Ian Hunter, "You Nearly Did Me In"

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Positively Precious

One of the downsides of opening your mouth to express a negative opinion is that someone, somewhere is gonna get hurt. Most of the reviews that are ever published about anything are positive. Sure, there are bad reviews out there for movies or books, but for the most part, whether you are thumbing through Rolling Stone's CD reviews or reading the Book Review, most of what you read falls down on the plus side. We're hard wired to expect good reviews.

One of the upsides of the blogosphere is the freedom to write about what you want. We do a bit of that here every now and then, but a guy like Nico Muhly does it on every engaging, meandering post. His hobbyhorses are food and grammar, and he's usually a good read. Until recently though, I hadn't noticed how flat out honest he was being. He's received a lifetime of press in the past few years, and almost all of it has been glowing. When he got a bad review from Pitchfork, he blogged about how deeply it got under his skin and confessed to the fact that the review hit the mark.

Over the weekend, Nico reacted to a negative review of a Grizzly Bear concert in the Times with what, for him, counts as a blistering attack on the reviewer. I find his warts and all approach refreshing. He could be posting 50 words about going into the studio with (uber-hip band) and how he can't wait for their show at (major venue). Instead of blasé blasts of self-promotion, we get the genuine, conflicted thoughts of a young, working composer.

Regarding the Times review, Nico suggested that there was no alternative to the description of Grizzly Bear's music as 'precious'. He found it to be coded, something that was irrefutable because it only had meaning to the reviewer who invoked it (Sort of like how Dick Cheney can keep insisting that those memos that Obama won't release prove torture worked). I pointed out in a comment that 'precious' does have an alternative, however. It's 'careless'.

There is a common usage of precious which means that something is too affected, but the more damaging meaning is when something is too closely held. Think Gollum and his ring:





The relationship between Gollum and his ring is so precious that it clouds out all other things. Neither the ring, nor Gollum, have a life outside of each other. In his adoration for the ring, Gollum keeps both it and him from actualization. A surfeit of care stifles anything.

Nico came back with this comparison:






Precious? “Everything Bagel” from WD-50


Sloppy? Not Precious?


Exactly. I'd be happy to eat both of those plates. The first is richly attended to, while the second is just meat on a plate. These are two very different experiences, and neither is inherently negative.

Returning to the Times' review, it touches on the only negative thing that's being said about Veckatimest, which is that its preciousness makes it dull. The musical analogy to those dueling plates that I'd offer is Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" versus Queen's "Love of My Life". Both come from richly detailed albums (A Night At the Opera remains the standard bearer for obsessively inventive studio wizardry). Both songs are beautiful on their surface and full of swooning, complex textures.

"Two Weeks" leaves it at that, however. That's largely due to the length of it. If it simply ended at 2'30", it would be a gem of a song, but by repeating its form and texture without major development, it frosts over. It becomes remote.

"Love of My Life" is as immediate as a dog licking your face. There's no distance between you and Freddie as he sings to his lover. In fact, it's so easy to think he's singing directly to you that the song became his in-concert lullaby to his audience for a decade.

Both songs are highly refined studio creations. The former remains self-contained, while the other sprawls in the ear. There are legitimate reasons to love and hate both songs. Calling 'Two Weeks' precious is just one way of describing it. For me, it's not a dismissal of it. It's just a helpful description of one of its flaws, which brings me back to my original thought.

Negative criticism often prompts people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. After reading my thoughts about Up, my wife assumed I hated it, even though she'd seen it with me and knew that I enjoyed it. Within minutes of saying that the wordless opening of Wall-E was overscripted, a fan of the movie wrote to cry foul, saying that I'd 'trashed' it, but I liked that movie too. Maybe in another post, I'll go on about the merits of those films. As Nico said, "This is what the internet is for."

Queen, "Nevermore"

The Drama In Doing Nothing

We were just in Cleveland performing a program that veered from Elliott Carter to Giuseppe Verdi to Prince, with heavy doses of Stockhausen and a finale of Queen. If it didn't all flow together like a good mixtape, I think we'd spend a lot of time answering questions like, "How do you justify putting Prince on the same program with Mauricio Kagel?". Thankfully, the flow works. It always has, for the most part, and to me, it's a very honest byproduct of being a child of the 80's, when everything started to become instantly available. My brain's all jacked up with high and low culture, and it's never really been clear to me what the difference was. Once, when I remarked to a professor that I thought Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' was as unimpeachable as 'Tosca', he said that if I really felt that way, I shouldn't be studying in a conservatory. At the time, most of my professors would've shared that view, but I doubt it now, given how many of us kids who grew up on CHiPs and Chopin are taking over the teaching posts nowadays.

What brings all of this to mind is Moby Dick, actually. I got to chapter 36 today ("The Quarter-Deck"), and it reminded me of Michael Jackson's entrance on the Dangerous tour. In my edition, over 100 pages have gone by, and Ahab has been not much more than a ghost. He makes his first real appearance in chapter 28, where Ishmael gives us a full rundown on his appearance. But he really doesn't do much until chapter 36, when he all of the sudden assembles the entire crew of the Pequod on the quarter-deck.

Melville ratchets up the drama with the slightest effort:

"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on shipboard except in some extraordinary case.

"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mastheads, there! come down!"

The exceptional nature of the circumstance is deftly drawn, and then Melville has Ahab lob some softballs at the crew:

"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"

"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of chubbed voices.

"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

Ahab has his crew in the palm of his hand by sheer dint of doing nothing for some weeks and then throwing them off balance. The sheer weight of their anticipation, their hunger for some direction, and the force of his personality marry in an alchemical moment. When, moments later, Ahab entreats these strangers to join him on his mad quest after a crippled white whale, they are more than happy to seal their doom with the fellow.

As I was reading the passage today, the image of Michael Jackson taking the stage kept coming to mind. On his Dangerous tour, he'd shoot up onto the stage from a trap door, amid fireworks. Then, he'd do nothing.

Like Ahab, he knew the power of his presence. By simply letting the tension build, as Ahab did in the weeks of his silence, Michael turns up the audience's enthusiasm to sheer hysteria. Then, after a minute of standing there in stone silence, what does he do?

He turns his head.

It's an absolute mastery of the moment and his audience. With that entrance, Michael, like Ahab, can command absolutely anything. Maybe I've watched too much TV and listened to too many rock records, but the connection makes sense to me:

Michael jackson - dangerous tour
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Queen, "Teo Torriate"

Queen, "Drowse"

Queen, "You Take My Breath Away"