The first decade of the 21st Century was largely a dire time for music. Chances are if you bought an album during those years it was due to the fact that you happened to have money to burn and decided a collection of songs would be preferable to lottery tickets or illegal drugs. Lord knows you didn’t pick up R. Kelly’s ‘Chocolate Factory’ because you had a burning desire to hear where this guy was “taking” R&B, or because you felt that owning this record was something that you as a person had to do, as a statement in favour of something, that playing this album loud on your stereo or in your car would say something about you that people needed to know. “It’s the remix to Ignition/hot and fresh out the kitchen…”
In the last four years or so music has gotten noticeably better, for anyone who cares to listen. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that there are some genuinely great artists working in music at the moment, and that they are actually making great music to back that up. You attend their shows when they’re in town, you share their music with your friends and read about them whenever they give an interview, and you actually own a hard copy of their music. But it never feels like you’ve been told how it was back in the old days. You know, when the news media was little more than the US military’s PR wing and you learned how to look at the world through the eyes of the guy with the guitar. Back when music mattered.
To matter and to be popular are not synonymous. In fact music that is popular in 2014 is more likely to not matter than music that doesn’t chart. Nor does it mean there is anything “wrong” with the artist or their music, some of the greatest things ever composed and recorded don’t matter. And just because certain music doesn’t matter now doesn’t mean it didn’t matter in the past, or won’t matter in the future. Music that matters is the kind of music that feels significant in the moment it’s heard, whether at a gig, on the radio or online. It’s music that is significant not just to society but to the individual. It takes something that has been bubbling below the surface for a while, abstract feelings or ideas that people have been experiencing without quite realising, and gives expression to it.
The Beatles mattered in 1963 because they amalgamated the youth culture of the previous eight years into one high-energy long-haired free-for-all, and Dylan mattered in 1965 when people were telling him what he should be and he begged to differ. But The Beach Boys never mattered. The Sex Pistols mattered when they were represented by a blank space on the charts during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and Nirvana mattered when they penetrated MTV’s glossy facade with their grungy look and sound in the early ’90s. But The Clash didn’t really matter, nor did The Stone Roses. Springsteen matters today but he didn’t matter at all when he released ‘Born To Run’ and as great as Paul Simon is he only mattered for a brief time when he made ‘Graceland’. Simon & Garfunkel never mattered. NWA’s ethos that black isn’t beautiful, that it’s something white people ought to be afraid of mattered in 1988 as did Eminem’s taboo busting ‘Marshall Mathers LP’ in 2001, but hip-hop has been largely unimportant otherwise.
Obviously mattering has little to do with great music, or who is the better band. Nobody with a pair of ears would try and convince you that The Sex Pistols were a better band than The Clash. In Dublin the disparity between quality and importance is glaring because literally no music in Dublin matters. In fact nothing that ever happens in Dublin matters. Joyce and Beckett didn’t matter in Dublin, they mattered in Zurich and Paris. Flann O’Brien was undoubtedly a genius but it could never be argued of him that he mattered, at least not in his own time. He had to leave Dublin by way of the grave before you could even conceive the idea of him that he might matter somehow.
A Matter of Opinion
So who matters in this second decade of the 21st Century? From such a close vantage point it’s hard to say, but undoubtedly in 2011 Fleet Foxes mattered quite a bit. The reason they mattered then was because they were singing for something. Enough acts sing about how shit everything is, particularly culture and bankers. But that’s irrelevant crap, nobody gives a damn what any musician thinks about bankers, we care what politicians think about them and even if Springsteen mattered around the time ‘Wrecking Ball’ came out, it’s because the message he was trying to get across in the ’70s is relevant now, not because he’s singing about parties up on banker hill. That doesn’t mean a thing to anyone.
The reason Fleet Foxes mattered was because they inhabited an alternative position to the loud obnoxious sounds of the charts and the hectic bustling nature of city living. They epitomised an individual way of life that felt genuine because of how they stayed out of the spotlight, but also felt inclusive to anyone who actually wanted to be a part of it. They saw the same injustices we saw, but they didn’t pretend to shed a tear for the plight of the poor. They saw “the men who move only in dimly lit halls and determine my future for ME”, not those who defined society’s future, but those who defined mine. They were a moment of pause and reflection outside the rapid white-waters of the mainstream, a chance to contradict popular society and realise that perhaps there is another path worth walking.
