5 — Friday, January 18, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
It’s practically worn out in musical discourse to
bemoan the “three-and-a-half-minute pop song,”
usually in comparison (as a strawman) to a more
complicated, underrated work. That concision
and formalism are, in and of themselves, seen
as worthy of disdain should seem strange to
anyone who regularly listens to popular music
— Irving Berlin’s acknowledged mastery was
generally constricted to an almost formulaic
32-bar structure, as were many of George
Gershwin’s songs
that later became
jazz
standards.
Concision
is
the
rule
in
songcraft, not the
exception,
and
for good reason.
A
song
is
a
perfect vessel for
clear and concise
expression
that
still
retains
the
ability
to
accommodate
complex
emotions and a
wide variety of
styles. It makes
sense that this
form has endured
to
the
present
day much more
than the intricate (and often opaque to first-time
listeners) European symphonic forms.
Songs are also useful in that people rarely
want to hear just one at a time. Some of the
earliest examples of short-form composition are
the 19th century “song cycles” by composers
who also worked in the symphonic mode. Franz
Schubert wrote two evening-length cycles for
a vocalist with piano accompaniment parsed
into small songs ranging from under a minute
to around six minutes. Trying to tell a story
with what is essentially a set of miniatures
is an interesting musical problem — there’s a
dialectic between continuity and subtlety. The
song cycle contains many-faceted impressions
rather than a continuous arc. Schubert’s songs
are little snapshots of the main character’s
emotional state, and some of the most poignant
songs cut away from the narrative arc to focus on
nature — the wind through the trees, a creaking
weathervane.
This approach to songs — a narrative told
through small elements — didn’t survive entirely
intact in the emergence of the album a century
later, but a lot of music criticism acknowledges
that albums need some kind of flow that both
acknowledges the separateness of the elements
and links them together. This discontinuous
continuity is hard to locate in any particular
aspect of the music, a certain je ne sais quoi.
To pick an example at random, a review of
LCD Soundsystem’s “Sound Of Silver”: “We’re
besieged and stupefied enough by downloads and
mixes and remixes and mashups and collections
of songs masquerading as albums that an album
that feels like an album strikes me as positively
ideal right now.”
It’s interesting that the reviewer mentions
mixes and mashups — the mix, whether done
in a continuous flow by a DJ or simply ripped
onto a cassette or a CD, is somewhere between
album and mashup. The mix splits albums at
their weakest components and collages their
component parts, creating a new large-scale
form out of pre-existing parts.
The creator of the mixtape, in essence, is
performing a “reading” of their particular
musical landscape. Their task is to maximize
a particular quality of music that they value
independent of the artists’ original intentions —
the creation of a personal genre that brings what
they value in music to the forefront. A mixtape
can be a sonic memory palace, a record not only
of listening but listening in a particular way and
with specific priorities. The role of the listener
becomes active — it’s a process approaching that
of the composer or the record producer, who
draws on their store of auditory knowledge to
create new things.
The “playlist” of the 2010s takes this logic of
maximization as its lowest strata, but functions
in a different way. Playlists, in their scale (it’s
very easy to make playlists that are hours long)
and ability to be updated and edited over time,
have acquired something like a furnishing or
decorative function, that of a lamp you can
turn on and off. Playlists are created, in part,
to fulfill some function: opening Spotify’s front
page presents the listener with playlists that are
tailored to a specific activity, like “deep focus”
or “brain food.” The writer Liz Pelly writes on
Spotify’s Muzak-esque attitude toward music
in general. Playlists are curated according to
genre and, increasingly, according to mood,
“chill” prefacing a multitude of playlists. Pelly
writes: “Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re
the purest distillation of its ambition to turn
all music into emotional wallpaper.” Pelly
has similar misgivings about the “discovery”
playlists Spotify offers, writing that streaming
“creates passive environments where listeners
stream what they like, and more of what they
like, and more of what they like — ad nauseam.”
This is the afterlife of the mixtape: The ability to
create specific pathways through music culture
as a whole is turned into a way to maximize the
passive aspects of music listening.
Curation retains its creative potential, even as
it threatens to pull the listener into an effective
undertow. Is it possible that we could have
seen this coming? Isn’t art made from other
art one with an already essentially narcissistic
relationship to the work of other artists? Mixtape
culture was initially lauded as lifting the listener
out of passivity
and into a small
act of creation.
