|
|
| |
REVIEWS | |
A
Warped Book
Review: From Dylan to Donne
by Brock Dethier
by
|
To paraphrase The Police, a message
in a bottle cast from the shore can beget 100 million more. For
all who produce music, poetry, books, and paintings these artifacts are
our bottled messages, thrown as far as possible into the sea where they
most likely crash into other bottles, crack apart, sink, and lacerate
the bulbous foreheads of dolphins. We can only pray that they
yield a bottle return worthy enough to make the trip to the recycling
depot.
Sometimes
as you are casting a bottle into the ocean one comes back in
but it isn't a reply, rather just a
|
 |
bottle
message that got crossed in
the aquatic party line. Or
else you simply recognize someone
else's bottle floating along and decide to pull it out of the ocean and
read it. Or maybe you just live happily on a desert island and you read
every bottle you ever find in the ocean, bringing some back to the hut,
recorking and setting others back into the water, and filling some of
them up with sand and throwing them back in.
|
Since I know the thrower of this
bottle, I have read the message,
filled the bottle with gasoline and a scrap of floral cotton shirt, and
waited for the right music to come on.
----------
If you want Brock's "take" on "Brock's ideas" I recommend that you buy
the book and read it, for what follows is not a book
report per se. Rather, it is my informal
expressive-analytical interpretation based on the sense and the
connections I made while reading the book with the insidious return to
Brock's ideas to bolster my opinions, ramblings, creative anecdotes,
and
significations. It's all I ever did in his Critical Analysis
class back in 1991, when he soiled my mind with Minor Threat and X, and
it is fitting that in the spirit of Stargate, his atom bomb be
sent back to Earth with enough mineral to destroy mankind altogether.
Since it is preferred practice to refer to an artist by his creative or
publication name, and for the benefit of the search engines conveying
thusly, I shall honor the convention of referring to the writer of this
book as Dethier.
A Warped Review of From
Dylan
to Donne:
Introduction:
Dethier's conception of the modern english classroom, if it were
exaggerated, would be a Heraclitean palintonos
between the forces of the romantic modern expressivist "So-Called"
School and a second, more Cynical/Nihilistic School. And it would
be a Heraclitean palintonos assuming
that the participants in the modern english classroom were not tearing
themselves apart instead of producing great works of cantilevered
torque, and that they were producing discernable if dissonant string
vibrations and not outright noise and snappage. Thankfully, he
did not say that it was a "dialectical discourse between ontological
extremes" for this would have marked the work as one of those
supplemental income works of departmental literature that frequently
dent my trashcan. For this
alone the book begins with at least three stars.
As a writer from a college department, Dethier succeeds concisely where
Geoff Waite (Nietzsche's Corps/e) fails verbosely to use elements of
popular culture to bridge the individual and the group. Dethier presents Music as a
pedagogical tool to bridge the gap between noise and signal with the
teacher as partial feedback transmitter to the student. Music, he
says
(in different terms), will also bridge the gap between creativity and
convention, romantic expression and the cynic's unwriting of his own
material. By comparison, no amount of slashmarks and sigmoidal
neologisms can do this. Thus is Dethier's pedagogical approach
superior to that of the widely used barricaded and deadagogical
approach of the petrified protestor as professor.
Lest Dethier's music-as-pedagogy inspire a bathos army of knock off
Julie Andrews pushing "The Singing Nun" as course material, let me play
Lenin to his Marx, or rather Shiva to his Vishnu, in that: wannabe
Dethierians must engage in the necessarily violent act of bridging
individualist creation to analytical destruction. And not even
Lenin to Marx, because it is not dialectic, but rather Orphic in
nature. There is More of Morrison (Jim) and Dante's Dancing
through Hades in his teaching style than there is Chomsky's Chomping or
Gramsci's Grammophone, or hokum about getting in touch with "kids these
days" by discussing their "music as literature."
By choosing music as the touchstone of critical analysis and expressive
writing, Dethier wields the philosopher's stone or power ring, where
other teachers and more importantly demagogues
roost upon or burrow into the skin of "youth culture," conning college
minds with Revolution and Apple as the serpent conned Eve out
of her virginity and swindled the secret of eternally rejuvenating skin
exfoliation from young Adam in exchange for the illusion of gyrating
hipsters "fucking the system." Dethier says (in different terms)
that "kids these days" are already budding critical analysts because
they
are
musicological idealists and that the english department's generation
gap has a similar backbeat to the musical generation gap, with its
Manichean pantheon of devilish vanguardists and reactionaries.
As a formality, Dethier throws in a bunch of references to other
accepted minds that prove that he is right by academic standards
and not fabricating a teaching style out of the blue. But these
merely season a bulleted set of reasons for teaching english through
music which include: We make
knowledge, Music shapes identity growth, Music motivates, Songs help
people create and understand their personalities and personae, De
gustibus non est disputandum, Pleasure principle, Inspiration, We're
all musicians, Go from passive to active listening, Dig the variety,
and It's political, motherfucker. These are all damned good
reasons. He finishes off these good reasons with a bonafide guy
who knew in 1969 that Dethier would have to write a book like
this. Therefore the demands of intellectual inquiry are satisfied.
Dethier rightly pegs social constructionists as something resembling
the dismembered floating intellectual head in The Adventures of Baron
Munchhausen, whose ideas are correct by the standards of Plato
(precession of the idea/l), or Godel (an incomplete, arbitrary formal
transformation), but whose ideas need practical application in the
lower dimensionality of the "post modern classroom" taught by naked
Grace Slicks in electric war paint. He calls the Almighty
Slashmark into service in the "cultural contact zone"
(Pratt-->Dethier) of the
classroom replete with its newfound sigmoidal, fuzzy, ambidextrious,
bisexual, inclusive, bothiness
but in the (guitar) bridgelike way previously mentioned, not in the
Unitarian Wormsex Convention at the Candlelight Vigil way. In the
Most Excellent future, it is going to be hard to believe that there was
a time when George Carlin didn't give guitar solos in classes on The
Canterbury Tales.
As a baby boomer, Dethier describes music as a generational tool for
self-construction. This truism has progressed and mutated since
his blues-rock-jazz and even early punk and metal era. He
confesses a lack of familiarity with the rap era, which warrants this
digression from the review:
In the rap
era, or the Hip Hop Generation, music is a tool for stealing a self,
for directing personalities, for cultivating personae, for amplifying
and looping together different synchronous elements of soul-life, for
driving certain sentiments and tendencies to a heavier thump, for the
outright deconstruction of anteceding elements, and their modification
and commodification into the low riders of today's racial, ethnic,
cultural and gender identity. I use those four terms in the the
most deliberately racist, chauvinistic, sexist, and homophobic way
possible, for The Now Music also has its opposite answer to the
increasingly pink triangled Wikipedian nature of the college
classroom. It has its autoselected features of masculine violent
niggerdom. It is the deliberate classroom - not merely the
passive relay system - of the city, the criminal penis, the evil dick,
the lascivious cunt, the punch in the face, the gun, the knife, the
drug as commodity and not as mystical experience, and a whole host of
nasty hawkish post-New Left counter ideals which keep music from going
all instrumental. That means to say the street and the headphones
and the car are a classroom of music and the music is a tool for
self-construction precisely because it allows the unsavory, unpopular,
and predatory to be created and for the destruction of the other which
is a critical part of generating ego.
Detuning is also a critical component of the music as
critical analytic experience. Dethier is thus somewhat
responsible for creating students who play his ideas at different
tunings.
(There are two Strausses to consider here). Or rather he is the
diabolical conductor who has the band thinking it is playing its own
song, when it is playing someone's sheet music and taking Dethier's
cues. This is his admirable mean streak and his
Mach-meets-Machiavellian formalism which is embedded in a teaching
style broadly characterized as "Here is a Nietzsche-Wagnerian rendition
of Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco," 1
now please relate this to current
events and the following text..." When I say "Dethier creates
students who play his ideas at different tunings" I am referring not to
Dethier's premises or beliefs (like so many college professors) but
rather to his relational and analytical techniques. These are the
widening gyre of his falconings, detuned.
...Make sure you wear....some fire in your hair.....
Playing Plato to his Socrates or Paul to his Jesus, I must attest to my
great misapprehension of Dethier's work even as I engage in an act of
the basest prodigality.
2 The null set being the subset of
all
sets, it becomes necessary that the teacher who uses music to spawn a
critical analyst sets into motion a series of events whereby
statistically at least some of them become musicians with a
critical-analytical bent, and one can envision the chickens coming
home to roost. I would like to bastardize one of Dethier's points
where he says "we can use [music] to advance many constructivist
goals." I would like to bastardize this by dressing it up
as a program for monkeywrenching education, which would really mean
fixing it. (As in: "I'll fix you!")
He says that music is a useful tool in
english class
for:
1)
"Putting individual expression into larger
contexts."
2) "Showing how social forces [color how we
create and receive
artistic
pieces]"
3) "Making
students aware of the
constructedness of artifacts."
4) "Levelling the hierarchies of taste and
knowledge, allowing
anyone to
be an expert and any taste to be valid."
5) "Helping students understand and gain some
control over
their reading
and reacting processes."
6) "Seeing
from the point of view of
marginalized characters."
7) "Inviting
resistance and divergent
thinking."
8) "Giving voice to
doubts."
9) "[Warming students
up for an intelligent
discussion using
musical
conversational metaphors as a pathway]"
10) "Demonstrating how we make sense of the
world through
metaphor."
Originally I had several cutesy responses to these. I axed the
superficial ones out to focus on the most important responses that I
shall address or weave into this review:
--Artifacts are socially contextualized.
--An
artifact is artificial and its production is an artifice. Ars:
anything done or made
procedurally.
--Dethier
makes an Epicurean point as "De gustibus" is a launch point for the
deconstructive or digestive power of taste, thus a concomitant
democratization of the artistic epistemology.
--"Minorities" permits
intellectual minorities such as Lex Luthor, or a gamut running from the
racial and gender minorities in Spiks or The Yellow
Wallpaper, to Harrison
Bergeron, thus it
allows everything from Lumpenproletariat to Ubermenschen.
