I was recently listening to the song Age of Consent by New Order and I was struck for maybe the first time by just how wonderful is the opening bassline. I mean, I’ve definitely noticed that bassline before. You have to notice it if you’ve ever listened to the song. It is the only thing one really hears for the first few seconds and it sets up everything else.
I’ve been listening to Erik Satie’s symphonic work—yes, I think it is something we would call a symphonic work—a piece he called Socrate. It is sort of an opera, though not really an opera exactly. It is a hybrid piece that I think he actually called a symphonic drama. Anyway, it is about Socrates. Satie took some bits of dialogue from a number of different spots in the Platonic corpus and then strung them together into a kind of sung dialogue with a musical composition in the background.
Hearing Marianne Faithfull sing “Don’t Forget Me” you realize that it could have been written by Kurt Weil and sung by Lotte Lenya. It’s an unknown B-Side from the Threepenny Opera. It’s a burnt out torch song from the last days of the Weimar Republic. Faithfull pronounces some of the lines, “Let me know you think about me too,” with a Deutsch-inflected lilt that sounds like maybe Lenya is singing them, or Marlene Dietrich. Faithfull knew what she was doing. She knew the ghosts she was summoning.
In the video recording of The Cure performing A Forest for Dutch television in 1980 one encounters a version of The Cure that doesn’t quite jibe with later versions of the band. Robert Smith, in particular, has short spiky hair and looks nothing like the fully-coiffed gothic prince that he would soon become. He also looks annoyed or indifferent.
The marvelous thing about the first paragraph of Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), by Patrick Mackie, is how carefully the narrator builds Mozart’s world in front of our eyes, as if it were being created sentence by sentence as we read about it.
I actually don’t think there are words that properly convey what Sinéad conveyed with her music and this is precisely the point. The words mostly get in the way. They are too precise or not precise enough. The things that Sinéad was trying to say are not communicated as declarative sentences or explanations or anything like that. More than anything, what Sinéad did, I think, was to make sounds.
One does not always think of German as a beautiful language. Okay, probably one never thinks this. It is the language of Hitler, after all. It is the language of spitting and of bringing up guttural noises from the back of one’s throat. The 1987 film Wings of Desire, though, and among many other things, is a movie about language and about how even German has its angelic side.
Music was easily the most enjoyable aspect of writing my novel Absolute Music. I mean the sheer amount of contemplative time spent listening to the great range of music mentioned in the novel, all of which I’ve assembled in a Spotify playlist. Not included in that playlist is nearly an album’s worth of Bob Dylan songs which are only alluded to in the text, not mentioned outright.
When, exactly, did this grammar of grief emerge? In my lifetime, it would seem to be the daily pages of biographies of 9/11 dead published in The New York Times’s landmark project, A Nation Challenged. And the homemade posters of the missing that flocked the walls and telephones of the city.
I was watching Oneohtrix Point Never trying to figure out just what the heck exactly it is about The Weeknd, who released his most recent album, Dawn FM, a couple of weeks ago, and I have never quite been able to understand why I am both attracted to and repelled by everything that is The Weeknd.
My sister’s listening habits introduced me to the Beatles, but I came to my own appreciation of them later, listening to reissued LPs and CDs at a temporal remove from the heady days when they and the Rolling Stones ruled the world of rock music.