The Reading Experience

Watching the Flags of Freedom

I've only just recently listened to Neil Young's Living With War, even though it came out months ago, and even though from what I could tell from reviews I was sure I would agree with its expressed outrage about the invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration more generally. Regular readers of this blog can probably guess why, since I've made my impatience with politicized art pretty clear. I admire Neil Young's body of work probably more than any other in the history of rock and roll (or at least I respond to it most readily), and although I'm willing to allow him an occasional polemical outburst (especially under the current circumstances), I assumed I would find this album fairly dispensable.

But I've actually been playing the thing over and over. Musically it's somewhere between Young's folky and his rocking modes (around the two of which he tends to oscillate). "After the Garden" and "Living With War" seem to me essentially folk-style protest songs revved up by Young's loud and impassioned electic guitar, while "Shock and Awe" and "The Restless Consumer" are hard-rocking shout-outs. Most of the tunes likewise seem pretty familiar variations on both his folk- and rock-derived song structures, which in this case only makes the songs seem more immediate, and ultimately the power trio format(fleshed out by an occasional trumpet and a choir) creates the kind of stripped-down sound that reinforces the urgency of the music.

Lyrically, the songs are equally simple, sometimes almost embarrasingly ingenuous when recited as verse: "Let's impeach the President for lying/and misleading our country into war,/abusing all the power that we gave him/ and shipping all our money out the door." But of course it's not verse, it's rhymed anger, and again the plain talk only reinforces the sense of urgency the album conveys, its high-decibel sincerity. It's reported that Young and company recorded the album in just a few days, some of the songs being written on the spot, and while the result does indeed seem rather loose-jointed, its unrehearsed quality is finally its greatest strength.

Perhaps this is the way to make "political art." Forget the art and scream, albeit with enough modulation in your voice to make the sound arresting. Admit you're not using the medium for artistic purposes at all, but to vent your rage and dissent and to provide a momentary opportunity for your audience to do the same. This is surely not an unworthy activity, although I don't see why it needs to be artificially elevated in importance by hailing it as a great aesthetic accomplishment.

Which is not to say that Living With War is all clamorous if rousing bombast. "Flags of Freedom" is almost subtle in its effect--if you weren't hearing it in the context of the rest of the album, you could almost take its description of the day "our younger son is going off to war" as a tribute to American soldiers and their martial spirit. And it is, as well as a paean to small-town values, except that the senseless mission on which the soldiers are being sent is ominously suggested in the song's images and its reference to the Bob Dylan song "in 1963" ("Chimes of Freedom"). "Flags of Freedom," as well as "Families," leavens the protest with honest observation of duty and sacrifice. Ultimately, these touches make the record somewhat less than (or more than) mere polemics.

(To appreciate its virtues, it is necessary to listen to the album as a whole straight through. Sampling individual songs precisely does deprive them of the context that allows them to transcend the limitations of the "protest song" and reduces them to artless complaining.)

I don't think that years from now I'll still be listening to Living With War in the same way I'm still listening to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere or Tonight's the Night. I agree with John Kenyon that it probably won't "age well," although he seems to have lost enthusiasm for it more quickly than I have. For now, it has helped to channel my own fury at the current state of the world, which is not nothing.

Staying at a Holiday Inn

From Time's interview with Neil Young:

I'm as predictable as a Holiday Inn when you really look at me. I keep doing the same thing all over again. I just make records, and the records are usually some sort of turnabout from the last record. It took me a long time to write this record [Prairie Wind]. I didn't write anything for two years after Greendale. . .'cause Greendale was a completely draining experience and a huge project that I think was one of the best things I have been able to do in my life, and a lot of people were lost by it, but that doesn't mean anything. A lot of people in the middle of the road don't pick up on what I'm doing when I'm not in the middle of the road, and it's an accident and a pleasant one when I do end up [there] and traffic is with me.

Undoubtedy it is Young's "acoustic records" that are most likely to take him to the "middle of the road". For those whose acquaintance with Young's music began with "Heart of Gold" or Harvest, they're more pleasant to listen to than the raucous rock'n roll records or the bitterly introspective albums like Tonight's the Night or On the Beach. Praire Wind will likely appeal to such listeners.

The first time I listened to this new album, I came to a conclusion similar to John Kenyon's:

. . .The disc has a few memorable moments, but like much of his work in the past decade, it is disappointing, containing neither the strong melodies nor homespun wordplay that elevates the best of his work. Instead we get odd namechecks of Chris Rock, the umpteenth song about Elvis being "the King" and a tune about Young's guitar.

I've listened to it about five times now, and it gets better each time I hear it. It's true that the disc doesn't have many "strong melodies" (except for, perhaps "The King," which is indeed more or less a throwaway, but I like it nonetheless), and the lyrics are more plainspoken in their, in this case, directly homespun way. Musically speaking, one could swear that some of the songs are near-cousins to those on Comes a Time or Harvest Moon. But the theme of the record (or one of the themes) is the passage of time, and songs that recall old Neil Young songs is arguably an appropriate way to emphasize lyrics that often evoke Young's childhood and his childhood home in Winnipeg, Canada.

This memorial quality is, of course, also appropriate for a group of songs that were written while Young was being diagnosed and treated for a brain aneurysm. But their pensive tone (leavened with humor, it must be said) never becomes merely sentimental, and the country-ish feel of many of them lends them a certain dignity. It's the kind of record that's best appreciated as a sequential whole rather than as a collection of discrete songs--in my opinion, something one finds in all too few pop music albums these days.

