Lucas Huang considers the way we’re listening now.
Photo by Lucas.
I once heard that jazz is the purest form of musical expression. I don’t remember who said it, but his point was that bebop’s emphasis on improvisation represented an artistic freedom lacking in other music genres, or even art at large.
I doubt many would fully agree (”purest” is a wobbly term) but if it were true he would have to add a footnote: live jazz is the purest form of musical expression. Because as soon as an outlandish, freewheeling sax solo is committed to record, it is immortalized and immobilized, doomed to repeat identically forever. The spontaneity and tension of a live performance are lost when transferred to the recorded medium.
In many ways, the music industry has been shifting away from live performance since the advent of recorded music. Touring is exhausting for artists, and probably the majority of consumers would prefer a ten-dollar album they could listen to hundreds of times to a ten- or twenty- or hundred-dollar concert ticket for a single evening of entertainment. While recordings began as promotional tools for live performances, for many artists the live tour soon became a promotional event for the album. Now we’ve reached the extreme where a band’s entire career can rise and fall with a YouTube clip.
The exponential decrease in the cost of recording technologies has spurred a flood of new artists producing records, and the internet has simplified the previously daunting task of finding widespread
distribution. A song can be written, recorded, and thrown at the world in a matter of minutes.
Since the inception of MySpace, MP3 players, and filesharing, music has become more easily accessible to the general music-consuming public than it ever has been. I don’t have any hard statistics to back this up, but with the sheer number of hard drives out there storing hundreds or thousands of songs per person, with almost every cellphone blaring some dancey chorus as a ringtone, with so many people carrying their iPods at all times… I would wager that more people are listening to more music, and more often, than ever before.
So, are we enjoying ourselves more?
I would argue that, although we experience music in greater quantity and with greater frequency, the quality of the experience itself has been compromised. Once upon a time, music was a treat, for some maybe a rarity. Now it’s taken as a mundane necessity, requisite background noise to our daily existence, a soundtrack for every bus ride and trip to the grocery store.
The result is that our music has been decontextualized and dehumanized. We don’t see the eye contact between band members, the odd hand movements of a singer lost in the moment, or the sweat on the forehead of a drummer struggling through the final song of a 3-month tour.
A recent Apple Crisp article discussed the importance of alternative venues like The Artel, atypical concert spaces that impart entirely new atmospheres on both performer and audience. I love the Artel because although it isn’t a dedicated music venue, its audiences are always dedicated music listeners. Sandro Perri played twice there in the past couple years, and both times commented on the crowd’s almost eerie silence. The audience remained quiet even when Sandro went fumbling through his guitar for a lost sound-effect gadget, our eyes locked on the singer tipping his guitar upside-down, as attentive to him as if he were in the middle of a verse.
Take a look at Holy Fuck, who played the Grad Club this past fall. They have a setlist and a well-rehearsed understanding of the chord structures and beats that sketch out their songs, but their
performances are wild and spontaneous, colouring far outside the lines. Most of their tunes derail into extended remixes of themselves. It’s unpredictable, and certainly different every show. And so much of the fun of their music is dancing (poorly) to the booming bass and fuzzed-out synths from an overloaded PA system, an effect which is compromised on a record and non-existent in iPod
headphones.
That kind of event, with music as a shared social experience, is critical to the experience of music at large. Music is fundamentally a human expression. Understanding music purely as data - files
on a computer and tinny headphone noise - excises it of its humanness, the very thing that makes it compelling to listen to.
The best show I ever attended happened a few years ago in Ottawa. Modern Life is War, who had opened for Strike Anywhere earlier in the evening, played a second set in the basement of End Hits, a record store down the road from the venue of the original concert. Forty kids packed in, each paying two bucks at the top of the stairs. Shawn, the store’s co-owner (and main operator of Punk Ottawa), handed out free earplugs. And the Iowan band, under varying degrees of intoxication, lurched through a half-hour of hardcore punk tunes. Lead singer Jeffrey Eaton was the strangest and drunkest of the five, recklessly throwing himself against the crowd, at one point putting his fingers up against his temples like bullhorns and charging the wall of bodies headfirst. Towards the end of the set they took a request from an elated fan for a song off their long-lost 7″ debut record. And when they ended the night on their track “D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”, Jeff turned his back and held the mic up in
the air, prompting a dozen of us to clamber over his shoulders and shout out its final anthemic chorus.
You can’t download that.
Photo by Paul Galipeau.
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