Musical Tribalism: Music Karen II

There is an entire level of engagement with music that has nothing to do, really, with its aesthetic properties except, perhaps, incidentally. Long ago I would have said this was a bad thing but now I take a more neutral attitude. There is something given for the music connoisseur that is not given for most people: that music per se is valuable regardless of where it comes from or when it was written. This means that music as an object of appreciation is abstracted from a personal, familial or social aura which it possesses and on judged on its own merits. To such a standpoint it does not matter that the Hurrian hymn (the oldest known piece of notated music) belongs to a world so ancient we can barely conceive of its values and priorities as our own. It is a nice series of notes and its very antiquity gives it a fascination it might not otherwise possess. It does have an aura but not the aura it originally had as that is forever lost. I have always gravitated to pieces of music like this and it took me a long time to grasp other people’s apparent resistance to them. For most of people most of the time music has an aura that is not a private contemplative construct but directly given by their social and familial world. Their stance is NOT strictly speaking aesthetic and this is not only true of the people who appreciate music but of the overwhelming majority of the people who have created it. Music, for most of its history, has been for use and this is true of a shocking amount of what we would consider great music like the 1610 Vespers or the French Suites. One of these uses, indeed the primary one, has been for rituals of social bonding. It is then, the connoisseur who has taken the odd stance of taking pieces of music apart from their aura and considering them on their own or even investing them with a private aura. Pop songs are perfect example of this for while they stay broadly the same as to type and sentiment different instances forever multiply the type. Every generation, in our world at least, requires its own set of memorable songs so while types, like the love song, may be handed down instances, by and large, are not.

Such a song, was (I can recall because I am that old) “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers, a dreadful one hit band from Scotland that at the time were ‘the next Beatles’. In aesthetic terms “Saturday Night” has virtually nothing to commend it over other songs from that period. It was, however, just good enough (and I’m sure a musicologist could analyze why) to start a fad and a fad is based on a feeling that we are ‘All in this thing together’. However, if had a time machine to go back and introduce family and friends to Bowie’s Aladdin Sane (from the same year) the result would be shock, irritation and disappointment. If I could have conveyed to people all the ways in which, lyrically and musically, Aladdin Sane was superior this would have made no difference. What people would have immediately perceived is that Aladdin Sane had no aura and all the musical skill in the world could not, at that time and place, give it one. In terms of social use it would have been isolating and thus not liberating or even interesting. This is because people are, rightly in fact, more interested in people than in things even if those things are canonized objects of aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, most people who have an interest in things want those things as ways of impressing something about themselves on other persons. This is based on the entirely reasonable view that other people are who you need to live with and though deracinated intellectuals like myself might use the word ‘’tribal’ in a pejorative sense (for an attitude that is non-inclusive say- see Frankie Goes to Hollywood!) that is not the meaning it has for most people and it is most people who are correct on the matter including the many people who literally live in ‘tribes’ today. Such people are ALL ABOUT the other people they have to get along with because they live in proximity of space or sentiment or tradition with them. To quote the Boss himself: “Nothin’ feels better than blood on blood”.

Plus, there are things to which I have tribal reactions. One of my pet peeves is the notion some have that there are intrinsically bad musical instruments. The usual candidates for this list are the accordion, bagpipe and ukulele. I have heard all of these employed wonderfully but I can add, that in the case of the bagpipe at least, there is indeed an aura of a ‘clannish’ variety. In my case this is complicated by certain aesthetic considerations that make it in part a private aura. This is the fault of an English tenor from back in the day named Gerald English. I had (and still have) a recording of him singing a mournful troubadour song accompanied by a Breton bombard. A Breton bombard is one of the many, many iterations of the reed family which includes the bagpipe. What is more, though not technically a bagpipe, its sound is a dead ringer for one. What does the piercing sound of the bagpipe, or other ‘outdoor reeds’ do aesthetically? Well, it creates space, lots of space for it is an outdoor instrument meant to be heard at long distances. A bagpipe is intrinsically far way and evokes distance. Add to this the ‘far away in time’ character of a troubadour lamenting the loss of his lady and you have distance both in space and time across which, nonetheless, we are addressed by a longing or desire we might easily take for our own. Such an experience is as individuating as anything that confronts us with our own mortality and the finitude of our desire but, I must also admit, that my reaction to this sound did indeed have something to do with hearing pipes all around me (I grew up in a rather Scottish place). This sound was not only MY sound but OUR sound. The Bretons were Celts after all and Gaelic speakers like many of my own ancestors on the paternal side.

An LP is a strange way to connect with what is immediately around you I suppose but human normality is something I have to approach asymptotically. This brings me back to the unfortunate Music Karen and her demand to hear ‘American Music’ in the park. It is absolutely no good to demand of such a woman that she approach a Puerto Rican pop song as a distinct object of appreciation any more than one can replace ‘Saturday Night’ with ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and produce the same feeling of bonhomie (the sexual politics of the song, if nothing else, would complicate that and break the community of feeling). Music Karen likes not ‘sounds’ but ‘our sounds’ and is displeased and disoriented where ‘their sounds’ enter ‘our space’. Music that does not have a tribal aura is, as she says, ‘crap’ because without its aura it is mere noise. BUT if one is to be ‘tribal’ in that way one has to be honest about who your tribe actually is. If you are North American and do not live under a rock African and Latin traditions absolutely define ‘your’ sound and if Americans freak out about black culture it is because they know deep down it is their culture too and they are nothing but transplanted Europeans without it. Music Karen is angry, in large measure, because there is something she does not want to admit about herself: that at bottom she is the other too. Just the other day, digging down to the bottom of a white American guy’s rage I discovered he loved Marvin Gaye. That is, no doubt, a big part of why he was angry. If we are ‘tribalists’, however, that does not doom us to perdition for we can be included in larger and larger tribes including one as large as the human race.