n + 1, as we all know, early in its career sounded a BLAST! against The Believer, a BLAST! against Timothy McSweeney's various Tendencies (though I think he only had an Internet Tendency and the magazine was given some other denomination? perhaps?), a BLAST! against what they were pleased to call the "Eggersards", for some reason, a BLAST! against dishonest tone (McSweeney's was wide-eyed, juvenile, faux-naif
—true enough as it goes (and true enough
is about what we should expect here), and quite annoying when done without skill, as, in the main, it is), and basically seemed to have set itself up as the Criterion to the Eggersy Reader's Digest, some serious intellectual undertaking for those who found Eggers and his crew too superficial, too facile, too willing to go for some easy effect, without skill. Harder-edged: the justified successor to the former, for those willing to think like adults and be serious.
It should now be easy to see that the ns+1 are just the obverse of the Believers, especially in the realm about which I am surprisingly moralistic, the rhetorical. Yeah, sure, they're willing to be negative, and to pontificate on suitably intellectual-seeming themes. But the style in which so many of the shorter squibs, and the Intellectual Situations (sections whose title shows characteristic ambition and presumption) that constitute the prefaces to the print issues, are written, is just as facile and false as anything done by the party of Eggers. Seen-it-all, portentous, faux-sophisticate: if the Believers are obsessed with the wisdom of children and white-haired philosophers, the ns + 1 are obsessed with the wisdom of themselves.
Oh my god how portentous, how supercilious, how … I have not the words (this owes to my own poor expressive powers, and is not hyperbole). Let's look at the article linked above, shall we? (Let's first, however, acknowledge that it wasn't published in n + 1, but rather an offshoot, Paper Monument, and following, in the issue in which it appears, an equally enraging article loosely having to do with New York but mostly, I think, caused by omphaloskepsis; however, the ns + 1 did decide to put it on their webbage, after all, as a piece in promotion of their new venture, and the last issue of n + 1 itself that I have is #4, which is, like, so old by now.) Let's look at the third paragraph.
Now ask Mister Brown what sex is really like. Nothing could allude less to the time-bending freedom of sex than the hyperexperience of subdivided time: boom, bat, boom, bat. We are right to fear sex and its mystery, but we are wrong not to conjure our courage against that fear. Rock and roll tries to lock fucking’s magic door.
Let's now count the idiocies. First, the essay pretends to be about rock and roll, but James Brown is a funk musician, apparently dragooned into the article on the grounds that he once sang about being a sex machine, and, like, isn't rock so mechanistic, man, like, totally ruining the magick of sex? Oh to be a pagan! Brown's being in the article despite the whacking great style trouble is somewhat forgivable, though, since apparently the author has never actually heard any funk music, else he wouldn't have said anything so monstrously stupid about rhythm therein. About the last two sentences I doubt anything needs actually to be written. I doubt anything can be written about them that would be more effective than simply letting someone with penny's worth of sense or taste read it (and if you've not got that much sense or taste, there's not much to be done)—about the next paragraph, too, and really much of it. When it comes to the way this tripe is written all I can really say is: but can't you see that it's shit? (Is it actually facetious? Is Paper Monument a twice-yearly journal "about" the contemporary art scene in that its creators feel that that scene is corrupt through and through, a failed endeavor that hasn't recognized its failure, and thus they have created a similarly awful journal which displays and "comments on" that transcendent (in the sense that it forever transcends any one attempt to comprehend it) idiocy by paralleling it in a more perspicuous fashion? That would be a sort of charitable explanation, I suppose, but it seems a lot of effort to go through.) Fortunately there are some more tractable passages:
We need a music worth our time. What would that different music be like? And how would the culture itself have to change before conditions might arise to make such a music significant or even possible? Contemporary music is just one part of a none-too-subtly militarized culture—boom, bat, hup, two—in which technologies bear us aloft, or back us against the wall. If your favorite band exists, it is already part of the problem.