--"Resistance" permits capital
"R" La Resistance as well as
electrical resistance, thus entailing everything from ressentiment to
electrodes on the head.
Naturally, any student would be Fucked For LifeTM if the
ways of thinking for oneself that music can provide were
endorsed by schoolteachers. It would
literally destroy education, all hell would break loose; there would be
intellectual miscegenation everywhere. This would destroy the
intellectual establishment. The concomitant
elevation and erudition of the youth would destroy the notion of
the youth as a mindless, angry mob. (Compare this to the
diatribes
between Norman Podhoretz and Jack Kerouac). Thus would Dethier
ruin
everything. The bastard even preempted usurpers like me by saying
"I trust that everyone using this book will challenge, deconstruct,
refine, amplify, extend, and perfect my ideas." 3 Thus, with an
expert's cunning does he thieve even this very article in an overt act
of
giving.
Note that this book was
written by a doctor of teaching with the primary purpose of teaching
teachers how to teach (metametameta). Thus it is primarily written for
teachers
and not for musicians. It is inspiring that a former teacher of
mine now also teaches other teachers, and the cleanliness and dexterity
with which he does so earns the book another star. (I think we're at
four). I am in no
position to evaluate the book as a pedagogical treatise, but it is
highly readable, instructive, and helpful to people who are students of
cognition, and even for musicians of the critical analytical bent who
strive to convert their often complicated and abstract analyses and
criticisms or feelings into
the compelling cadences of musical parade.
Dethier earns street cred as another rapper who can't sample lyrics
even for instructive purposes in the classroom because some musicians
don't want their lyrics repeated without getting a royalty, and others
won't give you the time of day to talk about them or refer to them
legally. Thus, where music is tangential to the classroom, the
RIAA is just a... nother brick in the wall. I guess we'll
just have to bootleg his class. Or else, Dethier heralds the
opening of
an age of totally illegal teaching methods, which certainly appeals to
me and might lead me to break my alumnus' Vow of No Return; School's
Out... For... ever! Can I even say that? Somebody call Alice Cooper's
lawyer!
Let's go on to the various chapters of Dethier's book, his key insights
and how they can be related -- through some convolution -- to the
self-taught, to Hip Hop, and to the
readers of Haters Magazine:
Chapter One:
Constructing Identity
This chapter opens with a description of how music slips into you and
tags your moods and perceptions to the point of housing a portion of
your identity. It describes the pitfalls of murderous and abusive
or self-destructive thoughts that we unwittingly or half-wittingly
receive when we absorb artistic material and therefore other material
uncritically. Music can automate certain aspects of our
personalities, even automate aspects of other people's personalities
within us. Without critical analytical skills, memeplexes are the
proverbial cat which drags in all sorts of unconsidered or unquestioned
behavior. This is basic Enzo
Traverso.
I must interject the rhetorical questions: How
many Mark David Chapmans and John Hinckleys read Catcher in the Rye
religiously but uncritically?
Changing venues: How many people
listen to rap music but do not think critically about the lyrics they
hear? And in particular, of the more intelligent listeners to
KRS-One, Nas, PRT, and Dead Prez: Who has identified the stale ideas,
the wack ideas, and even the ideas that the artists themselves felt
compelled to
modify heavily or repudiate later? Who has identified the emcees
who are dead because they tried to live up to the contradictory,
self-destructive, or self-refuting personae they created for a music
label? And who painted themselves so far into a corner of
unbelievable bullshit that they finally just quit rapping altogether
because it was easier than digging out? And which emcees found
themselves to be above criticism, and thus made their work-artifacts
and artistic names into sacred cows which were not supposed to inspire
critical thinking in their "conscious" fans (read: ingroup)? In other words: "Who killed rap?" with an
understanding that it was the
artists. If "I am Hip Hop," then who committed suicide?
These are the dangerous and analytical root questions
within Hip Hop's Neo-Pythagorean Temple, and no use of the Almighty
Slashmark (i.e. Rap/Hip Hop) can
evade them. These questions are inspired by a Dethierian
analytical style.
In Chapter One, Dethier details the identity growth of the student
through music and shows how it is a useful tool for trepanating and
releasing the usually reserved, reticent, caged or latent personality
in a student. This opens the floodgates of written and oral
self-expression. His message, if found by a musician, could be
taken to mean that one should know one's strengths, develop a capacity
for versatility of expression both inside
and outside his creative
persona, and thus not become trapped in one's own artistic persona,
which
is of course a fatal career and biological condition in musicians and
some writers.
Chapter Two:
Understanding Ourselves
In Chapter Two, Dethier describes how people can be products of a
culture that produces subliminally racist musical reactions in young
listeners. 4 This is an
example of how Dethier uses music to open
students into the critical analysis of the nurture side of current
musical texts and therefore the texts
of modern culture. Thus he presents critical analysis as the part
and parcel that it is of Kulturkampf, and humbly hips us to the idea
that a Kulturkampf is actually taking place and that various armaments do exist should one have
the adventuresomeness to clang a sword on a
shield or shoot a dumdum at a desperado. Never does he enlist
people into the Kulturkampf and choose the battle or proclaim God's
correct side. In this he is a better man than the lecture hall
peda/dema-gogue, and ranks among the Three Wise Professors that every
university has.
I know that in no small part Dethier was subliminally responsible for
inspiring my first low budget release "Context Flexed In Corporalis"
which morphed into the name of this website,
www.contextflexed.com. The verse, "when I flex, my syllabus is
complex. My body is a cipher, text with text, my flesh is context
flexed in corporalis" was influenced in part by a technique now
committed to print
in Chapter Two of his book. The technique, which posits that
understanding a text means understanding ourselves, gets students to
become self-critical by tricking them into critically analyzing a text of their own choosing. Thus
do students who are loath to analyze their motives and choices become
drawn into the act of merging with the texts they analyze, and nowhere
is the distinction between self and text more blurry than in the
composition and aesthetic appreciation of music. Thus will a
student present a song, an emblem, a badge, an aegis, or a semiotic
artifact as a golem of his identity and then analyze, defend,
and deconstruct it and his own motivations.
For people who do not find this to be a serious pedagogical tool, I
refer you to The Dyad, which is a similar technique utilized by MK
Ultra sadists at Harvard which drove Ted Kaczynski to become the
Unabomber. I refer you also to the Manson Family and the Branch
Davidians. In the case of The Dyad, subjects were culled from a
population of repressed geniuses and their cherished beliefs were
elicited via cross-examination and mercilessly ridiculed and stomped on
by a sadist. In the case of the Branch Davidians, a millennial
cult figure cultivated a cult commune out of his guitar groupies.
In the case of the Manson Family, Charles Manson, a recording artist
and studio mooch, created a murderous crime ring out of aspiring
musicians, topless dancers, high school dropouts, and Haight-Ashbury
rejects. Brock Dethier, by comparison to these notorious figures
of history, has put musical induction into the service of pedagogy and
more importantly, of self-awareness. Thus has he taken a sublime
weapon of indoctrination through pop and laid it before students as a
cruelty-free auto-vivisection tool, and assailed what Geoff Waite calls
the corps/corpus/corpse of autoregenerative memes without reenlisting
students into the Gramscian Campus Industrial Complex of hypercritical
leftist nitwits. Nor does Dethier try to "deconstruct your racist
sexist attitude through brown lesbian fiction" and leave you dribbling
in helpless guilt. (He merely suggests). Nor does he posture as a
mystical guru of his
teaching technique. This shows remarkable ethical quality,
restraint, and finesse. 5
Dethier asks the sample question "What do rap fans think, for instance
about what Richard Shusterman calls rap's 'horribly macho celebrations
of the (often violent) exploitation of women?'" One answer to
that question is nobody (outside of
critical analysis) ever heard
of Richard Shusterman, but they have heard of Too Short. Another answer is that there are
phenomenal female rappers who earn respect, and there are male emcees
who don't boogie down to the disrespecting of females. My answer to the question is
that Richard Shusterman is probably from an effeminate and sheltered
intellectual-critical culture obsessed with goading or squishing
exoteric pop art forms into the service of his aesthetic. 6 He hasn't produced any rap
song
that I ever heard, and cultural critics outnumber cultural producers to
the detriment of art. The only thing deader than Hip Hop is
cultural-criticism of Hip Hop. Even conscious rappers whose
esoteric Kultur-critical gimmicks exceed their funkiness and lyrical
cohesion get tossed aside, left to conspiracy delusions and resentful
bitterness. How much more so a professorial fanboy?
Furthermore, we are not "all in the same gang." I find solace in
the fact that rap
celebrates machoness even to the occasional detriment of women for the
same reason that I find solace in the fact that Black Baptist preachers
did not get in line on Gay Marriage -- this indicates that black
cultural conservatism and black liberalism do not instantly translate
or subserviate to the patronizing whims
of white liberal-puritan or judeo-marxist monoculture and that true
racial and gender alternatives (even dystopian ones) exist outside the
bland-but-critical beltway of college solipsism. However,
Dethier's question is a good of an example of song meets lyric, lyric
meets text, text meets self, and one's musical preferences can become a
literary game of Rock' em Sock 'em Robots. My answer to the
question he relays is only one (two, if you
read the footnote) which could be
elicited in the discourse
which spawns from his teaching
technique.
Though not his primary aim, Dethier's technique inspires musicians to
create
music that anticipates and explodes the canards that critics tend to
hurl at certain music and to stimulate the production of preemptive and
provocative hypermodern works. This may even be contrary to
Dethier's purpose but not
beneath his sensibility: There is a live possibility of inverting
the technique where critique of preferred song leads to critique of
self. In this inversion, the critical analyst is preemptively
dumbstruck by the work of a crafty art huckster who produces music
designed to sabotage the critical process. I cite the groups
Ween, and Momus, the first being a group who crafted genuine sounding
country music with an explicitly female derogatory (e.g. rapper's) set
of
lyrics. The second, Momus was a music critic who began making
synth pop rap critical of obscure other musicians such as Walter Carlos
and rife with obscure and sophisticated if not homosexualized
homophobia. These musical forms do not stand up to conventional
left-cultural criticism, and if they are selected by a cynical student
as the emblem of identity, they will even mask or cloak that
identity. A fake student, or a non-trad could potentially
sabotage the process of sabotage causing a series of (Paul) Verillian
accidents of criticism which might accidentally receive a good grade,
though the orgasm of introspection was entirely faked. (I did this once
in high school when I was sick of being asked to analyze Beckett plays
from the damnably base cultural aesthetics of Elie Wiesel).
