It's Not Even Past #19 - The Crisis of What is Art - Part 3 - Halfish

So believe it or not, I was already going begin this podcast by using the example of hip hop to weigh the differences of how and when and why we should take popular art seriously. I wrote some of what follows three weeks ago. Then it was announced this week that Kendrick Lamar won this year's Pulitzer Prize for music in circumstances that the classical music world finds extremely controversial.

I honestly don't know why anyone cares. Awards are stupid, they don't matter. They do not reward achievement, they reward power and are a way for the the award committee to increase their influence. The vast majority of award committees bestow awards because they want to make some kind of grand political statement or a statement of office politics that advances their own careers by bestowing a favor on this or that person who can do something for them. The only award in the arts that matters is not that a work receive an award, but that the work be watched and listened to, often and actively. And on that account, Kendrick Lamar and a hundred other potential winners from popular music have so exceeded any classical composer in America in appreciation that I have no idea why such an award would even appeal to them.

Awards carry the foul stench of respectability. An artform becoming accepted by the establishment is, by definition, a sign that its ability to create work that subverts our expectations of what art can be is growing more limited. There are all sorts of critics in various fields who will tell you that the worst thing to happen to movies and jazz and many other American artforms was that they received academic recognition. Once they began to be grown in the academic test tube, they lost a large part of their general appeal; they ceased to be a regular ritual in the American way of life, they ceased to be subversive, they ceased to matter to people's lives in anything like the same way. So no matter whether or not Kendrick Lamar deserves a Pulitzer Prize, most compositions which get it don't. Let rappers and rock guitarists get it and seem thereafter as dull as us stodgy composers, and perhaps a tradeoff can happen that makes classical music subversive enough to attract just a million or two of Kendrick's listeners.

And even if awards were not a joke, the Pulitzer for Music was always clearly a bit of a joke.  It didn't just go only to composers, but composers of extremely academic credentials. The list of American composers who never got one is a bit of an honor role: John Cage, Phillip Glass, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, Conlon Nancarrow, Meredith Monk, Morton Feldman, even jazz greats like Ellington, Monk, and Coltrane were only awarded Pulitzers for lifetime achievement posthumously - but not even a lifetime Pulitzer for Miles, Mingus, Basie, Bird, Brubeck, Nina Simone,... The only two pieces of music that ever got the award that are unassailably standard repertoire now are Copland's Appalachian Spring and perhaps Ives's Third Symphony. Both were rewarded in the Pulitzer's first ten years. Meanwhile, there are Pulitzers rewarded for such luminaries as Leo Sowerby, Gail Kubik, Quincy Porter, John La Montaine, Robert Ward, Leslie Bassett, Richard Wernick, Michael Colgrass, Roger Reynolds, Mel D. Powell, Wayne Peterson, George Walker, Melinda Wagner, and Henry Brant. These are the names of the composers I've never heard of, and if I've never heard of them, nobody has.

This being 2018, it can't be surprising that an award which was so pointlessly elitist for the better part of fifty years would slip into a populist overcorrection. Is Damn really as good as all that? Well...  I'm sorry to say that I think it is absolutely not, and it would make my life a little easier if I could say that I liked it, but for a good 70-75% of the album, I really, really, didn't. At some points of the album I was somewhere between stifling laughs and gagging. And giving this the Pulitzer Prize is pathetically pointless political posturing, as pathetic as it was to give an award to a composer nobody listens to who might reciprocate by giving you the award the next year, it is perhaps pathetic on a revolutionary scale for a committee of non-specialists like those who now distribute the music Pulitzer, and who wanted a huge gesture like the Nobel's awarding Dylan the Nobel to show that we live in a new, revolutionary era, where the rules of what once was literature or music no longer apply, because the reciprocity becomes so obvious - they want more people to care about the Pulitzer Prize, so they give it to a major celebrity whose aim is a little further up from middlebrow and who at least tries to make something genuinely good in at least some songs. I'm obviously well too stereotypically old-fashioned to call myself anything like a connoisseur of rap or hip hop, but I can name a few albums I really enjoyed when I've listened to them over the years - De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, Jurassic 5's Quality Control, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, and like everybody in college in 2003 it was impossible to get away from Outkast's double album - Speakerboxx and The Love Below. But I've been putting off truly giving hip hop an exhaustive listen to for years and years, though I suppose I've heard just about every song that the average white guy's heard. I suppose the reason is that the best thing which could happen is that I think it's great, in which case I'm yet another white guy who's seen as trying to seem cooler than he is, and the worst is that I would think it's terrible and spend the rest of my life trying to avoid the topic.

