If ever there was a subject I feel well-versed in, it is music. My first, and to this day, strongest love, I cannot imagine life without it. From baroque to classical, swing to rockabilly, reggae to heavy metal, and everything in between; I truly love it all (well, except for Cool jazz – I can’t stand Cool jazz). When I first heard Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” at eight years old, I was overcome with the desire to play the drums, and continue to do so to this day. I have a relatively decent collection of vinyl records, and I even have artwork from one of my favourite albums tattooed proudly on my right forearm. In short, when it comes to music, I like to think I am no “square”.
Yet, it seems that “cool”, as far as music is concerned, has these days reached a certain level of parody, being infected by the same virus that has plagued the world of visual art for decades. The other day I found myself standing in a record store. It was a small store, offering a handful of second-hand vinyl records as well as a decent number of new vinyl releases. There were absolutely no CDs to be found, yet there was a shelf of cassette tapes. If that wasn’t a big enough of a hint, the store’s Brooklyn location and shop clerk – a grown man whose bleached hair seemed to be a personal choice and not the result of a lost bet – made it blindingly obvious that I had wandered into a nest of hipsters. But I digress.
After I’d spent about ten minutes browsing in silence, the clerk left his chair to put on a record. “Great”, I thought naively, “about time they played some music”. Unfortunately I was in for quite the shock, because the sounds that started to emanate from the store’s speakers could hardly be called music. I can only describe what began to play as a concoction of various noises and feedback over which a talker (for this certainly wasn’t ‘singing’) spoke a few words every ten seconds or so. Three minutes later, as the track began to fade away, I thanked the heavens it was over and thought to myself that whatever they played next couldn’t be as bad as that. I was wrong.
The next “song” didn’t have any talking. Nor was there a variety of background noises. A simple ditty, it seemed to be composed of seven or eight tracks of harsh feedback in various frequencies, all blended together to create a single sound of even harsher feedback. After about a minute of this my ears literally started to ache. It sounded like something best used to extract intel out of Guantanamo inmates, yet there was bleached-hair guy, nodding his head softly to the cacophony seeping out of the surrounding speakers.
Despite the aural torture I was subjected to, I continued to peruse the store’s selection, clinging to the hope that I might find something to make my suffering worthwhile. But, as I made my way through the “New Vinyl” section, I was overcome with the horrible realisation that around half of their new inventory consisted of various noisemakers pretending to be musicians. I knew this because every record had a sticker on it with a short write-up from the store, explaining a little bit more about the artist and “music” within, and almost every other one of these I read included words like “noise”, “harsh”, “ambient”, and even “uncomfortable” (the first time I think I’ve ever come across that word being used as a positive concept).
Now, lest any reader out there think I’m merely suffering from Old Man Syndrome, I feel it necessary to point out that I’m a fan of both hardcore punk and black metal, and listen to both regularly. But as harsh, noisy, and seemingly atonal as that music can be, it’s still music. It still has discernable notes and composition. What was playing in that store – what is now evidently “cool” when it comes to music – seems to be the auditory equivalent of Piss Christ, a masturbatory exercise in exhibitionism that explicitly rejects what any sane mind connected to the permanent things and free from ideological tarnish would recognise as art.
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