Testimonially speaking, preemptive critical analysis as part of the
music creative process or phreaking-one's-own-tunes is a necessary
artifact that settles out of Dethier's method as absorbed by
musicians. A savvy musician will say to himself: "men are blind
to the issues of female oppression, therefore
let me become the Ray Charles of Misogyny." This is a
shade of Andrew Dice Clay, Ziggy Stardust, and Marylin Manson.
Dethier has thus
opened a Nietzschean doorway into Ecce Homo as
self-referential song lyrics; behold the composer
as he carves his own bust and sings about those women who will carve
his
name into their busts. And for the
feminist/marxist/objectivist/art-snobs? Witness here the sabotage of
banal lense-based Kultur criticism: Ayn Rand, Eleanor Roosevelt,
Hannah
Arendt, and Martha Bayles all carve the name "objective beauty" onto
their own busts
only to
have it come out reading "Thug Life" and "Makavelli." This is not
far from philosophical critical analysis as it stands today. To
push this metaphor further, Dethier in Chapter Two tries to get beyond
the good and evil of like and dislike, of reader and listener, but this
Nietzscheanism is syncretized with the Epicureanism of the expanding
palate and palette. Thus does he conjure a taste for the
multifarious as well as the nefarious in both music and
introspection. Critical analysis is after all not only a
gustatory act (see Ratatouille) but an act of devouring and shredding
which requires the
sharp mind and the strong stomach.7
Chapter Three:
Creating Contexts
This is the chapter in which I most likely bungle my interpretation
because the professor I had before Brock Dethier, (Eric Constantineau)
was a proponent of New Criticism, whereas Dethier is post New Criticism
and I am post Dethier. I am therefore a dubious last spark in the
decay series of critical analysis that begins with people who taught
me things before I became an autodidact, and last in the decay series
of musicians and writers who once listened to musicans and
writers. It's Mad Cow Disease, pure and simple. Dethier's
approach is critical of the critical process, and therefore "Kp
complete" which leaves the rest of us to pull the critical process
engine
and
dump it into various vehicles that Dethier has already casually
referred
to as canard, cliche, or post "post-modern." The implosion of
critical analytical nihilism gives way to critical analyst as creator
(e.g. spark) leaving the teacher with the responsibility to create what
Dethier calls the musical "tone, atmosphere, environment, and context"
of the first class.
Dethier also elaborates on a point I first heard expounded by Eric
Constantineau on the reverse mutation of "Crossroads" from Eric Clapton
back to Robert Johnson, a street which as I have discovered in my
musical and movie consumption leads sideways to Fela Kuti and Ginger
Baker, and -if I remember correctly- backwards to Legba and a notorious
intersection in Lagos,
Nigeria. I also read a paper comparing the differences between
the Eric Clapton version of "I Shot The Sheriff" and The Bob Marley
Version. I used this critical analysis paper as a basis when I
carved up the Eric Clapton version for "You Are Gone" by Da
Bulldogs. (The Clapton version had to be deepened and
lengthened). This is another chance to speak back to Dethier's
work:
Rap producers are by nature music librarians and critical analysts of
various musical lyrics and sound frequencies, and music production in
studio involves quite a substantial deal of erudition and
exchange. There is as much meaning in the rhythm and chromatism
of blues and reggae refrains and basslines as there is in the lyrics,
and
this is before the marvelous transpositions of lyrical venue from
Britain to the Deep South that Dethier uses to illustrate the
importance of context to text. Another good critical comparison
is "Hey Joe" the Hendrix version as compared to Robert Johnson "32-20
Blues." Which leads to the question "What is Jimi Hendrix"
especially in the context of British musicans who do blues-rock.
Of bluesmen
in general,
or of Fela Kuti who went briefly to England or of Shaka Zulu who
conquered South Africa, or of Bo Diddley who conquered the United
States we can ask "Is blues actually sad music?" According to Voodoo,
Legba is the intermediary between the Loa (spirits)
and humanity. Legba stands at the crossroads, and as gatekeeper brokers
world communication in all of the human languages. Is this not
the
consummate act of critical analysis, separating broadband noise from
signal? These are the questions which result in good papers, good
music, and deeper understanding of our motivations. 8
Dethier decribes not only the contexts that texts or songs fit into,
but also the contexts they create and what is permitted or not
permitted in the open or closed interpretation of the work. The
song "Lola" by The Kinks comes to mind as a song that permits or
rather, forces interpretation. This function of what is permitted
and not permitted in
an interpretation is a crucial deconstructive tool for mapping the
logic of statements and finding the author's intent, and perhaps the
reader or listener's intent in seeking out the author. This
also helps us ascertain the masked intention (his or ours), and thus it
is also a political deciphering tool and goes into a place where Noam
Chomsky should have gone, but did not go in Linguistics.
It is no small coincidence that Dethier chose Robert Johnson as an
example in this chapter. As Eric Constantineau once pointed out,
Crossroads Blues is at once African and Orphic. Mary Lefkowitz
and George G. M. James
will have to share the Stolen Legacy. Nobody stole
anything from anybody (though there is a cultural
appreciation/appropriation gradient). Back away from the righteous
indignation. The serpent climbed the Asherah pole at the crossroads and
interceded in communicating the wishes of the speaker with Anu. A
man traded his soul for virtuosity and snake hips. Orphee' tuned
in to death on the radio to get his next avante garde poem. And then he
fell in love with her.
As I write my own context-aware language parsing codes, and read about
the context-aware computer applications of the International Conference
on Pervasive Computing, (ICPC) I am pleased that Dethier refers to the Facets Model for Studying Artistic Works.
I mean to say several things simultaneously: 0) we are in the knee of
the curve (Kurzweil), 1) within 20 years humans will be entirely
immersed in the Pervasive Computing environment (ICPC), 2) classrooms
will overlap the home audio-visual entertainment center (Fraser,
Rodden, O'Malley), 3) entirely the wrong sorts of teachers
(tea-ceremonial nazis) will have remote access to children, inflicting
censorious and
intrusive hyper-regimentation under Platonic auspices 4)
"who, what, where, when, how, why, form, structure, and tropes" are
basic context determining query primitives (Barrett, McCoy, Veblen),
and 5) The basic
queries are all variations on the question "what" (Flipside). My
synthesis of these numbered observations is this: The speed and
degree to which Dethier's teaching methods can short-circuit the
dictatorial excesses (institutional and socio-critical) of the
pre-electronic teaching process will put analytical power in the hands
of students before it comes to their living rooms electronically, and
this will mitigate the coming scholastic cyberfascism.
Dethier refreshingly presents contextual-awareness in teaching and
audio in a time period when bots, iPods, and hypertext are commonplace
items. His timeliness in approach makes his pedagogy a useful
template for teaching context-awareness to machines and should be
studied by artificial intelligence developers as one would study
programming techniques. His section on "Providing Context" has a
rich musical metaphor for how expressional mode preferences in agents
(in this case two brothers) preclude affinity formation in all sets
from null to infinity. The example is James Baldwin's "Sonny's
Blues." Preferences or skins fit certain contexts, which if we
imagine Riker's trip to the Holodeck jazz joint (hokey Star Trek
reference mine), have venues, millieus, presets, tagged values,
weights, schemes, colors, and emphases that make them cognitively
assonant. A crafter of seamless and believable environments based
upon popular and era
culture would have to be a critical-analyst to coordinate the
suspension of disbelief. This will be of increasing importance in
a virtual civilization, and Dethier lays out the paradigm for the
dreamweavers of the near future.
From Dylan
to Donne
earns a fifth star by contrasting Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be
Happy" with Minor Threat's "In My Eyes." Smooth Jazz vs Straight
Edge: How to Maximize Social Impact at the Wrong Meeting. Dethier is
master of the dynamic contrast. I am reminded of the record 20 Bands Trash 20 Songs from
Sesame Street. Dethier belongs alongside Rita Moreno as
psychotronic teacherbox. He deserves special kudos for exposing
syncretist jainist eco-skinhead netscum 9 to the pre-Ira Einhorn
environmentalist humor of real Diggers. Again, the Enzo
Traversist tendency in Dethier's methods sabotage --with vitamin and
mineral lattices-- the endless accumulation of junk food residues in
the
human mind-bowel, and people are no longer free to absorb and excrete
their memes acritically. In fact, he is in contrast to our
Orwellian society an Orson
Wellian teaching the power of fascination and an H.G.
Wellian teaching the Eloi how to rebuild civilization; but one of
his mysterious three chosen books contains music CDs.
Dethier presents variable proximity analysis (with attention to
detail), context brainstorming, and then aggressive hyperlinking of
detail to context as part of the context-awareness process. Here
his approach is in sync with both the neurological-associative network
that produces the multi-entendres of poetry and song, and the
internetworks of Google Earth, Namebase, Internet Relay Chat, YouTube,
and Wikipedia.
Chapter Four:
Understanding Interpretation
To trust and
explore one's
reaction and then make an interpretation strengthened by textual
reference. Here Dethier bridges sensory absorbtion with
the formation of meaning, the verification principle, and
signifying. One is reminded in a way of the passage in deCoy's The Nigger Bible page
44,
| "Now, you will ask me, my
Niggers: 'How does a people go about freeing their minds and spirits?'
And I will answer you with FIVE WORDS: Look. Listen. Analyze. Dissect. Reject." |
Envision if you will, the lector or auditor as he is trapped
in deCoy's "American Nigger Dilemma;" the screaming spirit
confined in the perceived captivity of a known or tactily assumed to be
known
master. Or to fuse a chapter heading of My Side of the Mountain
with Malcolm X: In Which Singing 'We
Shall Overcome' Failed to Free Us Before First Snowfall. (These
are hard and fast references, but not beneath the repertoire of avid
readers). Dethier
activates the interpretive process as a necessarily liberating stage in
which classroom "Niggers" bring in their scathing riffs and fierce
beats which are those deep and tempestuous liberation anthems under
which disconnected or tenuously connected neurons palpitate under the
cultivated and compressed slavery of Tom Morello's emotional jump metal
ego anthems, or the
self-sycophantic half-bred rage of Zach de La Rocha, the caged panther
mentality of
Paris, or the pornographic reactive suicidal violence of Biggie
Smalls.
