Monk and habit
A new interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, has just appeared on Christopher Bussman’s Bop and Beyond blog. It contains some meaty technical musings about, among other things, the curious length of the bridge in “Brilliant Corners” — which is, thank god, something you actually see in much jazz biography writing (and which pop journalists could use to get a hang of a little better, even if it is not as immediately useful). But in isolating his motivation for writing the book, Kelley brings up an important point about responding to music, or art, generally — letting things stand in for the reaction itself:
As a young (self-taught) piano player, I discovered Monk by way of pianist Cecil Taylor, whom I adored. From that point on I spent years trying to learn Monk’s music. I’m still learning now. But besides Monk’s work as a pianist and composer, I found the stories about his quirkiness and eccentricities quite curious. They seemed to stand in for any serious critical engagement with his music, and in many ways stories about Monk (some apocryphal) had come to define him, to the point where the alleged “weirdness” of his music was conflated with the “weirdness” of the man.
My favorite piece on this topic is Tom Ewing’s sixth Poptimist column, which appeared on Pitchfork back in 2007. He writes about the tendency for our relationship to musicians as people rather than artists to obscure the reaction to the work:
The miserableness of the Smiths was what I think of as the Big Fact about the band. Most bands have one: The thing that everyone who’s heard of an act but doesn’t generally listen to them knows about them. The Big Fact about Joy Division is that Ian Curtis killed himself. The Big Fact about Ashlee Simpson is that she lip-synched on TV. The Big Fact about Amy Winehouse is that she likes a drink or two. And so on. The Big Fact doesn’t actually need to be a fact, it can be an opinion or a judgement— the Big Fact about Radiohead is that they’re innovative, for instance. Big Facts are shorthand substitutes for thinking about something, which doesn’t make them wrong. They can be a little misleading, though.
He goes on to make a case for the “Big Fact” as a tool in the marketing kit — and it can be good, useful, distracting — but eventually arrives at the larger perspective that, largely, music writing often tends to lean on this or that sort of tool rather than engaging with the emotional response (which is what created the original urge to write).
… the emotional pull of pop music is routinely dodged when people talk about it. The other day I looked at an online discussion about the new Interpol album— I’d heard the single, and wanted some understanding of what anyone could get out of a record I found so emotionally inert. I didn’t find any: I found people saying it was good, and people saying it wasn’t, and careful calibrations of where the new record stood in relation to the previous two. It’s not that I thought the commenters didn’t genuinely like Interpol, but none of them tried to explain it, and there was certainly no indication from any of them as to how the album made them feel … In general I can’t shake a sense that how we relate to music is an elephant in the critics’ lounge. I don’t think I’m alone in taking ideas I might use to validate my emotional reaction— innovation, craftsmanship, artistic intent— and turning them into a stand-in for the reaction itself, a reassuring Big Fact for the whole of music.