'Deconstructionist' Music

I know next to jack shit about Derrida or modern architecture, but I find myself fascinated by something I often hear described as a "deconstructionist" approach to making music.

I take this to mean (more or less) breaking things down to their most basic components and then building them back up in a way that differs from the norm. Maybe someone can fill me in on a better definition of what deconstructionism is about - particularly when it comes to music.

Still, I'm interested in this - the idea of un-genres, un-music - using the void as the sculpture rather than the sculpture itself etc...

It's probably better if I use some examples here rather than rambling.

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple who formed with the intent of stripping rock down to its barest components. The result is a stilted Beefheartian sound that is still recognisably rock music (guitar/bass/drums/vox, pentatonic scales etc) but structurally fragmented - unorthodox time signatures and meters, vocals based on "tones" rather than lyrics.

Black Dice do this too - in their early days as a hardcore band that eschewed traditional structures and later as an electronic/noise outfit, essentially turning whatever genre they dabble in on its head.

I'm also very interested in what the producer Actress does. He often describes his compositions as being "studies" of other tunes. My favourite track by him, 'Hubble', is supposed to be an exercise or study on Prince's famous 'Erotic City' b-side. While it doesn't sound much like the song that influences it, 'Hubble' could be the result of what happens if you put 'Erotic City' into an airlock and then blast all the pieces into space, rescuing only a resulting fragment for deep analysis.

This kind of approach to songwriting or composition fascinates me in a similar way to generative music. The idea of making something sound chaotic and fragmented through a highly logical and meticulous method.

I'd like more recommendations on this kind of thing. I'd be especially interested in this technique being applied to pop.

Is Low by Bowie not the motherlode of this idea? Deliberate (wilfull, even) experiments in composition and structure and tone and texture etc etc?

US Maple are probably the most Derridean band I know of, stripping back the layers of 'rock' symbolism to a single truth, then building back up again. But I wouldn't call it un-music, even if that's what it sounds like to unfamiliar ears: the stuff US Maple and even mid-period Don Caballero were doing was intricately arranged and intensely rehearsed, with every single element thought about and probably agonised over. You should see the short documentary on YouTube on the making of US Maple's Acre Thrills, which goes a little into Al Johnson's lyrical and vocal technique in particular: there are lyrics for every song, and he had his own notation for how he should pronounce different words, where to put emphasis, how to breathe on this line or that line, etc. Most vocalists don't get so involved in their work.

^^ Yes, I love this idea. Meticulous, rehearsed semi-chaos. Maybe Troutmask is the year zero for this kind of thing?

We're gonna need to be careful to differentiate deconstructionist from meticulous from experimental here, I suspect.

Dog, there's a thing called jazz...

Yes I'm aware of jazz thanks

Unless you actually take the time to understand what deconstructionism means and THEN define how you think it relates to music this is just going to be another thread featuring a load of people listing records they think are vaguely experimental or a bit weird.

US Maple remind me of Pere Ubu quite a bit too, although I'm not sure how much Pere Ubu would fit into this category? Maybe by New Picnic Time they would have.

*sorry for being snotty Sicko, I was referring to deconstructivism in rock/pop. As opposed to jazz/avant-classical in which I'm certain there are myriad examples.

You also need to really understand the motivations and techniques of the musicians / composers, too, otherwise it's just speculation.

Matt, well that's it I guess. I'm not that familiar with the tropes and theories, but if anyone can help with a clearer definition of how this would work, that would be cool. In my mind I can differentiate what a deconstructivist pop/rock band would sound like (or at least their approach) compared to mere umbrella experimentation. Just prefer to have someone who's more familiar with the term to help define it.

You also need to really understand the motivations and techniques of the musicians / composers, too, otherwise it's just speculation.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 4 September 2012 12:37 (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the case of Black Dice, US Maple and Actress their motivations and techniques have been made pretty much explicit by said artists.

promising thread this one

just to make it explicit "deconstruction" as critical/philosophical technique has really got nothing to do with the aesthetics of most musicians, the only record that springs to mind as remotely Derridean wd be Scritti's Provision wherein Green seems to be digging at the aporiae in the way 80s soul sounds as well as in explicitly lyrical ways.

the problem is that "deconstruction" in that sense is nothing to do with "stripping down" in the way you might guess if you haven't read Derrida. the other problem is that the best answer to "what are Derrida's ideas?" is 'read Derrida'"

you're no fun

Scritti's a great example of what (I think) I'm edging towards NV. We are on the same page here, despite my admitted ignorance to the practices and theories behind deconstructivism in the philosophical or critical sense of the word.

wld be tempting to claim 'james brown live at the apollo' in how it completely takes apart the notion of the music they're playing as songs having any semantic content at all, plus five decades worth of black american music history as having any semantic content. but then it does want to reinscribe some kind of transcendent presence at the centre of that (ladeezundgennermunaryuhreadyfuhSTAR TIME) but i suppose you could claim james brown always stands at the edge of himself, or at least occasionally goes off mic

'the present lover' (bonus: vladislav delay has probably actually read some critical theory)

also James' transcendent presence in the context of the live show is at least partly erased by the record's status as sound object with his showmanship obscured or displaced. JB feels like a generally good answer to deconstructionist music now you mention it, problem being that once you think about something post-structurally then everything can feel like a good answer

yeah, those two are actually just the last two records i listened to

"No More 'I Love Yous'" is explicity written in the flush of 80s pop post-structuralism too iirc, tho probly more Barthes than Derrida

the only real audience noise on live at the apollo is for brown dancing in instrumental breaks, which we have no access to; all the audience noise in the breaks between songs (at the 'music') is overdubbed

v/vm's 'the death of rave' (james leyland kirby has definitely read some critical theory)

now i am just sitting here trying to think of clever 80s pop hit examples

everything with an amen break in it

actually i'm now certain that simon reynolds has made that argument with a straight face somewhere

well like i say it was definitely a "thing" in the 80s, difficult to read a Melody Maker or NME without somebody dropping a Barthes reference and that was undoubtedly feeding from/into the mindset of a certain set of musicians, probably a result of critical theory first taking off in unis at the end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s

just need to work Vanilla's "No Way No Way" in here somehow, or ponder how Artful Dodger's "Movin' Too Fast" functions as a paean to différance at the same time as it gets the dancefloor moving

aporiae between the vocal and the musical content are a v. long-standing trope tho, way way before Jacques D et al

kind of the least intersting approach to deconstructive music tho, i like yr reading of Live at the Apollo better

deconstruction is an interpretative practice so i'm hesitant to suggest that a particular album is more deconstructed than another. if anything, music seems to resist deconstruction more than other mediums since genre + sound already seem fluid + boundaryless / undermining initial hierarchies. i think there are questions of ownership tho that make sense to read deconstructively - who owns a particular sound or genre (both culturally but also in terms of essential performer/listener relationship) - is it in lipstick traces where marcus writes that a really punk concert would include a moment when an audience member takes the stage and says, "ok, now this concert is over it is my concert now" etc (or maybe frank?).

i'm not too fond of deconstructivism as an umbrella term applied to skeletal, disjointed rock music but to each its own i guess.

some stuff from the top of my head not too dissimilar to the maple/beefheartian offbeat approach described upthread:

first 2 gastr del sol records

storm and stress (ian from don cab trying his hand at more abstract, jazz-not-jazz kinda territory. the guy's guitar playing was pretty unique during this period, to say the least)

gorge trio - dead chicken fear no knife (1st record only. the later stuff sounds more like skronky improv vignettes)

natural dreamers (john & chris from deerhoof. surprisingly melodic anti-rock)

the italian band starfuckers and its offshot sinistri

joan of arc - the gap

rope - widow's first dawn

grand ulena - gateway to dignity

i guess i'm done now, will try to come up with more of this later.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3t0f0z2l0m3Y041T2h1P/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-04%20at%2010.07.40%20AM.png

I bet Derrida was a right laugh at parties.

Deconstruction, as I understand it, doesn't produce any post-rock.

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

max i swear i have seen you earnestly attempt to explain deconstruction on one of these threads

haha on several of these threads, probably

most recently on the lupe fiasco thread

kinda more interesting question to me is what music texts would be theoretically productive pieces fertile for deconstructionist reading. for me mahler (esp #9) - who fastens low brow ideas about film scores (obv this is esp true about adagietto in #5) + almost carnivalesque 3 ring circus performance sounds to his otherwise more deliberate composition (or the insertion of his heartbeat - this biological rhythm - into classical genre).

