Week 4: South of Delia by Richard Shindell
Chosen by: Tim Godshall, designer of houses
Day 5
Yesterday was tough. I'd had enough of Richard Shindell. I wanted nothing more than to listen to something I wanted to listen to. My body, it seemed, physically craved it; at the thought of listening again to South of Delia my gut tilted toward nausea, my limbs felt listless, weakened, brittle. The single ounce of my iPod Shuffle might as well have been a 50 lb. sack of concrete. I'm only going to listen to it once today, I told myself, just once.
All of which made me wonder, naturally, why in the world I am doing this to myself. The "fun" of it is wearing off, and I am left staring down the reality of 49 more weeks of denying myself those pieces of music that bring me joy, or comfort, or confound, or excite. Not that I won't stumble on those albums during the course of the year, but I am beginning to realize those LPs will far and away be the exception rather than the rule. For a person such as myself, for whom music plays a significant role in the everyday, this is frightening. A pit of dread.
And yet. When I remind myself of the true motivation behind this project, it was not that I thought it would be a good time, but that I wanted to change the very nature of the way I listened to music; to, instead of getting swept up in the wash of new tracks, new albums, new videos that every minute are flooding onto the interwebs, allow myself to confront a single artist, in all of his or her glory or horridness, for what these days accounts for a significant amount of time: one week. Not months or years or decades, but a simple seven days. If it was enough time for a world to be put together, then surely it was enough time to make something out of an album, however much it attracted or repelled me.
So there will be weeks like this one, when tedium is the only word that can adequately describe the experience. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. I was reminded of an article by Matt Feeney I ran across on Slate a while back, about boredom and David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King, which revolves around the lives of a group of midwestern IRS employees. I haven't read the book, but the article nicely summarizes one of Wallace's central themes, that, "Today, heroism consists in attending to existing facts, so as to order them better, and bravery consists in bearing up against this task's unbelievable tedium." Or, in speaking of one of the novel's characters: "In other words Mr. Excitement is exemplary because he pays attention. He gives the tedious world its due. He doesn't waft into dreamy contemplation when the ocean of facts leaves him understimulated. He listens, closely enough to find these facts exquisite, and then, for some reason relating to the pleasure he finds in boredom, or to the bravery and heroism he embodies in his transcendent blandness, he levitates."
He gives the tedious world its due.
Attention is at the heart of my listening. To confront a miniscule percentage of the existing facts of this world and for a specific amount of time give them my attention. It is not that this is an attempt at heroism. It is my gift to myself, to take some person's creation, some person's soul, and pay it enough mind to flush out whatever bits of exquisiteness it has to offer.
Week 9: Give Us Rest, or, (A Requiem Mass in C [the Happiest of All Keys]) by David Crowder Band
Chosen by: John Freed, University grounds crewman
Day 5
It came sooner than I thought it would; truthfully, I was crossing my fingers that I might get lucky and not get one at all, but week 9 sealed the deal. The double album. I have nothing against the double album, you might even say I'm a fan of it. Some would say they are audacious, pretentious, or are a simple display of an inability to edit. I disagree. They are bold, sure, and brash, sure, and usually do have a few songs that feel like throwaways, but what fan is going to complain when their favorite artist feels inspired to crank out a double? Not me. Pink Floyd's The Wall, The Smashing Pumpkin's Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness, or more recently M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, all, if given the time they require, are beautiful and potentially life-altering testaments to the power and potential and variety that can be wrung from the rock or pop song's simple structure.
This week, however, I am finding the key word in that last sentence to be "time." When trying to listen to an album at least once a day, a double album like Give Us Rest feels damn long. Curseably long. I get through disc 1 triumphantly, then realize I've got a full album's worth of material to go and my shoulders droop, my head sags. The iPod stays close by. I get a few songs in while washing dishes, a few while driving to play a round of miniature golf with my nephews, a few while writing this, a few while rocking in the hammock, a few while shooting baskets in the driveway. I pray for it to be over. I don't dislike the album (though I might be developing a unique length-based hate); listening just feels like a real effort, for the first time in this project. Long. An infinity of its own. On and on. I want to be at that place where I can say "I remember." The funeral over. We can always remember, right? But man, how great not to have to hear.
Week 11: American Saturday Night by Brad Paisley
Chosen by: Kevin McCleary, prison guard
Day 5
Yesterday I read an interesting article by Mark Edmundson, an author and professor at the University of Virginia. The piece was called "Can Music Save Your Life?" which for me immediately evoked the pathos of my teenage and college years, how many people I heard say This saved my life when describing an album that sounded to me like so many other albums, so it was always a bit of a mystery why that particular album was such a game changer for them, or why their life needed saving when they seemed no more nor less happy or sad or lost than I felt, but who am I to say what others feel, maybe I'm an unmeltable iceberg cruising the boiling sea of human passion, I couldn't say, really, just that I never felt any individual album or band was on the level of being life saving. Maybe I was just a natural swimmer, never needing the life preserver tossed my way.
