In which a promise is discharged

Well, now I have read the piece I said I would, having also said I would say something about it, and I confess, I'm somewhat at a loss. This is disappointing, because, on the basis of an early paragraph, not much further beyond which I'd read before now:

The music arrived for me historically late, at the end of the 1980s, and personally early, when I was fourteen years old. I was a child. Rock is for children. You have to be that young to feel it with full intensity, to hear the drumbeat strike and think it is the world reaching out to punch you. With experience the nerves become sclerotic, and you learn that the promises of the lyrics are lies and posturing. By twenty-eight you're left with the knowledge that you're the fan of a deficient art form. Your emotions have evolved to deny you rock music's best benefits, and it's become much too late to develop any comparably deep feeling from any other music. As a grown-up, still listening to the same stuff, you're genuinely ruined.

I had been anticipating being able to sound high-minded and erudite, at least in comparison to some, by referring to that part of "Of the Standard of Taste" in which Hume observes that "[a] young man, whose passions are warm, will be more sensibly touched with amorous and tender images, than a man more advanced in years, who takes pleasure in wise, philosophical reflections concerning the conduct of life and moderation of the passions. At twenty, OVID may be the favourite author; HORACE at forty; and perhaps TACITUS at fifty. Vainly would we, in such cases, endeavour to enter into the sentiments of others, and divest ourselves of those propensities, which are natural to us"—which is not to say that the elder, no longer so moved by Ovid, has discovered a deficiency in him. But as it turns out the essay is almost completely uninteresting, except perhaps to those who have a deep interest in Mark Greif. (I invite you to confirm this for yourself.) I suppose there are such people. The marginal interest it does contain lies in confirming that it is not just for unreflective boomers that the term "rock music" has an indexical character; it denotes also for unreflective children of the 80s whatever amplified music the speaker listened to in his or her mid-to-late adolescence. Moreover: whatever the speaker, then, got out of it, that is what it is provides according to its nature ("rock music's best benefits" = "what I liked when I was a kid", suprisingly enough; you wouldn't have thought the youth would be so discerning). The "same stuff" that no longer provides the same satisfaction really is the same stuff: it's not that Greif doesn't get much out of, I don't know, Cheer-Accident or Head of Femur (two rock bands that are completely unlike both each other and Greif's capsule vision of rock music), but that, returning to the once-highly-cathected treasures of his youth, or their soundalikes, he no longer gets what he once got.

To which one is tempted to respond, "duh, but that hardly makes it a deficient art form", though as it turns out Greif isn't actually interested in supporting anything claimed in the quoted paragraph above, some sort of mixture of cod-Greenbergianism and vaguely Germanic fear of popular culture (especially in its musical manifestations, in which it incites one to move one's (ugh) body, not to mention it appeals to the baser emotions). But once it's clear what the claims are really about, they become uninteresting (because obviously false when they can be made sense of, mostly) anyway. I'm left very unclear what the point of this essay was. It doesn't help that he's just not very good at writing about music, something evidenced by the catastrophically stupid opening suggestion, his answer to the question how music can produce the feeling of violence (he characterizes the answer as "stupidly literal", whereas in fact it's just silly), and passages like this, the first part of whose first sentence is a masterpiece of some sort:

A drummer in a rock band can actually hit objects with remarkable facility—can strike physically, can beat on skin—and this striking or beating, rather than falling into straight rhythm, can in its most effective instances hold onto a movement of the unexpected, as when a tom-hit or a snare roll or a cymbal crash drops in at any moment, and makes you feel it first as a kind of percussion upon or in your own body, and then as your own arm or foot punching down, to strike. A fully-amplified, distorted and fed-back guitar, rather than leading at all times, could follow such drumming as part of the musical fabric, emulate it and respond to it, lock into it—thud along with the bass drum at one moment, and scream tunelessly as the drumstick strikes a cymbal at another. Then you have a new kind of artistry, a terrifying rock n' roll art of symbolized physical violence fully manifested.

Someone introduce this man to Last Exit! On the other hand, I recently read MFK Fisher's An Alphabet for Gourmets, and, while it contains an awful lot about food, it also contains an awful lot about MFK Fisher; one of the best essays in it, "P is for Peas", recounts some pea-involving adventure of hers. No doubt part of the difference here is that that's just a less vexed topic, but also she comes across as actually enjoying food, while Greif doesn't seem to enjoy music, even the music he's talking about.

Comments

[k-sky]

Since I pointed this essay out to you, I feel responsible for defending it, and reading it again, I still feel quite happy to. It was interesting to me because I identified so strongly with that sense of being ruined my early experience of music.

For one thing, it's a much more personal essay than you seem willing to credit. Maybe if you want to develop this further, you could divulge what the experience of music was like for you when you were fourteen? I'd be interested to know that, even if, as I'd suspect, I wouldn't identify with it as closely as I did with Greif's.

Also, about your ending note: it's not an essay about pleasure, necessarily; it's an essay about response. It begins in fear and dwells in violence and pain. Your Hume riff makes a certain amount of sense: as you get older, your tastes mellow, and, you say to yourself, refine. My experience has been that I find music less immediately, viscerally full of impact, yet I haven't developed the sensibility to enjoy what might come next. That sense of being ruined by the youthful experience of music -- or at least unprepared, and somewhat at sea -- rings very true to me.

[ben wolfson]

I was unprepared for its turning into such a personal essay by is beginning with such impersonal claims; if you're going to make claims like that, follow them up!

Probably nothing will seem as intense to someone in his early thirties as something of the same sort did to that person in his early teens; most things are experienced more viscerally then.

[rone]

In my experience, i can still feel a visceral impact from some new music and that impact is perhaps felt more strongly because my taste is more developed than when i was young.

To claim that rock is for children is risible; i can imagine someone in the `40s writing about swing being for children, or someone else in 20 years writing about AutoTune-heavy hip-hop being for children.

I don't feel "ruined"; i find it a very strange way to feel about music. Yeah, i listened to a lot of crap as a kid. I don't anymore.

The second paragraph you quote talks about using tension in music, but it's hardly unique to the drummer.

Greif's head is so far up his ass in this essay, he could become a human Klein bottle with just another push.

[k-sky]

I was unprepared for its turning into such a personal essay by is beginning with such impersonal claims

A fair point to make about a lot of the n+1 stuff. There's a personal hermeneutic style that often brings idiosyncratic experience to bear on artistic products and doesn't always account for it. You get genuinely deep insights that seem more generalizable than they might otherwise be.

[ben wolfson]

AFAICT, that's a mischaracterization; what goes on is rather the bringing of artistic products to bear on idiosyncratic experience. That's what makes it such a tiresome (to me) instance of the personal essay: it's not about Fugazi, it's about Mark Greif, and the occasion for it is Fugazi. To the extent that you share some of Greif's Fugazi or punk-related experiences, you might see some insight into the character of that experience, in a sort of "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" way, but it's not an insight regarding punk or rock music generally.

Greif might think that he's actually bringing his penetrating insights to bear on the nominal topic of his essay, and that might even be his goal, but if it is, he hasn't reached it.

This is, indeed, something that bugs me about a lot of n+1 writing, and I think I've even complained about it before. If everyone were like their authors, it would be a reasonable way of proceeding.

[A White Bear]

I would just like to add that I love it when you hold current writers to the aesthetic standards of Hume and Pope, Ben. It makes me feel warm.

Also, you have made me want to read Fisher, whom I have not read before.