― Mordy, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 2:29 PM (6 minutes ago)

lol i don't think mahler himself anticipated visconti et al

how did lupe fiasco get turned into deconstruction. oh wait was he 'deconstructing' the word 'bitch'? right.

actually, i saw kanye using the tag #thewordbitch and i thought he was trying to cross-reference scritti politti

i ain't sayin' she's a heidegger

obviously the deconstructionistiest ray charles is 'what'd i say'

has anyone done a narrative history of the word 'deconstruction' in the wider culture

i don't think it needs to spend much time in ex-polys and green gartside cuz it's more of a slate.com thing

Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television's Greatest Sitcom

Opinion: The Private Sector Built Everything - Private Sector - Fox ...
nation.foxnews.com/private.../opinion-private-sector-built-everythin...
3 Aug 2012 – One of the more amusing distractions of this campaign has been the post-modernist deconstruction of Obama's "you didn't build that" comment.

this is like a HUGE pet peeve for me, admittedly largely b/c complaining about it allows me to show off

but i do find it REALLY annoying when ppl are like "lil b is deconstructing rap music" or "deadwood is a deconstruction of the western"

fashion is a big part of this, most of the daily mail results are from catwalk shows w/ margiela et al

i get a bit pissy about people using post-modernism for post-structuralism but hey language goes where it wants

Hot new looks you'll love | The Sun |Woman
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/.../Hot-new-looks-youll-love.html
1 Aug 2007 – "The Mac is essential - wear it over skinny jeans with flat pumps. ... include the deconstructed look: Wear your skinny grey jeans with a drapey

is 'deconstructed' operating in its high-falutin' way there though or is it just ... you know, deconstructed

it seems parallel to the 'deconstructed' food 'trend'

fashion journalists, even for the sun, have probably been exposed to actual deconstruction rhetoric at some point from some couture types

then they use the term as shorthand and it quickly becomes 't shirt made to look shitty in artisanal way'

like a lexical analog to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_line

i'm taking this thread to concern "deconstruction" of a rather mechanical sort that's only tangentially related to derrida and the subtleties of his theories. like deconstructed clothing or w/e.

deconstruction here = the willful disassembly and reorganization of familiar object-types, so that the results superficially resemble what they're "supposed to be" while at the same time denying some of the expectations that are typically brought to things of that sort. this sort of deconstruction might be said to resemble a tzara/burroughs/gysin-style cut-up, in that it explores the territory generated by reconfiguring the component parts of existing texts, though it depends less on chance for authorship. if the word deconstruction does not seem appropriate to this use, any acceptable other might be substituted.

the italian band starfuckers and its offshot sinistri

starfuckers were the first rock band i thought of in response to this thread, along with US maple and black dice. that's probably because i was introduced to them by a review which described their music as a "deconstruction of rock", but they definitely seem to approach the genre as a box of puzzle pieces without a single correct solution. infrantumi sounds like an album assembled out of pieces left over from other songs, stray beats and whispers jigsawed together by chance as much as intention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3DUpQVBcNg

didn't they have something to do with this lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7v2vFvJWX8

obligatory "deconstruction is a way of reading, not of writing" post, if the point hasn't been made already

I wonder if car dudes get mad about "turbo-charged"

I've always considered Here Comes the Indian by Animal Collective as a deconstruction of the album format. It's sequenced just like a normal rock-album, with the hits a the start (here the drums and harmonies of Native Belle and Hey Light), then a less catchy 'filler' mid section (the abstract drones and soundscapes of Infant Dressing Table, Panic and Two Sails On a Sound), one last hit towards the end (the 6/8 punk of Slippi, as soon as it has fulfilled it's role as a shot in the arm it devolves into a caribean drum-along) and then a moody slow-burner to finish off (yet another weird soundscape, Too Soon). The dynamics of it seems to be completely normal, while the sounds and compositions are quite out there.

I always thought the White Stripes did this sort of thing. They took elements of a style (blues, country, folk metal, punk, garage...) and then presented them in bold minimal strokes.

As Chris Handyside says of the first album; "Minimal to the point of sounding monumental, this Detroit guitar-drums-voice duo makes the most of its aesthetic choices and the spaces between riffage and the big beat."

They took elements of a style (blues, country, folk metal, punk, garage...) and then presented them in bold minimal strokes

Yes but as has been mentioned upthread that has nothing to do with deconstruction.

Pussy Galore felt more "Deconstructionist" to me than White Stripes, blues-wise

As for the term--I feel like there isn't really any Deconstructionist art, but rather art whose creators have read Derrida and do stuff to try to make you aware of that.

It's an easy mistake to make – to literally interpret the word 'deconstruction' and applying it to various forms of music. But I think if you stick to the Derridean meaning, you'll find that music has been deconstructive for quite some time. I think the interpreting sheet music is inherently deconstructive. Various forms of avant-garde composition, jazz and free improv were toying with Derrida's concept of deconstruction before he developed the idea.

Sorry about all the typos.

assume those posts abt anco and the white stripes are jokes? cuz the anco album is just sensibly and traditionally sequenced, and the white stripes were just a two-piece blues rock revival outfit.

Contenderizer always manages to save my sorry arse by understanding and reiterating what I meant to say in a way that actually makes a whole lot more sense, and for that I salute you mister.

Let this thread not get bogged down in theoretical semantics, (although I'm sure many here are very keen for that to happen). Let's also not take 'deconstruct' to mean simply 'experiment'. I'm talking about a very specific method of experimentation here rather than a stringent adherence to Derrida and his theories. Again I think Contenderizer summarises that approach best in his post upthread.

tbf and i don't mean to sound hardman here but you used the term incorrectly in a way that a lot of ppl use it incorrectly. it's understandable, but it's not theoretical semantics to point that out.

Something like Emptyset might apply to this area - sculpting a sort of untechno out of blocks of solid noise rather than filling silence with beats.

Pussy Galore felt more "Deconstructionist" to me than White Stripes, blues-wise

this is OTM, in that pussy galore seemed to present their music as a sort of comment or attack on rock music & culture. same is true of the butthole surfers and sonic youth. in retrospect such stances seem more indicative of american punk's attempt to come to terms with its affection for classic rock than anything truly subversive, but at the time a lot of fans and critics seemed willing to accept distressed rock music as a "deconstructive" antirock gesture.

isn't the idea of stripping down music to specific bare elements more like minimalism?

Fair dos Mordy. Like contenderizer, i'd also seen the term applied (in reviews and articles) to the bands I mentioned in the OP, and felt a thread running through them that I liked and wanted to know more about. Sorry for being confusing.

isn't the idea of stripping down music to specific bare elements more like minimalism?

sure, but reconfigured and repurposing the stripped carcass is something else. the white stripes were blues rock minimalists (of a sort). starfuckers and black dice weren't just stripping down, they were breaking and remaking; calling attention to the wounds, joints and cavities; making the familiar sound strange.

"reconfiguring"

black dice were a noise band, contenderizer

yeah, i no. they started out as something much closer to a hardcore band, though. watching them disengage from that genre was like watching someone take a car apart while driving it down the road. that they then took the buzzing, clicking, klonking pieces of their used-to-be-a-hardcore-band junkyard and used it to construct something like "dance music" makes their career arc seem deconstructive in the sense i'm discussing.

"discontinuist"

they were a miniaturist hardcore band, who bought some synthesizers and started making 10 minute tracks with ululating baby sounds and samples of ocean waves

yeah, that's another way to put it. language is fun.

it is suggested that our conflicting accounts of the early history of black dice are ultimately irreconcilable

<Insert Girl Talk jokes here>

1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzVqqzkL_o

2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct21e3sqEog

3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubHkJlKg0ts

they sound pretty good if you play all three at once

no they don't

lol

Yes but as has been mentioned upthread that has nothing to do with deconstruction.

god, I hope there's not going to 100 of these, if the thread gets that long. dog latin explained how he was using the word in the first post.

I say we try get ride of the word "indie" when trying to describe music.

assume those posts abt anco and the white stripes are jokes? cuz the anco album is just sensibly and traditionally sequenced, and the white stripes were just a two-piece blues rock revival outfit.

Well, you could say that about HCtI, but it still functions as a deconstruction of the rock-album in my view. You might call it 'traditional', but I haven't heard any other noise-album (and AnCo was heavily indebted to noise-music at this point, and Black Dice in particular) work this way. Most of the time, noise-albums makes me feel like symphonic paintings (Beaches & Canyons really sounds like three paintings of beaches, and two of canyons) or travels (stuff like Vision Creation Newsun).