Students of a small mental universe
In Which The Bullets of Fired Ego Swiftly Circled and Killed Their
Shooter find entry into the active listener gangsta set via
Dethier's connectivity of human receiver to human broadband processor
to human transmitter In Which Text
Becomes The Means By Which to Operate the Human Stereo as a Pirate
Radio Station. Welcome to a world of self-actualization
through pattern recognition and signals intepretation. To fuse
Ferlinghetti, Epictetus, and Abbie Hoffman:
Chinky eyed B(uddha) Boys dreaming they're Niggers
Drift back up the Yangtze, reverting to Diggers
as the sea continues its carrier wave
Showing even Ginsberg to be a slave
"I want you just to listen and react, maybe jot something down. I'm
looking for first impressions. Nothing analytical." (Dethier 44) Thus
begin Dethier's classes, and also the critical scenes in Suspect Zero,
Dark City, and The Matrix. Carrier wave induced automatic
writing. Injection of a sentient code into one's unexamined
childhood memories by the Good Humor Man. The pill that brings
the quiksilver tracer and the liquified mirror that is also in
Cocteau's "Orphee"
and Prince of Darkness. Therefore: also Alice Cooper, Dr. Sun,
Quicksilver... or Argent. Edgar Winter's Frankenstein midriff 10
suddenly drips with sweaty cannabinoid liquid dimensionality and the
cascading hieroglyphics reveal what is fundamentally a heavily
manipulated voltage controlled and filtered multi envelope synthesis --
the basis of signals intelligence. Molten illegality. Why
didn't you see this before? Why didn't you see memes replicating
over cantelevered FM waves projected from solid-state devices?
Why did you only see it as "Track 10" and not as hyperwhite albinism
transgressing the color barrier and smoking electrofunk rock to purvey
soul through the absurd limit of overstretched caucasianism? Why
didn't you see the allusion to vampirism in the title "They Only Come
Out At Night?" Entendre: solar
sensitivity. Why do you listen to Jay Severin? Not only
for the Godsmack Vampires
intro. You also dream of Drobeta-Turnu Severin; just across Trajan's
now collapsed bridge, the
Podul lui Traian. The
Bridge is Over. In Romania. O insulă de latinitate într-o
mare slavă. 11 Why didn't you see the
patterns of black over white keys that you prefered as sublime examples
of miscegenation and racial dominance hoisted in the service of the
transylgressive Freak Flag and your will to overbe, to subsume and to
be subsumed? To be over and to overbe. The concept is Slav... Slave... Drac is back. Slave. Prince.
The Prince. The Artist. The Concept. There must be books about
this? If not, then open
the block of paper and take this passage down. This is
interpretation brought to life by music.
"I'm a slave, i'm a slave, i'm a slave to the rhythm / Def rhymes on the microphone is
what i'm givin." --MC Lyte
"I'm no
slave to the
rhythm / I take it's
name and change it's religion." --Pharoahe Monche
Like a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, Dethier's technique cuts to the
oft glossed over visceral reaction but delays the leap to
the cerebral interpretation. Frankly, that is the same effect
that smoking a joint has: sensory attenuation as a preliminary
investigative technique. Therefore, in a civilization which
prefers coffee and cigarettes, fast answers, and expert opinions,
Dethier is one of the few pedagogues actively engaged in extending our
inner space so that we may begin to see how we float in our own brain
fluid and how these mental connections and stored bits of meaning are
just lying around in the cranium like so many wires, pennies, and fuse
boxes, just waiting for us to reconfigure them by reapplying the
frontal cortex to our previously unexamined motivators and briefly
taking it off the task of maintaining the illusion of correct public
mimesis.
The second phase of Dethier's technique of interpretation is to reread
the automatic writing and become surprised at the novel word clusters
that emanated from the visceral reaction; then to freewrite upon
these. That is how this very article was written, a testimonial
to how innately one retains and
automates this method. It's like saying "Brock Dethier taught me
how to tie my shoes." But replace "shoes" with "thoughts." A scientific
jargon word
for this process would be Text Assembly by Iterated Dynamic Free
Linkage. Dethier is onto a process similar to protein
manufacture. I cannot stress enough the importance of this to an
internet generation striving for new social, representational, music
sharing and informatic paradigms.
The third phase of Dethier's technique is the formulation of thesis
statements from the freewriting. But since the term "thesis
statement" kills a brain hardon, and is just too damn authoritarian,
he, and common sense dictate viewing this as a summary, a generalized
statement, or a working hypothesis. Using this new hypothesis as
a vector or search tool, Dethier encourages its use to probe the Why
questions of one's own reactions, background and struggles. The
writer then embarks on an analysis of artifact text and of self-text,
which will develop into a tier of authorship. Dethier backs up
this technique by referring to other pedagogues, so in terms of the
teaching circuit, he voluntarily scales down his guruship and shows it
in the context of formalized didaction. This is a tactic I have
always admired in teachers such as Eric Constantineau and Patricia
Garwich, who could on a dime or under an audit switch to being "the
formal instructor." Insert Mr. Chips, Miss Jean Brodie, and the
Peripatetics. One imagines that under a totalitarian regime,
these type of professors could work undercover to foster the
self-reliance necessary for a "Dumbledore's Army" scenario. It is
always good to keep these kind of teachers on hand because inquiring
minds are precious, if not the very seeds of danger to the minimum
security education camp system, the mustard seeds which, to paraphrase the
poet Alice
Fogel, can crack the bricks and mortar of a soulless
education. O! My surrogate fathers and mothers of
education! The academic Pee
and Em.
Dethier continues his chapter on Interpretation with the value of
seeing from other peoples' perspectives, the value of misreading -
which is akin to the value of endorphin mimicry, the value of slug
tokens, the value of Markov chains, and the value of lockpicks.
Hey, man, however you get there The value of ambiguity as
double entendre and as gestalt. (Every good instructor must provide a
key to gestalt.) The value of ambiguity as a nonexclusive or
(~XOR) to create choice and to cheese out extra options wherever
possible. Approaching Abbie Hoffman, Dethier shows us how to Steal This Look. I want to
say something about Dethier's Comparative Interpretation, in which
intepretations are critical analyses, and in which comparing them is
another level of critical analysis. It is best just to use a
musical metaphor: this is the equivalent
of modal (moodal) changes in Jazz. Allow me to refer you to
Herbie Hancock's 1995 album The
New Standard in which he plays "All Apologies"
by Nirvana.
"When does an interpretation shade into a creation?" (Dethier 53)
This is one of his questions that I beg to digress upon as I intepret
his book and a question I have
never ceased to ask myself when creating Hip Hop music and intepreting
a previously existing piece of music. I experienced this most
profoundly when I recorded Gain That
Might on The People
Of Paradise when I had to reverse engineer Procol Harum's Homburg and fuse it with Whiter
Shade of Pale, but The Hesitations
version which is sung in George "King" Scott's more soulful
voice. Fancy the preference for a "Blacker Sounding Whiter Shade
of Pale" and you will fancy my motivation as a composer. I even
learned the bass phrases of the Harum version which constitute
alternately an "inspired line" or a heavily permuted (or a heavily
concealed) sample of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air on a G String."
I combined that with stuttered Alesis SR-16 kick drums inspired by
Bjork's song Hunter. For
Da Bulldogs album, Almost
Famous, Brock's question was omnipresent in my mind as I turned
"I Shot the Sheriff" into "You Are Gone" and broke down and
remanufactured The Guess Who's "These Eyes" --and again when I invented
a
song from the whole cloth but wove in Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To
Do With It" bassline. It was present in my mind when I combined
Mr. Rogers' Neigborhood of Make
Believe with Abba Eban's Voice
of Israel in "Intensity." The points where
interpretation shaded into creation occurred as successful acts of
combination and permutation. But there's more to it:
When something fits together in a finished piece of music and you are
like "Ahhhh! I am surprised." Then you step back and see
the whole album and the series of semi-conscious, visceral choices
writhing through the conscious choices, and these overwhelm with work
as if a hidden hand wrote the music, the interpretation shades into a
creation. If you do further research on your sources
post-publication you discover astonishing things like "Hey,
George King Scott died from a gunshot" or "Chad Allan and The
Expressions are also The Guess Who!" These later discoveries show
that during your musical tonal composition, mood-based selection, and
interpretation phases you were really onto some secret and formal
hidden pattern or creative vein, and that your trajectory represents
the continuance of prior thought by prior individuals. In Five
Percenter terminology, you built.
To that
point, I confess that I reached out recently to Brock Dethier and Alice
Fogel and received by that reaching the concepts of Dethier's book of
musico-critical analysis, and Fogel's poetic interpretations of Bach's
Goldberg Variations and thereby facilitated the production of my next
album which contains an interpretation of Gould's Bach Goldberg
Variation
#2. This answers the Why question of selecting these two authors
to inform my creativity. Consider it an Artistic Conversation
with the Muses.