Regardless of what one thinks, one way or the other, about rap and hip hop being music or literature, or whether people who don't listen to hip hop consistently have a tin ear for what makes it great, or if racial bias informs such judgements, there were parts of this album I enjoyed very much, but I thought the human qualities of the album were lacking; I thought it was pointlessly, irritatingly, maddeningly self-obsessed. And because I know some people might say 'Evan's not taking this seriously enough' I'll tell you what I think of every track.

The first track, Blood, is in many ways the most interesting, it's a story that can be interpreted all kinds of different allegorical ways. Then we get DNA, which is, frankly, a not particularly profound or clever comment on race relations. Yah is just kind of a look at his life as a celebrity, and a generation that doesn't hear about Kendrick Lamar every day will not care nearly as much. Element I just found annoying, and while Feel is good, but I feel like I shouldn't need to point out that it's pretty goddamn narcissistic. As for Loyalty, it's a little creepy to feature Rihanna, whose relationship with Chris Brown was so famously violent, on a song about looking for someone who would die for their loyalty to you. Considering how many people who applauded this Pulitzer congratulate themselves on their sensitivities and progressivism, my hunch is that they turn a blind eye, or more to the point, a bruised eye, to the meaning behind this song, which seems to look at such violence with a kind of approval. The insights in Pride aren't exactly deep. I suppose Humble is a parody of bad or stereotypical rap, or at least I hope it is, because the best interpretation I can give to it is that seems like he's doing this song just to show his superiority to it. As for Lust, every time I hear the refrain 'Let me put the head in' I had to stifle a laugh. Love is a much better song, at least it expresses something giving, something that feels like it reaches out toward giving a piece of this incredibly absorbed self to another person. It took eleven songs, somewhere between thirty-five to forty minutes, before I was genuinely impressed by the poetry of Kendrick's rapping. In XXX, finally, I felt the visceral force that everybody seems to now say makes Kendrick Lamar the greatest rapper of this time, and perhaps any. This song is a real statement about America that says something complex about it, a song with a kind of Whitmanian breath and as much a kind of response to Whitman's celebration of America as Langston Hughes's. At least the first two verses of Fear seem to be about somebody who's not Kendrick Lamar, or at least not Kendrick Lamar after he became a celebrity. This is a song which shows that he understands the concerns of his most devoted listeners, but then it becomes about Kendrick again. As for God, just remember these four lines:

Everything I do is to embrace y'all/Everything I write is a damn eight ball/Everything I touch is a damn gold mine/Everything I say is from an angel. 

Either this is God speaking, or this is the rapper speaking, and if Kendrick means himself, he's a narcissist. Duckworth, on which the album ends, is another story, autobiographical this time, and not nearly as interesting as Blood

I've said many times when this podcast was just a blog, there are demonstrable quantitative facts about many artistic creators - there are too many objective facts about Shakespeare's innovations to argue that his greatness is only a matter of opinion, the fact of his 28,000 word vocabulary, the number of which he invented is said by most estimates to be in the thousands, the fact that virtually all plays followed the mould of Aeschylus and Sophecles until Shakespeare broke it more than 2000 years later: The same Aristotelean unities: minimal subplots, occur over 24 hours, and always exist in the same physical space. Or the fact that characters before Shakespeare did not have contradictory motives, there was nothing of the conflict between Iago's public self vs. his private motives, nothing of Hamlet's vacillation between his extreme rationality and madness. There were inklings of authors who could portray the messy inwardness of the human experience, perhaps a little bit of that inner life here and there in Chaucer, or in a number of characters in what's commonly called the Old Testament, but portraying inner human conflict was never the point of telling those stories. So you may disagree that Shakespeare is great, but because of these facts, the burden of proof is on you, not on those who assert his greatness.