But it's of course true what they say up-thread about deconstructivist art/interpetration

reconstructionist music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBlKMK_AbBI

http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html

^^ required reading

from wiki:

The White Stripes have cited the minimalist and deconstructionist aspects of De Stijl design as a source of inspiration for their own musical image and presentation

I'm not that serious about it. I should just stick to polls.

I take this to mean (more or less) breaking things down to their most basic components and then building them back up in a way that differs from the norm. Maybe someone can fill me in on a better definition of what deconstructionism is about - particularly when it comes to music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpPaeBloCXY

A related line of enquiry here would be the notion of the rhizome as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, who were not pure deconstructionists but whose thought shares some common ground with that of Derrida. A lot of '90s electronica (Oval, Mouse on Mars, maybe even Autechre) might be seen as rhizomatic in the way it refuses linear and binary hierarchies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUN3RNM6iiQ

^^ at 00:40 he deconstructs an already deconstructed song

US Maple feels like the right answer but also i don't really know wtf deconstructionism even is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXLqMB6vBic

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple the trashmen who formed with the intent of stripping rock down to its barest components. The result is a stilted Beefheartian sound that is still recognisably rock music (guitar/bass/drums/vox, pentatonic scales etc) but structurally fragmented - unorthodox time signatures and meters vocals based on "tones" rather than lyrics.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3t0f0z2l0m3Y041T2h1P/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-04%20at%2010.07.40%20AM.png

http://www.rejectedunknown.com/art/books/RichardMeltzerTheAestheticsOfRockBook.jpg

This may be a boring response but I always thought Spoon had done this really well with "Kill The Moonlight" on a less extreme level than may be what is being sought out here.

mark sinker piece works about as well if you read every third word/paragraph/volume

I'm kind of thinking about bands like US Maple the trashmen who formed with the intent of stripping rock down to its barest components. The result is a stilted Beefheartian sound that is still recognisably rock music (guitar/bass/drums/vox, pentatonic scales etc) but structurally fragmented - unorthodox time signatures and meters vocals based on "tones" rather than lyrics.

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:35 PM (5 minutes ago)

don't think playing real shitty and wrapping yourself in toilet paper = what dog latin was getting at

LOL at contendo taking on sinker

you must be this tall to ride this ride, mister

anyway enjoy your list of arrhythmic bands, i will go be pedantic somewhere else

A related line of enquiry here would be the notion of the rhizome as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, who were not pure deconstructionists but whose thought shares some common ground with that of Derrida. A lot of '90s electronica (Oval, Mouse on Mars, maybe even Autechre) might be seen as rhizomatic in the way it refuses linear and binary hierarchies

― my father will guide me up the stairs to bed (anagram), Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:30 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol. if you want to think about schizophrenic development or whatever baroque classical is gonna be an easier place to see the sights. but asking about "deconstructionist" music doesn't make a whole lot of sense because critical/conceptual models like this are meant to be applied, not recited in musical/genre form or whatever. this is why examples of the concept in the arts (that are cross-genre or "non-linear" or dj spooky) are always kind of bad or boring imo.. the art isn't meant to be a slave to the concept, the concept is supposed to liberate the art or the production of the art or w/e.

let the art see itself in new ways, not compel some ham-handed cross-genre exercise or dress up a 'generative' (boring) max object.

the radically de-assimilative possibilities that contenderizer envisages would more properly be found in a late post-punk record such as swell maps' 'jane in occupied europe'

swell maps situate themselves within the bloated stomach of the soi-disant 'progressive rock band', but employ the ornery durations and literary allusions of the progressive to bayonet the very stomach that they parasitize

every track emerges, blinking and unloved from the undigested animal matter coagulated within the forebowel of king crimson, the canterbury scene or late floyd -- and collapsing from the wound we find chuck berry, captain beefheart, the silver apples, brutalist echoes of the old rock amid the baroque redunancies of prog

swell maps take this raw fibre, this grist, and redeploy it in surprising fashions using the minimal instrumentation of white-heat punk, but this is not mockery: it is trans-substantiation

you're Paul Morley and I claim my Art of Noise 7"

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uOGpdecUr8E/TllNNFCqxSI/AAAAAAAABlw/E_XvbWAM0vQ/s400/boskothedoughboy8.bmp

pictured: the soi-disant 'progressive rock band' (note distended stomach)
not pictured: the swell maps

the gnomic pictogram reveals nothing, except perhaps that you admit that your rosy-eyed claims for the deconstructive possibilities of the providence noise scene of the late 1990s were glib mendacity?

btw contendo i think a lot of people would argue that the mummies are at least as calculated in their "playing real shitty" as, say, us maple or pavement

^interesting "well-formed" genre tensions in a record are just that, interesting (or not interesting, this is so contextual and not absolutist). deconstruction is about taking one of those statements and giving it a sort of full accounting-for, showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them. i think it has to be extra-musical in order to work (but isn't music always extra-musical, see what i did there).

this is all off the cuff and imprecise, i'm just thinking out loud, hope it makes sense to others. some xps

showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them

when does music not do this

i think theres a lil bit of gnomic contenderizer in there too somewhere or am i making that up

― *rolls eyez on me* (D-40), Saturday, July 9, 2011 7:31 PM (1 year ago)

i'm gonna have to look that word up

there is more deconstruction in a single bar of surfin' bird than anything ever released on the ghoulish hit parade of DFA records, brainchild of bloated feederist charlatan james murphy

The car analogy upthread is good. Maybe I should have called this thread 'disassembled' music or something because the accurate description is that - you take a car, you take it apart, and you're left with a pile of stuff which is still made of car but no longer a car which ou can then rebuild into something completely different.

when do you know when you've subtracted a drum fill and when you've taken a song apart?

btw contendo i think a lot of people would argue that the mummies are at least as calculated in their "playing real shitty" as, say, us maple or pavement

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 12:59 PM (2 minutes ago)

oh yeah, absolutely. i love budget rock. i don't wanna get all pedantic and arguey here, but i think that pussy galore's playing shitty read as antirock or "about rock" in its moment and would say the same of u.s. maple. mummies just wanted you to have a good time with some beer and toilet paper.

when do you know when you've subtracted a drum fill and when you've taken a song apart?

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:03 PM (2 minutes ago)

want to know the jeopardy clue that occasioned this question

once you find out what gnomic means, perhaps you could gaze into the eyes of james murphy and consider whether this cretinous moonface could every yield an ounce of deconstructive intelligence

http://i.imgur.com/zpH5l.png

showing how these statements are created, what the language process is, how the psychoanalytic/material field invests the statements and the production of them

when does music not do this

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:01 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah it's definitely already 'there' but like a car that runs it's hard to know how until you open the hood. continuing the car analogy, why would anyone want a car that doesn't run.

pussy galore's playing shitty reads as antirock only to those who have never heard a royal trux record, or who like shit

the point is not what the mummies wanted to do - though mind you, these guys were friends and neighbors with negativland and the residents at a time when humorless diy hardcore had swamped the scene, even in SF - but that they accomplish everything on the "list of things deconstructivist bands do"

If we begin to discuss the rhizome as well, this thread will probably veer off-course, but actually the 'rhizome' is introduced in A Thousand Plateaus in a discussion of literature, and the chapter very much seems to imply, that modern art 'should' be rhizomatic (ie taking non-rhizomatic aspects of art and saying it leads to fascism...) Also, there is a chapter in there which I would think should be called On the Refrain in the English version or something like that (I read it in Danish), which is actually about music, so a discussion of rhizomatic music should probably start there. There's a whole lot about Boulez and other Darmstadt-stuff, a bit about jazz and minimalism, and it's really not that interesting. I remember reading it, and thinking that James Brown/Fela Kuti/Neu/On the Corner/Future Days etc seemed much more relevant.

But this is kinda off-topic.

you been reading kodwo eshun or something?

xp

except time signature, though they "problematize the beat" by knocking over the organ instead of parping to the rhythm

http://www.mille-plateaux.net/theory/download/raynolds-thewire.pdf

mark sinker piece works about as well if you read every third word/paragraph/volume

one might argue that's because he's making a consistent and well-supported point

but an expression always functions like a machine (deleuze and guattari again), even taken apart or broken down ones, but broken-down machines can easily be machines of rigidity imo. again i'm thinking of dj spooky style intellectualizing which ends up being an art world calcifying machine. vs. a band like swell maps who seem to have a lot more life in their music. this is a little bit received ideas about both, though i do really like swell maps. dj spooky i'm not all that familiar with beyond some 'writings' lol.

xp to frederik b. - thanks for that, i'm unclear on the rhizome and haven't read a thousand plateaus but that sounds otm to me.