I had another one last week with Jonathan Lerner from the
Weathermen. Some sentences of his essay, I
Was a Terrorist stick in
my mind: I"I was a sweet little boy. But I
was not a nice young man." "We responded to each other's
cleverness, savored the ways we were exotic to each other." "It
was like a branch of the sweet academic village where we'd all met,
grafted onto the big city." Finally, this one quote more
pertinent to my frame of mind and why it relates to Dethier:
| You had to parrot the
party line. Woe unto you if you uttered some political formulation that
sounded too much like what a rival faction -- whose members might have
been close friends a few months back -- could have said; or if you had
hesitated during that day's confrontation with the cops. You could be
subjected to a "criticism/self-criticism" session, in which you were
expected to abase yourself and recant, and to then "fight for yourself"
and show reconstructed thought. Weatherman ideology, distilled to its
simplistic essence, was this: that racism was the organizing principle
of American history; that the United States was a thieving imperialist
power... |
That passage from Lerner describes the misuse of criticism, cross
examination, and
the Third Degree in fermented activist organizations, where one might
say that a pre- or un-Dethiered student jacked up on Rage Against the
Machine, Morrissey, Crass, and David Rovics might find himself on a
stained mattress in a campus outbuilding trying to rebuild the Students
For A Democratic Society, complete with its abortive nonstarters,
preemptive hijackings and high-falutin' self-cross examinations and
public humiliations. To reprint some pertinent quotes selected
by Corrupt.org
from that touchstone of sobriety, the Unabomber
Manifesto:
Many leftists
have an
intense identification with the
problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated
(American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The
leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would
never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is
precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they
identify with their problems. [...] (Theodore Kaczynski, "The
FC/Unabomber Manifesto", paragraph (13)
[---]
Words like "self-confidence,"
"self-reliance,"
"initiative,"
"enterprise," "optimism," etc. play little role in the liberal and
leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic and
pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's needs for them,
take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense
of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy
his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of
competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser. (paragraph 16)
|
Dethier is needed in classrooms
where real and retro Rockers and Hip Hoppers cycle through, like Norman
Mailer's White Negro existentialists or Enzo Traverso's
tabula rasa proto-Hitlerites absorbing and transmitting their and other
people's (even Mario Savio's) Luddite rage against various machines,
their strifes, and kampfs expressed in the form of unquestioned
snatches of music. Kaczynski, himself driven to mailbombing by
cracking under the Third Degree at Harvard, correctly pegged issues and
minority advocacy as a form of decadence
wherein young, waspy white and
Jewish products of the establishment serve the establishment by
protesting and rebelling against the establishment, helping it to
rubberize, compromise, advertise, lubricate, and coat its prophylactic
surface to more smoothly penetrate. People do emulate,
sympathize, and solidarize with certain groups because they actually see them as inferior
and thus find a haven in which to cultivate their resentment and pariah
status, form a low common denominator, or hideous mean, and
consequently become new niche markets for Newbury Comics to
exploit. They glom into collectives with similar music and
fashion tastes and revel in their own loserness, consuming and
producing artifacts to contaminate minds and infect children with bad
ideas. As a musical artist, I myself confess to having done
this. I
have wrested this disgusting process back under my own proper
control. I cringe not at the content of my artifacts, but at the
inherent weakness of control of my previous creative process proven by
its successor. I cringe at the thought of bad memes running on a
mobius strip, a record, or CD in a vicious circle of unrequited
liberation petrified on a plastic grinding wheel rubbing away the
layers of brain matter of its listeners. Jane! Stop this crazy
thing! The next album must destroy the previous one, just as
Dali's "Disintegration
of Persistence of Memory" destroyed "Persistence
of Memory." Without a Dethierian technique, there is very
little impetus to
transcend the previous creation through its deconstruction. There
is no Phoenix, and thus no replacement of the concept of "liberation"
with the concept of "transcendence" or "separation" at least insofar as
they are internal states of a creator.
Chapter
Five:
Constructing Meaning
Dethier used to tell me: "To preserve continuity of composition, one
should choose the topic sentence of the consecutive paragraph which
builds upon the conclusion of the preceeding paragraph. This will also
help you develop your theme." I definitely used this in making my
album as the songs are all timed such that the first beat of the next
song is in time with the last beat of the previous song. I am
sure I paid at least $150 in additional studio time to make sure this
track spacing was preserved. (Subtleties of program layout are
often lost in MP3). Dethier also does this between chapters as Chapter Five
deals with how artists try to control the meaning of their creations,
and how this translates into reader and listener approach to processing
meaning.
In short order, these composition techniques include: setting,
description, hyperbole, "heavy-handed manipulation of listener
sympathy," ambiguity, allusion, obscure reference, and embedded
clues. An instructor can stimulate thought about these by showing
the diabolical, blasphemous, or lascivious interpretations of these,
even as I have done in this article. Thus the meaning is unpacked
along the lines of the reader or listener's interest, frame of
reference, or mood. Dethier gives the striking example of
Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner
in which Jimi skews its meaning with feedback
and dissonnance, two items
which exemplify the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He also
promotes the superficial view as a remedy to the excessively
hyperscrutinous myopic view. This view allows critical minds to
analyze beyond the trite filters of the art-tribalist and the Frankfurt
Schools of marxist social and literary criticism,
which are two of the junk forms of critical analysis, one coming from
music groupies and the other coming from interest groupies. (I
have always cherished taking the refreshingly superficial view after
bouts of intense scrutiny.) Specifically, Dethier describes the
"healthy respect for the power of the individual or group to fabricate
meaning and draw conclusions that may be both elegant and clever but
may not correspond to anything else." (Dethier 62) E.g.
exaptational, non-utilitarian, surplus profit abundance of meaning, and
simulacra of meaning. I believe the negative side is that most
critical analysis books and social
critical books are shoddy things that are written by the pound, by grand pisseurs hypocritically
aiming to make a fast buck peddling Marcusean logic12 or to put revisionist words in the
mouths of the dead. That is not to say that one does not ultimately
return to some hybrid --or in my case, a liminality-- between hermeneutics
and critical social theory.
Dethier seems to imply that we would, should, or eventually must return
to this.
Dethier adds "schema" to the composition techniques, which refers to
conscious cues inserted into text to evoke pattern recognition in the
receiver. When it is in there, it gives insight into the
composer's desire. And what of the phantom notes? When schema
only appears
to be there, it gives insight into the reader or listener, or
insight into the paranoid schizophrenia of individuals or
masses of readers and listeners. I wish to apply Dethier's
proximity analysis to his own observation: Stated less forcefully,
imagined schema gives insight into the
meaningful coincidences that Carl Jung said expose our anima hidden
beneath our persona. Stated more forcefully, apparent schema as an argument from silence amplified by
an edgy critical analyst, or a literary
psychoanalyst gives insight into the agenda and biases of the
reviewer, the same kind of idiot that sees Jesus in his pancakes or
anti-Semitism and homophobia in his toothpaste.
Dethier discusses the novelty of being able to evoke "India" with a
saxophone. This is similar to being able to evoke "Butter" with
Diacetyl (or Fabio), or evoke "Wintergreen" with methyl salicylate, or
evoke "Empathy" with 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine.
He encourages us to see music lyrics as text, but also to focus on
"arrangement, production, instrumentation, studio innovations, and
insider information" e.g. the nonverbal evocatives. I am always
surprised and proud of my 3 year old son when he pulls these out of a
piece of music on the radio and names them. Dethier surmises
things about preference tagging and associative predictions, such that
perhaps a Smiths fan might also like Flannery O' Connor. This
reminds me of the interest to object pairing that Amazon.com does when
conjuring additional books and CDs to my checkout page. You bought Eek-A-Mouse. Perhaps you
would also like Kurt Vonnegut and the Chinese Connection! Of
course I would. Dethier cites the band Morphine in the context of
evocatives. I submit
that if you like Morphine, you may also like Wilson Pickett, and the
movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen. You may like dark green
Mustangs, black Dodge Chargers, Lalo Schifrin,
.357 Magnums, and urban landscapes. I spoke to Mark Sandman in a
record store a couple of weeks before he died. I think of him
whenever I hear dirty baritone sax. That is to say dirty baritone
sax evokes
"Mark Sandman."
As someone raised on the ghettoblaster, an item which entered my life
with Hip Hop music, and an item which I retained long past popularity
and dismantled and rebuilt into a receiver for a production sound
system, I am amused
by Dethier's description of it as an emblem evocative of white
cooptation of
black culture, which of course it is, but whose lifespan taken as a
whole proves that it is not. Dethier carries something smaller
than a boom box, (a loud knife) but keenly elaborates upon the boom box
as an example
of "The Medium is the Message." He goes into some great shit
about Bikers preferring 78's to 45's to 33's, which are conversations I
was raised on, and can testify that 45's have deeper and louder grooves
than 33's, and 78's have faster playback and therefore higher
fidelity. Much of this is lost on the MP3 generation who are now
three media removed from vinyl.
On the subject of bikers, I pass on three quotes by three master
chopper builders whose medium-as-message in the steelbending version of
wildstyle graffiti or twisted lyrics say:
" '(Jerry Covington:) My bikes
are smooth and clean and everything flows [...] I feel that I have
always had my own designs in my head. I like many of the other
builders on the scene, guys like Eddie Trotta, but I definitely listen
to the beat of my own drummer.' That drummer has served very
well. The
beat of that drum is very similar to the lopping thump of a Harley
Davidson motor."
"I like nice flowing lines. Whether the bike is a chopper or a
digger style, or whatever, it has got to flow. One piece has to
flow into the next."
--Cory Ness
"Roland [Sands] sums up his creations as 'Fucking pissed off... major
attitude without a bunch of gay shit hanging off them. A bike's
platform should be simple, concise, and very rideable.'" 13 |
These
are so so
relevant to Hip Hop, Dethier's message about "the medium is the
message," and where we perhaps differ in our valuations of a
hypermasculine ethic --something which I endorse, but everyone from
Catherine
MacKinnon, to Sigmund Freud, to the Office of Strategic Services, to
the Villiage People find dangerous, false, or only emulable as
parody. With Led Zeppelin in mind, sometimes the cock and balls are the message. Sometimes
the swindle is the art.
Never Mind The Sex Pistols... here come the Bollocks! Sometimes LARGE
is the medium. Sometimes Rock -n- Roll is just sex. The Big
Ten Inch (record). The Super Sperm. The Funky Worm. The
worm is the spice. The
spice is the worm. Sometimes
the funk means skunk, sometimes the funk is the junk. Post-punk and punk funk. Why throw it in when you
can slam dunk? Wilt the Stilt
has no guilt. Sometimes the rap is built... around the vinyl.
And if you want to get vaginal... (who doesn't) 14...
let's not get started on the many connotations of "the groove."
