in order to be (and being is an accumulation of dusty reminiscences), in order to create and have that creation take on significant weight and meaning enough to displace some of the current dominant narratives in music.    

The Sub-Text of the Psychogeography Project: Music as Language

The longer we live the larger we grow spatially, which is to say the more we displace the atmosphere in which we move; each experience adds to our girth and either focuses or splinters our vision. Of course, we naturally affect and effect our surroundings, and those surroundings reciprocally alter us in different fashions, but with similar mutations. The more ground we tread, the more we erode the infrastructures that fall beneath our feet and, thus, the more we absorb the historicized ingredients of that which falls before us into the essence of what we are at the very core of our beings.. The longer we stay in one city, the more we become it- my San Francisco may barely resemble yours or your neighbors’. Daily we walk by our past lives, our past loves which become partial memories continually reinacted throughout the course of a mundane activity such as grocery shopping or grabbing a quick cup of coffee. As we meet new people, new facets of the spaces around us are unlocked and exposed, and this effecting reciprocity explodes outward, further creating ourselves and our cities. We are the institutions, the structures that categorically define the world in which we interact, but, at the same time, we also built them; we are concomitantly the signifier and the signified.

This relationship that we develop with our surroundings has a language and a soundtrack that is uniquely its own; different dialects develop around the individual that is attempting to speak, and what we are able to extract, to understand is the result of how we interpret the emotive properties that comprise this. All of the senses are involved-sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste-as we are a combined product of them all. This is the language I am attempting to map, and I am hoping to do so by musically identifying how a neighborhood emotes and how we as its guardians and benefactors internalize this interaction and become it at a fundamental level; essentially I’m musically sussing out the alphabetic pretext of our daily interactions. 

In the same vein, the specific elements of our world that we choose to hoard around us are the product of our dialogue with the present, derived from how we were affected in the past and linked to how we want to speak to and interact with our future worlds, our future selves. The shoes we wear, the art we hang on our walls, the sausage we buy at our local ethnic markets, the dive bar we drive out of our way to have a pint in are all our attempts to construct ourselves, albeit largely unconsciously. This is how we occupy the multi-layered atmospheres that surround us, this is how we live our lives. And what better way than music, the unconscious distillation of life into melodies, to explain our lives and the spaces we live in to us.

Psychogeographical Mapping of the San Francisco Urban Landscape

In an attempt to reconfigure the atmosphere in which we live, I am musically mapping the San Francisco urban landscape, which is to say I am attempting to detail the way in which this city emotes and the interchange that occurs between its infrastructure, the buildings and other steel, concrete and brick structures that create the city’s horizon, and its population. Since there is a certain dialogue that occurs between us and our surroundings, I am trying to flush out the specific phonetic nuances that construct this interaction. At the core of the experiment is a desire to give meaning to the mundane individual images that coalesce in the creation of our surroundings: a veritable pastiche of sights, sounds, smells, images, and tactile experiences. How do we interact with the neighborhood in which we live? How do we interact with the freeways we utilize on our way to that office we interact with on a daily basis? In an age of globalization and an obsessive expansion of technology, we often move at too rapid of a pace to have any meaningful interaction with the fundamental foundations that allow us to network our lives. By slowing my pace, by extracting devices that divorce me from the urban landscape (such as vehicles) and strapping on an ipod at times, I’m hoping to reclaim a visceral interaction with the streets of the city, and by doing so to alleviate the alienation with which the urbane experience is riddled. After all, our existence is nothing if not a mere matter of creating knowledge, constructing meaning, and exploiting the hell out of it once it has been established; and I’m funneling this through the medium of music. And god damn it I’ll form this city in my likeness if its the last thing I do.

This will be an ongoing project that will subsist over the course of many months; at least that is my hope. What will follow during its duration is a collection of film shorts and narrative entries.

To get the ball rolling, I’ll give you the lyrics to a starter song by Rocky Votolato entitled Uppers “Aren’t Necessary,” which, coincidentally, is the song that stoked the flames of this experiential experiment.

Uppers Aren’t Necessary: Lead me through these cities of imaginary trends/Something’s gonna be changing come the morning time my friend/as fickle as these streets are they might not even wait around till then/ I’ve got a lot to lose so come and take it from me quick/everything you lose if it makes you stronger it makes you sick/take these cities from me I’ll build buildings up with my own bare hands/ the uppers aren’t necessary the guilt is the coal/ that keeps the fire burning to drive out the cold/ that creeps in every corner crack and never leaves you alone/ till the lonely messengers come calling you back home/ the trees are stacked in rows on the side of the road/ stripped of any dignity a birthing may have had/ a hundred thousand crucified on the Mojave I-5 line/ singers shepherds and salesman all longing for someone/ to kill the joy of wondering and end all their desire/ to help them to remember that the road is nothing but a liar/ the uppers aren’t necessary the guilt is the coal/ that keeps the fire burning to drive out the cold/ that creeps in every corner crack and never leaves you alone/ till the lonely messengers come calling you back/ to the red door, cracked and crooked walkway/ the fence impaling the stars/ ghostly keepers lead the way/ through the railroads of abandoned cars/ the tracks and city streets cut through the scars/the uppers aren’t necessary the guilt is the coal/ that keeps the fire burning to drive out the cold/ that creeps in every corner crack and never leaves you alone/till the lonely messengers come calling you back home.