Some of the best listening experiences are the most alienating. You might be a reasonably knowledgeable and well-traveled person (whatever that means), living in a major metropolitan city (whatever that means). You might have a passing familiarity with a few languages, and you might be basically unafraid of looking like you’re in the wrong place. You’ve been the only whatever in the room plenty of times.
Yet you will step into a community temporarily redefined and strengthened by ecstasy in a music that, it turns out, you haven’t learned enough about. Essentially you are a child waiting for a stranger to have pity on you and explain the map. You are worrying that you have gotten lost.
But being lost is not an absolute condition. It only means that you haven’t received enough cultural information yet. Everyone knows the critical moment, whatever the circumstances, when confusion ends and understanding begins: I’m not lost anymore; I can see the way ahead. The feeling is the same when you can’t find your way home in a foreign city or when you have gone to a concert and can’t understand why the crowd has started cheering intensely at a beat or a dance. It’s not science. It’s culture. It’s good to experience exclusion. It only means that you can then become part of a community.
Many of us, around music, reach a time when we don’t want to learn a new map. We’re skeptical. Seems like there’s a new map every six months. Do I have to learn them all? Can I count myself out once in a while? Mostly: Since I know the old map, I should be able to read this one. If I can’t read it, it’s not worth knowing. This is the unseen force that obscures the inventory.
* * *
There is a messy narrative claiming that bebop was invented in the early 1940s—by the same people, it is supposed according to the myth, who became famously identified with it—in order to create a new and exclusive club dedicated to a revolution in taste and training. Bebop was tricky to play harmonically and rhythmically, and so your inadequacy would show if you weren’t ready to sacrifice for it. It was played after-hours at a few clubs in Harlem; if you were a listener in this situation, you’d have to be up into early mornings in Harlem, wanting to see small-band music in a small place, which often meant you were a competitive or curious musician who’d finished your big-band job in a big place. The core musicians, according to the narrative, knew they had a prize, a golden ticket, and it was pure; they wanted it to be neither stolen nor diluted.
There’s plenty of this kind of thing in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, the oral history of jazz compiled by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff. Dizzy Gillespie: “So on afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk would work out complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys.” Kenny Clarke: “As for those sitters-in that we didn’t want, when we started playing these different changes that we’d made up, they’d become discouraged after the first chorus and they’d slowly walk away and leave the professional musicians on stand.”
Those “different changes,” of course, became a sound and a style. But early on they helped engender a new kind of privilege, writing rules for a newfound land, where the creators could monitor the borders.
Over time, the narrative has been revealed as a half-truth: bebop evolved a lot more slowly, and with more desire for commercial acceptance, than these quotations indicate. I have never been sure whether the people who perpetuated the narrative—historians and writers, mostly, arranging the anecdotes in a certain way—felt threatened by the rise of such a club (because exclusivity can create new positions of power and also begin wars), or saw its formation coldly, as an inevitable outcome of human evolution and behavior (many musicians do, after all, believe in a natural aristocracy of talent), or imagined the club as something they needed to belong to.
* * *
All music is powered by its search for a membership. Some music seeks as large a membership as seems feasible: perhaps not only young but under forty, perhaps not only American but English-speaking, perhaps not only Mexican but pan-Latin. Some seeks a smaller market, or feigns exclusivity—as if the enjoyment of a kind of music could be patrolled—and operates on the assumption that many more people would like to be part of that group than actually are.
Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” recorded in 1949, shows you exclusivity and gives you community. It is an idealized step-by-step demonstration of a culture, the culture of young black musicians in southern cities. I am listening to it now and I feel the map being drawn instantly: it tells the listener how and where to eat, how to dance, how to be excited, how to be skeptical, how to live. But first, how to get past the door.
Its narrative is Rampart Street in New Orleans: the song was written, mostly, by Ellis Walsh, a bandleader from there. Jordan—originally from Arkansas but by that time a New York songwriter, crossing from big-band jazz into what would soon be called rock and roll—adapted the lyrics but kept the location. Its point of view is that of the impressionable opportunist, new to the particulars but wise to the patterns: if you want to eat on a Saturday night in New Orleans, if you’re “a cook or a waiter or a good musician,” you get yourself to a fish fry and you talk your way in. The narrator gains entry to one, and so does the listener.