When Dethier elaborates that ease of
manipulation of the medium is also the message, without
knowing it he speaks to DJs, makers of loop-based music, and George
Orwell. Not to mention 8 tracks, which evoke purple carpeting in a van, or my
dad who shuns rewind buttons,
saying "Let it play. It's on a loop anyway," which is how I feel about
the news. As text, today's vinyl-based music is manipulated (or
spin-doctored) by pitch, time, direction, and in more ways than a
Wonkavator. These are critical to processing the art form, and of
course they color the artform, and impart meaning through
interpretation and changes of modality forced upon them by the
medium. This is not to say that all media is a desired or useful
message or even a message we may delete or shut off.
Dethier hits a power chord when he says "commercially debased forms
of [text are] infused into every cultural space." (69) We are of
course saturated bombed with posters of iDiots dancing to iTunes, not
to mention
that we are ever-fed the same FM (fossilized music) by the band Boston
on
the radio. -- I'd like to think that's why Brad Delp killed himself,
but that is of course an assholish thing to say, and it is the one
comment in this article that I am equally compelled to make and be
sorry
for making.-- Fortunately, Dethier's analysis of Eminem
centers not on a tedious lesbo-mandarin rehash of how objectionable he
is
(thank
god), but rather on how Eminem is firmly within the system like
McDonalds, Wal-Mart, or Starbucks. (Just you think again on Kaczynski's
loser symbiotes!) Eminem is as routinely derided
by angry subgroups as he is routinely promoted by various
corporations.
None of this has any bearing on his musicality (which is high) or his
message (which is psychotic). He is of course a glaring example
of Rapper-Commodity and something which pervades cultural space
regardless of whether people actually want to consume that.
To an
extent, pervasion or even perversion
of cultural space is the mark of successful artistic promotion.
The opposite is also true, and bands try their best to cultivate a sort
of faux nonexistence and un-heard-of-ness; Band persona on an
introvert-extrovert spectrum. Looka heah: There is also band animus. Thus also the obsession
with
"underground music" and underground authorship as a real or imagined
stamp of authenticity alleged to impart special meaning to
composition or reveal bands with animus as well as a persona. On
this note, most rappers are hyperbolized
situationists who engage in heavy-handed manipulation of
listener sympathy, milking whichever side of their situation pays
more. Eminem is thereby to be counted as an actual rapper, not a poseur one.
Dethier rebounds from the superficial view by also exhorting students
to resist song meanings and reverse the role. For example,
imagine yourself as the victim of a misogynistic lyric, or someone
whose Every Step She Takes is being stalked by Sting. How
horrid! I like to reverse this again and imagine myself as the
abusive creep upstairs waiting to beat the crap out of "Luka." Or I
imagine myself imagining that all the things that John Lennon imagines
don't exist, really do exist, and that they are coming to get him on
the back steps. Or I imagine myself as a landlord wondering when
the fuck Tracy Chapman and her girlfriend are going to either pay me my
damn rent or get in a Fast Car and leave town. Cue the scene in
Clockwork Orange where Alex listens to a story about the Passion of
Christ and imagines himself as a Roman. To use two new
expressions
from the criticism, modal logic, and psychological warfare glossaries:
the sadistic
inversion of identification with the
aggressor is accessible
from Dethier's suggestion of inverting the gestalt. This cripples
the desired task of instilling a sense of reciprocity and universality,
allowing us to murder our past self rather than integrate and
assimilate it into self-criticism. The insatiable lust to expand
the domain and criticize then prods us to devour more works of music or
text and assert more dominance and control over the realm of texts that
we despise. 15
Consider again, one can listen to Kurt Cobain and hear a suicidal
depression patient. We can cheer for him as he sucks the shotgun
barrel. Or listen to Alice in Chains and hear a heroin addict
dying slowly on a bed; perhaps put a pillow over his face. Or
listen to Jewel and hear a red diaper baby who is
the
musical equivalent of a half-pint of Ben and Jerry's. Or listen
to Green
Day and
hear whiny, validation-seeking Gen Y-ers, and imagine real punks
beating the crap out of them. Let's go too far and
hear Jim Morrison conning his friends while they are on peyote, or
Marvin Gaye singing his way down some girl's pants, or Madonna trying
to get laid by a 19 year old Puerto Rican, or somebody furiously trying
to turn the Kabbala, the
Talmud, Aldous Huxley, or matchbook instructions into a viable
philosophy of life. Somewhere in Dethier's idea must exist a
ranking
scale in which alternative views and role reversals could be scaled
into the more viable, or the more favorable juxtaposition, rather than
an endlessly relativistic reciprocity of interpretation. Dethier
deals with the practical aspect that some people intepret music as
entertainment or parody, while others absorb them as
instructions. I submit that an uncritical emulation of Catcher In the Rye is as
dangerous as any currently available music CD. Only the most
worthless people carry it everywhere in their back pocket.
Dethier has you ask "what kind of audience is being constructed by this
work?" which is a question he attributes to Bruce Pirie. I hope
in my mind of minds that I may always fulfill the question: "what kind
of audience is being exterminated by this work?" Next to
the back pocket, is of course the brain, where Dethier says we carry
our most important songs and paperbacks, and where we have fashioned
highly specific, highly personal even if banal or sociopathic
meaning. Abusum non tollit usum. Do not confuse attraction
with causation. Somebody must have stabbed someone in the eyes
while singing Happy Birthday to You, or the Love Boat theme, or Barney
and Friends. I certainly hope
they did.
At the end of this chapter Dethier presents a means of creating meaning
by doing revisionist history on one's High School or childhood
experiences using the
techniques of rewriting historic personal failures as successes.
At the very least it reduces depression, but at the very most, it
transforms self-criticism and situational-criticism into a potentially
positive narrative. Thus he is ripping off the Zoloft
market. If you doubt that this technique works, then you haven't
read Mein Kampf which
is the world's singular work of unabashed self-revisionism.
Chapter Six:
Understanding Voice and Tone
Last month in the sales flyer from Guitar Center, they referred to
"tone" and how deep, rich piles of it could be generated by the various
products advertised therein. From acoustic electric guitars to
effects pedals, to speakerboxes, to guitar straps and packing crates,
you'd be surprised at the wonderful tone
they all made. Louis Farrakhan once intoned the nuances of "tone"
for
about 45 minutes at the Million Man March. Putting a Thighmaster
between your legs is supposed to give it to you. Suffice it to
say that tone can be very exciting. Dethier's far more
interesting elaboration on voice and tone encapsulate the shift in
gestalt made in the listener when he listens to, say, In A Gadda Da
Vida.... performed by Slayer. 16
Dethier describes Voice as a characteristic which supervenes upon
"style,
diction, syntax, register, tone and persona" (77) with a parallel
between writer and singer. He adds, using the singer simile,
"pitch, accuracy, fullness, and resonance." He relates these to
the construction of our tastes, which can be inarticulable. But the
lack
of articulation is precisely what Dethier seeks to remedy in his
students, helping them seek their appropriate vocabulary and
metaphor. I credit him with helping me learn how to speak in
metaphorical riffs. (You of may prefer to curse him for
this). Dethier cites the importance of riffs and
uses the example of Chuck Berry whose raging riffs helped lay the Rock
and
Roll smackdown. Don't forget Little Richard who is nothing
short of a professor when discussing how he grafted R and B onto up
tempo
Boogie Woogie. His singing voice and his playing voice are one
and the same conveyance. Dethier's comparative listening sessions
evolve into insane blackboard renditions of Eleanor Bron and Dudley
Moore's texture game in (1967) Bedazzled.
Dethier's listening exercise reminds me of the car trips my crates
digging crew would take to New York in the early 1990s, where we would
listen to 25 different versions of "Get Out My Life Woman." Biz
Markie uses two or three different versions on "All Samples
Cleared." While Dethier uses the method to identify voice and
evocatives to provoke free association and paper writing, we in the
music world use this for music writing. It is a viable
cross-disciplinary technique that relates to neural pathway learning
and simulated neural machine learning. My HP iPaq uses this to
calibrate its stylus. Essentially, you present a learner with a
web of
similars and it "learns" the middle, the average, the sense, or the
archetype. Add to this learning a playback, or a "version" and
you have some core elements of reggae studio composition. Again,
"Air on a G
String" is an example of Procol Harum's learning curve and permuted use
of the basic elements of Bach, played in their own Voice within a re-created
bachosphere and woven
together with
their own unique compositions.
In another iteration, Dethier describes the building blocks of voice as
"vocabulary, sentence length, sentence structure, sentence type, point
of view, metaphors, jargon, humor, and slang." (80). Most of
these are also considered key components of lyrical composition, but it
can also plainly refer to musical composition such as in blues, which
has a repeating stucture, or calls and responses, and other choices
reminiscent of haikus, jarchas, and sonnets. Good rappers such as
Biz Markie, Wise Intelligent, and Grand Puba use caesura. Check
that word out. Versatility and repertoire are as important breath
is to voice. Dethier follows up by
distinguishing between voice and technique, using technique to also
distinguish players from overplayers and writers from
overwriters. I consider Umberto Eco to be an orgasmic overwriter
as
compared to Dethier's reference to overplayer Yngwie Malmsteen, but
nevertheless a great writer. I'll bag it the day I write articles
like Liberace. (The first time I've lied in this article).
Dethier shows a preference for tones that echo across racial, cultural,
or
gender barriers. He also cites parody artists, such as Weird Al
Yankovic and Ween, also Mothers of Invention, who while assuming the
voice and tone of another artist or another genre, imbue it with an
irony
and barb unique to their interpretation. He cites Jello Biafra's
sarcasm, which in my opinion is delicious on a punk album, and pissy
and irritating to the point of inspiring assault and battery on an
Alternative Tentacles spoken word monologue. This is absolutely
the case as
well for Moby or KRS-One, who are charismatic, convincing, compelling,
and fluidly cogent while rapping over a beat, but are effete,
effeminate, embarrassing, passive aggressive, stuttering, pathetic and
forced when speaking at a podium. Dethier therefore opens the
inquiry into why it is that musicians, actors, and writers'
intellectual voices sound like shit outside of their preferred medium,
and why their personas don't translate well outside of performance.
