In October 2004, Kelefa Sanneh introduced his New York Times readership to a hot topic from the world of music geeks: "rockism," the mentality that hears (and judges) all music through the lens and values of one specific genre, usually rock. Midway through the article, he pointed a finger in an interesting direction. "This summer," he wrote, "the literary zine The Believer published a music issue devoted to almost nothing but indie rock." This wasn't any big accusation; it was meant to show how much rockism can work as an unspoken assumption, such that a literary journal could throw together a music issue and default to talking in those terms. Nothing sinister in it-- but that's exactly the danger of unspoken assumptions.
The next summer, The Believer ran its next music issue, this one with a CD of contemporary acts covering one another's songs. And this time it wasn't just a passing example for Sanneh-- he wrote a whole Times article organized around it, raising the same question. "The Believer prides itself on being omnivorous, and usually for good reason... That's why it's so puzzling to find, for the second year, that [the] music issue contains almost nothing outside the alt-rock world."
I can't guess how much Sanneh's challenge had to do with it, but over the next few years, the magazine's music issue ventured out from comfortably folky indie acts and touched on rap, metal, and music from around the world. This year, the companion disc was put together by Chuck Lightning, of Atlanta's Wondaland Studios-- part of the creative team that works with Janelle Monáe, who's featured on the cover. The CD is a nice loose spin through something like their territory, the eclectic boho side of R&B and soul; a lot of the acts are ATLiens in name (like Joi Gilliam's new project), others just in spirit.
That's a pocket of "black" music, of course, that appeals to plenty of indie's values. (I'd be remiss not to mention that many of those values are considered "middle-class," and that's a class black families have spent decades steadily joining.) An indie act like Of Montreal fits neatly on the disc, and their singer, Kevin Barnes, does a guest appearance on another track. Meanwhile, the black Atlanta rock band Tendaberry are in love with the sounds of post-punk and new-wave, but something about their songwriting reflects the modern soul that fills the rest of their influences list. Parts of the disc put me in mind of a jumbling of genres that's popular lately. These days we see plenty of indie that chases bright colors and groove; we have plenty of R&B that leans toward artsy freaky flair; and we have plenty of pop that grabs from both. It all creates the kind of loose borderline Barnes gets to lean across when he works with people like Monáe or Solange Knowles-- the kind of space Santigold's spent her songwriting career strolling around. I'm not sure how much stellar music this borderline has created so far-- sometimes it just seems to be repeating Kid Creole and the Coconuts-- but it seems like a good intersection to have going: musicians looking to hop around ideas and sounds as easily as your mp3 playlists do.
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When The Believer's 2005 covers disc sparked notice in the music press, it came with a bit of eye-rolling. The selections, according to some, were simply a celebration of dull, drab, predictable, middlebrow, NPR-approved music. (This wasn't an unreasonable assessment-- from a music-geek perspective, the disc was like a crush mixtape from someone slightly too boring to date.) This was an interesting bit of turf warfare, since The Believer isn't a music magazine; it's a literary magazine, and a nice one. (If you're interested, they've published a collection of essays from their first five years; it has the unfortunate title Read Hard.) I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot of those eye-rolling music folks might think about books in a way that was open to the exact same complaint-- that its criteria, and the writers it paid attention to, sat in the exact same unsurprising, middlebrow landscape. And they wouldn't feel bad for reading novels whose authors did NPR interviews, would they?
Granted, those music folks weren't presuming to publish a magazine about their taste in fiction; they weren't stepping into anyone else's sandbox. Still, there seemed like some kind of lesson there: Some people are insiders about one thing, and some are insiders about another. There's hardly enough time in life to be really immersed in one thing, let alone be savvy about two. That's my excuse, anyway, for not knowing as much as I want to about either books or music.
Music folks get plenty of opportunities to be annoyed by this arrangement, because popular music is one of those areas where a) It's possible to know a hell of a lot about it, but b) People don't just defer to "expertise" when discussing it. That second quality is terrific and necessary-- it's what makes popular music popular music, and not some obscure nerd hobby. It's also the root of a lot of semi-justified snobbery, and the reason music people can find themselves cringing when someone else comes over and starts stomping around their sandbox. What the visitor has to say about music might seem blinkered, poorly thought through, clueless-sounding, "wrong."