The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-night universal practice today of what may be called pastiche. This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who owed it in turn to Adorno's great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation (Schoenberg's innovative planification and Stravinsky's irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of parody.

dj spooky is not good imo

dj spooky is contenderizer in musical form

pussy galore's playing shitty reads as antirock only to those who have never heard a royal trux record

at one time, this described quite a few people

taking apart an object only to reconfigure it as something new is collage

http://www.exoticwireart.com/Images/composite.jpg

that's not the best example, but i'm sure everyone has see the booth at a local community art fair where the objects are made of household objects.

i think dog latin is saying that us maple is more complex than the naive art of the local art fair

i am contesting that

mordy how much for the set i love those guys

also which one is supposed to be fela?

but an expression always functions like a machine

no way man

that's the machine of hate, the pretty hate machine

the point is not what the mummies wanted to do - though mind you, these guys were friends and neighbors with negativland and the residents at a time when humorless diy hardcore had swamped the scene, even in SF - but that they accomplish everything on the "list of things deconstructivist bands do"

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:16 PM (9 minutes ago)

the "deconstrucive" bands i'm thinking of are characterized by music that is recognizably of a specific genre or tradition, but that is in some sense alienated from that tradition, and that deliberately creates a sense of sense of alienation or frustration in its audience. US maple produce something that sounds like "rock music", but doesn't provide musical closures and satisfactions typical of the genre.

the mummies' "budget rock" aesthetic is certainly hostile towards traditional notions of musical virtue, and the sound they produce is deliberately broken, but i think of them as happy formal traditionalists, reaching back to the basically mythological "wildness" of 60s frat rock. they break rock music, but seem to do this in pursuit of a purer and more primitive essence-of-rock.

xp poorly formed joek

taking apart an object only to reconfigure it as something new is collage

yes and no. collage implies referentiality, that the pieces retain some of their original identity. sound-collage music exists, but is somewhat different from the sort of "deconstruction" we're talking about here, where the disassembled thing isn't a particular piece or set of pieces, but rather a governing set of expectations or rules.

xxp so you need to read that sinker article, particularly the part that says "war with yr neighbors, chillin' with yr friends ... or war w/ yr friends, chillin with yr neighbors?!?"

us maple sounds pretty much like rock music to me tbh

dj spooky is contenderizer in musical form

― Einstürzende Joebarton (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:25 PM (21 minutes ago)

ty

US maple produce something that sounds like "rock music", but doesn't provide musical closures and satisfactions typical of the genre.

us maple provides the closure and satisfactions typical of us maple, the # of us maple listeners who actually feel that sense of dislocation you guys are fetishizing rather than the comfy "ah just chillin' listenin to some derek bailey" comfy on the couch w/ cup of tea feeling is i wager a small percentage, they get the closure and satisfaction they expect of US maple and they expect of that corner of rock

btw 60s frat rockers don't actually wear mummy outfits

I thought this thread would be about 2000s music such as

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZueuki4-Q

this is the great paradox of noise music - it is very very easy to quickly become inured to that sense of dislocation and to hear any sort of noise / chaotic / deconstructed / rule-breaking music as just more music w/ its own set of rules

anyway all music in the age of reproduction spirals inward toward its core meaning without ever reaching the ideal and along the way laying bare the "punctum" of affect (thx oxtober magazine) so i dunno what you are all on about

these guys just do it in a semi-boring and quite obvious "oh yes our album cover it's a raw SCRIBBLE do u see?" kind of way

[bandname] is not your regular [genre] band. though they do take influences from [genre] and [other genre], they also frustrate expectations by utilizing [technique] and [lyrical style adjective]. [nameofalbum] is a [improperly used academic term] of [genre] ideas that transcends similar artists. would you like me to set up an interview with [leadsinger] for a profile or send u a dropbox link so that you can review the new album?

seeing US Maple live is a big part of the whole thing IMO.

yeah it's like if don caballero actually got to falling-down-drunk stage instead of just teetering at the alcohol-fueled beat-up-the-drumkit-and-wrestle-the-furniture violent drunk stage

us maple deconstructed rock by changing what it meant to rock and to be a rock band

The Monks is probably the best example of this. Their producers took apart their songs and reduced them. Instead of singing a verse, they would just narrow everything down to 5 words, or 4 words. The less the better.

Yeah it can't be "Oh we are punk and we are playing shitty" even though the songs are all 4/4 beat and 1/4/5 chords.

xp i like us maple btw i just don't think its special esp in a clever "deconstructive" sense, they're basically just doing sparse "free rock" because they followed up on some byron coley albert ayler recommendations or something

us maple sounds pretty much like rock music to me tbh

― max, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:48 PM (53 seconds ago)

it does, i agree! that's sort of the point. it sounds like rock music, but like rock music that's been undone at a basic level. it resembles, but does not function as. if you approach it with the idea that it's going to scratch the zz top itch, you'll likely be frustrated. alienation from apparent genre identity seem like a big part of the point. sure, it scratches the US maple itch for fans, and the dislocation itch for those interested in such things, but that doesn't reduce the extent to which they seem to be frustrating rock's basic impulses. same thing, really.

and i'm not really taking shots at the sinker piece. just horsing around.

it's fascinating but extremely dense, and it's taking me a while to process it.

it's taking me 10+ years

i have talker and acre thrills on CD

much like aesthetics of rock

btw 60s frat rockers don't actually wear mummy outfits

no, they just wore revolutionary war outfits. or dressed all in black with one black glove. or shaved their heads and dressed like monks, etc.

The Monks, guys, the correct answer is the Monks.

yes but a MUMMY has a particular meaning in context of reviving the past DO YOU SEE, just like does a MONK or a REVOLUTIONARY

not sure w/ black w/ glove is all about

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6poag7ZQ4Zc/St2Fzbci3II/AAAAAAAAAh4/3hEcZbGk0FU/s400/back-from-the-grave-1.jpg

i believe that's from the same time as the mummies?

well before. back from the grave comps started showing up in the early 80s. around the same time garage punk's "RAW! WILD! PRIMITIVE! TRASH!" aesthetic started to coalesce into a formal genre. all indebted to the cramps? mummies were a decade deep continuation/refinement.

guess i'd say that billy childish was at least as important as the cramps in building defining this sensibility, though a good deal less well-heard in the states

yeah it's like if don caballero actually got to falling-down-drunk stage instead of just teetering at the alcohol-fueled beat-up-the-drumkit-and-wrestle-the-furniture violent drunk stage

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 3:54 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

BULLSHIT! they did everything exactly like the record! al wasn't drunk onstage he was acting. they deconstructed u bro

the closest billy childish got to deconstruction was schtupping trace emin

never been sure, tbh. they sure sound drunk.

xp i like us maple btw i just don't think its special esp in a clever "deconstructive" sense, they're basically just doing sparse "free rock" because they followed up on some byron coley albert ayler recommendations or something

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 3:56 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see that's the crux, is it sounds like "free rock" but it was played just like the records

did you guys ever see them live?

they did not deconstruct me but they awed me. also he was drunk man, i could smell him (close enough that his sweat was drenching me and it felt like the kick pedal was hitting my chest)

only show i think actually deconstructed me was a ruins show

xp to contendo - the mummies are part of a process of ongoing engagement w/ 'deconstructionist' music which is not codifying punk tradition any more than indie rock dudes imitating wire music is breaking down any codes

see that's the crux, is it sounds like "free rock" but it was played just like the records

crux of what though, i don't get what that signifies to you

the crux that you are talking out of your ass

me?

are you just saying they didn't "play shitty"?

but seriously i think contenderizer said it pretty well....

i mean "free rock" in the sense that it sounds like that music not that it's free improv

xpost no i don't think they played shitty at all, i saw them probably like 5 times i think?

the closest billy childish got to deconstruction was schtupping trace emin

― Einstürzende Joebarton (Nilmar Honorato da Silva)

yeah, he's a roots. wants it to be like it's supposed to be, the pursuit of bygone purity.

i don't think us maple played shitty either, they were skilled which is why i compared them to don cab

but i think the mummies are skilled too, and not just at what they do but also at what they choose not to

i think it's definitely missing the point to listen to surfin bird and listen to mummies and say "oh sure deconstruction exists as a thread everywhere in rock" but then try to claim the mummies are just trying to do surfin bird and us maple is trying to *push further* than something else

next you're going to tell us spacemen 3 were just copying the sonics

i have no opinion about the mummies other than that they are p fun

the monks seems like a pretty good one, just because in that documentary they talked about how they worked with those weirdo german ad agency dudes to break everything down etc

xp to contendo - the mummies are part of a process of ongoing engagement w/ 'deconstructionist' music which is not codifying punk tradition any more than indie rock dudes imitating wire music is breaking down any codes

