Owning Music

Reviewed:
All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky (The Temporary Residence Limited 2007)
“Bog Lord” from Half-Eaten Guitar by Wyrd Visions (Bluefog Recordings 2006)
Yahoo! Music
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Etc.

At this point in the accelerating history of the 21st century, with the Napster/Metallica controversy as old and faded as the Parthenon, any discussion of music on the Internet risks painful anachronism and banality. But a predominant focus on the rights of musicians has largely ignored many other questions regarding music ownership, questions that concern the paying, listening public in addition to the artist, label, or music thief. While the Internet may provide its customers with easy access to music, does it actually deliver true ownership? And do cheaper, easier means of acquisition come without a cost to aesthetic value? In addition to some excellent music, the true subjects of this review will be the modes of acquiring it: the aesthetics of the material object versus the liberating potential of the hyperlink.

Last week I purchased the latest Explosions in the Sky album, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, on CD. Its expansive, complex, post-rock instrumentals develop the sound established on their previous three releases, the album opening with a short storm of heavy guitar layered with a cascade of rising and falling tremolos before settling into a quiet melody. A drum beat throbs, building tension before quieting further, until suddenly the music lifts, surging into a propulsive anthem of rapid percussion and multiple, shimmering guitar blasts. The use of their music on the soundtrack for Friday Night Lights, the high school football drama, makes perfect sense: like their music, no sport has the kinetic range that football does, the utter motionlessness, the lengthy runs, the abrupt collisions, the cohesion and diffusion of players across a field. The band reconfigures the post-rock formula of soft/slow-loud/fast-soft/slow into countless permutations, conveying a broader spectrum of emotional nuance than similar epic instrumental bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor (as incredible as they are).

The track titles—“The Birth and Death of the Day,” “What Do You Go Home To?,” “Catastrophe and the Cure”, “So Long, Lonesome,” among others—articulate well the effect of the music, how the moments of poignant quiet evoke the beauty to be found in the loneliest twilight, how the momentum of the rousing anthems pulls the listener from despair to hope. One of the unexpected pleasures of All of a Sudden, however, is its packaging, a case of grainy textured cardboard and fold out artwork by Esteban Rey, which grounds the music in a suggestive, symbolic visual narrative. In the center of one side of the foldout a man stands with a lantern in a boat, floating across a deluged town with a small light far off in the distance. Surrounding this central image are portraits of people in various modes of connection and disconnection, children watching television, a man sadly alone at a birthday cake, lovers in a pool. The soft, pastel chalkiness of the portraits suffuses them with nostalgia, as if the scenes are being remembered by the central figure in the boat, who also stands representative for all those lost in the deluge of everyday life. Inescapably, too, the flood recalls Katrina, the tsunami, and other present horrors, and takes up the entire reverse side of the poster, in which the figure’s head now bends in despair, though the lantern remains held high and the distant light has neared—another boat has come. A simple yet suggestive enclosure emphasizing the personal connection strove for in the music, Rey’s artwork directs without enforcing multiple interpretive narratives for the album’s wordless songs. It also represents an aspect of the popular music listening experience that may vanish with the over-development of Internet music providers.

As a kid in the 80’s I never would have heard of a non-MTV band like Explosions in the Sky, despite the explosion in indie rock at the time. I would have no access to bands like Dinosaur, Jr. or The Replacements until college or even later from books like Our Band Could Be Your Life. The suburban New Jersey religious school I attended was culturally remote despite its proximity to New York City, counting among its student body no kindly mohawked senior classmates to fill me in on the underground. Until grunge broke through in the early nineties, all I had to relieve the boredom of top forty radio was heavy metal. In 6th grade I had been struggling to satiate a thirst for edgy music with the most visible—awful hairbands like Motley Crue and Poison—until a friend’s older brother loaned me an early Metallica album on cassette. I listened to it a hundred times—desperately—copying it before I returned it, and then biking to a record store a town away anyway to get a copy of my own with lyrics and liner notes. Even though Master of Puppets falls far short of anything put out by Black Flag or Husker Du at the same time (and of which I was totally oblivious), hearing it then was like finding water in a desert I had not known I wandered.

Had I the Internet back then my fate would have been much different; I might have been listening to Captain Beefheart and The Fall by the time I hit college. The conventional wisdom that the days of musical artifacts like the compact disc are numbered is no idle hype, and though I see no reason why the store bought CD should not continue to live alongside Yahoo! Music, Real Rhapsody, or the Internet in general, the scope and power such technology brings to music listening is undeniable. On Yahoo! I can indulge the slightest whim, clicking from Robert Johnson to Smog to Kelly Clarkson, from Arvo Parte to Lukas Ligeti to Joni Mitchell, from Modest Mouse to Ennio Morricone, reducing the days and weeks spent browsing record shops and libraries to minutes, and the hundreds of dollars required to purchase them all to the six dollar monthly basic membership fee. I can unearth that old Archers of Loaf album stolen from me in college; I can check out bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk that I have heard name-dropped for years without the commitment of a purchase.

