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Why write songs? What is it to have "integrity" as a musician? To be "authentic?" Is there anything wrong with playing pure pop songs, or aping styles created by those now dead? Our guests Victor Krummenacher and Jonathan Segel (of the famed indie band Camper van Beethoven) have a beef with the Internet society where music and other trappings of identity are now available without effort and often without cost. Your favored music speaks for you, and you in turn mirror it, but how can this work if the music is somehow fake, or if you are? Or is this concern with authenticity misguided?
Mark and Wes pioneer a new PEL era in interviewing rock stars without a text. However, look here for our agreed-up on list of topics and links to songs/videos/blog posts we all looked at before the discussion.
This was the episode that prefigured Mark's Nakedly Examined Music podcast.
This recording includes a preview of the Aftershow featuring more musician voices including ex-Camper Chris Molla. Not a PEL Citizen? Watch it on YouTube!
Of course, becomming a Citizen (for a mere $5/month) is a great way to support PEL and get future episodes ad-free, so you might want to look into that. We also accept donations and have some new T-shirts and many other things at our store page.
End songs: "The Bastards Never Show Themselves" by the Monks of Doom from their upcoming album The Bronte Pin. Written by Immerglück/Krummenacher/Lisher/Pedersen, published by Bumps of Goose (BMI). Plus, after the Aftershow preview, we present "RG" by Mike Wilson, a first-season regular on the excellent Wasted Words podcast.
Opening instrumental (under the announcements): "Balalaika Gap" from Camper van Beethoven's first album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory
Musicians! Share your online music with us: send your links to mark@partiallyexaminedlife.com.
Loved this show. 100% terrific. You all made me think about the other countless artists of every sort who’ve gone ‘back to being Danny Kaye’. Learn the form, work hard, make mistakes and after years of that become the child you were born to be. Great stuff. Thanks.
I didn’t have high hopes for this episode and boy, was I vindicated. It was typical rockist screed after typical rockist screed. I needed to cleanse my ears with some good dubstep after this. I understand you guys are old and don’t understand the appeal of popular music these days, but then don’t pretend to have a discussion of what makes music good. DJs and other electronic musicians are revolutionizing music. I’m sorry you’re too old to appreciate it.
Come to the aftershow, Jake, and share your wisdom!
I don’t think there is a productive conversation to be had here. I’m not going to convince the rockists that dubstep, moombahton, and trip hop are amazing. Their synapses are pruned and their tastes rationalized.
I kind of sympathize; after nearly half a century of the supremacy of the electric guitar, I sometimes (not always) think that it will be too soon if I never hear another solo. But come on now, fetishizing youth as a justification of your own tastes is the mirror image of your complaints. DJs and electronic musicians have been around for a few minutes now.
I don’t know how I’m fetishizing youth. I’m just acknowledging the neurological realities of older people. Studies show that it’s harder for them to appreciate new music. My tastes are pretty varied. I like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Snoop Dogg, Jack Johnson, and Skrillex. DJs are revolutionizing music. The rise of EDM is unmatched. Electronic musicians today can make music that just couldn’t be done without modern technology.
The focus of the conversation so far as I was trying to steer it was the existential comportment of being a creative musician. Our guests find import in they do using rock values that are not universal: For example, being able to picture the musicians doing their thing is, I think, a fetish peculiar to musicians, and that’s not necessary to “identify” with the music.
More generally, do you agree with the thesis that “identification” is the point?
There are at least two types of identification being conflated here; I’ll likely write a blog post on this soon: 1) being able to point at the person singing and saying “that person is like me” and 2) sympathetic vibration with the music itself, i.e. feeling in the beat/melody/whatever some something resonant to your biology.
Clearly #1 is not universal; it only applies to vocal music, for one, and focuses on lyrics and “style” (both things for which Kant would have no use; these would be irrelevant to music). it also has the effect of making music tribe-specific, e.g. it’s not an accident that most of the artists I really get into (and I am one of the kinds of people that pays attention to lyrics and the worldviews they convey) are white guys, just like most of the philosophers have been white males. If I don’t understand/identify with black culture or being a woman, then it takes an extra effort to connect with those, which I’ve done in a lot of specific circumstances (e.g. Ray Charles, Tori Amos) but haven’t in general (and for the record, there’s lots of white guy music that I don’t connect to this way either, e.g. more rural or conservative or hard-living or otherwise foreign to my experience).