Chapter
Seven:
Constructing Genres
Most of us (and now you) have experienced an unreliable narrator during
our
consumption of some text. Dethier describes how
unreliable narration in music can be used as a doorway into deciphering
unreliable narration in literature, and to deciphering the construction
of genre in
general. He presents the decipherment of song lyrics using poetic
analysis, but shuns the elitist fixation with the lyric/poem
dichotomy. Additionally, HE DOES NOT attempt the unreliable critic's Fitzgeraldian
neo-blues-jazz snob's rescue of the Fine Art of African-American MusicTM from it's facile european
hijackers in West Egg. He does not put Zoro's graffiti in a
museum and strand him at a fag hag party. 17 In this, he
supremely distinguishes himself from Martha Bayles' (Hole in Our Soul: The
Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Pop Music)
and deliberately constructs no thesis regarding pop culture's
inferiority to high
culture. Distinguishingly, he does not even conceal a bias beneath gilded
appraisals of certain genres or periods of music. He leaves the quality or spuriousness of
the artifact as purely
a question of its internally consistent structure and of one's personal
taste. Bayles almost does this but gets sucked into the A & E
page. Dethier rightly
says that the act of legitimating and rationalizing pop culture is a
form
of insultingly patronizing condescension. I must add that the
defense of genres and subgenres of pop and
sub-pop (what Jeff Conolly from The Lyres lovingly calls "Sub-Poop") is
as much a parlor game of the unhip as it is a furtive pasttime of
those loserly-feeling collectivists who justify themselves by
justifying
the self-believed low forms of music and art of their ingroup; ergo
persons who are not
comfortable with overtly proclaiming their own tastes as their own and
who resort to apologias. This is why I
listen to and produce, but do not defend the production and consumption
of Hip Hop, a genre rife with unreliable narrators who tend to believe
their own narrations; a genre with no shortage of outraged and
signifying
defenders in ridiculous, expensive, and uncomfortable syntax and
clothing.
Dethier does acknowledge that a hierarchy of genres exists relative to
the individual, and asks his students to explore and explain --mainly
to themselves-- these
rankings. Here his thinking is subversive but in a way that
subverts hierarchies or biases which had a concealed intellectual basis
in our writing. In this way he is
literarily subversive like Mark Twain, helping his students establish
the origin and nature of their "corn-pone opinions," 18 which
will, of course free them to write both inside and outside the box of
upbringing, and therefore become narrators who choose to be --rather
than unconsciously blunder in a way that is-- reliable or
unreliable. Thus he delineates another
gestalt, and the book earns another star. (I have lost star count
now).
De gustibus non est
disputandum.
Dethier is also prepared to upset the taste hierarchy in the English
Department, of which I was quite overjoyed, being partial to Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, and not Nathaniel Hawthorne. The most important
thing here is that he does so not because he is a sucky teacher or a
decadent, or a columnist working as a professor. He renews haute
academe by pursuing risky categories,
believing them to be the source of good writing, as opposed to esteemed
curricular writing, or a movie review. To this effect, he is a
Nietzschean
philosopher of the dangerous, upsetting the historicity and notions of
progress within English Literature, but also rescuing writers from both
the Eternal Recurrence of the Same bad writing and the Ouroboros of
criticism eating its own ass. Suffice it to say, his
addressing of the risky but timely questions of pop and high cultural
miscegenation do not collapse into a frivolous hyper-relativism of
equally dubious viewpoints and modes of expression. He is not
socio-nihilistic. He revalues "goodness in writing" according to
the categories: "mechanics, focus, sentences" and is satisfied to
"group and perhaps conflate," (93) jamming the square pegs into the
round holes and using the Non-exlusive Or to a double advantage and
increased access.
This is a very power political and cybernetic phreaker's approach to
writing. It takes the higher road in universities where most people are
focusing on an organic, hyper-relative "empower me with group voice"
approach to writing. It is also a clever primate's (Hoffman's
Assorted Freebies) approach, where
the monkey gets two juices by pulling one lever.
Dethier reformats Bennett Reimer's categories of good writing into: "craft, depth of feeling, originality, and
internal consistency" (94) which delights me, because it makes
Hilbert and Godel basic functions of good writing, as well as game
theory, uncertainty, and nonreciprocal hierarchic symmetry. He
goes on to discuss Genre Boundaries, and having opened the
door to consistency theorems as a prerequisite to good writing, he also
paves the way for boundary analysis equations, and the writing of
narratives using boundary equations. (Kaczynski again). Very
risky. Very
daring. Very dangerous. Dethier asks whether fidelity to
genre is superior to originality in the formation of our taste.
The mathematic subtext of this question, which Dethier does not
specifically ask, is whether Euclidean musical and literary genres can
be interesting after a certain point in one's personal artistic
history, or if they must all be Non-Euclidian, hyperbolic, or funhouse
mirror jaded manifolds to have appeal? Is a music or a book whose
formant concepts, characters, and notes are platonic solids such as
spheres and cubes simply unappealing unless rendered in hyperspheres
and hypercubes? Consequently, are pop book genres doomed to be
nonlinear accounts of Iraqi lesbian girls masturbating with mandarin
orange slices, or will there still be a market for straightforward
fiction? What will win? Noise music, or signals
music? Even Bayles bites her
nails. Will all music and literature have to be specialized and
geared to sub-cultures, or will people be able to genuinely enjoy books
and music with broad cultural appeal? Each man his own monkey, or
all men The Monkees? And more importantly, which would one prefer to produce? And most
importantly, how to maximize expression and audience by producing
content which is deliberately assymptotic or transgressive to many
boundary lines? How To Offend People And Make Friends.
Dethier refers to a biological principle called heterosis, "first
generation hybrids tend to be vigorous growers." (96) One can add
to that the dynamic of oscillation and hybrid genres. Mutt
genres and narratives by
first generation Americans or professional zebraheads such as Adam
Mansbach (Angry Black White Boy)
have produced some of new literature's most relevant manifestations
of the Holden Caulfield voice, tone-adjusted for the early 21st
century. Perhaps seeing
himself as a member of a scorned genre of pedagogy, Dethier moves
into
the beloved realm of Scorned Genres
in music and
therefore Punk. He describes scorned tracks and how different
people like the same music groups for
different songs and often diametrically opposite
reasons. I am guilty of a big one: I prefer Gilmour Pink Floyd to
Barrett/Waters Pink Floyd. (NOOOoooooo!!!)
One can also like the band
but hate their influences. I love Jim Morrison (Ray
Manzarek even more) but hate Allen Ginsberg, preferring Ezra Pound (for
pound) as a
personality. I like System of a Down (even ATWA) but not Squeaky
Fromme. Abbie Hoffman I adore up to a point, but Jerry Rubin
is too close to being Ira Einhorn. They all opened the first
Earth Day. I love Bebop but neither Jack
Kerouac nor his opponent Norman Podhoretz speak to me. Out of
schadenfreude, I find their enraged
salvos against one another
utterly amusing and fascinating, like a form
of pornography. Podhoretz'
defense of civilization is every bit as laughable as Kerouac's defense
of
barbarism and Ginsberg's defense of his technical prowess as a fat
bastard poet. Those are the decadences of Columbia University
students who
attempted to hammer the cymbals of gentile culture into dissonant pie
plates more in Bizarro tune with the
Pharisaical snobberies and Ba'alist primitivisms of Judaism. One
guy upholds the law of culture and the other guy brings back the
golden bull. This
oscillation between assimilation and regression is a
genuine cultural engine in the United States and is highly present in
Boston to New York
migratory culture. Abbie Hoffman is from Massachusetts.
"Angry White Boy" also takes place in Massachusetts and Columbia
University, as does The Strawberry Statement. The genre and its
protagonists
speak to a part of my soul and define a phenomenon of my State.
Norman Mailer refers to the phenomenon as "hipster psychopaths who
possess the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher." 19
Dethier's delineation of genre construction evokes Norman Mailer's
construction of his genre, and our constuction of identity,
associations which I have reinforced
through stylebiting or citing Advertisements for Myself,
"The
White
Negro,"
and inversely by being macho, "The Homosexual Villain." The last
two titles are contained in the former, but taken together with the
work of Mansbach, they belong together as works of unreliable
exhibitionist deconstructions of one's own bigotry and treatises on
composing writing while a selling a public persona.
The dictionary definition of "construct" and "genre" reflect Dethier's
axiomatic approach in presenting the construction of genre:
Construct: L Construere to make or form by
combining or arranging parts or elements.
Genre: MF Gender a category of artistic,
musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style,
form or content.
Here is a good segue point for what may be one of the widest
digressions from Dethier's text, but certainly no weirder than the fact
that in next section I will tell you that I am still waiting for my copy of Norman
Mailer's book to arrive in the mail, 20 even though it arrived two weeks
ago and I have sprinkled it throughout this composition. How
unreliable! Since many of you will not bother to read Mailer's
book, let me just say that "The Homosexual Villain" contains a
self-advertisement for Mailer where he pats himself on the back for
going into strange and uncomfortable territory by confronting his
homophobia for a gay magazine. The part relevant to Dethier's
book is the exhortation to go into strange, uncomfortable, forbidden or
scorned genres in order to grow as a writer. I could bolster this
by saying that there is a word root similarity between Constructing
Genre and Constructing Gender, but I leave that for some dishonest
college professor because I find it boring.
What I do not find boring is
this next theme which I have hinted at throughout: Discourse of
critical analysis has been poisoned by the dishonesty of Marxist Agenda
professors who practice unlicensed psychoanalysis, so there is now an
assumed unpaid debt that I have to defend my sexist or heterosexist
attitude. Mailer is also partly responsible for this assumption
since he was equally a good writer and an anarcho-communist
wanker. For that matter, so is Arthur Miller who has become the
de facto authority on the Puritans. So I need to prick and bleed
the dragon of my purported
homophobia, or else be accused of not analyzing myself sufficiently
throughout this text about analyzing text. I disagree with
Mailer's self-diagnosis and self-healing for profit, even when it is
presented later on as a chapter in a larger book of
self-advertisements, as this article on Dethier's book may. But I
do not disagree with Mailer's statement on going into uncomfortable
territory. As I said, it gels well with Dethier's advice.
