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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In the bizarre and wonderful world of mash-ups, bootlegs and remixes, racial and musical boundaries disappear -- and the joy that's missing from so much of today's pop is back.
Aug 9, 2003 | "Lemme bootleg yo' shit."
That request, from a radio call-in skit on the new Lil' Kim album "La Bella Mafia," might be the ultimate expression of our current state of media overload. Everything gets bootlegged, though it hardly needs to be since, sooner or later, everything gets released. DVDs contain deleted scenes and director's cuts. Most new CDs glide past the hour mark, and older ones are rereleased with unheard bonus tracks, B-sides, demos, alternate takes.
You can buy pricey imported box sets of jazz or blues or R&B artists that contain entire recording sessions, including false starts and studio dialogue. Buy a reissue of a jazz CD and you're likely to find yourself listening to 10 different takes of "Bye Bye Blackbird" or some other standard. The inclusionary model for current media might be Greil Marcus' description of the '70s album "Having Fun on Stage with Elvis": "The King saying 'Well ... wellll ... wellllll' for 37 minutes." If it ever existed, some collector somewhere has to have it.
But at some point, after reading about the umpteenth hot new band/singer/novelist/artist/actor/gastroenterologist, after being induced to buy the latest remastered "complete" version of a classic, it's easy to start craving the mental equivalent of a high colonic. I'm quite happy, thank you, with the five tracks that originally comprised Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," and with Steven Spielberg's original cut of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." (Blessings, though, on those wonderful souls who brought out the restored texts of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Sons and Lovers.")
Feeling that way may signify a retreat from pop culture, where the thrill often comes from having so much vying for your attention, from believing that some great new thing is just awaiting discovery. It's especially easy to feel overwhelmed when it comes to popular music -- even if you've managed to keep paying at least some attention after you hit 30, the age when most people begin to give up on keeping track of what's new.
There are a lot of reasons people stop listening to current pop music: The feeling that it's not for them anymore; the drain on the energy and attention they want to devote to family and work; even just plain creeping old-fartism. Lately, though, there's another reason: There's just too much out there, too many artists, too many niches, to feel like you can get a handle on what's going on. Radio as a place to hear new music has pretty much ceased to exist; you can hear more new music shopping for clothes or watching TV commercials than you can on most radio stations. Those stations that do play new music have all settled into ever more narrowly defined categories, and that's tough luck if you happen to like both Aaliyah and the Strokes.
The rock press hasn't been much help either. With the exception of sharp writers like the New York Times' Kalefa Sanneh (who is embarrassingly good week in and week out), rock journalism seems written in language that's impossible for the general reader to decipher (Spin and the Village Voice are mostly incomprehensible). If you want to discover new music on MTV, that pretty much means staying up all night or setting your VCR from 2 to 8 A.M., when the network still bothers to show music videos. And with CDs routinely nearly double the length of what LPs used to be, getting to know any individual album well becomes harder. How many times have any us been captivated by some new song, bought the CD and found the hit surrounded by crap?
The most satisfying listening experiences I've had in the last few years have been with electronica and dance music compilations, not just because it feels as if there's something ecstatic and utopian in that music (even if I can't tell garage from trance from house) but because the variety of artists who appear on each CD mitigate against boredom. You can enjoy Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By" on a compilation by DJ Peter Rauhoffer without the lame cuts that surround it on the band's own album. In this overloaded culture, it's inevitable that something approaching mass attention deficit disorder starts to set in -- and compilations can function as something like a spam filter. But then, sometimes the sheer number of compilations released every week, often with competing mixes of the same songs, can make me leave the record store empty-handed, sure that any choice I might have made would have been the wrong one.
I think the feeling of being behind before you start, slotted into target audiences in a way that rock audiences were not in the '60s (when it wasn't especially unusual to like both Bob Dylan and the Supremes), overinformed and clueless at the same time, has a lot to do with the emergence of mash-ups.
Mash-ups are mix tapes that segue sometimes almost imperceptibly from a snatch of one song to a snatch of a different song or, in their most delightful and imaginative versions, put bits of two songs together on the same track. Christina Aguilera may find herself being backed by the Strokes; Salt 'n' Pepa square off against the Stooges; the Beach Boys' sublime harmonies on "God Only Knows" waft out of the heavens over the endlessly repeated opening riff of "Billie Jean"; Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" gets support from the electronica duo Royksopp; and Kurt Cobain fires up the pep rally with special guest vocalists Destiny's Child.
Peer pressure doesn't really end with adulthood -- it just becomes cultural pressure. In school we may be embarrassed to admit we like a certain group or song. When we get to be adults, we find we're supposed to admit to liking only what has been deemed worthy (or hip -- the urban equivalent of worthiness). It's OK to be in your 30s and express admiration for the tuneless droning of Radiohead, but watch out if the new Justin Timberlake single tickles you. The most honest response to current rock culture I've read came from Wilco's Jeff Tweedy in a recent issue of Bookforum when he said that the interaction that goes on between a teenage girl and an N' Sync album is more profound than what some 50-year-old rock critic thinks about the new Interpol record. Tweedy was restating the importance of immediacy in listening to rock 'n' roll, the feeling of instant understanding and connection between artist and listener, the belief that what you're hearing is yours. That's also why rock fandom can be as much a solitary as a communal experience.