― the late great, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 2:15 PM (2 minutes ago)

i'm not sure that we're at odds. i'm boxing the mummies in w/ b. child as revivalists, keeprs of the sacred flame. like the cramps, they define what they enshrine, but that's only because they're enshrining the defilement. this seems v different to me from the attempt to make deliberately alienating and "difficult" music that denies its apparent genre. like, you can enjoy the cramps, the milkshakes and the mummies in exactly the same way that you enjoy the trashmen and the novas. that's the whole point. the streams cross at pussy galore, who i'd argue were really just the new york mummies, forced to pass off their budget rock as an art prank by the tenor of the times.

anyway who cares US MAPLE RULES
HATERS S THE D
BEER BONG

^machine of life

us maple are not alienating to their audience at all though, and i think both would polarize joe bloggs

or difficult. the average us maple guy rolls with nels cline and royal trux in his closet, so keepers of sacred flames whatevs

and probably albert ayler and anthony braxton and other stuff that sounds like us maple w/ jazz instruments

or at least the tricks that make it scan as difficult and alienating to yr mom

i don't think US maple were pushing further than the mummies. i think they were being obtuse for the sake of it. the mummies were giving it to the people, moving asses, wrecking parties. i respect that far more.

spacemen 3 were copying the stooges. then street hassle, then suicide. or something. i mostly liked the stooges, so i stuck with "o.d. catastrophe".

i am my mom, so...

spacemen 3 were copying terry riley

and mc5

and suicide and red krayola for sure so they knew their drone

US Maple are constructionist

The correct answer is Beach Boys 2012

otm

since negativland got a mention, i suppose the residents figure in here somewhere. resemble and seem to comment on rock music, but produce something that doesn't work properly. devo too. i can't get no.

does this impulse/approach exist much in pop genres outside rock & punk?

xp seems like you just did there

according to some critics it exists everywhere and at the core of all music

http://www.domesticviolenceseries.com/images/awareness.jpg

mel gibson?

listening to US maple

post back when they *surprise* you

beautiful picture

still not redeeming the fanciful rhetoric

it does, i agree! that's sort of the point. it sounds like rock music, but like rock music that's been undone at a basic level. it resembles, but does not function as. if you approach it with the idea that it's going to scratch the zz top itch, you'll likely be frustrated. alienation from apparent genre identity seem like a big part of the point. sure, it scratches the US maple itch for fans, and the dislocation itch for those interested in such things, but that doesn't reduce the extent to which they seem to be frustrating rock's basic impulses. same thing, really.

you could say this about pretty much all death metal - and black metal - and most rock bands on Atavistic or Skin Graft. I think what you mean is "rock that doesn't strictly adhere to permanent blues-based progressions in 4, yet is not prog."

i liked the skin graft ac/dc covers. they didn't sound 'deconstructed' as much as 'essentialized'?

i feel like wire is in the same category. no extraneous notes.

i insist that i'm talking about music that seems to establish a kind of love/hate relationship with a specific genre. music that is in some sense of that genre, yet remains openly hostile to or critical of it. deliberately sounding ruined, broken or wrong - not in a general sense, but with regard to contemporary in-genre expectations - is a big part of it, too. at this point i want to position devo's "satisfaction" cover as the exemplar.

though maybe the resident's "satisfaction" cover would be better

devo's 'head like a hole' cover seems more of a hostile commentary on the original than does 'satisfaction' though, even while sounding less altered.

i insist that i'm talking about music that seems to establish a kind of love/hate relationship with a specific genre. music that is in some sense of that genre, yet remains openly hostile to or critical of it. deliberately sounding ruined, broken or wrong - not in a general sense, but with regard to contemporary in-genre expectations - is a big part of it, too. at this point i want to position devo's "satisfaction" cover as the exemplar.

presumably Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" would work here too - this has been going on in music for a very long time, it's musical conversation, not deconstruction.

oh oh oh you know what fits your description dog latin is Harvey Milk, esp first two albums.

residents must be right! c'mon deconstructionists throw me a bone over heah

fuck yeah the residents for sure, was just looking for examples with less "this is for satire's sake"

devo

c90: (i can't get no) satisfaction

this u.s. maple band are okay but they're way less whatever than i thought they were going to sound

ok who edited the wiki

U.S. Maple was an American noise rock band. The group formed in Chicago in 1995. The band consists of Al Johnson (lead singer), Mark Shippy (guitarist), Pat Samson (drummer), and Todd Rittmann (guitarist) — who banded together with the intent of becoming the deconstructionists of rock and roll.

haha my moneys on Nakh

http://www.allmusic.com/album/long-hair-in-three-stages-mw0000181380

NABISCO NOOOOO

nabisco not otm

U.S. Maple plays deconstructo core not jazz
U.S. Maple is free from solos

What about math rock?

was going to mention yowie. they're like beefheart on steroids, kind of.

Matt P OTM on this thread.

I've never heard US Maple

Has anyone here heard Y. Bhekhirst? Really some of the most bizarre rock n roll you will ever hear in your life.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/07/hot_in_the_airp.html

It sounds like they wrote out really simple arrangements and sent the musicians into different isolated rooms to record, and nobody could hear what anyone else was doing.

But in a good way!

like hitler and black dice and maryanne amacher having sex on acid in different rooms, in a really great way

The Monks, guys, the correct answer is the Monks.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, 4 September 2012 20:59 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Bingo! I started making a loosely-based-on-this-thread compilation this evening and I put some on it.

Devo's a good example too.

So far on this mix I've got US Maple, Pole, Emptyset, a repurposing of Duran Duran's 'Rio' by Bass Clef, 'Last Night At the Jetty' by Panda Bear (which I hear as a reassembled version of the Beach Boys' 'Kiss Me Baby'), The Monks, Holy Modal Rounders, Scritti, Pere Ubu, 'Ccec' by Autechre, Black Dice 'Shithouse Drifter' followed by an early track 'Studdered' and STL's 'Rainwalker'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MghjLQs_7ok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsDwynKAFPo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXwpx9iRBUM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lo5jwLNAmE

I shall seek out some early Harvey Milk. Only got the one from about a year or two ago.

I actually posted a youtube of an early Harvey Milk track on FB today , Dl

it sounds pretty cool!

presumably Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" would work here too - this has been going on in music for a very long time, it's musical conversation, not deconstruction.

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, September 4, 2012 3:19 PM (3 hours ago)

this is tough, cuz i can't deny this, having no sense of what "my favorite things" might have sounded like (to some hypothetical alter-me) in its moment. i nevertheless want to deny it, because i don't hear coltrane's music as being "about jazz" in the sense that, say, some of the early residents stuff might be described as being about rock. so i think i'll just leave that one alone.

occurs to me that two kinds of not-really-deconstructive deconstruction have been discussed itt:

1) discombobulation - music that sounds deliberately broken, counter-intuitive, disassembled/reassembled. describes stuff like like black dice, mapes, starfuckers. maybe beefeart & coltrane? maybe the mummies, too.

2) commentary - music that seems to reflexively critique the genre with which it's affiliated. describes the residents, devo, pussy galore, etc. lots of music stands somewhere between the two. not sure whether or not "my favorite things" fits in here.

xp Yeah the "My Love..." album, give it a listen, the whole thing's on Youtube. The 'hit' is called "Anvil will fall"

I'm not exactly sure if it fits but I've always loved the way the other people place's lifestyle of the laptop cafe lp stripped down the already pretty spartan detroit techno/electro/technopop styles to their absolute minimum but still kept things funky as hell. and catchy too! "it's your love" is just the best bassline ever.

the whole thing is deceptively simple but the balance is just perfect. I've never really found another record that works the same way for me.

thinking some EAI may fit in here as well. good morning, good night, something like that. noise minus the noise, y'know?

I think it's pretty common for rock dudes to read irony into My Favorite Things where there is none, and therefore to overestimate its significance within the overall context of jazz.

irony?

I think of the no wave band Mars as being comparable to Television. There's some kind of shared aesthetic there, perhaps, and they're both two guitars, bass, and drums groups living in New York a couple of years apart. To get from Television to Mars, something is subtracted. Music, really, is subtracted. Mars' appeal comes in part from the blank space that's left - there's a modernist aspect to that.

Maybe this gets a little more at what dog latin posited at the beginning: "the idea of un-genres, un-music - using the void as the sculpture."

The Godz are another example of this.

Nickelback are another example of this.