And then the narrator becomes a roving camera eye, like the tracking shot through the Copacabana in Goodfellas: there is Sam jiving with Jimmy’s wife, there’s a fat piano player, women in expensive dresses or bobby socks. The point is: multiplicity, flexibility, movement, bounce, style, response. (The rhythm tells you all that, and so do the answering riffs on piano and guitar.) There’s a police raid. The narrator is hauled into jail and forswears visiting another fish fry, but that doesn’t matter: you’ve been in, you can’t undo what you’ve seen. “It was rocking,” goes the chorus. “You never seen such scuffling and shuffling till the break of dawn.” The assumption is that you know why the story is worth telling.
* * *
The great singer Umm Kulthum, from the 1930s to the 1970s, provided an experience of belonging and participating and identifying to more citizens of the world—chiefly the Arab diaspora—than most performers ever had before. Her performances were exercises in mass identification; they were also social and religious, to some degree. They illustrated a new way forward for Arab thinking: a twentieth-century model that would have to proceed without as much Western influence as had once been anticipated. And so these performances—many of which were recorded—had a more urgent intent than many ever will. “The world represented by her performances,” the scholar Virginia Danielson has written, “is where many listeners have wanted to live.”
“Ana Fe Intizarak,” a live version from March 3, 1955, is a great example—her lines, whether improvised or written, are followed loosely by the string players of the ensemble, and her phrases are bursting, soaring, drenched in emotion but untiring.
These performances are as much as an hour long, and they construct a map, too; they have a logic and a grammar. Some of her stunning long tones don’t provoke applause, but some improvised sections, in which the strings mimic her patterns—and in effect show you how difficult she is to mimic—reach the audience deeply; they erupt in applause and chatter and yelling while the ensemble continues. This is the ritual of tarab, a kind of managed process of ecstasy in Arabic music.
And their ensembles use heterophony—the concept of variations on a single melodic line coming together in rough agreement, the tool that so much English-language music has ignored outside of rural religious music or amateur choirs. Heterophony in itself implies community: it implies people of different interests moving in the same direction. Listening to “Ana Fe Intizarak” is a serious proposition—its length, its intensity, its coding. It asks you, as Aaron Copland did in What to Listen for in Music, whether you are listening to your music correctly; but by that point it has made you complicit in its making.
* * *
Some songs are quite clear in how they’ll get their membership. The Germs’ “What We Do Is Secret,” from 1979, opens a little side-door to a private ritual, establishing a general and exciting “we”—the band, perhaps their friends, perhaps their fans. Flipper’s “Brainwash” 45, from 1981, makes it nearly impossible, but more desirable, to get inside: the vocalist, Bruce Lose, struggles to begin a song and ends it with “Never mind, forget it, you wouldn’t understand anyway.” (A locked groove in the vinyl makes the phrase repeat forever.) Héctor Lavoe’s “Mi Gente” (my people), from 1975, invites all Latin Americans—“ustedes,” with the assumption that “my people” and “you” are the same—to get inside. Cultural pride is the ticket. If you identify with him, you’re in. If not, you’ll never hear his call.
Vinieron todos para oirme guarachar
pero como soy de ustedes
yo los invitaré a gozar
conmigo sí van a gozar.
(They all came to hear me party / but as I am from all of you / I invite you to have fun with me / if you’re going to have fun.)
Loretta Lynn overlapped with Héctor Lavoe in chronology as well as sound and temperament: her voice was honest and unapologetic—loud, husky, eager, sometimes clumsy or independent of the groove, with nothing to hide. Her 1971 single “You’re Lookin’ at Country” wins the hospitality award: it talks straight to her audience, appeals to its visual sense for decoding music, and essentially offers it a guarantee. As long as they know what they’ve come for, and as long as they know what “country” is, they’ll be satisfied:
I hope you’re liking what you see
because if you’re lookin’ at me
you’re lookin’ at country.
The idea that the audience is looking for something to hold on to and belong to, that they have ideas about membership and authenticity—all this is taken for granted. She’s selling herself, but not in a way that compromises who she is.
