It is unclear who first said “Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture”, but the culprit might wish they had a penny whenever the
phrase was used. In the opening sentence of Dark Mirror: The pathology of
the singer-songwriter, Donald Brackett ascribes the wisecrack to Elvis
Costello, who added in a 1983 Musician magazine interview: “it’s a really
stupid thing to want to do”. But Costello himself tentatively attributes it
to the comedian Martin Mull. Other contenders include Thelonious Monk, Frank
Zappa, Schopenhauer, Yoko Ono, Steve Martin and Laurie Anderson; in fact,
anyone you like.
What is clear, however, is that the quotation is overused, practically
meaningless, and makes for a disheartening first line. It’s not hard to see
why it gained currency both among artists (a glib bon mot at the critics’
expense) and critics (a licence to abdicate responsibility), but as Alex
Ross, the author of The Rest Is Noise (2008), asks: “Why is music more
difficult to write about than any other art form?”.
Brackett’s subject matter is the singer-songwriter, a relatively recent breed.
Before Bob Dylan, popular musicians rarely sang their own songs. The genre
bloomed in the late 1960s when folk singers, taking Dylan’s lead, began to
perform what were presumed to be autobiographical songs with introspective
and “poetic” lyrics. During the next decade, sales rocketed: James Taylor,
Cat Stevens and Carole King, among many others, helped make it the dominant
form of popular music. Received wisdom dictates that Punk killed this kind
of indulgence off, but it was only the boys who thought twice: the greatest
commercial flowering was yet to come, with Sarah McLachlan (whom Brackett
refers to once as McLaughlin) and her annual, all-female Lilith Fair
(1997–9), the most successful multi-artist touring festival in history.
In all its incarnations, the genre has thrived on the cult of personality, but
for critic and fan, the identification of singer and song has been a trap:
however sincere he or she appears, the singer is finally an entertainer, the
song an artifice. Brackett says of “Sister Morphine” by Marianne Faithfull:
“the shocker is that she had yet to fully taste the oblivion she craved when
she wrote that song”. But this is only shocking if you believe that “what
makes a great singer-songwriter is usually his or her public telling of
personal experiences and their effects – for good or ill”. This formulation
excludes many of the greatest – for example, the satirists Randy Newman and
Ray Davies – but Brackett’s definition of a singer-songwriter appears to be
a matter of personal taste: Amy Winehouse and The White Stripes would not
merit entire chapters in many books on the genre. It is understandable that
he chooses to exclude “such talented islands as Madonna and Michael Jackson”
but his reason is a head-scratcher: “they are clearly more dancers than
writers”. Tell that to the Performing Rights Society.
Brackett doesn’t seem to grasp what a singer-songwriter does. In his
discussion of Faithfull, another who would figure in few top ten lists, he
talks at length about the classic album “she penned”, Broken English (“only
a voice like hers would be chosen by thoughts like hers in order to be
brought up into the light”), lavishing special praise and attention on “The
Ballad of Lucy Jordan”. But he fails to mention that the song is not written
by Faithfull, but by Shel Silverstein, who does not even rate a footnote. In
a book supposedly about songwriters, this is shameful.
Brackett’s central thesis, that the “pathologies of singer-songwriters are
manifested in the songs they write” is uncontroversial, and his central
metaphor that “[singer-songwriters] somehow serve as our dark mirror”,
appropriate to its subject matter and worthy of further exploration. But
further metaphors – and there are many – do not elucidate: discussion of
making records becomes an epic fantasia into “the coal mines of [the
singer-songwriters’] own personalities and identities, real or imagined,
into which they must first descend to scrape away at the dim walls of their
own emotional mineshafts”. The raw material they chip away is “a coal
blacker than belief”, eventually refined “into that other substance that
originates as humble carbon . . . the glittering diamond of a great song”.
By the time “the carbon atoms . . . shrink into the tighter bonds of the
covalent structures we call diamonds”, the reader has become lost in a dark
cavern of rockspeak. One wishes that the insights were worth the excavation,
but, as Leonard Cohen once sang, there are no diamonds in the mine.
It is almost impossible to believe that Dark Mirror, which hums with howlers,
passed before an editor’s eyes: Paul McCartney did not precede Bob Dylan, or
indeed anyone, by publishing his lyrics as poetry in 2001; Writings and
Drawings had been published thirty-one years before. (By 2001, even the
singer Jewel had published a book of poetry, chiefly remembered for the fact
that Charles Bukowski’s name was misspelled in the title of a poem.) It
could not have been “the unnamed publisher at Scribers [sic]” who wrote the
preface to Dylan’s Tarantula, because it was published in 1971 by Macmillan.