This summer's music issue of The Believer is pretty good reading. There's a nice piece on Nina Simone's diaries, and an interview with M.I.A. that I wish could be read by as many people as that Times profile that caused her so much trouble. (She may be politically messy, but she's in no way dumb.) There's an oral history of Warp Records, an interview with dancehall singer Lady Saw, a very Believer-ish piece on the 1960s vogue of faux-Arabic dance music. And of course there are a few details that you might gnash your teeth about. There's a run-down of the costs of recording that's full of weird nonsense. And novelist Rick Moody provides some really penetrating thoughts about drum machines and Depeche Mode's relationship with religion-- except the whole piece sits in the shadow of his apparently forgetting that dance music exists. (It suggests that drum machines lead to music about "absence of feeling," even including New Order in that one-- the whole thing makes me want to mail him a house compilation.)
Does that read like I want to chase Moody out of the music sandbox? I don't; not really. I'm in favor of open sandboxes, no matter how much cringing is involved. And one big reason why is just this: Different sandboxes have different ways of talking and thinking about things.
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There's a quote about poetry that I half-remember and can't seem to find: It says you read one poem to better understand the next poem, and you read the next poem to better understand the one after that-- eventually you can really understand the first one, because now all the poems are spread out like the stars, holding one another in their places. So let's make two huge generalizations. The first is that I think a lot of music criticism winds up working like that: Often it wants to map out the constellations, draw the connections between things, and pick out the brightest stars. And the second is that literary criticism can have a slower pace: Often it gets to spend more time sifting through the world of one text or body of work, worried less about how it relates to other writing and more about its relationship with lived human experience. Both of these tendencies make sense-- they're appropriate to how the art they're talking about actually works.
And when you apply one mentality to the other art, the results can range from cringeworthy to fabulous. The difference between those two outcomes tends to be how much the writer is aware that being savvy and insightful about one world does not mean you're savvy and insightful about all worlds. Some of the Believer essays music people have picked on did not, for certain, have a thorough map of the stars at their disposal-- but a lot of them still represented solid efforts to unpack what a particular artist could mean. The problem with Moody's essay is that he brings this forceful critical tone to bear on the constellation he's looking at-- but he draws strong conclusions without noticing even bigger constellations that might invalidate them. Failures run in the other direction too, of course: So far as I can tell, focusing on that mapping-the-stars approach is not always the most productive way of thinking about literature. So you'll get, for instance, people who pick up sort of a "punk" mentality from music, and then find themselves searching for the same dynamic in books-- some raw underground literature that's categorically different from what normally gets published. Hooray for our nation's wonderful small presses, but the mental map you have of one scene might not be accurate for navigating another.
Obviously this isn't just an issue between literature and music. Think, for example, about the way people from the fashion or visual arts worlds engage with music. Sometimes their ethos winds up drawing out interesting things from the self-presentation of musicians, the conceptual and performance art involved in getting on a stage and playing something. Among music folks, this fact gets used to insult people's taste: "You're not really interested in the music!"-- you're only interested in the fashion, or the lyrics, or music as an adjunct to some kind of lifestyle! And yet all these different takes, all these different mentalities, go on contributing to one another, seeing things in one another that are clearer from a distance.
Which brings us back to that thing about genre. Eclectic, left-of-center R&B singers make friends with Barnes. The king music-geeks in the Roots pull in collaborators like Dirty Projectors. Kanye West listens to Thom Yorke and works with Bon Iver. Robyn makes pop music that appeals to a lot of folks who don't normally listen to popmusic. Danger Mouse starts a band with the singer of the Shins. None of this is remotely surprising or genre-busting, is it? People have talked for years about the music world becoming more fragmented, full of more and smaller boxes, but they also talk about the ability of listeners to hop around from box to box, sampling everything. So what could be strange about musicians reaching from one box to another, or hanging around between them?
Often those big-name collaborations feel more like self-conscious formal visits-- one artist politely dropping by another's turf. But under those bridges sits this wide-open territory where ideas flow back and forth, where it seems like a big chunk of the people in some scenes aspire to the ethos of some other scene altogether. (And not just to broaden their market base.) So there's another thing we get the pleasure of alternately cringing over and marveling at.
