What Sticks?
“The absolute,” La Maga was saying, kicking a pebble from puddle to puddle. “What is an absolute, Horacio?”
“Look,” Oliveira said, “it’s just that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.”
— Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
One of the memes that comes around on Facebook (and is coming around hard these days) involves listing “albums that stick/have stuck with you,” be it 15 or 20 or 25. Sometimes it’s worded as “lasting impression.” My goodness, what does that even mean? These lists are presented via images of album covers (how old fashioned!), not sounds, and stretched out one at a time for days. It is apparently also of utmost importance not to explain your choices. The picture is worth a thousand recordings. But I prefer sounds. And I like explaining. What I want to explain here is why I find this meme highly problematic.
Things stick but don’t stick with me. With so many recordings available and floating in and out of our lives, how could they? I know that some people seem to stick with the records they loved in high school and wistfully claim that no one makes music as good as they did back in the day. For me, that’s lazy bullshit, no offense meant; I know that we wear music like a badge.
I used to think wearing your tastes like a badge was a low-level way of listening. I know now that everyone wears their tastes like a badge; that’s how music functions. My realization came partly through experience and partly through reading musicologist Christopher Small’s writings. To summarize: Music—like all cultural activities, not just the obvious “arts,” but ranging from sports, to fashion, to food, to religion—is a way to experience and explore values and relationships. You like cultural activities that reinforce values you have that you like (or are too scared to dump; sorry, the cynic in me rears its ugly head from time to time) or ones that you would like to take on. The values and relationships, however, are in the ear of the behearer and this may be conscious or not, which helps explain why, for example, the Republican party would be attracted to “Born in the USA,” a song whose lyrics have a rather liberal bent.
I think about the albums that were keynotes of my youth and beyond, but rarely listen to them anymore. They were so important at those particular times in my development and I still hold many of the values I saw in them in the first place, but I don’t revisit them much at all. Making the list made me think that perhaps I should.
1. Blood, Sweat & Tears, self-titled
2. Joni Mitchell, For the Roses
3. The Beautiful South, Welcome to the Beautiful South
4. Steely Dan, Aja
5. Yes, (beh, do I have to pick one?)
6. Steve Reich, “It's Gonna Rain”
7. Joe Jackson, Big World
8. Herbie Hancock, Headhunters
9. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos 2, 3, & 5
10. Makanda Ken MacIntyre, In the Wind
11. Animal Collective, Sung Tongs/Feels (I got them simultaneously, so they're kinda of stuck together in my head)
12. all the mixtapes my friend Jason ever made for me (also stuck together in my head)
13. Throwing Muses, House Tornado
14. Pat Metheny, Offramp
15. Ravel, String Quartet in F Major
I think the only record I still listen to on a regular basis (= at least once a year, maybe) is Headhunters. “It’s Gonna Rain” I play for students once every five years or so, because I absolutely love watching them squirm through all seventeen glorious minutes, and then interrogating them about the experience afterwards (“Oh, you didn’t listen to it for homework? That’s okay, let’s listen to it now!”). I made this list a while back and then never posted it to Facebook. This was before Tuneyards crossed my ears. Or Lord Invader. Or before I had a kid and was listening to Elisabeth Mitchell’s oeuvre every two seconds for six years and counting. (It still calms us all down. I think I owe Ms. Mitchell a bottle of something.)
The list also made me think about all the things I left off, not because I thought of them afterwards, but because... well, probably because that’s not the picture I wanted to paint of myself. For example, I don’t necessarily still hold the values I found in these recordings:
1. Mötley Crüe, Shout at the Devil
2. Judas Priest, Screaming for Vengeance
3. Def Leppard, Pyromania
4. ZZTop, Eliminator
5. Dokken, Tooth and Nail
6. Queensrÿche, The Warning
7. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Brain Salad Surgery
8. Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed
9. Marillion, Misplaced Childhood
10. GTR, GTR
Starting in junior high, I was really into virtuosity for a long time. That’s what it was all about: infinite “progress.” It coincided with my recognition that I could work to become virtuosic on the flute. I was starting to see the results from my work. I was starting to make connections between the classical music I studied and similar values in other forms of music, namely hard rock, heavy metal, and prog rock. Part of it, too, was that I was, and still am, rather weak and uncoordinated. I think a lot of people, both the tough and not-so-tough, like loud, aggressive macho music, because it makes them feel tough. Strong. Mighty. Even if it is Def Leppard. Or heaven forbid, GTR! I went back one day and could only get through maybe the first minute of it before I freaked out in shame at how awful it was. On a more positive note, GTR did cause me to dig up more recordings of Steve Hackett, who has a lovely variety of releases. At least, I used to think so...
By the time I got to college, the view that virtuosity as the virtue of music had many cracks in it. I was surprised to meet someone my freshman year who had convinced himself that heavy metal was the new classical music. “Um, but classical music didn’t stop...” That fell on deaf ears. I had to admit that I saw something of myself in that guy. Don’t get me wrong, I still love virtuosity and still explore it in my own music making. But simple hits the spot more often than not.
I remember being in a store — fine, it was Beacon’s Closet in Park Slope, but I am so not a hipster, okay? — and the staff put on Mötley Crüe’s “Too Fast for Love,” which was probably the first time I had heard it in over twenty years. I was grinning like an idiot, I’m sure. I heard it in an entirely different way: how raw and punk it was, completely different and much better than that which followed. Perhaps I do, in fact, still hold some of the values that those left-off-the-list once triggered in me. Holding those values and letting them go is just as influential and important to my development as a person and musician as continuing to revisit Bach over and over and over, like every classical musician does.
These lists could go on forever. And what do they really tell anyone? How could I have left off Schubert? Now that I think about it, I can’t hum a single melody from Offramp, but I remember the feeling of being really taken by it. What about stuff I learned through performing and not recordings, like that semester of singing William Billings and Josquin des Prez? I learned so, so much about music that semester, and I’m still digesting it, almost 30 years on. God, did I really leave out the entire 90s? It sometimes feels like nothing worth mentioning actually happened, musically or otherwise. (Not true, of course…)
These lists could go on forever, but the problem is that they don’t. The problem is they are supposed to be absolute. Static. Desert island discs—that describes my personal nightmare. Never hearing anything new! You can keep that scenario. I read an article— diatribe?—by a classical music critic that said something to the effect, of why bother listening to any new music when Beethoven is all he needs? This was not in jest. It was basically anti-new music. Glass half empty: Everything sucks. I’m going to hide with Beethoven now. Go away.
It’s a world-view that is completely foreign and incomprehensible to me. I love the old stuff. I don’t feel the need to keep digging through it. It makes me feel disconnected to the world when I am unaware of recent musical endeavors. But it’s getting harder and harder to really keep abreast. We do what we can. I will still welcome the old into my ears, happy to say hello, and listen to anything new it has to tell me. Just don’t make me pick one fixed set to represent everything I have been, am now, and will become.
Andrea La Rose lives and works in Prague.
