On Music and Writing

In December, I began a standard ritual. It's a ritual I've been doing for over a decade – going through Pitchfork's year-end top 100 songs and listening to them, in order, from number 100 to number 1.

I'm not going to comment on the music itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Much of it is in-between. Some of it might be good, but it is not for me, or for people of my general inclination, but there are still reasons to qualify it as by and large good. These are not the issues I care to write about. After all, is there anything more tedious than an aging hipster bitching about contemporary music? (Answer: yes, there is, and it's an aging hipster glomming onto contemporary music in a pathetic attempt at youthful enthusiasm).

What I wish to write about, rather, is the writing about the music.

Consider their commentary on their number 1 for 2020, Cardi B's “WAP” (and Ben Shapiro's song-that-must-not-be-named, a fact which will forever be hilarious):

“...a Cardi verse somehow tributes the unsung uvula amid an imposing tour de force of lecherous metaphors.”

Really?

To a certain degree, I have a sympathy for the writers. If they want to say that a song is a banger, there are only so many ways they can. There are only so many descriptors, so many adjectives, especially when it comes to pop music that has its appeal in groove and hook more than anything else (credit where credit's due, Cardi has had some very clever lyrics in her day, albeit in other songs). When a music critic tries to review a DaBaby song, say, there's only so much you can milk out of the repeated phrase “I'm a young CEO, suge” before getting to the point where there's more analysis in your review than in the song itself. There's a reason that the absolute most common album review I hear referenced in conversation is a Pitchfork review of a Jet album that was just a link to a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Furthermore, lyrical complexity doesn't really make the critic's task any easier, because the lyrics are inextricably embedded within the music. It's hard to think of a dumber Nobel literature prize than that given to Bob Dylan, because no matter how much 16 year old boys in Middle America (spotlight casually falling at my feet) would like to claim that Dylan's lyrics are poetry, they would be absolutely godawful if they were actually written down as poems. Consider Desolation Row:

“Ophelia she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She is already an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness.”

See? Just awful, high-school creative writing class shit. But in Dylan's voice with his spare guitar, it's heaven.

And when you think about those songs that form the soundtrack to your life, it's rarely the song in and of itself that you think of – it's the context. It's where you were, both geographically and in your life, it's the nostalgia of old friendships, first loves, long drives.

Yet in another era – not too long ago – poetry was itself a form of music. It was meant to be remembered and recited, with a rhythm akin to that of what we have formalized as music, and in oral cultures, there is very little distinction between poetry and music. A time before those of us in the industrialized world didn't have to deal with the shattered remnants of a dead God. When the stained-glass windows of Chartres were the most radiant thing one would see, when the emperors were still descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

And while such things are but distant memories, their residue is all around us.

We still seek the transcendent, and it is so often that that transcendence cannot be reduced to words.

It hits you as see the afternoon light moving across the corners of your room.