Day 28
What was the point of this exercise? My original intention was to find the next Sugar Man, as that seemed like a rather productive thing to do. But if I still believed that was what I was doing here then I’d surely have made one last great effort to find someone both obscure and brilliant. I’d love to tell you that that’s exactly what I did, that the past week I’ve been listening to this amazing album that nobody’s listened to in thirty years and that this final edition of A Musical Discovery would reveal it to the world. But that’s not what I’ve been doing. You know what I’ve been listening to the last week? ‘St. Vincent’, the same as everybody else.
Not that I broke the rules I’d set up for myself about not listening to the music I was familiar with for all of February. I’d never heard of St. Vincent before then, or if I did it didn’t register with me. But it’s a certainty that if I hadn’t decided to take a step away from my old familiar record collection that album would have breezed by me like so many others. That’s the real musical discovery I made in the month of February that I did not know how to find good music, whether new or old. I didn’t know what radio stations to listen to, what friends to take recommendations from, or even what I liked, as my discovery of Broadcast showed (a love for electronic music, who knew?).
One very important thing I discovered is that the idea of “taste” is actually true. I was quite convinced that there was good music, which I liked, and bad music, which you found on the charts or in those awful Harcourt Street nightclubs. But now I’m hearing music like the latest albums from Beck and Wild Beasts and I’m thinking “I don’t like this at all”, but people whose taste in music I respect like them a lot. That is a liberating feeling. To be able to have disagreements with people who know about music, to not have to like Mumford & Sons just because they’ve got a banjo (I never liked Mumford & Sons, that’s just a wee hypothetical).
***
From the outset I was under the impression that I’d be desperate to listen to some of my favourite albums by the time the month was up, but what I’ve found instead is that I’m desperate to listen to the music I was aware of before February but never took the time to listen to. I’ve become addicted to that very first listen, the one where you hear something new and strange yet completely amazing, those opening electronic sounds on St. Vincent’s Rattlesnake, or the drony vocal delivery of Courtney Barnett on Avant Gardener. From tomorrow onwards I expect to be experiencing that with Talking Heads, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, The White Stripes, Radiohead, The Stooges, Kate Bush and all the hundreds of acts who passed me by as I clung to my copy of ‘The Band’ like it was a life preserver.
But there’s also that urge to stay aware of what’s happening at the moment, what’s going to happen next. I managed to wait until Phantom 105.2 found itself being restructured before actually listening to it with any kind of regularity. Now it’s being aligned with Today FM so what will that mean for my Irish radio listening habits? BBC Radio 6 has started making itself known to me as has the Melbourne-based Triple J, and while none of these stations have yet introduced me to anything I’d consider brilliant, there does seem to be potential for the latter two at least.
I’ve had this feeling before. You know the way in Ireland they don’t actually teach you critical thinking in schools, they instead mould you into perfectly functioning members of society who slot conveniently into the little gaps that open up in the job market from time to time? Well, for my sins I took a semester of critical theory in college, where you’re taught how to look at things from perspectives other than “popular opinion”. Marxist theory, how is the outcome of a story defined by the flow of money? Feminist theory, what level of importance do the women characters have in this story? Formalist theory, to what extent is the structure of this story the point of it? etc.
The ability to look at the world from someone else’s perspective is the greatest thing an education can give you, but we barely have an education system in this country, it’s more of a trade system. You’ll learn to solder and become an electrician, you’ll learn how to interpret poetry and become a teacher. What a relief it was during that semester to shed “my” beliefs, this middle class Irish view of the world in which the traditions of Asian or African countries aren’t “their traditions”, they’re just weird. Buying sixteen bottles of Budweiser and drinking them all over the course of eight hours, now that’s normal, that’s what we do.
The reason being able to think critically was such a revelation was because it allowed me to judge for myself what I wanted, rather than letting myself be led by what was expected of me. What this past month allowed me to realise was that every aspect of my life is defined by these societal influences. Sure I decided I didn’t want to slide comfortably into a teaching job as soon as I finished college, to pursue something more satisfying, but what about my eating habits? Do I still cook with jarred Bolognese sauce; have I ever eaten any other kind of cheese besides cheddar? Do I wear the clothes I want to wear, or do I just go for Hollister because that takes the least amount of thought? Am I really enjoying communicating with my friends solely on Facebook or by text, or would it be nice to drop over to them for no particular reason, like we did when we were kids?
Music for me is just the latest in this long drawn-out process of personal discovery, or personal creation or whatever it is. It feels as if I was hiding under a bed all this time, only ever adding to my collection when someone would slide something in to me, unwilling to stick my hand out to catch whatever was passing by in case it got cut off, believing a band just “wasn’t for me” without ever having listened to them. Now I’m outside again, I can breathe. It’s a testament to the idea that if you really want to change your position in life you have to shut yourself off from everything familiar, everything that makes you comfortable. It gives you perspective; you get to see the road ahead from a great height, which keeps you from walking in circles your whole life.
***
I’ve found myself watching a bunch of old interviews with John Lydon the past few days and as a result I’m dying to give The Sex Pistols a proper listen. I had an idea of what Punk was all about, what it represented, but I never really gave it a good listen. The Clash would be an exception but ‘London Calling’ is hardly even a Punk album.
There’s an interview John Lydon gave with Jonathon Ross on the YouTube where Ross plays a video in which the head of the Greater London Council (1970s London’s version of our own City Councils) Bernard Brook Partridge said on television “I think most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death. The worst currently are The Sex Pistols, and they are the antithesis of human kind. The whole world would be vastly improved by their non-existence.” Lydon then retorts: “and I was accused of being violent.” (Lydon also claims that Partridge is now head of the Freemasons in London but if you Google him there’s no info on him…it mustn’t be true, LOL!!)
Lydon has historically been a bit of a media pariah since he first rose (or descended, he’d probably say) into the public consciousness, painted as an unnecessarily coarse and belligerent individual whose only purpose in life is to upset the nice polite people who are only trying to get along. However, after skimming through a few videos you don’t see him as this figure that is constantly out to fuck over whoever is trying to squeeze a bit of information out of him; he does have his moments of calm. He just doesn’t tolerate bullshit.
There’s a lot of bullshit in music. The Sex Pistols and The Stooges both realised that actually knowing how to play an instrument is a lot of bullshit. I suppose what you really want in an artist is one who realises that, who doesn’t think what he’s doing is the ultimate culmination of the entire history of music funnelled directly into him. The Sex Pistols managed to stick in the sides of the conservative classes thus becoming part of the conversation. Their songs are knowingly provocative, they exist specifically in opposition to something rather than existing simply on their own merits. They become bullshit in a way, but considerably less bullshit than what they’re antagonising. Artists who recognise the artifice of what they are doing tend to be the truly great ones.
St. Vincent can’t dress the way she does without realising how inherently ridiculous it is. Similarly I couldn’t write this piece without realising that it doesn’t really mean anything, and that most people have already figured this stuff out. It’s all very indulgent to try and connect listening to music to making major life decisions but I do honestly feel there’s a link, and I wanted to write about it. Similarly I’m sure Annie Clark wants to dress up that way, she’s not doing it to fit in, it’s her own desires driving her rather than some PR person, or some trend. That’s why the first thing I listen to on 1 March will be The Sex Pistols, a band that followed its ethos through to the bitter end.
But, if an obvious band feels like a cop-out for the final edition of A Musical Discovery, here’s a few reliable places you might find something unfamiliar: BBC Radio 6 Music, Triple J, NPR Music, La Blogothèque. Just click on something you don’t know. It’ll probably be useless but that’s how it goes.