Six Degrees of Separation from the Strokes to Schoenberg
A good friend recently gave me Paul Morley's book Words and Music over spring break. I only just now started reading it, and on the whole, I like it very much so far.
There was a part, however, that bothered me. He was talking about bands/musicians with decidedly retro leanings like the Strokes and Oasis. His basic point (as I remember it) was that bands like this are an ultimately pointless repackaging of old musical ideas. To his ear, the Strokes' conservative approach to music was no more (perhaps less) innovative than a Britney Spears single because they ultimately failed to take music any further forward.
To a certain extent, I think I understand Morley's point, but to me it is a continuation of the approach to writing music history that ultimately ruined classical music. It's an approach that views music history as a long string of innovations that pave the way for further innovation. It's a history that is based on a linear trajectory model, something that is not only wrong but destructive. Musicologists and historians have written like this for several centuries now (although some who thought they were being particularly clever, talk about history as being cyclical, an idea ultimately just as reductive as the linear model). But intellectual history does not work this way. If you were to try and represent history graphically, it would weave erratically, branch and reconnect, bend backwards, stop and start randomly, vanish and reappear miles away from where you saw it last. Knowledge is not simply one innovation moving to the next. Ideas are constantly being created, lost, forgotten, replaced, rediscovered and reinvented. It is damaging to think that every artist has to somehow reinvent the wheel to be worthwhile.
Unfortunately, lust for innovation ran roughshod over musicology beginning with nineteenth century Germany. German music critics, fed up with seeing French and Italian composers wooing German audiences started to fight back by instituting new standards by which good music should be judged. Paramount in these standards was innovation, a trait deemed to be uniquely German. Anything deemed not innovative enough (or German enough) was passed over. This ultimately codified a canon of "Great" composers and works. As a result, many fantastic non-German composers (and even works by German composers that were not sufficiently forward looking) were left out of the history books.
What Morley seems to be missing is that great art can still be conservative. There are plenty of great pieces that use older techniques or even sound old, that are not simply a rehashing of the same ideas. What made composers like Schoenberg or Stravinsky so great was not their innovative approach to composition, but the way that they used modern concepts to make music that had a decidedly backward facing outlook. Schoenberg of course created and entirely new musical language for his compositions, but his compositions owed more to Bach than they did to Strauss. And although sonically speaking a Schoenberg is further from Bach than the Strokes are from the Beatles (after all, the span between the former is 150 years larger than that of the latter), they both are purposefully playful reinterpretations of their musical predecessors.
I'm no ardent Strokes apologist (and I certainly have no strong predilection for Schoenberg) but I did like the album Is This It? a lot. I liked it because it had good song writing, but it was also dripping in irony. They sounded like a Beatles or a Rolling Stones that had lived to see the 60's counterculture fall flat on its face, witnessed white flight, race riots, AIDS and Reaganomics. In a way, the Strokes sounded like the Beatles had fathered a child with the Ramones and neglected it its entire childhood.
What killed the Strokes was not their lack of innovation, it was that their gimmick was only good for maybe one album. Boredom only works as an aesthetic for so long. But I do not think that the Strokes were a mindless rehashing of used goods. Like their musical mother the Ramones, the Strokes knew exactly how to take the old with the new.
There was a part, however, that bothered me. He was talking about bands/musicians with decidedly retro leanings like the Strokes and Oasis. His basic point (as I remember it) was that bands like this are an ultimately pointless repackaging of old musical ideas. To his ear, the Strokes' conservative approach to music was no more (perhaps less) innovative than a Britney Spears single because they ultimately failed to take music any further forward.
To a certain extent, I think I understand Morley's point, but to me it is a continuation of the approach to writing music history that ultimately ruined classical music. It's an approach that views music history as a long string of innovations that pave the way for further innovation. It's a history that is based on a linear trajectory model, something that is not only wrong but destructive. Musicologists and historians have written like this for several centuries now (although some who thought they were being particularly clever, talk about history as being cyclical, an idea ultimately just as reductive as the linear model). But intellectual history does not work this way. If you were to try and represent history graphically, it would weave erratically, branch and reconnect, bend backwards, stop and start randomly, vanish and reappear miles away from where you saw it last. Knowledge is not simply one innovation moving to the next. Ideas are constantly being created, lost, forgotten, replaced, rediscovered and reinvented. It is damaging to think that every artist has to somehow reinvent the wheel to be worthwhile.
Unfortunately, lust for innovation ran roughshod over musicology beginning with nineteenth century Germany. German music critics, fed up with seeing French and Italian composers wooing German audiences started to fight back by instituting new standards by which good music should be judged. Paramount in these standards was innovation, a trait deemed to be uniquely German. Anything deemed not innovative enough (or German enough) was passed over. This ultimately codified a canon of "Great" composers and works. As a result, many fantastic non-German composers (and even works by German composers that were not sufficiently forward looking) were left out of the history books.
What Morley seems to be missing is that great art can still be conservative. There are plenty of great pieces that use older techniques or even sound old, that are not simply a rehashing of the same ideas. What made composers like Schoenberg or Stravinsky so great was not their innovative approach to composition, but the way that they used modern concepts to make music that had a decidedly backward facing outlook. Schoenberg of course created and entirely new musical language for his compositions, but his compositions owed more to Bach than they did to Strauss. And although sonically speaking a Schoenberg is further from Bach than the Strokes are from the Beatles (after all, the span between the former is 150 years larger than that of the latter), they both are purposefully playful reinterpretations of their musical predecessors.
I'm no ardent Strokes apologist (and I certainly have no strong predilection for Schoenberg) but I did like the album Is This It? a lot. I liked it because it had good song writing, but it was also dripping in irony. They sounded like a Beatles or a Rolling Stones that had lived to see the 60's counterculture fall flat on its face, witnessed white flight, race riots, AIDS and Reaganomics. In a way, the Strokes sounded like the Beatles had fathered a child with the Ramones and neglected it its entire childhood.
What killed the Strokes was not their lack of innovation, it was that their gimmick was only good for maybe one album. Boredom only works as an aesthetic for so long. But I do not think that the Strokes were a mindless rehashing of used goods. Like their musical mother the Ramones, the Strokes knew exactly how to take the old with the new.