I never ever want to hear anyone telling me what kind of music (art, literature, sport, revolver) we
need. If it's not too much to ask. Especially prefaced with the indefinite article, such claims are nearly always the mark, these days, of self-obsessed, self-important ruminations without which one can really get by just fine. I pass over in silence the bits that follow, because, of course, it should take nothing more than an accurate transcription to show how stupid they are, and instead mention here that it's the teeniest bit ironic that the criticizes exactly two musicians in the course of the article, James Brown and John Lennon, and what he says about neither of them is accurate. This is, if you recall, an article about contemporary music (or maybe just rock, or maybe that just is contemporary music). (He also mentions Bach, Mingus, Kelly Clarkson, and Black Flag, the latter two for basically no reason, except perhaps to establish that he listened to punk and doesn't like pop (JUST LIKE ME!!!!), the first to establish that his rejection of so-called classical music stands on the firm footing of a dude who once took piano lessons, and the second to praise him, apparently unaware that, since his band existed, it was once part of the problem. How soon they forget. Maybe it gets a pass because it was jazz, a style which apparently doesn't exist anymore.) Here's the bit about Lennon:
File under Dionysus the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing, or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?
Gosh, I have no idea. Ok, that's actually a translation of a Queen song, "One Vision", but it's probably safe to say that the realization that a pounding beat can be put to militaristic ends is not exactly a new one. (Einer wie Adorno hätte das alle sofort durchschaut, wenn er es in Betracht gezogen hätte—though actually he does make the point about homogenization there) But actually, while the world living as one might fit with a racist rally, under the peace in our time or we wipe you out
principle, I hope someday you'll join us
doesn't, really.
The bizarre generalization about contemporary music is, well, bizarre. Somewhat amusing that this lamentation on the all-pervading four-four is out at the same time as Sasha Frere-Jones' lamentation about lack of rhythmic interest in contemporary indie rock, since SF/J does at least manage to find some areas of contemporary music whose rhythm doesn't merely plod, a feat that is not, it must be owned, even slightly impressive. J. D. Daniels' ability to make completely unfounded generalizations about contemporary music is more impressive, and that's a pretty easy thing to do. Rock, if you recall, was "the tyranny of the backbeat", and he can't find any music that escapes it. I gather that n + 1 is based in New York City? If Daniels were to stroll into Other Music and ask for some music without a tyrannical backbeat, I am willing to give good odds that they'd be able to accomodate him. I could accomodate him, if that's what he actually wants. (In particular, if what he wants is music that encourages a sense of timelessness, I would recommend Tony Conrad & Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate Alive and Orthrelm, OV, two albums which accomplish the same end through opposite means (though both share length), or perhaps Anthony Moore's Reeds, Whistle and Sticks. Or endless other things. Does he just want music for screwing? Eyvind Kang's Live Low to the Earth, in the Iron Age might suit his apparently delicate sensibilities. In none of these will one find an oppressive boom-bap backbeat [actually that isn't true; the Conrad & Faust contains about 40 minutes (out of a total length of 50-55) of a nonstop duh-rock beat. Nevertheless it manages to create a sense of timelessness as it wears on stamping endlessly under the string drones. Quite a remarkable performance, really. It also ocurred to me that the last movement (heard in context of course) of the Quartet for the End of Time could fit the bill, but it's a bit of a gimme]. Kyle Gann seems like an approachable fellow: maybe Daniels should email him for recommendations.)
I fear that if I continue in this little exercise I'll be reduced to simply quoting paragraphs or sentences and being dumbstruck, and my being dumbstruck will not, I think, translate very well onto the page (or page metaphor). So I'll just recommend the one mentioning Kelly Clarkson as good for a laugh, and quote this one, and be off:
Many writers on rock, by now the boringest of all possible musics, attempt to enliven things with a bit of proctological egotism: that headfirst disappearance up the asshole of lyricism, that display of the self—if that’s your idea of a self—in excruciating prose poetry, or pose. It’s the 21st century, so tell me, dear, why is it so Romantic?
Quite.
But do read the article for yourself. It's really quite impressive. The bits about Dionysus and Apollo are works of art. (Come to think of it I'm surprised that no mention of Plato banning certain modes from the music of his republic is made.) I don't doubt that you will all see that it is shit. (How could anyone not have seen it?) The New York article was similar. I see that someone has voiced a similar complaint to mine about the main rag proper.
Comments