The question then
becomes whether
or not a society
where
everyone
is encouraged to
have a passively
creative
(and
corporate-
mediated,
in
Spotify’s
case)
relationship
with
other
art
is
desirable.
Mixtapes
were
never meant to
be the default way to engage with music, and a
world where everyone exists in a lonely sea of
their own taste was never the intention.
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
Albums, mixtapes, playlists and the craft of concision
DFA RECORDS
‘Mars Room,’ in portrait
I have a crush on Rachel
Kushner — everything about
her.
I
was
initially
turned
on by her debut novel “The
Flamethrowers,” a smart and
stylish sojourn from the dirty art
hoes of 1970s Soho to the political
underground of Italy, complete
with glamorous touches of DMT
churches, performance art and
street violence. Swoon.
“The Flamethrowers” is so
vivid, so bitingly electric and
feminist-without-the-word that
I got curious about the woman
behind the pen and slipped into
a
forty
minute
biographical
research bender. Rachel Kushner
is
a
San
Francisco
native,
the certain spawn of beatnik
scientists that lands a gig at a
feminist bookstore at the ripe
age of five, does the Berkeley
thing and bools around the SF
nightclub scene on her Moto
Guzzi before casually saucing
over to Columbia for her MFA.
In author imagery, she often
appears in front of cars, behind
Wayfarers
and/or
clad
in
leather. She’s got three critically
acclaimed blockbuster novels, a
Guggenheim, an honorary PhD
from Kalamazoo and now a spot
on the Man Booker shortlist
with her latest book, “The Mars
Room.” I repeat: swoon.
“The Mars Room” reads much
like “The Flamethrowers” in
its grunge-glamor. Our femme
fatale, Romy Hall, grew up
hard and fast in San Francisco,
getting into catfights and PCP
on the weekends before working
at The Mars Room, a low-fi
but high-cred strip club in the
gritty Tenderloin district. It’s
not a stereotypically secure gig,
but Romy enjoys the power she
wields at the club and a steady
source of income to support
herself and her son. She’s smart,
pragmatic and tough (“Every
stripper I know is clever. Some
are practically geniuses.”), but
she doesn’t have the ability to
prevent or outrun a customer-
turned-stalker, and she really
doesn’t
have
the
cultural
capital
or
capital-capital
to
defend herself at court when an
encounter with the creep turns
violent. But this is all delivered to
us through sporadic flashbacks.
The novel opens in the thick of
consequence:
Romy
shackled
chattel-style to a prison bus,
careening nebulously into two
consecutive life sentences in the
Central Valley.
“The Mars Room” unfolds
like
this,
unsticking
and
resticking in time between its
present (2003 at the Stanville
Women’s Correctional Facility)
and Romy’s shrouded past on
the streets of SF. Structurally,
this can be unpopular territory:
Novels that nix the frameworks
of time and place run the risk of
bleeding out into disorganized
and
disorienting
masses
of
detail. Kushner, however, is a
seasoned rebel. She manipulates
the timeline so deftly that these
scenes slide into each other
with a dreamlike logic. Romy’s
GED prep session at Stanville
summons an anecdote of teaching
her son to count, a memory that
morphs into musing on how
counting functions “like prison,
from a name to a number.” This
brings us back to Stanville where
the women on death row are
sewing sandbags for “five cents
an hour, minus fifty-five percent
restitution.”
The narrative is a ride on
Romy’s train of thought, a
psychological portrait made vivid
by its very meandering. Between
the hustle for shampoo and
tampons, hazy recollections of
bad lap dances and dehumanizing
treatment from prison guards
and
public
defenders
alike,
Kushner captures the indefinite
restlessness of a mind pinned
between past and future, time
and place, hope and regret.
That being said, “The Mars
Room” sprawls. Those who value
plot will be frustrated with the
way this one constantly wavers
between
absent
and
forced.
Those who enjoy form and detail
will revel in Kushner’s obsession
with it, a highly visual approach
to storytelling singular enough
to land her on the Man Booker
shortlist.