But for #2, then any kind of music should be potentially grooveable, and the more mind-blowingly foreign, the more I can’t even picture human fingers/voices making these noises, might be better. I certainly get that.
These get conflated because they’re not totally different, and there is a middle ground, e.g. identification with the composer’s attitude as expressed in the music. But I’ll have to think on that more and write something longer to put up tomorrowish.
I’m not a big lyrics person. Sometimes I like to get into them and look for hidden meanings, but I’m mostly fine with not entirely understanding the lyrical content or just understanding it superficially. I don’t identify with gangsta rappers, but I can empathize and kind of put myself in their shoes. Is this identifying? I don’t know.
Dubstep and trip hop are great because the sounds are so foreign and weird. They scramble my synapses like no other genres can. I think it’s the absence of the human element that makes them compelling to some extent.
Jake,
Sorry if I don’t accept your so-called neurological realities of “older People”. I’m 59 and I’m into EDM, especially Deep House. I also create my own EDM music. I played in hard rock bands on the Sunset Strip in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I’m not even remotely stuck in the past. I appreciate music across the whole spectrum; from EDM to Heavy Metal to Nickel Creek and Sarah Jarosz to Bill Evans, Kurt Elling, Keith Jarrett and Bob Wills and Elvis to Deadmau5 and I’m listening to DJ Hardwell right now, he kicks it big time. Artists and talent are never limited to genre, age or what tools they use to express themselves. I look for those who move me, if they do that, I know it’s the real deal,
How they choose to do that – whether by Electronica or playing a live acoustic instrument – is irrelevant to me. Art always transcends the medium used to express it. My 59 years on this planet makes me appreciate art more than I ever did at 19. DJ’s are bringing it big time, I love it – ya, an old 70’s rocker LOVES DJ’s and Electronica……the world moves on, we all only get our little
(parenthesis in time) to experience it. Beethoven would have been a great DJ today, no doubt in my mind – a great DJ is every bit as much a composer as all the greats in history……just a different medium……I say, “just bring it”. 😀
totally!
any discussion of authenticity that gives short shrift to hip hop seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of the genre and how authenticity manifests itself in the context of modern african american experience
is boots riley’s expression less authentic because of “quantized drum beats”? chuck d? kendrick? etc.
This might be my favorite episode so far, probably because so many of the ideas discussed weren’t just taken from a text but were well-funded by actual experience and practice. Plus I’m the right age to know and love Camper. So impressed. Bravo.
I’m fairly new to this podcast but this is my first time commenting as it’s actually an area I feel I know enough about to say anything.
I was optimistic for this episode after hearing Jonathan on the Schopenhauer episode since he seemed to know his stuff and he’s worked with really interesting people like Pauline Oliveros, but I was a little disappointed with how narrow the focus was in terms of the ideas and musical styles discussed.
One of the major things you focused on was the idea of authenticity, and I was surprised by how uncritically the whole notion itself was treated. It seems to me the desire for authenticity primarily grows out of the nationalistic mindset that comes to prominence in the 18th/19th centuries in Europe and only applies to music still wrapped in that mindset (though admittedly those ideas obviously were very far reaching). To just stick to the Western musical tradition for a moment, before the 18th century you don’t see the arguments about national character in music. Of course there were inevitably regional differences in music, but it appears that people just weren’t concerned with basing a whole identity on such distinctions. In the 15th century for example, a Flemish composer like Guillame Dufay incorporated elements from composers in England and Italy into his music, but the idea of questioning whether or not it was authentically Flemish wouldn’t have even been a conceivable question. Then as you move into the ‘baroque’ period of music, in the mid 17-18th centuries as nations are solidifying, you start seeing more strict notions of the French vs. Italian styles and such, and into the 19th century you get composers like Grieg and Bartok actually going out and collecting folk songs in mass and using them to bring out the ‘true’ national character in their music. The nation sometimes gets shifted to the sub-culture or individual through the 20th century, but it just seems to me that the whole quest for authenticity is misguided and might be called into question. I think it’s telling that before nationalism takes over you don’t see it in Europe (I guess I should temper that by saying at least in the written records), and generally in non-Western music it’s mainly brought up by Western comparative musicologists/ethnomusicologists in the 19th- mid 20th centuries (It’s a subject most modern ethnomusicologists try to avoid) rather than the musicians and participants. In short, I feel that Jonathan’s issues with the Swedish Americana group are mostly in his own head. Another question is, how does the issue of personal authenticity even apply with music that isn’t designed to be sold or consumed purely for pleasure, say religious or other communal music?
