"All the tangled chaos that the music periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest…"
Bela Bartok,
In a letter of 1926, cited in Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise.
The musiphilosoph, though driven by the engine of her own ideas and directed by the steering column of her proclivities, must read, when time calls, the contemporary music presses. It may seem counter-productive that one so invested in their own investigations into music would bother with the hacks and jackanapes that print their one opinion this week and their other opinion the next, never coming to a conclusion that sales needs won’t alter, but there is a necessity. For the music press is the rear-end of the pop-cultural baby; one need only dip into it to measure the current temperature. The considerations and modes of the mo may well give rise to some otherwise thought or stance upon which one’s readings and measurements had cast no light. Take no heed of the hype, the soon-to-be number ones, the cultural shifts killed by early exposure, etc. The press, whether as artefact or artefiction, only informs if one reads between the lines – this is especially important in music, for, if we didn’t read between the lines, not one of us would play an a, an f or a c from the treble clef.
Newspapers are much like toenails; one can take all the clippings one wants, but something uncannily similar will merely grow in its place, while the off-cuts curl and yellow. Some cuttings I have taken include:
"And given the absence of preconceptions, everything that follows has a little more of an emotional edge."
The Boston Phoenix on Uh Huh Her by Ms Polly Jean Harvey
"Every track has some sort of melodic edge…"
Mr Kris Ex of Rolling Stone reviewing Mr Mather’s The Eminem Show
"The album was produced, for the most part, by the R’n‘B beatmaster Timbaland, who gave a propulsive rhythmic edge to a collection of songs bursting with energy, wit and glamour."
A The Times comment on Ms Furtado’s tour promoting the album, Loose
"The theatrical edge to his performance has been replaced now by polish."
Mr Morrissey described by the Telegraph
All fair comment and well-informed personal opinion, I have no doubt. No musiphilosoph worth their soph would pronounce doubt over any such statements; they would, instead, note a certain trait that I’m sure the ever-patient reader has noticed. The word ‘edge’ seems to have a particular pre-eminence in all these and other musical descriptions. And this word, with its structural resonance and concrete imagery, is central to the visual metaphor of the moment. Whether it is the construction of a song or the hulking body of rock’n‘roll itself, the current fashion is for a mental picture with edges. Not one solitary edge, like a razor, but many edges: melodic, emotional, theatrical, rhythmic. If you imagine music now, you must imagine it polygonal (Fig. above).
Fig. above is a current pop song rendered in two dimensions. It is composed of n edges, but, for convenience sake, I have only drawn six. Amongst these sides we have the emotional edge, the melodic edge and others taken from my clippings. There is also a retrospective edge, a sexual edge, a philosophical edge and on back into infinity. The full number of edges and their individual characteristics is, perhaps, unknowable, although taking a protractor and set-square to XTC’s Another Satellite may help. No journalist, though, would attempt to describe all the component parts; it is sufficient to speak of one side, while intimating those unseen, unheard and infinite others. This particular approach may result in a non-uniform polygonal representation of the song, where the emphasised quality seems to dominate the others. In a song with only three distinguishable edges, this longer side is equal to the hypotenuse, with all the geometric properties that entails. One such song might be Ms Lee’s Fever, which is more heavily rhythmic than it is melodic or emotional, but moreso of all three than anything else. It is illustrated by fig. left.
What could be the reason behind this particular translation of aural to visual, I don’t know. A possible solution lies in the desire for music journalists to invest the topic of their professional discussion with greater worth. By implying this multiplicity of edges, they are trying to paint pop as being many-sided or multi-faceted; it is a thing possessed of and by various elements. Rather than being mere ephemera, pop is reshaped as something higher and, frankly, more rounded. Because, as we know, the more edges a shape has, the smaller each edge must be and the rounder the shape appears. Presented as the equal of the more grown-up classical and jazz, it is easier to find meaning or content within the structure – meaning is represented in figs above and left by red shading. Thus, as in fig. right, should an edge be removed (in this case, it was the harmonic edge) the content will spill out and the song will sound hollow and without any real meaning. The most derogatory comment that one can make is to suggest that a piece ‘lacks edge,’ while the term ‘edgy’ is largely considered complementary.
Through my studies, I have come to favour a different mode of representation; the simple circle. It stands as a perfect metaphor – the platonic ideal of rock’n‘roll is, as the press men and women suggest, rounded, like the supposed higher musical arts, but we all know that those crafted by human hands will always be slightly crooked, except for Mr Da Vinci’s lovely records from 1479. The choice of model incorporates the impossibility of translating the model into actual terms. Also, if one draws a straight line through any part of a circle, the resulting areas are called chords, which are the same things one finds when one slices open a rock song. All of which can be seen in fig. below.
However, the centre of rock is, I fear, not the nebulous quality of meaning or intent, but, more simply, desire. Nor, do I think that the containing factor is these edges and qualities to which the song may lay claim, but rather the single curtailing line of frustration. The authentic singer-songwriter, meaning well and meaning his or her own truth, desires, but is only compelled to write when this want is denied; they shepherd desire into the pen of frustration. Equally, the professional song-seller channels the desires of their audience into a single singer singing a single song on a single, quelling the listeners’ frustration at their own inarticulacy.
The heart of rock’n‘roll, then, is neither its worthy meanings nor component parts, but the two forces pushing against each other. It is this surface tension, like that in a bubble, which shapes our specimen into a fragile, tenuous circle.
What sound would, thus, proffer forward were we to remove this important tension? Why, what sound would one expect when the surface of a bubble is slackened? Pop! That is the music of simple, innocent desires easily granted (The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand) or deepest, primal urges offered without restriction (Ms Spears’ Slave 4 U). If one were to pictorialise the modern pop song, with its pretence of sexual freedom and easy gratification, one could do no better than to draw a gloopy splatter. It is practically a Rorschach inkblot test, waiting only for one to read into it whatever one desires.