The way this digression melts back into Dethier's work is this:
Dethier is in the position of college professor, teacher of teachers of
critical analysis by self-analysis through textual analysis and
analysis of the highly personal selection of musical memes. He
thus shows outstanding ethical mettle when he does not proceed down the
route of performing psychoanalysis on his students in order to weed out
their "undesirable tendencies" or hammer them into what I previously
called "dissonant pie plates." At any given point in this
article, my dissonance has been my own, and I retract the potentially
insulting statement that he taught me how to structure my
thoughts. He provided a very stubborn and convoluted student with
some tools to make my --to be harsh-- disordered
thinking into something more aesthetically pleasing to myself.
Not to skate out on the homophobia thing, which I get to now:
Before 1985 it was perfectly normal to be homophobic. Now it is
considered not normal. I was alive in 1985 and I am alive now,
but because I have not conformed to the new consensus of what is normal
or even adopted the new feminized pronouns, I have become a relic
indistinguishable from an ancient artifact or something which just fell
off a spaceship; that is to say, an artifact from the collectivist's outgroup; something from off-campus. One of the ways in
which people who live by social consensus (i.e. Neanderthals or the
Amish) erase the normal people who have been reclassified as abnormal
with respect to the new autistic conventions on homosexuality is to
call them a "homophobe" and pose as the psychoanalyst and diagnose them
of "latent homosexuality." I have poured this contamination upon
myself by writing this book review in a way that unabashedly emanates
from my personality.
"Latent
Homosexuality," a
charge leveled at
"homophobes" is an
iatrogenic effect of
psychoanalysis. In
plain english that
means that the
"doctor" infects the
"patient"
subliminally, as men
were once killed by
lead in their
alchemical
"medicines." This
is especially true of agencies who use psychoanalysis in psychological
warfare. The object of psychological warfare is to diagnose pathways
and deliver
psychological instability or mind-virus into the enemy. One route is
preying on his
hypochondria, i.e. suggesting he has cancer, or that he is a homosexual. Similarly, television commercials
use psychological warfare and
iatrogenic effects to hypnotize us into believing we have disorders,
smells, and maladies which require purchasing products to cure
them. The products range from pills, to sprays, to books.
Philip K. Dick made a joke of this when he wrote that if you see decay
all around you, then spray it with Ubik, the ubiquitous restorative
substance.
I lifted the word "iatrogenic" from Wikipedia, but not the corn-pone
opinion which is my own. Iatrogenic means that the doctor infects
the patient, just like poor Beethoven and his lead poisoning.
Coming completely back to Dethier's methods, I revoke also my earlier
jest that he soiled my mind with Minor Threat and X. Dethier's
teaching methods do not have iatrogenic effects.
Students are not infected or
poisoned by the Good Writing Doctor. But they may just take their
own naturally produced internal poisons and use them to tip darts or
dip quills.
Chapter Eight:
Process: Rehearsals, Beginning, Revisions
Without ostentation, Dethier describes
his teaching approach as using "music as a muse" (104). Music is
"any art presided over by the muses, especially the art of ordering
tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal
relationships to produce a composition having unity and
continuity." 21
The phrase
"Music as a
Muse" also forms a
sura. To
him and to you, I recommend Kamal
Dollah and Indrasani Mursalim's Music
as a Muse: Automatic Drawing billed as "spontaneous surrealist art
[created] to the inspiration of live traditional Flamenco music."
Kamal is an accomplished artist who is also pushing graffiti in
Singapore which is of course an uphill battle, the phrase "graffiti in
Singapore" resembling "a cold day in hell," "rights in Pakistan,"
"truth in advertising" or "oath of office." Kamal says with
respect to the
high-artiness or not of graffiti: " I don’t have to tag electrical
boxes before I can be called a graffiti artist. That’s just
irresponsible."
With all the climax of a partial birth abortion, Dethier's opening
measure of "Music as Muse" is to break it to his class that no one is a
rock star overnight. No
first timer picks up the guitar and bangs out Megadeth guitar god riffs
ex nihilo. The art gods must be satisfied by draftsmanship, practice, and
application. At first writing, Dethier's students are all
Wyld Stallyns. He exhorts them to write a good opening, citing
opening hooks in English pop songs, and thankfully, Whiter Shade of Pale, thus
validating
one of my earlier digressions. Here I digress to note that while
writing this article, I have striven to conform to the original
structure promised in the opening: review, digression, return.
Without digression, Cyrus could not have taken Babylon; thus said
Herodotus in a time before footnotes 22. It is a potential failing
of this writing that the call and response was not stylized into a Run
DMC Peter Piper call and
response; but then again, in my review of Chapter Nine, I will explain
why I don't slavishly copy rap styles into literary styles.
Here is a wider digression based on Rap
openings:
breakbeat music values the great opening and the great central break of
a good song, extending, modulating, recombining and layering those
first and central two to eight measures of phrase with great
interest. Here is the return: Dethier's question "What
hooks us?" is critical to the
construction of song choruses, as well as the strong leads that he
mentions. In writing songs sometimes the chorus is invented
first, and the verse develops around it, and sometimes the first verse
is developed first, and the chorus is a distilled synthesis of it which
goes on to shape the permutations of verses two and three, while the
chorus also permutes based upon these verses. This dual-shaping
or codependent permutation within an expanding, internally consistent
universe stymies the creative process for unpracticed
artists and writers and assists it for practiced ones. If
these
compositions
are created on two turntables, I bring in again Yeats' theme from The Second Coming:
- Turning and turning in the widening gyre
- The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
- Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
- Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
- The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
- The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
- The best lack all conviction, while the worst
- Are full of passionate intensity.
From which
the phrase
beginning, "The best lack all conviction" sticks out as an object of
contemplation
best left for future private musical labor. Suffice it to say
that it relates well to whipping oneself up into a frenzy and allowing
people to watch the transformation.
Dethier delves into "those first seconds of not-yet-music" which seethe
with anticipatory openness before the beginning of many rock
songs. He delves into the four count, which lays out the four-mat
of Black American musical vernacular. I am sure he notes the
speed with which Dead Kennedys do this before "Moral Majority" 23 which
also establishes tone and tempo as well as the four phrase and four
diss structure, where "Blow it out your ass" is repeated three times
and finished up with a taunting rhetorical question. The
structure adheres
to black music vernacular, but is written by a pissy white
homosexual in baroque punk.
Regardless, it is a strong example of a good opening and bitchingly
consistent tone. As far as books go, I submit that A Tale of Two Cities also
has a
good opening rife with juxtaposition. For movies,
I think Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's
Baadasssss Song has the absolute best movie opening. If I had
to choose three random media for opening leads in his class exercise, I
would begin with those three.
Dethier shoots holes in the belief that spontaneous writing is the
best writing. (Let this article serve as a reminder). As a
member of a musical writing culture that
embraces freestyle, I am refreshed to read a teacher who dares to say
that "off the dome" freestyle composition can be a ripoff, boring, narcoleptic, vague, and
made of iron pyrite. A long quote from his
book is in order:
Writers lulled by this idea invest
their energy into setting up the perfect creative situation -- perfect
setting, tools, atmosphere, drugs-- and tend to scorn revision because
it's not spontaneous, it tampers with the results of the original
creative impulse. Instead they wrack their brains (or destroy
their brain cells) trying to come up with the genius idea, and then in
desperation turn in what little they've produced as though it were a
genius idea, without bothering to support, detail, or bring it to life.
(107)
|
I must admit that I cried, deleted my article and never published it
after reading that. (My second lie. I merely rewrote the
hell out of it). This criticism damns
everyone! From the most weeded Emcee, to myself who had to clean
my apartment five times, eat three cans of sardines, drink six pots of
espresso, two rum and cokes, buy a Korg Keyboard, oversleep for
consecutive mornings, take two sex breaks, and bake an Indian
Pudding before banging out this triflingly small section of a
pathetically abusive and
meandering review of Dethier's book while
reading it; and jotting my
observations into the main body of an article that followed his book outline chapter by
chapter, detailing all my
secondary and tertiary observations, largely for the benefit of myself
and perhaps
three other human beings with nothing better to do than read my crappy
run-on sentences. I'm
copping out.
It was one of two evils, the smaller being to read the whole book first
and then write a short and generalized non-introspective synopsis of
Dethier's salient
points, which would not benefit me as much. So I chose the greater of two evils.
Using the paradigm of Jazz writers, those allegedly so-so spontaneous
and random composers, Dethier says that even they had notebooks, and
that one should "rehearse, revise and resee" (108). He mentions
false starts in songs, to which I must recommend the false start in Knockin' Round the Zoo
by James Taylor, and the (perhaps now licensed) "Get Back Sessions"
bootleg of Maxwell's Silver Hammer in
which John Lennon morbidly shouts outs the lyrics to the song as note
changes: (Gee, Gee, Gee, Gee, Dee Mynorr... or something like
that) and the Beatles contemplate breaking up the band. Lennon
accused McCartney of flogging the song to death in studio production,
taking it apart and reassembling it. Plodding is
a necessary component of composition. For a literary reference,
Salman Rushdie presents plodding deconstructions of his writing process
as asides in Midnight's
Children. Personally, I have thousands of .wav files on my
hard drive representing ultraminor or nuanced changes in bits of music
that are currently under composition, including variations of Hey Bulldog and Temporary Secretary and spend hours
identifying
phantom notes and perfecting compressional variations. Tomato,
fucking tomahto. It took
me two years to finalize my last 60 minute album. I started writing this article in June
2007 when the above pictured issue of Classic Rock came
out. Everyone in Black Sabbath is dead by now. Incidentally, Stephen Thomas
Erlewine derides that great McCartyney song as "muddled and confused
[...] with ridiculous lyrics [... and] self-consciously atonal melody
over gurgling synths. Things rarely get worse... " 24 Sheeeeeit. James Taylor
doesn't even like Knockin' Round the
Zoo. 25 Researching the origins of your
inspirations helps you pick up where previous artists left off and also
to identify unsolved problems between artistic creator and artistic
critic or more importantly artistic creator as artistic critic.
Research is important, according to Dethier, preliminari | | |
