What is music for?
If artists are well-advised never to read their reviews, from those reviews the rest of us stand to benefit—in theory. Often speechless about the music that I love, and wanting to acquire some useful vocabulary, I took my spade to the lush fields of criticism grown up around R.E.M.’s 1998 album Up, which was recently re-released for its 25 anniversary, and acquired by me.1
Some critics point out emotions, moods, or other mental states they hear in the music. This album is “moody,” “inward,” and “downcast”; it “bristles with anxiety.” It is “hesitant, almost apologetic.” If no plain description of what one hears is available, a metaphor may be used, as when a critic says that Up’s arrangements and instrumentation “evoke twilight moods.” But it’s not all gloom and doom. Track 10, “Why Not Smile,” “summons a glimmer of hope in sadness,” while “At My Most Beautiful” is “open-hearted.”
Other times, critics simply describe the music. On “At My Most Beautiful” may be heard “metronomic piano” and “tingling chimes,” while “Suspicion” inspires attention to its tempo: it is a “gently percolating” song; it “simmers sensually.” I myself would call it quietly funky. As a whole, the album is "heavy on atmosphere and leisurely in pace.” Michael Stipe's voice is “strident”; “Daysleeper” has a “sublime" bridge, and is a "lovely, lilting" song. “Hope” “hums along to an understatedly urgent pulse.” Here the critics earn their keep, as sensitive listeners. I could have told you that the songs on Up tend to be slow in pace; but to characterize that pace, metaphorically, as “leisurely” or “percolating,” takes creativity and expertise. Similarly, telling a “sublime” bridge from a ridiculous one, strident from grating vocals, and an urgent from a frenzied pulse, is in some cases no easy task.
But...what is one to do with this information? If it leaves you with little sense of whether you will like the album, loathe it, or find it completely boring, I am not surprised. Occasionally critics will mention the music’s possible effects on the listener, as when those twilight moods are said to be “by turns unsettling and caressing,” and “Daysleeper” is said to have an “infectious hook.” But really this is not much help either; “Meet the Flintstones” is infectious, and nevertheless an abomination.
Missing from the discourse is some guiding idea of what music is for, and how well or badly Up achieves that aim. Do the critics just not know? Is this what philosophy is for?
Maybe sometimes music, song in particular, is for the management of the self—or else for its disillusion. An angry teenager, I listened to a lot of Metallica. Did listening allowed me to focus, “work through,” or express, in imagination, my feelings? That would be song-as-thoughtwriting. Such use of music may not always be a good idea; it may lead to the shoring up and cultivation of emotions one would better do without. I eventually swore off the band. “Hope,” on Up, is a better choice—“you want to cross your DNA / to cross your DNA with something reptile”—even if its use of the second person makes the lyric more aptly imagined to be someone else telling you what you think and feel, than one’s own expression of one’s thoughts and feelings.
That’s management of the self. What about its disillusion? This is Nietzsche’s Dionysiac art, which causes either a loss of or transcendence of the self: a kind of aesthetic intoxication. Rather than exploring one’s feelings or desires, one escapes from them. Arthur Schopenhauer, who inspired Nietzsche’s early work, held that being alive is essentially a state of misery:
so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.
A brief respite from all that is available, Schopenhauer thought, in music: music can lift one out of the “endless stream of willing.” But the Dionysiac intoxication is supposed to be more than this. Freedom from desire is not yet freedom from all the burdens of being—the terror of death, for example, and the sense of meaninglessness it inspires.
Could a state as alien and lofty as a complete forgetting of the self be achieved by listening to music? Who knows!—it sounds a bit insane—but if so, special techniques would certainly be required. Ian MacDonald points to Bob Dylan’s "free-associative lyrics" in songs like “Gates of Eden,” in which “a musical unfolding of images and concepts ... could lead, via a kind of lateral thinking, to the release of reason's hold on awareness.” Talking Heads’ Remain in Light is a whole album devoted to this goal. Its static harmonies and looped baselines may induce a trance-like state, and in that state its free-associative lyrics (“Well, I'm a tumbler / Born under punches / I'm so thin”) and mantra-like repetition may be even more effective—same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Brian Eno, deeply embedded in the band during the making of this album, disparaged the importance of pop song lyrics, and if he was right that the meanings of the words and phrases don’t matter, still: meaningless lyrics may mean a great deal. In his writing process David Byrne
turned to straight speech for influence...The airwaves in 1980 were filled with people ranting about all kinds of out-there stuff...David found passion in their diatribes, a passion bordering on the ecstatic. These American words transcended the nonsense stew from where they came. David wanted to achieve this kind of rapture in his lyrics. He was playing [the instrumental track that would become “Once in a Lifetime”] on his little tape player when he found himself shouting: “You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.”2
The track closest to this on Up is “Airportman”—if “Once in a Lifetime” is a shout from the mountaintop, “Airportman” is a murmur in the dark. Dim the lights, close your eyes, give it a spin.
See also: Song as Thoughtwriting; On Appearance Emotionalism.
I added the italics.
with some songs, particularly PJ Harvey's Joe, i let go of my will and let the music move me. it flings me around my living room, maybe like a Dionysian dithyramb: i sure am ecstatic in those moments! Dithyrambs as historical events also evidence, i think, the possibility of losing oneself in music.
and, i'd agree with the part in your post where someone, Bob Dylan? denies the importance of lyrics. half the time I cannot pick the words of a song, so they take up the meaning i give to them as i'm experiencing the music (and lyrics), the song.
And, supposedly a minor chord (a C minor) is a sad chord. But is that a value that is subjective or some fact about music?
Wow, I love this. I'm fascinated by the idea of music for "management of the self," and by the way we might sometimes feel that a song itself understands us, or puts voice to feelings we couldn't yet name. The way someone might make us a playlist in the hopes that listening will help us know them better. And somehow, with careful listening, we might.