Deaf Center is a Norwegian duo that plays dark-ambient music—and here it seems worthwhile to break with my attempt not to put the name of a genre in the first mention of a group. The reason not to do so is because it seems a severely limiting mode of definition, as if a group exists only to take part in the construction of a genre. But the reason to do so here is only because Deaf Center really does seem attached to a limited definition for themselves. They are exploring a mood and trying to make it last, whatever the consequences, however narrow the music ends up being.
The mood is sort of sullen, static, natural, invested in abstract beauty: the aural equivalent of, let’s say, dark, high-definition, close-up photographs of furrows and fungi. It is achieved by heavily echoed long tones played on stringed instruments—cello or electric guitar—and piano notes, recorded closely but with a microphone capturing their long decay.
There is, in other quarters, some wordless mood music that achieves its goal efficiently: that’s what the pianists Jim Brickman and Philip Aaberg do, for instance. Theirs is music about melody, but intensely attuned to the desires and myths of a certain kind of American—sentimental, aging, and well trained by the emotional cues in film soundtracks. It implies with great strength that all is well with the world. Deaf Center does not achieve its goal efficiently and does not bring easy peace. It goes the long way around.
The group’s work is amazingly visual, as music can sometimes be: alluringly lit, as if you are hearing shafts of light and blankets of shade. Its reverb and long decay suggest natural patterns and unseen forces. In “Close Forever Watching,” from Owl Splinters, a plan takes shape. It becomes a tidal shift between two chords, with a thick pressure of sounds growing around it—multiplied human voices, perhaps string notes slowed down or run backward. In any case, it is immersive, beckoning, and not meant to convey anything other than time, voluptuousness, and some kind of rumination. The listening experience is not about the performers, Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland, whose musical identities are obscured either by reverb or by a kind of cold and impersonal playing. It is about you and the mood and the darkness. Are you the kind of person who identifies with this mood? Here it is, at length. If you’re lookin’ at me, you’re lookin’ at country. If you don’t identify, go to a better-lit place.
The tendering of an extreme mood, in these cases, keeps out the riffraff, the no-talent listeners. Because passive acceptance isn’t an option, it makes listeners know that they need to have a reason to be here. And among certain skilled musicians the extreme mood is communicated very, very quickly, by means of a special method. Morrissey, for instance, has his sigh, and had it from the first Smiths single, “Hand in Glove”: an exhaling that transmits a weariness and a state of being transported. He doesn’t want to be where he is. He’s created a willed world more suitable to himself, and perhaps to his fans.
* * *
The Mexican ranchera singer Vicente Fernández recorded “Volver Volver” in 1976, and it became his signature in performances thereafter: one of the most extravagant records in pop, the wettest song in a discography drenched with fictional tears, where women tend to be sublime and all sacrifices total. Except for the slow, steady chop of the nylon-string guitar on the two and four, the sounds are doubled or massed or echoed: double trumpets, tremoloed organ, earth-moving strings. He is practicing emotional psy-ops: ending a verse with a soft, plummy, contemplative phrase (“Y me muero volver”—“I am dying to come back”) and then starting the chorus with an incredible bellow (“Volver, volver, volver.”) His voice clutches with tears; soon he delivers a fantastic yelped grito, the cry of Mexican independence that became the stamp of ranchera: I love my people, I love my song, I’m prepared to die for either—and you? “Ey-aww, ey-aww, ah ha ha ha!”
The ranchera grito—as practiced by Vicente Fernández, or Miguel Aceves Mejía—is a wordless marker, a cultural stamp, a sound as good as a slogan. An Umm Kulthum long tone, a Louis Jordan blues narrative, a Morrissey sigh, a Deaf Center echo, are all gritos in their own way. They are enticements to join and reminders of a fee.
LOUIS JORDAN, “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” 1949
UMM KULTHUM, “Ana Fe Intizarak,” March 3, 1955, live recording
THE GERMS, “What We Do Is Secret,” 1979
FLIPPER, “Brainwash,” 1981
HÉCTOR LAVOE, “Mi Gente,” 1975
LORETTA LYNN, “You’re Lookin’ at Country,” 1971
DEAF CENTER, “Close Forever Watching,” from Owl Splinters, 2011
THE SMITHS, “Hand in Glove,” 1983
VICENTE FERNÁNDEZ, “Volver Volver,” 1976