Edmundson doesn't believe music can save a person's life. In fact, he seems to think music is generally misused, that most people employ it as a means to dramatize their otherwise painfully dull lives. "Usually it's about getting your emotions packaged for you, quieting the static inside, fabricating an exciting identity (the gangsta, the hipster) to counteract one's commitment to a life of secure banality," he says. I agree for the most part, though I'm less sure that a life of secure banality is such a bad thing, especially if it is used as a starting point to launch some act of creation. Heck, this project began out of a boredom with how I listened to music. Heck, a lot of country music, like American Saturday Nights, takes on the banal as its central focus. The romantic notion of the promiscuous, booze addled and emotionally unstable artist is attractive, but, contrary to popular perception, remains the exception. Most of the creative folk I know lead stable, pretty humdrum lives, when viewed from the outside. But humdrum is ok, if it gives you time and space to live within the thunderstorms that roll across your inner fields.
While Edmundsom acknowledges the inspiring power of music, I don't agree with his idea that "if music doesn't produce ... something fresh, it's often a sterile diversion." He fails to acknowledge that people listen to music for reasons other than to experience some emotional cataclysm or awakening. Sometimes a sterile diversion is exactly what is needed. Sometimes we like driving the highway thronged with traffic, sometimes the quiet country road is what we prefer. Both roads can get us to the same place. Creation is most often born of the moss and dirt caught in the cracks of the asphalt, not of the road itself.
Week 18: Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
Chosen by: Jonathan Lantz-Trissel, University Sustainability Coordinator
Day 4
I've been reviewing reviews of Channel Orange, and realized one word consistently pops up in the critics' discussion of Frank Ocean: Zen. They cite his "zen-like calm," his "zen-like progressive value" (a phrase I am still trying to figure out), his general "zen." I can't recall in my extensive history of reading album reviews ever hearing the word "Zen" bandied around so much. Is Ocean really such a Zen master? Yes, his music does relay a "smooth" vibe, one equally suited for sparking a blunt with the boys or snuggling up with the lady-friend for an evening of smooches and petting. And true, Frank does have an "old-soul" aura about him, "wisdom beyond his years" (another often-used review phrase) even, perhaps. Musically, I concede, I grant, I declare, he has the gift of timelessness. But the man?
I'll answer my own question: I don't care. It doesn't matter. I will maintain the music and the man are not the same creature. Ocean could be a crack-smoking petty-cash-stealing bitch-punking bastard, and it wouldn't alter the magnificence of the music. See, this Zen stuff is nothing too special. I right now am exercising my inner-Zen by engaging in the act of non-attachment. Look at me getting all monkish. Let it go, baby, let it go.
While on the topic of Zen, the other day I was thinking how I've hit a kind of Zen-like mind frame in this listening project. Four months in, and I'm in a zone. I can't remember the last time I had a craving to put on a specific album; I think I've half-forgotten that I even own other albums. Whatever is assigned me for that week, that's what I listen to. It's ok. Even if I hate it. Even if it makes my ears bleed. It's ok.
It's hard to say how long my own Zen-like calm might last. Could be it disappears in a puff come next week, tomorrow, later today. For now, however, I'll enjoy it. Albums like Channel Orange make going Zen a heck of a lot easier. Achieving Zen is a piece of cake when the waves filling your brain are their own little bites of bliss, mini-morsels of pure pleasure.
Week 19: West of Rome by Vic Chestnutt
Chosen by: Tom O'Halloran, Professor of Weather and Stars
Day 5
And there it goes, that Zen. West of Rome is stirring up an entirely different kind of need for control in me, the need to edit. This album is just too much. In place of a grand finale, following are a few thoughts on how it might have been trimmed down, in the shape of a fugue.
Exposition
Is a poorly edited album shot through with moments of loveliness to be considered a "good" album, or does its unwieldiness ultimately overwhelm the positive?
Would Vic Chesnutt's West of Rome have been a classic alt-folk album from the get-go had he been willing to trim 65% of the fat off of it?
Was Chesnutt a self-indulgent artist, unable to put art before ego?
Development
Several options for editing West of Rome:
1. Leave the album as it is, but cut tracks 15-22, and replace track 11, "West of Rome" with track 17, "Latent/Blatant." The album would still open with "Bug," but would now close with "Little Fugue."
2. Again cut the last 8 tracks replace track 11 with 17, then flip the order, so the album begins with "Little Fugue." We would also have to move "Soggy Tongues" from the track 2 position it now holds and make it the closer, to give the album some circularity.
3. Start over: Tracklist: 1. Little Fugue. 2. Bug 3. Latent/Blatant 4. Stupid Preoccupations 5. Where Were You 6. Steve Willoughby 7. Lucinda Williams 8. Panic Pure 9. Big Huge Valley 10. Soggy Tongues
4. Give the entire thing to Flying Lotus and let him remix the fuck out of it.
Recapitulation
Death is the elephant in the room. I can imagine a guy like Chesnutt, having survived a major accident and left with his body and life forever altered, his health poor as a result and unsure that Life is going to let him stick around for very long, wanting to put everything he had on the album, just load it all on, get it out into the world, let the music live even if he didn't. I get that mindset. But as an artist I don't trust it. It reeks of ego, of posturing, of fear, of control. Death will acknowledge Art with Life if the artist can remove the fog of self that clouds creation. West of Rome is good. Good is not great is not classic. Murder your darlings, and such.
David Brennan's recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Coldfront Magazine, Atticus Review, BODY and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collection The White Visitation (2010) and the chapbook The Family Flamboyant (2010). Read more of his thoughts on listening to other people's music at 53lps.tumblr.com.
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