I believe there's this thing called sampling too

I think it's pretty common for rock dudes to read irony into My Favorite Things where there is none, and therefore to overestimate its significance within the overall context of jazz.

can you support this claim or is it a hunch?

yeah i'm not trying to pick any fights here since this thread is dead to me already but i've never heard anybody suggest anything like that re: coltrane

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5qhhhVWmU1qcs2ab.jpg

yes, those were the same words he used in that movie

or close enough

After slipping in some Devo, I've made a 60-minute mix of stuff that would fit in with this thread. I'll try and get it uploaded at some point soon.

I think it's pretty common for rock dudes to read irony into My Favorite Things where there is none, and therefore to overestimate its significance within the overall context of jazz.

can you support this claim or is it a hunch?

A jazz dude rather than a rock dude, but:

http://www.secretsocietymusic.org/darcy_james_argues_secret/2007/09/irony-man.html

All of the standards I listed above would clearly, clearly have been understood by audiences at the time as being ironic choices. But through a combination of the passage of time, the ascendence of the "Jazz Education" industry, the museumification of jazz, and and the overblown mythologizing of the "Great American Songbook," they have somehow been drained of their ironic bite and cultural significance.

But for audiences at the time, these songs were not "standards." They were covers -- reinterpretations of recent pop songs that had specific, current cultural associations. It's not just that the songs were familiar, it's that they meant something. When audiences in 1961 heard Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," they immediately thought of The Sound of Music, the Trapp family singers, "Doh, A Deer," "Edelweiss," Broadway kitch, Austria, WWII, all the rest. The show had been playing on B'way for less than a year before Coltrane recorded his cover version. (The movie version with Julie Andrews would not be released until 1965.)

Why is it that when Trane and Sonny use irony as part of their art, we understand that there is an underlying seriousness to what they are doing, but younger musicians can't touch irony with a ten-foot pole, lest they be dismissed a joke?

yeah, sounds reasonable to assume that most of Coltrane's audience would assume "My Favourite Things" was ironic given that they probably hadn't heard the original

may be letting the idea that "ironic" covers are the preserve of indie dweebs colour my perception tho

Wow, what a lot of thread. I think there's been some misconstruing here of the approach of bands like US Maple or whatever as being ironic or merely disassembling and reassembling sounds. And personally I don't buy the notion that deconstruction is purely a technique of reading; from what I remember of my undergrad days, and I may be remembering this wrong, Derrida himself said that deconstruction is a process that is always happening, whether we read it or not.

So for me it seems perfectly valid to read or analyse a given text (whether a literal text, or a concept like a musical genre, or even music itself) and take that as inspiration to perform an action (I want to say 'something tangible' but of course making music isn't that, apart from the playing) of deconstructing its binary oppositions (melody versus dissonance, etc) and rebuilding into something more true to what it is in itself, not what it is in contrast to something else (of course even in saying that you can argue I'm contradicting myself - and that's what's fun about philosophy).

Though I love Devo, I feel that what they did/are doing is getting into another territory, the nested dolls of bricolage, counter-bricolage, anti-counter-bricolage and so on. Still interesting, but different.

The Better Beatles & Culturcide?

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

I don't know how much it fits in with this thread's concept of "deconstruction" because it's still recognisably a cover of a song in another genre. Here we're talking about a style or aesthetic that's somehow been "taken apart".

I was thinking a bit more about this last night and remembering how in my younger days people would describe Autechre as "hip-hop", whereas all I heard was experimental electronica. It took a while for me to understand the connection, but now it makes a fair bit of sense. Autechre have always cited hip-hop and breaks as a central influence on their music. Break off all the abstruse branches and splinters and you will see that Ae's central core (or engine if we're gonna go back to the car analogy) is made of hip-hop. They share the same operating system, it's just that Ae have meddled with the subroutines.

Now I'm wondering about why I think Devo's version of 'Satisfaction' fits here but Coltrane's 'Favourite Things' doesn't...

Maybe it's because the Devo cover is almost entirely re-fabricated save for the lyrics. Even the topline vocal melody has been broken down into this stuttered yelp - a bizarro darkside version of Mick Jagger's sultry drawl. The rest of the music is bare-bones, but then so was much of the Stones' music stripped down and raw. The Devo cover is like looking at an exploded diagram of the original. I don't get this feeling with My Favourite Things.

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

this is nonsense

i wonder how ironic he and miles were being that same year when they played "some day my prince will come"

yeah, sounds reasonable to assume that most of Coltrane's audience would assume "My Favourite Things" was ironic given that they probably hadn't heard the original

if they hadn't heard the original, how would they have associated it with kitsch?

There's definitely a camp/kitsch factor abounding on 'My Favourite Things'. I don't know what a modern-day equivalent might be, but you'd have to appreciate the more lighthearted aspects of "serious jazz dude" re-purposing a popular showtune and yet using it as a display of pure musical might.

See I think it's just a great melody and Coltrane recognized that. He wasn't trying to elevate something he thought was kitsch into high art.

But my bigger point was that ironic or not, Coltrane's cover was hardly an innovation. A huge part of jazz's foundation was built on a cover of a corny song from a musical! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_changes

See I think it's just a great melody and Coltrane recognized that

people who covered rodgers & hammerstein songs from 1956-1961: sarah vaughn, frank sinatra, j j johnson, glen miller, ahmad jamal, ray conniff, stan kenton, kenny dorham, cannonball adderley, lena horne

so it's not like a way out of left-field thing to cover a rodgers & hammerstein song

and rodgers & hart were hugely popular w/ jazz dudes so it wouldn't have been a big leap sideways to rodgers & hammerstein

and ironic or not, it can't be read as a critique of jazz itself (at least i don't think it invites such a reading)

so it's not like a way out of left-field thing to cover a rodgers & hammerstein song

yeah, exactly

Now I'm wondering about why I think Devo's version of 'Satisfaction' fits here but Coltrane's 'Favourite Things' doesn't...

It's not that I don't think there was any humor or irony in jazz, but I don't think it was attached with the same level of cynicism that a contemporary rock audience reads into it. I think it was a more openminded borrowing. And because of that I think people read a bigger distance into My Favorite Things than there really was. But Devo or Residents doing Satisfaction definitely have less distance. They're still operating within their own genre I guess.

The big elephant in the room (re: residents, devo) is Zappa. But I think people overestimate the level of cynicism there too. I think it was Julian Cope who compared Zappa to Faust and claimed that while the Mothers were these really cynical guys who hated Louie Louie and covered it in a mocking way, the Krautrock bands genuinely loved that music. But it seems obvious to me that Zappa had a real affection for it too.

A jazz dude rather than a rock dude, but:

this completely undermines the claim that irony-finding is an outsider's wrongheaded view

the irony isn't a two-dimension dumb irony, i think the problem here is that people seem to be using irony as if it weren't a sophisticated artistic device. "My Favorite Things" is from square culture, safe white culture - jazz is avant-garde, especially bop. The irony in "My Favorite Things" isn't "ha ha, I'm playing 'My Favorite Things,' isn't that hilarious" - that's like amoeba-grade irony. The irony is in musical conversation between things that would be thought of, my non-musicians & probably by some musicians, as incompatible, and in how fluid that conversation in, how much there is for the jazz rendition to show us about the thing in which we did not previously here jazz. It's a free ride when you've already paid, you know.

my = by as almost fuckin always all my fuckin life

"My Favorite Things" is from square culture, safe white culture

I don't really agree with this but either way, isn't the same true of Gershwin?

What's the difference between the subtler form of irony you're talking about with MFT and say The Beatles doing a Buck Owens cover?

and anyway coltrane was FROM square culture, he'd been in the air force band like glenn miller!

lol a stint in the air force band does not make Coltrane a square - and besides, all players know that AFB/Navy band is player central, those guys are on point

should own up that most readings that people think of as crude "ha ha" irony don't strike me that way - "Act Naturally," for example. I think the Beatles do that because it's a great tune and a clever lyric; I don't think the Beatles are saying "Buck Owens is dumb" - they're musicians, they know Buck Owens is incredible

maybe not but i think it would be an easier case to project that onto coltrane's thinking ca. "my favorite things" than his attitudes of the 60s

by project i mean project the square attitude onto him

well, I mean - dude grew up in nowheresville, NC, right - but he's been making the scene for a while by the time he does "My Favorite Things." he's played with Miles & Monk, played Newport, done Giant Steps - he's for sure a heavy intellectual imo but his immersion in jazz as culture and his presence as a moving force in it is sure, I think. there's a divide between the culture in which his music is made and the culture of Rogers & Hammerstein, but a musician doesn't really acknowledge that divide as valuable: there's more to learn by contrasting crafts. irony is contrast, especially when, right, a guy from the avant-garde is putting "My Favorite Things" over modal changes.

surely the listener can locate irony in coltrane's "my favorite things" regardless of coltrane's intent

by that logic you could locate whatever you want in it

max if you start with that I'm gonna give you such a punch

should own up that most readings that people think of as crude "ha ha" irony don't strike me that way - "Act Naturally," for example. I think the Beatles do that because it's a great tune and a clever lyric; I don't think the Beatles are saying "Buck Owens is dumb" - they're musicians, they know Buck Owens is incredible

Exactly. And in the same way, TSOM is not kitsch, it's great! And Coltrane obviously felt the same way or he probably wouldn't have taken a song from it as a jumping off point for a 13 minute improvisation. So I don't know, maybe there's an irony inherent to a jazz musician borrowing influence from square white culture, but that doesn't mean Coltrane did that as a statement. I think he chose the song for purely musical reasons but I don't have any proof to back that up.