But Fleet Foxes don’t matter any more. Despite the huge folk outpouring that followed their first release in 2009 what matters is changing. ‘Graceland’ matters more today than Fleet Foxes, but not for the same reason it did in 1986. Then it mattered because it was saying something about music that politics didn’t understand; that music doesn’t obey political borders. Today it says that music doesn’t obey the cultural borders that are propagated by the mainstream and exist mostly in our minds.
Easily the most important musical moment I experienced first-hand last year was witnessing Bassekou Kouyate perform in Dublin’s Sugar Club with his band Ngoni Ba. Bassekou Kouyate feels significant because in Mali there was and is a genuine threat to people’s way of living. Like all important musical performers he doesn’t know the sociological or cultural or political reasons why these forces exist, who try to silence music, he just knows that they do, and that he is not going to go down without a fight. For that reason his coming to Dublin and having the people of this city dance to his music and communicate with him in that way was significant. It was a cultural exchange, him giving us his sound, and us giving him our ears.
But I don’t have to tell you that this didn’t matter. For one thing, it happened in Dublin. Nobody talked about it, nobody wrote about it and so – apart from those who were there and will attest otherwise – it never actually happened. Bassekou Kouyate’s performance in Dublin is a sign of what should matter. But it can’t, despite how good it is, or how important it feels in the moment. What’s most likely is that whoever will matter a year from now will be familiar with Bassekou Kouyate, they will play a kind of music that doesn’t discriminate between cultures, where some middle-class white kid from Austin and a black kid from Bamako and a tabla player from Calcutta can come together and make genre-less music. That’s the utopia we’re told music’s supposed to bring about, that some people swear blind actually exists. Perhaps it’s a bullshit kumbaya idea, but if a music act can break down the unquestioned presumptions of what music and society and the people who partake in both should be, then it must matter.
Another State of Matter
Perhaps this concept is a media construct. Maybe there is no such thing as music that matters. Look at early blues music. Those guys definitely didn’t matter. They sang for pennies, for a meal, for fun. They weren’t trying to change the world when they got up on a rickety old stool on some termite-bitten stage in some nigh-on abandoned dive in the middle of the dust bowl. For one thing, those guys were pure musicians, playing music by ear or by divination, whereas music that matters is about breaking through something, making a point, leaving a stamp on history, knocking down the walls of censorship or decency or what have you.
So at a gig in Dublin on some miserable night you may hear this beautiful music and it may touch you somehow, but it won’t matter. You won’t turn to the person beside you and say “did you feel that?” because you won’t expect an answer, you won’t go home and write about it or talk about it incessantly. And if you do you’ll wonder why nobody cares, if you aren’t expressing yourself properly; that feeling it gave you, that moment of clarity. You’ll scan the internet, hoping to find some reference, someone else who felt what you felt, but all you’ll come across are a lot of the same old stale reviews, “great band, great melodies, needs more cowbell har-har”. It’s as if you need a thousand people to know how great an experience you had, but why? Does that make it any more real?
The reality is that probably ten thousand people in Dublin had the same experience as you at different venues for different bands. Moments of real clarity, where everything made sense for one brief instant. None of them were Dylan going electric, or Jim Morrisson flashing his cock, they weren’t moments that really mattered. They’re moments that occurred and felt real and then faded away: The Staves harmonising on Wisely & Slow in Whelan’s on 25th of November 2012, John Murry throwing down the mic-stand and storming off stage at the end of Little Coloured Balloons in the Workman’s on 9th of May 2013. They’re the moments that mean nothing to anyone, and even if you explained why they were important to you still no-one would care. They’re the moments that people whisper about in the back of the class while the teacher pontificates from the front that this is the really important part of history that I’m telling you about. And maybe they’re right, maybe great music doesn’t matter. But then maybe that doesn’t matter.