A Road Less Traveled

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

On Friday nights, my wife and I will typically open a bottle of wine and settle in to watch some streaming TV, usually a movie or a limited series, but this last weekend, after supper, I went into the family room and started sorting out some of our vinyl. Instead of turning on the TV, I began putting on albums. First was True Stories album by The Talking Heads, then Under the Big Black Sun by X, and then Meddle by Pink Floyd, and on and on and on. 

We opened our wine and sat back and listened to records. It had been a long time since I had listened to music with no outside distractions. Typically, if I’m listening to the radio in the car, half my mind is on the music and the other half is on the road. If we have our Sonos digital player on in the kitchen, the music is only background to conversation and cooking—what jazz players call wallpaper music. The music is there but people barely notice. It’s only white noise to them. 

As I sat back with my glass of wine and listened—actually listened, I was pleasantly surprised at the musicianship and imaginative range of these musicians and songwriters–as good as I remembered them. The songs brought back a lot of memories. I thought it was amazing how I could recall every guitar lick or break in a tune, even though it had been years since I listened to them. And I let my mind wander with the rhythms and melodies and the stories—the sad saga of “Acadian Driftwood”, the plaintive plea of  “It’s Just the Motion”. And more. It went on for hours and it was beautiful.

That sort of listening used to be part of my everyday life in high school. We’d squirrel ourselves away into my friend Dan’s basement—complete with black lights, state-of-the-art stereo system, beanbag chairs, and loose joints—where we’d listen to music all night long, everything from Blue Oyster Cult to Ten Years After to Yes to Deep Purple. And then, later, when I went to college, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, The Specials, and The Pretenders took their places on the turntable.

It was a revelation—or revelation revisited—coming back to close listening. That night, I enjoyed everything from the raw power of X to the gentle ironies of The Talking Heads to the elemental quirkiness of Tom Waits to the tasteful and intelligent articulations of Miles Davis. These were gems that had been sitting in my record collection for years. I had just forgotten how brilliant they really were.

I’m not sure how I got so far away from listening to albums. It’s easy to blame television, video games, streaming media, or smartphones for diverting us, which is not too far off base, but the whole truth is more than that. It’s easier to watch a TV show or play a video game than it is to listen to an album. Video games and streaming TV lead us where they want and—to a degree—tell us what and how to think. It’s easier to have these imaginative works spoon-fed to us than to have the work of understanding art performed in our own imaginations.

Games and TV shows are structured to guide the user to follow the artist’s vision, while music is a largely pristine imaginative fuel for the listener. With a good song, most of the action takes place in the listener’s head. Like reading, it forces the user to walk down individual imaginative pathways that are not tightly bound by artistic conventions or dictated by corporate priorities. It is one of the few times our individual imaginations can take over and lead us on real flights of fancy. 

Wynton Kelly’s brilliant solo in “Freddie Freeloader” is glorious and even though I’ve heard it a thousand times before, when I listened to it Friday night, I heard things and made connections I never had before. The same was true of Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army” or Jeff Beck’s “Freeway Jam”. 

Reading takes us down the same road. As the reader follows the narrative, she is forced to envision the characters’ voices, faces, and mannerisms in her own mind. Even though she is such a wildly idiosyncratic and unique character, two readers’ versions of Great Expectations Miss Havisham can be completely diverse. And like music, every artist and every author bring us an artifact to which we can attach our own emotions, thoughts, and sensibilities. Distinctive voices give us distinctive views of our world which we can interpret through the channels of our own imaginations.

Listening and reading involve active user participation. While it may be argued that video games—particularly cooperative gaming—involves active participation and some imagination, the truth is that most of the imaginative work has already been done by the game designer. The setting is completed and cannot be changed. Character appearances and mannerisms are predetermined. Even the plots are preset, although in some cases, gamers are guided along different (but still predetermined) paths. Television and streaming also offer us prefabricated realities. For example, the settings in Game of Thrones, as incredible as they are, lock us into Westeros in a way the novels never did. 

In many ways, the corporations that manufacture and distribute today’s entertainment tend to cultivate prefabbed products because they’re easier to market. In the early days of rock and roll—and then New Wave—music was incredibly original and diverse. The Sex Pistols, Devo, Pretenders, and Elvis Costello were all grouped under the New Wave label, even though their music couldn’t have been more different. 

Now most music is written by corporate committees. In fact, two songwriters, Max Martin and Lukasz Gottwald, are credited with penning hits for Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus. They are part of one of many collaborative teams of songwriters who churn out hit after hit after hit for their corporate bosses.

There are still artists who write their own tunes, but they seem to be a dying breed. The breathtaking originality of an Elvis Costello or a Joni Mitchell or a Bruce Springsteen have been sent to the back of the bus in deference to homogenized assembly-line songs. Product conformity and predictability are preferred by the record companies; it makes records easier to market and sell. Still, close listening to any sort of music can reveal deeper layers of theme and craft, even in the cookie-cutter song churning workshops that are geared only to producing this.

As the music becomes more and more homogenized, listeners will find it increasingly difficult to navigate places their imagination takes them during the listening process. They might lose their way. 

Absorbing original art is indispensable for creating a well-rounded and empathic culture. We need to occasionally listen closely, to walk down that road less traveled in order to understand—through our imaginations—who we really are, not who corporate America wants us to be. 

Sources

https://nypost.com/2015/10/04/your-favorite-song-on-the-radio-was-probably-written-by-these-two/