There's a similar dynamic at play within hip hop sampling. Where's the line between simply sampling a great break vs making some kind of hidden gesture or getting a kick out of the idea that the great break came from the Monkees? It's like the white rock audience and critical community has this weird self-hating thing going on where assume that a black artist couldn't genuinely enjoy "square white" music on its own terms without some layer of irony.

i dont think im saying anything that pomo or weird

xp

i don't know if it would be right to call coltrane a heavy avant-garde dude in 1961, when ornette coleman was doing "free jazz" the same year and what eric dolphy was doing and so on etc

miles and monk played all that songbook shit too and probably engaged w/ it even more than coltrane

i feel like this conversation is imposing this post-70s "jazz is the black rock fire music of beatnik rebellion" onto what was basically a given at the time, which is that dudes would play modal changes over a good tune regardless of whether monk had written it or rodgers had written it.

and the idea that "the sound of music" is some safe pedestrian shit is funny too

jazz dudes please school me on this but i thought taking riffs from pop songs and running with them was standard practice in jazz -- like it's just an established ritual that doesn't necessarily bring with it any trappings of irony or appreciation of the original. don't they still do that in jazz of today?

right, but it's not completely meaningless when they grab that tune from, as elsewhere on the same record, antiquity (Greensleeves) - there's play there, there's some irony. I think Trane's point is actually yours, that music is a vast conversation and that a new way of approaching it shows us new ways of hearing things, but another layer is the irony of a (what I'll hold still counts as avant-garde post-Ornette) jazzman playing a medieval melody

jazz dudes please school me on this but i thought taking riffs from pop songs and running with them was standard practice in jazz

afaik yes? and I think there's an affectionate irony in it. idk I think people have this conflation of irony with sarcasm or insult that's really limiting and dumb

The irony is in musical conversation between things that would be thought of, my non-musicians & probably by some musicians, as incompatible, and in how fluid that conversation in, how much there is for the jazz rendition to show us about the thing in which we did not previously here jazz. It's a free ride when you've already paid, you know.

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 10:33 AM (13 minutes ago)

i still don't hear the incompatibility. i instead hear some rather self-consciously "serious" musicians taking a break from that identity to play something light, popular and beautiful, something they genuinely seem to enjoy and respect. it's not as though there's no awareness of irony and incongruity, but the musical embrace of the piece seems completely earnest.

xp

well i'm sure he must've studied some classical / medieval music at some point - well actually i know he did - so is it equally ironic when he begins to deploy indian classical / medieval melodies or only ironic when it fits into a neat narrative of jazz dudes vs squares

i instead hear some rather self-consciously "serious" musicians taking a break from that identity to play something light, popular and beautiful, something they genuinely seem to enjoy and respect.

as if the other stuff they were playing was dark, heavy and alienating?

it wasn't so entirely lighthearted & rooted in pop, no

surely the listener can locate irony in coltrane's "my favorite things" regardless of coltrane's intent

Of course, but I think that does a disservice to the spirit of the piece. I think people are imagining a greater distance between R&H and Coltrane than actually existed in '61. Sound of Music was a popular, award winning work and became even bigger in '65 with the film release and that massively selling soundtrack album. Coltrane doing MFT would seem to be a conversation as aero calls it. Through that gesture Coltrane is bringing himself and R&H's music closer together, not highlighting any binary opposition between hip and square. The irony exists solely in the mind of the audience, not in the music itself. But rather than leading to contemporary audiences embracing R&H and SoM, I think the general rock crit reading pushes them further apart. Coltrane is elevated to canonical status within the rock world, partly because he is seen as having elevated a song that the rock audience perceives as being low and kitsch into something great.

lots of cps

so is it equally ironic when he begins to deploy indian classical / medieval melodies or only ironic when it fits into a neat narrative of jazz dudes vs squares

^^^ exactly. rock audiences are projecting their own arbitrary perceptions of high/low, hip/square.

afaik yes? and I think there's an affectionate irony in it. idk I think people have this conflation of irony with sarcasm or insult that's really limiting and dumb

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 11:10 AM (3 minutes ago)

a lot of the "deconstructionist" rock music under discussion yesterday is both ironic and sarcastic (and perhaps even insulting), as well as self-negating, self-sabotaging, a deliberate critique of its own chosen form. so simply locating irony in coltrane's choice of material doesn't really connect it to this tendency.

well, when you're engaging a musical culture which has had little dialogue at all with your point of reference, it'd be hard to locate irony - how had indian music previously received jazz, it at all? and vice-versa?

but let's clear - your claim is that to hear irony in jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes is to misread what the players are doing, is that right? fine if so, I think you're imputing all kinds of alien stuff to the claim of irony, just making sure

so when jazz players riff on "my favorite things" today, are they still making a commentary or just referencing coltrane? i got the sense that it's just part of jazz vocabulary now, however it started. is there really any sense of archness involved when it seems like the selections are chosen out of how well it fits the jazz idiom? I'd grant that someone's probably being arch if they took some limp bizkit song or something but "my favorite things" really doesn't sound at all out of place.

but let's clear - your claim is that to hear irony in jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes is to misread what the players are doing, is that right? fine if so, I think you're imputing all kinds of alien stuff to the claim of irony, just making sure

No. I just think the importance of that irony is vastly overstated in the case of MFT. And "jazz renditions of non-jazz tunes" is the entire foundation of jazz!

And I think this line of thinking sets up a weird dynamic where a black artist can only take influence from a white artist in an ironic way.

No. I just think the importance of that irony is vastly overstated in the case of MFT.

yeah I mean - I agree with this, as I say, I think there's a mild irony, an awareness of contrast and of transformation, but if there are people claiming there's a sarcasm (as we might imagine in Zappa covering something from a B'way show) that's obviously wrong. But I don't know that there are such people!

well there are people itt calling MFT kitsch, which would make the cover more ironic than if you don't consider it kitsch.

coltrane had played 'surrey with the fringe on top' with the davis quartet, what, three years before?

also your original mention of MFT was in the context of contenderizer's "talking about music that seems to establish a kind of love/hate relationship with a specific genre. music that is in some sense of that genre, yet remains openly hostile to or critical of it"
xp

but i'd want to claim, or at least be willing to concede

i. 'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad
ii. 'my favorite things' actually isn't
iii. it's not hard to hear *things going on* in coltrane doing 'my favorite things' that aren't going on in 'surrey' (which is on ... cookin' with? relaxin' with?)

I guess you could argue that jazz criticizes musical theater by stripping away the corny and sentimental lyrics and entire theater aspect and using it as raw harmonic and melodic material. The problem for me is that I think MFT supports two contradictory ironic readings:

The current popular reading: Coltrane the hip jazz guy covers a piece of square white kitsch and makes it hip
or
IMO, a reading that may have been more accurate to the time: A piece of popular, acclaimed "high art" music is recontextualized as underground club music.

the popular reading is based on a contemporary understanding of the worth and relevance of musical theater which doesn't reflect it's actual status and cultural dominance in 1961.

its like skrillex covering u2

i. 'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad

I disagree. The rhythm is interesting as is the repeated note which then jumps up higher at the end of each line. pretty easy to see why it would work in a jazz context.

'surrey with the fringe on top' is (by the standards of r+h, or any external standard) really f'n bad

"Surrey" was the absolute favorite song of the African-American woman who used to host a jazz program locally. I probably heard every jazz version extant via her show, and I'm sure she didn't view it as square white kitsch. I'm inclined to side with wk's second reading.

the popular reading is based on a contemporary understanding of the worth and relevance of musical theater which doesn't reflect it's actual status and cultural dominance in 1961.

