The Chatter of Pop

An Essay sprung from Visions of Joanna Newsom, edited by Brad Buchanan (Roan Press)

“The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean.”

Pop music is kept buoyant by hot air. It is the heat of hyperventilating fandom, the prefab puffery of the press release, or the hyperbole of the press room that fills and carries it.

This is not a slight; at least, all this warm breath proves that the participants are alive. But, as Umberto Eco, wrote of football, so the same is true of music – the empty chatter of the spectator removes them from the event itself.

Speak of a football fan and one suggests a person that supports and watches a team, not a person who plays for one. And, certainly, watching a side is carried out with more passion than playing ever is. Once this is sanctioned, one can see how the fan comes to care as much about the results of all games as the action of any one of them. And, thus, the empty chatter of the back pages and the tickertape of match results passing under the Sky Sports presenter become a means by which the spectator engages with the game. But these are far removed from the fundamental purpose of sport: fitness, exercise, and fun.

In a similar fashion, pop music, as a sort of spectator sport, removes the consumer from the technicalities and important banalities of music. Writing about pop seldom engages with the music itself, but, then, pop music as we know it, rejects technique and theory, so pop writing must do so too. Instead, most pop journalism focuses on the structures around the music: the lyric, the aesthetic, the biography, the sub-cultural context. And, perhaps, like the chatter of sport, these angles are just ways of trying to capture the feeling of excitement long after the goal is scored or the last note struck.

It may all work as a distraction as well, maintaining the mystery of the music, making it something distant and unknowable, a subject that can only be talked around. Even attempts to describe music seem to obfuscate it all the further. A clichéd reference to ‘angular guitars’ or ‘thundering bass’ does not allow the reader to replicate the song in their own head, as a detailed description of a painting’s composition or, even, a winning goal might. There is, of course, a method of translating music directly through print, but for music writers to reproduce scores would be asking too much of them and of their readers.

And, so, as pop cannot be seen to exclude anybody on grounds of musical knowledge (although it has its suspicions about age, sex, race, class, and sexuality), it must be spoken about in oblique terms, using only the highest of praise or the most hyperbolic of put-downs. It is from this form of discourse that the basic rhetorical styles of pop chatter come: hype, sarcasm, and mythology. There is not a pop writer alive – or, in the case of Mr. Bangs, dead – who does not depend on these to give their writing force. The problem is that the excitable, ongoing chatter of pop, all that hot air, has the natural effect of hot air pumped into a finite space: it causes a pop. How many artists, in the end, can survive being discussed in this way? Few bands reward the hype, too many are rendered kitsch by sarcasm, and some are made infallible by mythology; so much so that the music is no longer able to sing for itself.

I am happy to say, after all this hot air, that Ms. Newsom comes out of this book unscathed.

I don’t mean to suggest that the writers represented herein intended her any harm, rather that she proves herself worthy of the attention, scrutiny, and talk of the book and that the proof of this is the book itself. Through the pages of this anthology of writings, the 28 year-old Ms. Newsom – still, thankfully, older than me, but only just – justifies having such pieces written about her, by slowly revealing depths, intricacies, and artistic contradictions within her work, or allowing them to be revealed. And, conversely, the pieces within justify themselves by identifying a pop artist (a contemporary figure, not yet established as an icon and not guaranteed as much) who warrants such analysis and treating her work with the appropriate vocabulary.

The topic of Ms. Newsom’s music, per se, is broached only briefly – within Mr. Pepper’s discussion of covers of Ms. Newsom’s songs, occasional references to her use of cross-rhythms, and her relationship to ‘folk’ – but that is to be expected: it is not strictly a scholarly work. It is, instead, a collage of different approaches to pop writing, including the scholarly, but also the standard gonzo of music magazines, poetry, fiction, biography, and memoir. Like the wider chatter of pop, speaking around the central subject maintains the mystery and prolongs the excitement. Taking several angled jets of hot air and focusing them on one point, we see, where they cross, something (if there is anything) held in place, but flickering so fast that we can’t be sure what it is. But, at least, we know it’s there.

This approach to Newsom’s work is –and this comparison is made in the anthology- like the blind men groping the elephant in the poem of John Godfrey Saxe: it is much bigger than them and, as each fumbles about a separate quarter, they all find a different element to it and devise a different purpose. This same analogy was used in Ken Emerson’s introduction to 69 Love Songs: A Field Guide by LD Beghtol and could, in fact, be the most apt description for pop writing altogether. If pop writers are deaf to music or ignorant of technique or presume as much of their readership, they must grope about for analogies and comparisons that don’t quite hit the mark or suggest socio-economic significance when it’s probably not the case.

Not that such writing cannot prove insightful (although, an elephant is not a wall, a spear, a tree, a rope…). The editor’s essay on ‘affectation’ in The Milk-Eyed Mender says, not only interesting things about that work, but about the nature of performance in pop music and how women are received in it, while T.S. Miller’s piece on the folkloric origins of Colleen (from the …& the Ys Street Band epee) reveals Ms. Newsom as being an accomplished storyteller, despite the seemingly fragmentary nature of her lyrics. Even the more creative attempts, the poetry, Mr. Kahl’s strange love note to Ms. Newsom and philology, make valid arguments or recount reactions one has had or one could dream of having.

However, it is when they are taken altogether that they are most potent. Some blow hot, some cold, but together they hold Ms. Newsom in place, just for a second. And what they uncover is that she is contradictory and complex, that no two people hear her alike. There are glimpses. It takes the form of a biography of her presence, from those first of Dave Eggers’ thoughts in 2004 (here re-published from Spin magazine), through her uptake via blogs and cover versions, to the canonisation of Ys as a ‘classic work.’ It takes the form of a biography of her form: Ms. Rodes-Ta’s childhood recollections, the figure of her sister Emily, a history of her voice. It takes the form of a biography of her fans, of how they heard her one evening, one morning, one June. And, yet, Ms. Newsom doesn’t take form.

The musician comes of out the discussion, just like the music, as a mystery, something to be spoken around, as if writer or reader was not capable of fully understanding her. Not that there would have been any more use in printing the manuscript of Cosmia than the lines and dots of Ms. Newsom’s DNA. Even Ms. Fett’s study of the portrait of Ms. Newsom that adorns the front of Ys tells us more, and therefore less, about the artist, although it suggests more and more about the ideas that hang around the music.

The mystery doesn’t sound hollow though. There is no sense of hype, as if the mystery were covering something up; no sense of mythology, as if it came from the certainty of consensus and the uncertainty of our own ear. We can hear ourselves that the music goes back, back into the depths and expands far and wide, too wide for any of us to get a grasp of. The chatter of pop confirms the mystery, rather than constructing it.

And the mystery, here, prolongs the enjoyment. It sustains us, no less, from the last note of …& the Ys Street Band to the first of the upcoming Have One On Me, hoping that the next record will help explain the last. Whatever comes of the albums that follow, we may gather together more hints and clues, more information, to put with those here gathered, in these records, and in this book. For we already know that Joanna Newsom has a tail like a rope, a tusk like a spear, and a trunk, through which is blown hot air.