Now, people like to point out that many hip-hop artists have coined as many words as Shakespeare. Does this mean that they're artistically as great as Shakespeare? Well, no, there are still a lot of other objective innovations that Shakespeare produced with which they have to contend. I will accept though, that if I wanted to prove that there is nothing great about hip-hop, and I certainly don't, then the burden of proof would be on me. 

But the innovations of hip-hop are clearly not fabricated, and because of them they deserve more respect than they often get. What is fabricated in hip-hop, as it is in every modern genre of popular music, is the illusion that you need to be great in any sense to rise to the top of your profession. In the 60's, at the same time that The Beatles and Dylan and The Beach Boys were making albums which now seem like they will never die, there was no real difference between their popularity and The Monkees, The Archies, Herman's Hermits, Sonny and Cher... Most of us were around in the 90's, so think back, who was actually more popular: Tupac and Biggie, Jurassic 5, Public Enemy? Or was it Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Puff Daddy, DMX? I know which I remember from those years... Now as then, a marketable product is what really keeps the music industry afloat, and skill is something optional for celebrated musicians to learn rather than a necessity. So because of that, when we really start investigating popular musical genres, we have to expect that the appeal of at least half of it is not based on any real quality. Say what you will about those staid, wheezing old arts, classical training as a musician or actor or poet is a real skill it takes a decade to learn and the rest of your life to keep up. You may find it rather distant from your life experience, but the skill needed to produce it provides automatic quality control. Now I'm sure some people will view that as a straw man argument, but then again, the same people probably view everything I've said so far as exactly that.

Furthermore, think about the importance of the producer in all forms of popular music. A good chunk of the finished product is not made by the artist who gets the lion's share of the credit. I have no doubt that it takes great skill and practice to be a great rapper, and the skill it takes to rap well is much more obvious than the skill it takes to write a popular song, but the music behind the rhymes is almost completely ancillary to the skill of rapping, it usually seems to be done by somebody else, and when the rapping is good enough, does an impressive sample add something or does it get in the way?

This is not to say that the skill of popular musicians isn't often extremely impressive, but because the control of the popular musician, or even a jazz musician, is not as complete as a classical composer's, who gives the performer instructions on every note and exactly how to play every note, neither is the achievement, and I have a very deep hesitation about allowing for the thought that a great achievement by a musician who leaves so many details of the music for others to decide is on the same level as a musician who controls everything about the music. That's not to say that there aren't popular musicians who haven't produced great art, but no matter how out-of-date my views are, I still think it's a bit of a scandal to say that even though Lennon and McCarthy and Dylan wrote great songs, to call them great artists, or at least titans on the level of even the great classical composers who wrote mostly song or lieder for voice and piano like Schubert, Mussorgsky, Hugo Wolf, Faure, Grieg, is a kind of artistic scandal.

And this kind of draconian standard goes particularly for the music I write. I wouldn't dare call myself a great composer, or maybe even a good one, because I'm not even sure that what I do these days is composition. I think a lot of what I write is good, but I wouldn't dare put it on the level of even a second-rate true composer. I discovered as a teenager that I had a gift for musical improvisation, and in my twenties I discovered I had a gift for musical arrangement, and my compositions carry improvisation and arrangement to what I think is a logical next step. For the last two years, the way I've mostly written is to give musicians a single page of music, and let them improvise on it ad nauseum. I then take the best samples from it, and a producer far more skilled with musical technology than I helps me to create inventive possibilities from it that I imagine in my head. From the earliest age, my greatest musical ambition was to be a conductor, not to be a composer, and I often think of what I do in the recording studio as a kind of higher-dimension conducting in which I give shape to the great talents and harder work of other musicians, no doubt many of whom long since proved themselves more skilled musicians than I.