SUPER OTM

OTM w. a big red cape and yellow S on its chest

this isn't a case of coltrane covering show tunes, its him doing jazz changes over what was a much-beloved - and deservedly so, it's very beautiful - popular song at the time from a broadway show that actually had - for the era - very serious undertones

nowadays we're like "oh show tunes how kitschy" or whatever like he's going into peaches & herb territory. no.

the late great your contention that there's no discontinuity whatsoever between bop and Broadway is just...weird? no one is saying "oh show tunes how kitschy" though it's necessary to keep making that claim for the argument of total continuity between John Coltrane & Rogers & Hammerstein going I guess

i like "surry with the fringe on top". what's not to like?

also, it seems to me that the "meaning" of a given jazz piece is less dependent on the choice of head/tune than what's subsequently done with it. there may have been irony or even mockery in miles' choice of "surrey" or trane's choice of "my favorite things", but the musical result seems to unify more than divide, to embrace rather than draw lines.

your contention that there's no discontinuity whatsoever between bop and Broadway is just...weird?

there's no discontinuity, there's a continuum

both are equal parts tin pan alley, right?

jazz just has some new orleans thrown in the mix and broadway has, i dunno, something else

ha i stand corrected i guess

i just really don't like 'surrey with the fringe on top', i can't really provide a rationale for it

yeah again, the biggest link between bop and broadway is probably Gershwin!

no one is saying "oh show tunes how kitschy"

but you kind of are?

no, I'm not

jazz just has some new orleans thrown in the mix and broadway has, i dunno, something else

music hall iirc

yeah, that's what i was thinking

well "oh show tunes how square" at least.
xp

music hall iirc

and uh... jazz.

Gershwin and Cole Porter had fully integrated a jazz influence into musical theater and jazz musicians had absorbed their influence back into jazz before Coltrane was even born.

i wouldn't leap to describe bway showtunes as a fusion of tin pan alley and jazz though. tin pan alley + music hall makes more sense to me, though jazz definitely figures in.

he means JAZZ not BOP

yeah, i know, even so

would like to learn a bit more about 19th century bway stuff tbh

yes, the jazz of the 20s was integrated or at least available to the broadway shows of the 40s, and i think the swing end of things in the 30s was available to them too

i don't think it was called broadway at that point, it was called music hall, right?

I think the style of musical theater is just a fusion of opera and other theatrical music with the popular music of the day. So during the jazz age it absorbed jazz, and in the '60s we got Hair and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

i mean, this is said to be the big pop number from the first modern-style broadway musical (instrumental version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PREholMWYUQ

damn those dudes must be old by now. what year was that modern-style broadway musical? 1930?

xpost re: musical theater

each bit has its own independent thing from opera and other theatrical music, like music hall has its own musical vocabulary, broadway has a separate one, "show tunes" have their pieces

but yeah always it absorbs the other popular music of the day ... because like all popular music that's just what it does

it's from the black crook (ahem), had its broadway premiere in 1866!

he means JAZZ not BOP

There's a distinct continuity there though. Gershwin brought a 20s jazz influence into musical theater, then bop musicians in the '40s were heavily influenced by Gershwin, so by the time Coltrane covered MFT I don't think it's fair to say that there was a discontinuity between jazz and musical theater.

ha so probably a historically accurate take by the cornet crew

god only knows

well "oh show tunes how square" at least.

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right? there is an inherent squareness to showtunes that gets unsquared by jazz!

I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right?

we live in a post keith jarret's sweaters era of jazz

benny goodman?

i agree that having " a love supreme" is almost as hip as having a sound of music LP

you cannot reasonably be arguing that 1) show tunes aren't a little square and/or 2) that hipness has nothing to do with jazz, right? there is an inherent squareness to showtunes that gets unsquared by jazz!

...I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

― we don't wanna miss a THING!!! (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:16 PM (24 minutes ago)

aero completely, ridiculously otm at this point. have to chalk any argument up to challops.

first on the agenda that tuesday was greensleeves, a traditional english folksong which had become a staple in the quartet's repertoire. the cynical might attribute it's inclusion to the success of my favorite things the year before - it is after all another jazz waltz with a simple melody. more likely commercial considerations just happened to concide with coltrane's own interests - the first of a succession of jazz waltzes which he used to further explore the waltz format.

Greensleeves is included because Coltrane, in recent months has been studying folk music ... "it's one of the most beautiful folk melodies i've ever heard ... it's written in 6/8 and we do it just as written"

david wild from the reissue is the first, dom cerulli on the original is the second

I mean, the irony is kind of that - jazz in the 50s/60s is cool as fuck, everybody knows it, it's a scene to make if you're hip; I think maybe when a non-jazz tune gets bop treatment there's that element present in almost any cover version of "look at this, a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" - but that is irony! Not the mean ol', bad ol', irony-as-insult that people seem to have in mind here, but literary irony - ironic juxtaposition of modes. It's a thing I think!

ok sure. that's a pretty large leap from where the conversation started which was the idea of being "openly hostile or critical" of a genre and of the implication that My Favorite Things was an innovator of that attitude within jazz.

"a tune you might not have noticed is hip really is plenty hip" is a different attitude than "this tune is really not hip so isn't it funny that I would lower myself to cover it" or "this tune is really not hip so let me obliterate it beyond recognition" which are both dynamics that are arguably at play in certain rock covers mentioned itt. Or even "this tune is considered hip but it's really kind of trash so I'll cover it in a deliberately horrible way."

that also otm

xp

"my favorite things" LP is made of two gershwin compositions, one cole porter and one rodgers & hammerstein. nowhere in the original liner notes does anyone make note of any of the "square" sources, except at one point coltrane notes that lester young taught him to appreciate simplicity as a springboard to more complex expression (this idea is more vaguely pointed out than i make it sound)

and I'm not really convinced that the kind of irony you're talking about is so superior to the cynical, sarcastic amoeba irony you dismiss. basically to find MFT ironic you have to think it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein which is kind of an adolescent and musically provincial attitude.

xp

nah i'm pretty sure he thought ella was a dunce

the late great is persuaded that there was neither ever hip nor square and certainly neither term ever had anything to do with jazz

and I'm not really convinced that the kind of irony you're talking about is so superior to the cynical, sarcastic amoeba irony you dismiss. basically to find MFT ironic you have to think it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein which is kind of an adolescent and musically provincial attitude.

no you don't! this is your baggage on the word "irony" - you're hauling a bunch of assumptions and bizarre accusations to the table to stick to your point, which is rooted in zero. " it's sooo weird that a hip jazz cat would deign to listen to such square white music as Rodgers and Hammerstein" <--- this exists in your brain, but seems so attackable to you that you place it externally. nobody's saying it, except you.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

les rallizes denudes = music as event-machine!

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

greensleeves is a fuckin' jam who fronts on greensleeves???

lol upper m

i think he might have genuinely enjoyed "my favorite things" and "greensleeves"

the only people who contest this are the phantoms in yr brain tho

that's how i usually describe ILXors to my IRL friends

lol

do I know you by an old screenname I can never keep track of who people turned into

I'm singing greensleeves right now

one time in like school or something we were reading the canterbury tales and had to do some sort of performance based on diff stories and I went up in front of the class and sang greensleeves for like 5 mins because I forgot to do my hw

that strat did not work as well in math class

kids do your hw or you'll post itt

you might remember me as v4hid or m00nsh1p. otherwise our only connection is i think some superfans of yours from encinitas.

oh no shit! dude some of yr thoughts on music had a real impact on how I listen way back glad to know which person you are.

maybe what coltrane, et al. were trying to do was posit that "hip" and "square" were meaningless signifiers...and moreover that perhaps it was hip TO BE square.

^^^

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Maple

"who banded together with the intent of becoming the numismatists of rock and roll."

haha, who changed this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ZUYOIh8Wg

also how did this thread digress into a huge debate about coltrane and his ostensible kitschiness?

the usual way--one poster made a claim, two hundred posters registered disagreement.

i just listened to "my favorite things" yesterday with my family and was struck by how straight the reading of the song sounded

my parents who are definitely jazz squares and rodgers/hammerstein fans did not jump out of chairs and go "wtf is this madman doing to this song?!?"

When I read DL's opening post a few minutes ago I immediately thought "Big Flame!" - seems to me they were doing something close to what Dog Latin was on about in the mid-80s, in a post-punk / indie context. The reason I mention this is because they referred to themselves (half-jokingly I assume) as "cubist" - their last single was entitled "Cubist Pop Manifesto" and cubism might be a better comparison for the tendency DL was getting at than deconstruction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KrkJ28c0fk

There's something to watch, not the most "cubist" of their stuff but whatevs.

Cheers Tim, I'll check this out.