Within The Context Of All Contexts: The Rewiring Of Our Relationship To Music
Imagine you are in an averagely pleasant pub in Manhattan, talking to a couple of people, half-listening to the music being played from the ceiling speakers, until a song from the distant past makes you start listening closely.
The song is Homer Banks' "60 Minutes of Your Love," from 1966, which was not an American hit, but became a favorite in the English mod club-dancer's canon of rediscovery called Northern Soul. Now this is a song: undiluted momentum from the first beat, one satisfying jolt after another. There you are, having an encounter with music's past. You point at the ceiling in recognition. You realize that you have been pointing at the ceiling more often lately.
All right: "You" is really me. I am a music critic, for whom all songs carry some kind of coding. I would be paying attention anyway — but I have a feeling you'd have noticed that song too. A while after Homer Banks, Ruth Brown's "Wild, Wild Young Men," from 1953, came on. Ruth Brown is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and her song was a hit, rising to No. 3 on the R&B charts that year; even so, you'd need to have a pretty decent grip on the history of American music to know it by ear. Later, I heard a few southern rock-shuffles strung together, including ZZ Top's famous "La Grange" and a more recent and more leaden one that I felt I should know and didn't. (It bothered me that I didn't.) And then, out of the blue: Blind Melon's "No Rain," a doughy song that seemed to be for some other place than this one, an early '90s MTV hit which I suspect far more people know than like. It felt even more shallow than usual, by virtue of the depth that had preceded it.
Clearly, I was listening to a streaming-service algorithm. The overall sequence made no sense. The music in that place, while I was there, at first felt like a gift — and then like an encounter with an alien presence. It had "taste" — and then no-taste. (Not "tastelessness," but an absence of so-called taste.) The signifiers had gone haywire.
Part of becoming an adult is learning to recognize cultural signifiers, which tell you something about where you are and who's behind the bar and what kind of time you might be having before you leave. These signifiers (not just musical ones) always, in some way, have to do with history, with the past. That Blind Melon song retroactively soured the Homer Banks encounterbut rather: And then, maybe, at best, ahalf-step further: And so on. A paradoxical reaction, both uninformed andconnoisseur-ish.
