This clip is a good demonstration of the Musician Proximity Effect (MPE), where musicians who have plenty of room onstage periodically move closer to one another, intensifying their facial expressions and deriving more power to Rock from temporary nearness to one of their bandmates.
The Effect is most powerful when two players, usually guitarists and/or bassists, actually lean against one another back to back, shoulder to shoulder being slightly less powerful. Rocking while simultaneously being involved in male-on-male physical contact is tricky but achievable with the introduction of varying amounts of humor and/or irony.
The increased ability to Rock provided by the MPE lasts even after the musicians disengage, though it is not permanent and may need to be replenished by additional bouts of proximity.
The attempted use of the Effect by more than two musicians at a time, or by direct instrument-to-instrument contact, (cf. Blue Oyster Cult) is risky and not advised or endorsed by Rock Town Hall.
Recently we pondered the musical foundation of Classic Pink Floyd. I learned some useful information, such as the influence of Miles Davis‘ Kind of Blue on Rick Wright‘s keyboard stylings and the fact that “Run Like Hell” was a pisstake on disco. All that I learned helped strengthen my confidence in my recent realization that Classic Pink Floyd, beginning at the time the band found its true voice on Dark Side of the Moon, had more in common with The Who and U2 than I’d ever considered, something I will hereby term Popeye Rock.
“I am what I am.”
I believe the case can be made that most rock bands that connect with the public to some degree develop their sound from an established musical foundation, or traditions. In some cases the influences run deep and are easy to spot. In other cases, as is especially true in the playlists and sales charts of any given genre, the traditions may run as deep as last week’s playlists and charts. In short, rock ‘n roll musicians usually structure their individual talents around an identifiable sound. The craftwork rock musicians typically put into their music involves applying the “fabric” of their instruments to an existing “frame”: stylistic conventions dictating beat, melody, verse-chorus-middle eighth structure, etc. The Beatles are credited with blowing open the vault of rock’s available frames, but it was always the frame that dictated the course of the music.
This was the uninterrupted history of early rock ‘n roll until The Who came along. They may have introduced the Popeye Rock approach that, while still not the norm, has become a viable path toward making rock ‘n roll, especially following the massive popularity and influence of both Pink Floyd and U2. Continue reading »
I’ve been promising/threatening to write this RTH Glossary entry for a while now, so here goes.
We mean it, maaannnnn!
Sincerity fallacy: The idea that the quality of a song (or of any literary or artistic work) can be measured by the extent to which it sincerely reflects the beliefs, emotions, or experiences of its creator. This is not to say that a “sincere” song is necessarily a bad song, merely that its sincerity is not a useful tool in judging its merit.
The idea that sincerity matters is a holdover from the Romantic era. The Romantic artist was supposed to have been a special creature who felt more deeply than ordinary people, and thus his poetry or music was thought to embody these deep emotions and give the reader or listener access to states of being he or she could not ordinarily experience. This gives rise to a corollary of the sincerity fallacy – the idea that more powerful emotions, whether greater joy or deeper pain, lead to greater works of art. To take an example from a recent RTH thread, because Phil Lesh’s father was dying while the bassist was writing (the music to) “Box of Rain”, the song is thought to achieve a level of profundity it might otherwise not have.
And this idea leads to another favorite RTH charge – backstory alert! When discussing the merits of a particular piece of music, allusions to the life history of the artist of the “real life” experiences that are depicted in the song are always suspect. The backstory of a song or album may be interesting, but any use of it to bolster an argument regarding the quality of said song or album leaves one open to being on the receiving end of a severe backstory-alert smackdown.
