Waxing on Wax Over the Weekend

At some point in the last week or two, I stocked my Amazon cart with six of the Continuum 33 1/3 series of books on legendary rock albums (Unknown Pleasures, Low, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Pet Sounds, Exile on Main St., and Sign O’ the Times). Late to the game, I know. Well, it turns out that, completely coincidentally (and a bit strangely), there emerged over the weekend a bit of “meta-meta” waxing, about the books themselves and their possible impact on or reflection of the current status of rock. I then got to do one of my favorite things, which is to read two of my favorite bloggers, Prof. Drew LeDrew from Chemistry Class (who’s done a bit of literary anthologizing himself) and Carl Wilson of Zoilus (who’s writing a book in the series on Celine Dion!), weigh in on Rob Horning’s April 5th Pop Matters essay about the Continuum series.

In his essays, Horning likes to take things to their “logical conclusions”, an example of which can be found in an earlier piece on mp3 blogs, a bit of didactic technological determinism where he positions music fans as passive consumers lapping up the taste culture surrounding them, which leads to an age where one “can do away with the whole process of working up your identity altogether”, and have it done instead through technology. He comes out in favor of the more traditional hoarding/gatekeeping mentality towards music, offering that it’s “cheapened” when distributed digitally. Naturally, I took umbrage.

In his current piece on the Continuum series, Horning again begins by positioning technology (not the human agents that power it) as what shattered the album format into millions of pieces, to be put back together via the tech-approved compilation discs and iPod Shuffle. He then situates the Continuum series as a stick in the sand by a “fresh cohort of intellectuals” to stem the tide of the remix culture and reclaim the album as the quintessential music format. Danger again enters the picture, though, as the critics effectively remove, through the act of writing, the music from its “pop” (as in intended for all) origins and elevate it to the realm of ivory tower academic culture, which is essentially what I though he was fighting for in the previous article, in which mp3 blogs threatened music’s hallowed place in the hands of collectors. But when critics (and artists—Colin Meloy and Bill Janovitz participate) write books about classic albums, they’re “taking (albums) out of the realm of spontaneous appreciation by fans, and organiz(ing) the discipline of album criticism as the specific practice of experts”, and turning them into “rarified and arcane objects of mystical potency that one must approach with the diligence, reverence, and thoroughness of a Talmud scholar.”

Horning, through these two articles, is playing both sides of a debate, essentially, on musical knowledge—specifically, music in mp3 form threatens the hoarding collector, and music in book form fails to appeal to those without the cultural capital to “understand” what’s going on. Both points bring up the issue of what it is to “know” music, and thus in whose hands the canon of pop music resides. The Continuum series is a rock canon of sorts, but at least it’s one comprised of a relatively diverse body of idiosyncratic music lovers (bless Wilson for including Celine), as opposed to those determined strictly by sales (RIAA), stuffy industry types (the R&R HoF, The Grammys), or an emergent coterie of po-mo writers (Pitchfork). The best thing about the series (this is based on the fact that I haven’t read one of the books, but only reviews of them) is that the books often seem to be autobiographical in nature. From a pragmatic perspective, it insulates them from being regarded as deterministic—like, this album means this. Instead, we get this album means this to me. While it can apparently still be a bit stuffy, it seems as if it’s as close as we’re going to get to a bonafide popular canon, where to know music is, to a degree, to have lived music.

Filed under: 33 1/3 series  canon creation  Continuum  Rob Horning