BOOK REVIEW
The first week of every
semester is always a haze of
casual inquiry. Why are you in
this class? What do you do in
your free time? Share a funny
story with the person sitting
next to you. It goes on and on.
But in my Comm 102 class this
week, the GSI asked a topically
relevant question: What is your
media guilty pleasure? The
answers from my discussion
full of sorority girls and frat
boys was pretty similar across
the board, from Instagram
to Netflix to a minor FIFA
addiction that made everyone
laugh. For me, I realized that it
was YouTube. And not just the
classical version of YouTube,
full of late-night clips and fail
videos, but almost exclusively
skincare and makeup taught by
beautiful French (or similarly
nonchalant) women. They’re
calming in a way that I’ve never
been able to put my finger
on, and I definitely watch too
much for it to be good on my
eyes late at night. But there’s
something
indescribably
soothing
about
applying
serums and moisturizers in
pace with a lilting European
accent in the morning and
before bed. I think it does the
same thing for me that praying
might do for someone else.
Going through the motions of
my skincare routine is a sort of
ritual, an excuse to reflect on
the day that has passed and the
one ahead of me while keeping
myself occupied.
Nonetheless, my love for
beauty
videos
(specifically
ones
like
those
made
by
Violette, Into the Gloss and
Christine Nguyen) is still a
guilty pleasure. My friends
make fun of me for the amount
of products I have lined up
hidden in drawers and on my
desk, for the hours I probably
spend watching these women
meticulously
apply
their
favorite creams and lipsticks
every
year.
As
I
jokingly
answered my instructor during
discussion, I began to realize
how much my little ritual really
meant to me. When I look at my
skincare habits fiscally, I am
shocked and horrified by the
potential hundreds of dollars
that I’ve spent on product.
But as a realist, there is some
part of this spending that is
an investment in myself that
pays off. Not only is my skin
fantastic (bar one very fun
week every month), but I am
also genuinely excited to do my
routine twice a day. As a self-
declared workaholic, my ritual
of beauty video play-alongs is
sometimes the only thing I do
outside of writing or reading
all day. Everyone has their
own little things that make
them happy, and for me it’s
the feeling of a fresh face, the
stinging satisfaction of a peel
or the faint taste of menthol as
my lip balm sinks in.
In
the
morning,
I
roll
out
of
bed
to
my
birds-
and-piano
alarm
of
Aphex
Twin’s
“aisatsana
[102]”
and subsequently settle into
my desk chair, laying out
the things I’ll need for the
day. It’s a little “American
Psycho”
Patrick
Bateman,
but first; there are serums,
then
moisturizers
mixed
together to thwart pollution
and
dryness,
sunscreen,
makeup, highlighter and gel
and hairspray. All the while,
I love to throw on a video
in
the
background
there’s
something uncanny about the
effect of someone else making
themselves up while you do,
like a very chic friend sharing
secrets before a night out. It
doesn’t even have to be related
what I’m doing, but knowing
that by osmosis I might pick up
a tip or two. Even a hint of the
calm and collected demeanor
of these women is enough
to
make
these
ten-minute
intervals of peace and self-care
in my busy life worth it.
The famed burlesque dancer
and general beauty icon Dita
Von Teese consistently brings
up these moments in every
interview I’ve ever seen her
give. To Von Teese, the thrill of
making yourself into something
beautiful, something different
than yourself and full of joyful
glamour. Like her, I find my
own joy in going through the
steps of my preparations for
the day, in making myself
into whatever I want to be
at any given moment. The
consolation of other women
in that process via YouTube or
a podcast or even in real life
makes those moments even
more powerful and effective
than they would be alone. It
may be a guilty pleasure, but it
is pleasure nonetheless, a small
happiness in an oft-stressful
and clustered world. If I spend
80 dollars on Vitamin C, so be
it: There is no price to comfort
and confidence.
DAILY GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN
CLARA
SCOTT
FINANCIAL TIMES
VERITY STURM
Book Review Editor
Choosing to treat myself
like all the best beauty vids
I find my own joy
in going through
the steps of my
preparations for
the day, in making
myself into
whatever I want
to be at any given
moment
Concision is
the rule in
songcraft, not
the exception,
and for good
reason
Mixtapes were
never meant to
be the default
way to engage
with music