The kind of listening the Internet encourages also releases songs from the regime of the album, privileging the single, allowing the track to stand alone to be appreciated and providing more opportunities to sample, pick, and choose. It also, however, tends to lack the patience required to enjoy the narrative complexity and multiple points of view possible on concept albums. As a record, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience would not have fared well in cyberspace: “The Lamb” remains blindly naive without “The Tyger.” The same could be said of Radiohead’s “OK Computer”; what is the self-annihilating postmodern despair of “Exit Music (for a Film)” without the closing one-line activist jeremiad of “The Tourist”: “Idiot slow down”? But not all albums are “OK Computer” and not all artists are Radiohead; plenty of collections contain only one or two standout tracks, while plenty of artists are best when tasted, not devoured whole.

Take Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, for example, with whom I started a recent several hour session of Internet music surfing, mostly on Yahoo! Music. A one-time boxer and would-be opera singer, Hawkins ended up a shock rocker, the Marilyn Manson of the 50’s and early 60’s, incorporating skulls and coffins into his stage act, voodoo and cannibalism into his lyrics. While I respect all of his music, I do not find all of it enjoyable. If this is a criticism, it is a criticism largely directed at myself: the novelty swamp sound effects, the bloated mud-bound bullfrog of a saxophone, and the pained, hysterical screaming of Hawkins are simply too much for me on “Alligator Wine,” a song about drinking a gator blood potion to entrap a lover. As hokey and ridiculous as this description may sound (and is), the song at one level really frightens, in the same way that a dust covered stuffed fish-boy at a cheap carnival funhouse will terrify and disgust far more than the most polished horror film. For all of its obvious artificiality, the former lays there palpably, looking back up plastic-eyed at the viewer, as a film never could—not to mention the fact that the mind crude and perverse enough to make such a thing could belong to the very man who sold you your ticket, just yards away.

But Hawkins was simply a detour that day, as was Odetta (50s and 60s folk matriarch, influence on Dylan and Baez), some early R.E.M., lo-fi Stuckist Billy Childish, and Final Fantasy, a.k.a. Owen Pallett, who composes perfectly elegant pop-chamber pieces for violin to accompany songs about videogames and Dungeons and Dragons (he also arranges strings for Arcade Fire). My true destination that day was the album Half-Eaten Guitar by Wyrd Visions, a black metal tinged Canadian psychedelic folk band whose song “Bog Lord” I had heard on NPR about four months ago. The track begins with the main vocalist climbing with a stately hum that descends into a moan landing somewhere between pleasure and pain, but that is ultimately too unearthly to understand. Several other voices whistle for a short time, as if the singer has been joined by a band of hobbits for a mystical adventure (there is really no other way to describe it). What is remarkable here is not the fantasy weirdness of it all, but how utterly persuasive the fantasy weirdness instantly becomes. It is the kind of sound Rip Van Winkle might have heard climbing through the Kaatskills. A strummed acoustic accompanies a loopy, sliding electric riff over the drone of an accordion or some other bellowed instrument to produce an effect so hypnotic that the lyrics become difficult to follow. The voice, too, lulls (not to sleep, but to dream), sounding ghostly or possessed, so detached it is from its own melancholy—until some word like “necromancy” jolts the listener to attention.

Here the Internet ends, apparently. Though Wyrd Visions have toured with indie bands as respected and well known as Grizzly Bear, they are not on Yahoo! Music—their album is not even available on Amazon. The band website has been under construction for months, as has that of their label, Bluefog. I have tried emailing the band directly, but to no avail. Fortunately, the track I heard, “Bog Lord,” plays on their myspace page, taunting me with the prospect of a full album of this bizarrely compelling stuff. But as with my first Metallica album, I might actually have to leave the house to get it, go on a quest all the way to Toronto in fact. And while I have neither the time nor money to do that, the idea that I could or would have to, the idea that something so interesting and vital can still escape the matrix of immediate convenient consumption, is immensely satisfying. It also recalls principles of ownership that Internet music downloading lacks entirely, principles that Walter Benjamin describes as drawing a “magic circle” around an item as the “thrill of acquisition” passes over it. In “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin describes how the books in his collection become valuable, not through their price tag, their contents (he does not read them), or their rarity, but through the effort expended to purchase them at an auction, the experiences he has in and of the city where the auction is held, and through the memories that accrue around this object in the process of its acquisition. Benjamin joins the greater history of the book and its past owners, even as the book provides him with a material record of his own personal history. This is total ownership, magical in its singularity, in its dependence on the purely individual relationship between possessor and possessed, and in how it involves the mind’s transformation of a blank piece of matter into something of value and meaning.

The disadvantages of downloading or streaming music are obvious, if under appreciated. Computer crashes, obscure licensing policies, complex regulations regarding extra fees for burning CDs or transferring tracks to mp3 players, all compromise a sense of authentic and permanent ownership. But the advantages are also clear and clearly commodifiable: ease, cheapness, and information (albeit information of a superficial, name-dropping sort), while the advantages of the CD or cassette are perhaps easier to feel than explain. Visual and textual supplements can illuminate and enrich an album. The physical object can leave memories of itself in the nerves of the fingers and eyes. I know exactly what Master of Puppets felt like in my hand, its color, where the crack in the case was. This seems important in some strangely intangible way, as if its physicality allowed the music to carve a deeper groove in the brain, for better or worse. Certainly the narrative of the cross-town bike ride clarified and reified its (and music’s) value in my eyes.

Strangely enough, just as I finish this review, Wyrd Visions has emailed me back, asking for my address. The Internet, then, does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of a “magic circle,” though if I actually ever do receive Half-Eaten Guitar, the acquiring of it will not have been convenient at all. And it will be all the more treasured because of it.