Chris M writes:
Music has rules for listening and most of the time if
you don't like the music then you don't understand it.
Jonathan Ross replies:
Bah.
I've only quoted Ross' first word because a well reasoned subjective
analysis of subjectivity is hard to argue with. It was a really good reply.
However, I have this conversation - usually slightly heated - with my wife
about once a year.
She has great ears, being both from Texas AND a great producer of recorded
material, mostly comedy radio commercials, but that's more like music than
you might imagine. Occasionally we'll be driving and I'll put something on
and she'll ask me to play something else, because she really doesn't like
what I'm playing. Some times it's music she liked the last time she heard
it, sometimes it's new music for her and it hasn't engaged her.
Experience has taught me that music I don't like at first is very likely
music I'll like later on. The list of music I didn't like at first, and
can't live without now:
Music of the African American culture
Soul music
Soul Jazz
Organ Jazz
Bill Evans
Stan Getz
Mambo
The Rolling Stones
Howlin' Wolf (I swear)
San Francisco Rock Music of the late 60's
Jose Feliciano's version of Light My Fire
Country music (up to about 1975 or so - still have no use for the rest)
Rachmaninoff
Aaron Copland
Bluegrass
In each case at first I didn't hear it, then I did. That's why I rarely
'hate' music I don't hear. I fully expect to 'hear' it some day. Even
Opera. I'm nearly certain it is not really just people screaming at each
other.
But after a few 'conversions' I had to ask myself what the hell was up. In
nearly every case I had to conclude, as Chris has, that these musics have
rules. Really, I think they're like different languages, only alot more
fun to learn, and generally acquired during a felicitous instant. I don't
think this happens consciously, but when music grabs that thing in you
which experiences a strong feeling when listening to music, you fall in
love in a second.
A for-instance experience. I worked at a record store in the late 60's,
when they were called record stores, and this store had a policy of playing
records that customers asked to hear. Old black folks would come in and
order me to play various soul records. I got a huge kick out of getting
ordered around by these people, who rarely got to order young white kids
around, but I had no use for Soul music, as it all sounded the same to
me. Imagine. But I could hear my family's words ringing in my ears - all
rock and roll sounded alike to them. I knew it didn't sound alike, but
they couldn't hear the diff, and I mapped that to my reaction to soul
music. (Mind you, I loved all kinds of blues already, and had a decent
collection for a teenager.)
And then one day, a few months into the job, I 'heard' soul music and
nobody had to order me to put records on anymore. Suddenly I felt the
music and fell in love.
This even happens with music I like. I had a Duke Ellington
compilation. Liked it, played it alot. Music from his 'high' period of
the early 40's. Then one day I heard that weird, beautiful 'other thing'
that's there in Ellington's music. Lots of Ellington freaks have
experienced this. I played the comp over and it was there on every
track. I ran out and bought a bunch more Duke from the 40's. It was on
every track, this 'other thing' that elevated the music to a place where I
had never heard music go before. It's still there for me. Hope you hear
it too.
Hell, it even happens when you're pitching music. I managed an act for a
short time in the early 80's. We put together 10G's to make a sensational
four song demo produced by a guy who made hits. We sent the demo to
everybody, including a guy I'll call The Big Cheese. I didn't hear from
Cheese for a month, so I finally called and talked to Brother Of Cheese, a
guy who became the head of one of the major labels a few years later. He
was completely dismissive, said his brother the Cheese didn't like the
music at all.
I parted ways with the singer. One year later somebody else sent the music
to the Cheese. He called from NYC (the singer lived in LA) and said he had
booked a flight to LA so he could meet her immediately, and wanted to know
why he had never heard her before. She was smart enough to not tell him
the truth. He flew out, they hit it off, he got her on Arista, produced
the record, it was really good, and the rest would have been history if the
record had been a hit.
(Huge life lesson for me. No is an insincere response as far as I'm
concern, the responder just doesn't realize it yet.)
Suddenly a barrier comes down. Sometimes it comes down at once. The
Beatles come to mind, for me and I'll bet for the other old farts on the
list. But when I talk to young people they nearly all tell me they had
their 'Beatle Year' when they finally 'got' the Beatles music after having
had it shoved down their throats by their parents from before birth.
Different musics hit different ears instantly, or after a while, or after a
long while. But I fully expect to like almost everything after a while,
and 'getting it', the notion that drives my wife insane when I tell her
she'll 'get' Blind Willie Johnson some day, has at least something to do
with hearing the rules for that music. One could not at gunpoint actually
verbalize or codify the rules, but those rules are as real as the rules for
putting together a sentence in your native tongue, and it took until pretty
recently to codify the rules of grammer.
All one has to do is listen to the music of a foreign land. If you have
access to the various musics of the Balkan states or of eastern Europe,
listen and my point will be made. You have to be around that stuff for a
very long time before it makes a lick of sense, so to speak.