Honesty in Song
I had a conversation with Tyler at US Digital many Thursdays ago about what makes music “good”, in objective terms. Anyone who has spent more than a half hour with Tyler will know how he feels about music. I’ve known him a bit longer, and have had several conversations about music, but never one that got so rudimentary. He said, and I have to agree, that good music is honest.
While listening to a story about the movie Juno on NPR, I heard both the director and screenwriter agree that honesty is what makes a movie great, so it seems only natural that music works similarly. Of course, how does someone judge the honesty of a track, an album, an artist?
The whole discussion arose over my general dislike of Björk, an artist praised in many geek circles for her electronic stylings and eccentric nature. She tends to use excessive amounts of dissonance between her vocals and instrumentals, and it drives me out of my mind. The music often feels uncomfortable throughout entire tracks, which pulls me out of the music and causes me to focus on the vocals and instruments. Bringing this up with Tyler, he expressed that he’d rather hear a track full of dissonance than perfect harmony, if it track felt more honest.
This point has been rolling around in my head for over a year and here’s what I’ve come up with: I’m terrible at judging the honesty of a song. While I’m not “into” pop, my default reaction is not repulsion to today’s Top 40. I can’t listen to an entire track, but it doesn’t upset me deep within my soul. Upon further inspection, I’m nearly always turned off by the cookie-cutter nature of the instrumentals and terrible lyrics.
On the flip side, discordant music cannot stay within my earshot for very long. I need to stop the terrible sounds that assail my mind. Thankfully, mostly because of Tyler, I’ve given some of these sounds another try and grown to love them—My Bloody Valentine being an exquisite example.
In essence, pleasing sounds make me happy, but once I can find the heart of the music—it’s honesty, I suppose—I can make a lasting decision about the music I listen to. That means I love Radiohead, The Submarines, and Howard Shore, but I still can’t stand to listen to Björk.
I’m now more curious than ever to hear how everyone else finds “good” music.
While it’s easy to say sources like Last.fm and Amazon Recommendations are good sources for finding new music (and they are), the most rewarding way (for me) is some good ol’ fashioned research. Since music by its very nature has a relatively finite number of solutions, if you like one thing there’s a significant chance you’ll like something that inspired it.
For example, let’s say I like My Bloody Valentine. From their Wikipedia article alone I can find out that they admire the melodies of The Smiths. If I dig further, I see they’re classified as a Shoegazer band. Wikipedia says other shoegazing groups are Cocteau Twins and Jesus and Mary Chain. They also say shoegazing influences include The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Spacemen 3, The Cure, Bauhaus, Galaxie 500, and The Smiths.
From that information, I now have nine different artists/groups I can listen to, with The Smiths getting priority for being mentioned twice.
It’s also a great idea to do this in person with people. Mallory is easily responsible for about 75% of what I listen to today; through numerous conversations, she took my love of britpop, indie and british invasion and cultivated it into a love of post-punk, new wave and synth pop, simply by talking and making suggestions.
Also, festivals are a great way to discover or further examine bands you haven’t paid much attention to. I didn’t know anything of Jesus and Mary Chain, Echo and the Bunnymen or the Human League before I saw them live.
It’s funny, but I’m pretty sure I just would never have delved into music if I hadn’t heard the back story of pretty much every band you admire. Of course, Pitchfork is my one-stop shop, especially if I’m in a hurry.
As for Festivals, I still haven’t attended an Indie one and would love to make it to Sasquatch. Now, I just get to pitch it to Kara.