And one last related point is I don’t feel like self-expression should be taken as the given purpose of music, which the sense I got from portions of your conversation. That idea also begins to appear in Western music around the same time as the striving for authenticity and I think it’s tied up in many of the same issues, but even more so than authenticity I think self-expression is really obviously not the purpose (or even important) for huge swaths of music both Western and non-Western.
I can’t believe you thought Ayn Rand and Nozick were stretches for deserving episodes and then you do an ep about “what some bros think about rockist ideology”
No one ever said Nozick was a stretch.
This was a bonus episode, involving no break in our regular recording schedule (it was actually recorded the day before our ep 117 Antigone discussion), with no reading involved.
We’ll consider additional things like that with guests on an ad hoc basis. It’s mostly just a matter of one of us especially wanting to do something like this.
So e.g. we’ve considered (and will probably do this at some point) having a scholar about some particular philosopher come on right after we cover some figure in the normal way, i.e. no additional reading from us involved. Or of Tom Fucking Cruise wants to have an impromptu interview with us to tell us about his “philosophy,” I’d definitely do it just for the publicity. But none of that would interrupt the every 2-3 week discussions we have on actual books, and folks are of course free to skip those episodes.
In this case, we’re getting more downloads of this interview in the first week than we got for the last few discussions, and I and a number of folks I’ve heard from have enjoyed it, so I can’t think this was a mistake, even though the result was more unstructured ranting than I would optimally prefer (but much less than Brin!).
Small factual correction to a comment made at 50:45 (since there have been episodes on both Freud and Jung): according to the Richard Ellmann biography on James Joyce (see also Wikipedia), it was Jung, not Freud, who said that Joyce was diving and Joyce’s daughter was sinking to the bottom of a river; two poles of creative madness.
I enjoyed the discussion. I certainly believe there is such a thing as authenticity relevant to making art, and that self-expression, or rather self-world-reflexion, lies at the heart of that. Does one want to identify with computers expressing themselves, or with flawed/genius persons? Let’s not pass any laws that ban electronic music, but I’d rather have interpersonal experiences (by which I don’t mean bumping in to people on a dancefloor). Yes, I prefer the music from 40 years ago.
Bingo
My biggest question has to do with this idea of peeling back to reveal the artist’s “authenticity.” I’m old enough to remember CVB, but that means i’m also old enough to remember Talk Talk. “It’s My Life” is completely different than “Laughing Stock”, yet I enjoy both of those albums / styles very much. I kept getting the impression throughout this discussion that the idea of authenticity is somehow antithetical to the idea that humans are multifaceted creatures. Is “Stop Making Sense” the “authentic” David Byrne, or is “My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts”? Shouldn’t an artists authenticity be explored hermeneutically, in the context of of the period within which the art was created? Or did I miss the entire point (not uncommon for me)?
Regards,
John
Hi,
In light of the recent comments about age and it’s impact on our music listening habits here is a very interesting article about the relevancy of age and music taste. Jake the article supports some of your comments…
http://skynetandebert.com/2015/04/22/music-was-better-back-then-when-do-we-stop-keeping-up-with-popular-music/
Long time listener, first time caller. The word authenticity was thrown around quite loosely here. From the sounds of it, the whole conversation revolved about it. I remember the name dropping of Rousseau at the beginning. Have you guys read Andrew Potter’s critique of Rousseau in the book Authenticity Hoax? I think in the age of infinite instrumentalities, hyperreality, and simulacra–we tend to scapegoat that person which “tries to hard” to be authentic (hipsters). Also, the god-term of “self realization” is a modern apparition that this hunt for authenticity seems to b3 contributing to.
Lastly, I recommend Kenneth Burke as a philosopher of language and literary critic… He’s all about identification (even identification with a principle within oneself that one may transform in a work of art, as in John Milton and Samson Agonistes; See the first chapter of The Rhetoric of Motives for more on that). Catharsis is also central for Burke, and some suggest that it was his means for getting at the mind / body problem (e.g. seeing a dramatic act in a play, a symbolic act, effecting a bodily state).