Awareness of the dangers of the sincerity fallacy is an important corrective to dangerous assumptions, among even the most sophisticated rock fans. We are in a sense still living in the Romantic era. But it’s easy to go too far in the other direction and end up with an attitude that all song lyrics are simply word games and nothing means anything to anybody. If you actually knew a songwriter personally, I think you might be justified in basing at least some of your opinion of his or her work on what you knew about the backstory. But in our media saturated age it’s all too easy to think you know about an artist’s life, but what you know is filtered through publicists, journalists, etc., and you’re better off sticking to the song itself. The problem is that there’s all that media out there leading us away from the song and toward the songwriter. And if you say you’re talking about authenticity and not sincerity, you’re going to to have to prove to me what the difference is or I’m not buying it.
All of this was brought into focus for me recently by Randy Newman, the master of the unreliable narrator. In recent years Newman has started working more autobiographically. There’s a song on his new album, Harps & Angels, called “Potholes”, which he introduces in concert as “the truest song I’ve ever written.” He claims all of the details in the song happened exactly as he relates them in the lyrics. In the linked video that follows he performs and talks about the song:
Newcomers to the hallowed Hall may sometimes become a bit disoriented by the frequent, peculiar insider-ism in the RTH vocabulary. Thankfully, there’s a handy Glossary to keep you nodding your head in understanding, if not necessarily agreement.
One term you’ll see thrown around here is “mach schau.” Fans of the Beatles will remember that German rock and rollers would frequently shout this admonition to “make show!” at the boys during their marathon, pill-and-booze fueled performances at the Star Club in Hamburg, to get them to work harder to entertain the audience. Lord knows the Germans have been wrong about a lot of things over the years, but that was one thing they got right. They knew that a weedy young band of precocious — if nascently talented — upstarts needed a swift kick in the ass to realize they still needed to *work* for their supper.
Around these parts, “mach schau” is sometimes used as a noun: “I’ll tell you one thing — Van Halen has a hell of a lot more ‘mach schau” now that Diamond Dave is back”; sometimes an adjective: “I like Stereolab just fine — I just wish they were a little more, you know, ‘mach schau.'” But the principle is the same as it was at the Star Club in 1962: Make show!
Anyhow, this late addition to the RTH glossary is really just an excuse to publish an extremely compelling vuh-deo by an artist who does a stellar job illustrating just what the heck we mean by this term. I used to love this song when it came pouring out of the jukebox at the embassy pool, and, 35 years later, I like it even more, now that I’ve seen it delivered with a *shitload* of “mach schau.”
After a year and a half of research, analysis, and discussion, Rock Town Hall has arrived at what might be its most important Glossary entry to date, Proctomusicology and its related terms, Proctomusicologist and Prock. We have identified a unifying principle in modern music that cuts across genres. A simple, concise definition follows:
Proctomusicology: Music up its own ass about its musicological means of creating music, inching forward the aesthetic principles of whatever style/s is/are being mined.
See also: Proctomusicologist, Prock
The research and development that went into the validation of this term is detailed in the links below. It was a true team effort, with Townsman Saturnismine responsible for the exact phrasing of our definition. Meanwhile, the author of our Glossary entry Kentonite, Townsman Hrrundivbakshi, noted the difference between a Kentonite and a Proctomusicologist:
A Kentonite is obssessed with the technical componentry of music, and cares not whether the music is looking forward or backward; the Prock-ist is obsessed with the subject matter’s musicological componentry, and always defines it in terms of its antecedents.
Of course, there’s a Rock Venn Diagram thing going on here, as well. Some artists are both Prockists and Kentonites. Donald Fagen springs to mind. I’d add that — slicing even more finely — there are Prock bands (eg, XTC) that contain Kentonite members (eg, Dave Gregory), and so forth.
Read back through the term’s Working Definition period of development, in the following links, and I think you’ll agree that no group of music lovers was better equipped to define this term. For more reading on this subject see here, here, and where it all began, here.
When I was young, before Jerry Garcia had touch of gray and Jam Band Culture errupted, I used to count on something in my dealings with Deadheads I called the Grateful Dead Package Deal. I was never a Deadhead or anything close to it, but their culture, shall we say, had a few features that I found stimulating. Continue reading »
