I listened to a pop song yesterday. For many, that is a banal activity, but for a man of my calibre, we’re talking about much more than listening. Something else is afoot. It’s the old familiar, but there’s a twist - something is different. For when I listen to a song, my seasoned wealth of cultural knowledge and good taste come into play. I can quickly discern a Susie Sensational Songs from a Tammy Turd Tunes, a Michael Magic Melody from a Davey Dire Ditty, a Jimmy Jaunty Jazz from a Larry Lousy Lyrics, a Vivienne Visionary Vibes from a Fanny phantasmagorical flop. I grade it according to the carefully ranked library of music in my head. Like poetry, my judgement seems to affect nothing from the outside, but within my mind, seas are changing. And I very much enjoyed this one.
Originality is key, as any credible artist will tell you - even though they are indulging in unoriginality by telling you about the importance of originality. Being original means that you did it first. That means that someone will do or has done it second. Which means they may well have copied you and therefore may not be as creative as you are. I value originality at all costs, and I will even forsake breathing if I need the air for an appropriate scoff at some fool who seems to be enjoying a knockoff tune. Indeed, I scoffed just the other day when someone told me that millennials are oblivious to Nirvana (there’s a certain irony in the phrasing). He enquired as to why I was scoffing, and I told him that ignorance of Nirvana was nothing to get indignant about.
“Why not?”, he pressed further.
I answered his question with another. “What was their biggest hit?”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“And what is Smells Like Teen Spirit but some borrowed riffs from Transvision Vamp’s Baby I Don’t Care? And that itself borrowed those same riffs from Boston’s More Than a Feeling. And who knows where they got that song from. You are defending a copy of a copy. You’re getting irate about young people’s disrespect for a smudged, faded facsimile.”
“You are so wise, Nigel, and your knowledge of music is superlative.”
That last line may not have been uttered. I’ll admit that it’s very hard to hear other people when you are so high up on your own pedestal. However, I place myself so high, because I have such stringent standards. I deny any enjoyment of The Killers, for example, because all I can hear is sounds of the 1980s, like The Cure (proto-emo, post-punk reactionaries) and Bruce Springsteen (a Bob Dylan experiment gone wrong) in their songs. Of course, they aren’t as brazen as Oasis or Supergrass were about plundering the discography of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones respectively, but if you are going to be puritanical about music (which is surely half the fun), then you can’t afford any allowances. And so we lapse endlessly backwards though time, keenly aware that what we have taken for original and pure in its creativity is most likely contrived from pre-established parts, or stolen wholesale from the previous generation. Eventually, we find ourselves, in an effort not to appear unsophisticated, enjoying only that which has emerged from unadulterated creativity and inspiration. In a credibility arms-race, you find yourself competing with the worst of hipsters (a bunch of Sonny Smug So-longs) for the most original music possible, so you can be into it long before anyone else (And then complain later about the unwashed Billy Bozo Bandwagoners - this being the other half of the fun).
Eventually, it becomes a free fall, where everything came from something else. This video illuminates the near futility of trying to appreciate originality and enjoy a song simultaneously. [Warning: contains ugly people]
If you are a person of integrity, folk songs, medieval ballads, classical music, and tribal beats all eventually get left by the wayside. The most hardened hipster will tell you that any early musical efforts were just ripped right out of nature in what was humanity’s first act of inauthentic derivation. In truth, however, most hipsters settle for primeval screams of the pre-historic swamp or Neanderthal grunts. On vinyl, of course. That’s a little too derivative for my tastes. Give me the pure sounds of Brownian motion on wax cylinder any day of the week. Critics might scoff that Brownian motion hasn’t quite been the same since the formation of the universe, but, for me, everything thereafter is just hackneyed, facsimiled crap. Except, perhaps, this uniquely crafted song, which as I mentioned at the top, I listened to yesterday.
