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Room music
Since I started this job last August, almost all the time I’ve spent listening to music has been in the office, played aloud over a couple of tinny speakers at the front. This has exercised a certain coercion on the recent direction of my taste. Leading up to this period, I was DJing semi-regularly and spending most of my disposable listening time on southern rap, eighties R&B, chart ephemera, things I’d be tempted to play out. But my current situation leaves me to choose between finding things that are both good and office-friendly, or sitting mute, letting my boss’s Jack Johnson wash over me.
This led me back into the embrace of eighties and nineties indie pop, which, as it turns out, is wonderful, lovely and unexpected; only a little colored by nostalgia, but mostly fresh from disuse. Its limitations are more manifest than they were at first, but also their irrelevance. (“Limitations” in art are, after all, as often as not about imposing inappropriate expectations.) The clarity of the indie pop tradition and the fairly reliable intelligence of each interpretation gives to each variation and new development an individual pleasure or unique disappointment that is, either way, clear and effortless.
But as there is a finite quantity of that, and a further limited subset that doesn’t have features overt and distracting — guitar distortion, say, or very twee singing — that, I learned, make it unpalatable to my coworkers. So I find myself in the market for some easily digestible chaff to stave off repetition, and that’s what led me into an altogether unfamiliar grotto. Digging through forgotten folders on my hard drive, I came across a crop of forgettable records, all from the last few years, taken on recommendation, or chance encounter, but at the time found immediately bland and offensively unassuming. These served, by their smooth, overclean surface, to be universally welcomed, or at least unnoticed. I was a little surprised by how uniformly these were accepted, actually, without regard to what I considered their relative accessibility. It threw into great contrast my coworkers’ taste for anything much older than the last few years: and it makes me wonder if the fashions of production techniques, even in relatively short and seemingly stable times, have in fact a very serious, coercive effect on more casual listeners. That’s a bit of an overstatement; developments in studio work only in the last few years are probably too modest to account for this entirely. Presumably also in play are shifting general attitudes to other surface qualities of the music itself rather than its processing: instruments’ tone, arrangements, vocal style fads.
Anyway, this round did little to revise my original appraisal of most of this stuff. But, as these albums tended to be preferable to the alternative, I found myself listening a great deal to twittery, gentle electronic pop, a genre populated by a depressingly finite array of miniature programmed drums and whispery feminine vocals. Such an invisibility can, indeed, be welcome — at work, listening to things that are consciously demanding can be tiring, even when you’re doing little more than shuffling names and numbers from one box to another — and so it happened that these records increasingly made up a wallpaper which now patterns large panels of my sixty-hour weeks.
Played over and over, one begins to discern certain familial similarities and differences. Which ones come more or less directly from what was called trip-hop, which ones more closely resemble whatever the genre is called that is composed of gossamer London lounge tracks fashioned out of rote electronic backdrops with token worldmusic appropriations. Wondering about genres like that can lead to the temptation to take on a certain dispassionate analysis. Dispassionate analysis is something I’m sort of principled against; it tends to lead to preoccupations with taxonomy or tractionless theories, but here, at least, those seem to afford some entrance or interest not really available in the music itself.
One starting point might be the supposition and comparison of rubrics for each quality that seems to be desideratum. Which one, for example, succeeds most vibrantly at doing nothing, which is most efficient at directing attention away from its melodic details and back into the atmospheric backdrop (delicately mastering a sort of aural sfumato). These are a decorative art of their own; and deserving of their own standards. But perhaps ignorance of Mega Chill-out Mix 1–30 disqualifies me from advancing a very exhaustive set of values. But what might they be generally? And where does Starbucks-music locate itself relative to this vast and rolling field? Nearby, surely. And where, then, do we put Norah Jones? Saint Etienne? Stereolab? Herb Alpert? The Junior Boys?
Remarks: 1 of 1
Remark · raef · 17 June 2007
Do tell me you play Hooverphonic at the office.