Scribner’s reprinted the book thirty-three years later, preface included.
In the end, writing about music turns out to be more like dancing about
architecture than the reader had imagined. Much better as an exploration of
the subject is Bill Flanagan’s book of interviews Written in My Soul, where
the singer-songwriters get to speak for themselves. Bruce Johnson and Martin
Cloonan have mined a much darker vein; their Dark Side of the Tune: Popular
music and violence is the Dark Mirror crack’d. It even boasts a tempting
X-certificate on the back cover that the book could “disturb and cause
offence to some readers”. The title, despite the pun, is apt, for it is the
music that is discussed here, not the words.
Exploring how music is heard and experienced – in other words, reducing music
to sound – frees the authors from the weight of the tired lyrical analysis
that bedevils rock criticism, and the bland view of certain of the key texts
of Popular Music Studies that rock music is “personally and socially
therapeutic . . . in the emancipative construction of individual space
(identity) and collective space (community)”. Arguing that violence is not
generated primarily by the verbal component of a song, Johnson and Cloonan
are able to look beyond the usual suspects. After all, it wasn’t what Dylan
was singing at Newport ’65 that made the Festival pull the plug; it was the
volume at which he was singing it.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Turn
them up to eleven, and they will: alone among the arts, music can harm you.
Literature describes violence, a painting depicts violence, but only sound
can produce physical damage. Stories of aural bombardment, where otherwise
innocuous pop is played at distorted, ear-splitting volume, have become
increasingly familiar since the Manuel Noriega stand-off, from Waco to
Fallujah, but such stories stretch all the way back to Jericho. Anyone has
the power to mount a sonic assault. The greater the volume, the more
invasive and offensive music becomes, the less can be heard our pleas to
turn it down. Loud music has its victims: sometimes the nextdoor neighbour,
elsewhere the torture victim at Guantáanamo Bay. Nor is it only the volume:
a song, perhaps one that is “morally or aesthetically objectionable”, played
barely audibly, “implicates private space with taste, opinion, belief”.
Dark Side of the Tune is not only a brave book but also, given the increased
incursion of sound in every day life (mobile ringtones, the hiss of iPods,
telephone hold music) a timely one. The authors’ mantra is that their book
is not a “conservative moral panic argument” or another “jeremiad against
contemporary pop”, but it is undoubtedly a moral book, laying bare the
hypocrisy of rock stars (Courtney Love, Fred Durst) who invite, then disavow
responsibility for, concert mayhem. There is a nuanced study of the
disastrously violent anniversary celebration Woodstock ’99 as well as
interesting digressions into self-harm among musicians, and muzak, that
blandly smiling, omnipresent instrument of Orwellian coercion and control.
Likewise, the authors take the media to task for its attitude to the use of
music as an agent for torture during the Iraq war. News that the theme song
to Barney the Purple Dinosaur was used to torture the prisoners was, in Jon
Ronson’s phrase from The Men Who Stare at Goats (2005), “the funniest joke
of the war”. The general tone is chilling when you consider what was being
mocked.
The book has its faults: Mark Patton is presumably Mike Patton, once of the
band Faith No More; Hattie Jones is probably Hattie Carroll; Buford must be
Bill Buford, but his book is not footnoted or mentioned in the bibliography.
Despite the authors’ attribution, George Bush did not call Eminem “the most
dangerous threat to American children since Polio”. The rumoured source of
this quotation is in fact George W. Bush, but the most likely candidate,
according to the fact-checking website Snopes.com, is Eminem’s press agent.
Nevertheless, the incidental pleasures of Dark Side of the Tune are many:
the artful combination of anecdote and fact results in a sharp book that
necessarily asks more questions than it answers.
Donald Brackett
DARK MIRROR
The pathology of the singer-songwriter
221pp. Praeger Publishers. £22.95.
978 0 275 99898 1
Johnson Bruce and Martin Cloonan
DARK SIDE OF THE TUNE
Popular music and violence
254pp. Ashgate. £50.
978 0 7546 5872 6
Wesley Stace’s first novel, Misfortune, was published in 2004. By
George appeared in 2007.