At any rate, the release of Praire Wind gives me an opportunity to voice how much Neil Young's music has meant to me for a very long time, and, because of that, how much leeway I'm willing to give him when he produces an album that's maybe only "middling" rather than great. If you want great, go listen again to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

Betrayed

Roger Ebert admits that until he saw Martin Scorcese's No Direction Home he never really forgave Bob Dylan for the behavior he exhibited in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967):

In my review, I called the movie "a fascinating exercise in self-revelation," and added: "The portrait that emerges is not a pretty one." Dylan is seen not as a "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies," I wrote, but is "immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright."

I felt betrayed. In "Don't Look Back," he mercilessly puts down a student journalist, and is rude to journalists, hotel managers, fans. . .

Well, it's hard to be gracious and understanding, I'd guess, when you're writing and recording some of the most innovative and entrancing popular music ever recorded and the best those you're performing it for can do is heckle and jeer. It's not that Dylan was attempting to be the "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies." He was trying to push his talent as far as it would take him, which also meant he had to leave the earnest folk music that made him popular behind. You'd think that those who had previously professed to admire him for his music--as opposed to the political posturing they apparently thought that music represented--might have been willing to give him a little room in which to do this.

People who still prefer Dylan the early protest singer probably have never really "gotten" what he was up to in such albums as Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. His turn to surrealism and other forms of hallucinatory lyricism required that he abandon the folk ballad-derived melodies with which he began for the fuller rock-based sound to be found on these records. (Although of course the influence of these ballads would always remain.) In the process he transformed rock 'n roll into a form of popular music capable of a kind of aesthetic seriousness, a form that in the hands of other talented people as well (John Lennon, Pete Townsend, Neil Young) could extend its own musical possibilities and sometimes express complex sentiments and ideas.

These albums did undeniably mark a kind of repudiation of the politicized folk music those fans in Pennebaker's film wanted to protect. But I don't think Dylan wanted to dismiss this music altogether; he merely wanted to illustrate through example that it had its inherent limitations. Ultimately Dylan was more interested in music per se and in lyrical content as a continuation and complement of purely musical values than in "protest," in "saying something." To me the hectoring audiences captured in Pennebaker's film and sampled by Scorsese represent a view of "folk music" as virtuous attitude rather than as what Dylan later called that "old, strange music." It's what makes so much of this music from the early 1960s almost unlistenable now.

A Musical Interlude

Not long ago I participated in a lively comments discussion at another weblog wherein I defended "modern" art music. (I actually enjoy modern music, not just admire it in a detached sort of way.) The majority opinion among those commenting seemed to be that modern music isn't music at all, just noise, and that only pre-twentieth century music, or modern music hearkening back to it, could even be called musical. This is an argument easily transferable to literature, since modern literature too is senseless, too difficult, and only pre-modern fiction and poetry are real, "normal" works of literature.

The April 23 issue of the Times Literary Supplement offers a version of this debate, as David Pitt, a philosopher at Cal State-Long Beach, reviews two books by the music critic Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, and Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Kivy is the anti-modernist, arguing, in Pitt's words, that "the emotions we ascribe to music are properties of the music, not the listener." Music doesn't evoke an emotional response, it embodies emotion in its very nature. Thus, any music that doesn't manifest a recognizable emotion (by implication at least, all of "dissonant" modernist music) couldn't be music.

This is a fairly transparent way of rejecting experimental music--just as many others reject experimental fiction or poetry because it's also "dissonant"--and Pitt does a good job of diagnosing its flaws. In responding to Kivy's claim that "when we characterize music as yearning, or angry, joyous or melancholy, we. . . are not saying. . .that the music makes us yearn, or be angry, joyous, or melancholy, but that it is those things," Pitt quite rightly points out that "Taken literally,. . .this would be absurd. A piece of music is not a sentient being, and cannot itself be in an emotional state." But arguments about music of the sort Kivy advances are intended to be taken literally, since if we settle for the listener's experience of various emotions (or anything else you'd care to call them), an irretrievable element of subjectivity is being granted, the kind of subjectivity that makes "modern" atonal music possible in the first place. It's all in the ear of the listener.

What really interests me most about Pitt's account of Kivy's books, however, is the additional discussion of what Kivy calls the "problem" of opera. According to Pitt:

. . .at one point Kivy claims that the crux of the problem of opera (and all music with text) is that music is essentially a repetitive art form, while literature is not. Musical form is determined by musical repetition, whereas literature (especially narrative fiction) is ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical. There is thus a deep incommensurability between them, and, hence, the problem of opera is insoluble.

Kivy must have "narrative fiction" in mind (although the real analogy would seem to be with drama), since poetry is of course full of repetition. Nevertheless, Pitt convincingly observes that the "repetition" involved in music "does not have to be literal" since "[in] the freely atonal piano pieces of Berg and Webern, for example, coherence and structure are achieved without literal repetition of whole sections. These works. . .have structure and coherence, though the musical relations that determine them are rarely on the surface of the music and almost never involve literal repetition."

Pitt also questions Kivy's assertion about literature, but not nearly as strenuously as he could. To what extent is it true that literature, even granting the narrowing of the term to fiction, is "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical"? Surely everyone can think of reputable works of literature that are either discontinuous, omnidirectional, or entirely cyclical, if not all three at the same time. Finnegans Wake? To the Lighthouse? Naked Lunch? V? Of course, these are all experimental, dissonant books, and the point of describing literature in the way Kivy appears to be doing it (at least according to Pitt) could well be to exclude such books from the category of "literature," just as Berg and Webern are excluded from the category of "music."

Moreover, why couldn't "repetition" be as valid a structuring device in fiction as it is in music? Pitt observes that "[c]ompletely non-repetitive music would be incoherent. If no musical event in a work bore any relation whatever of similarity or sameness to any other event, the work would not make any sense." He further observes that the same thing must be true of fiction. I would only add that to the extent any work of literature is literally a composed and arranged text of written language, it is quite like music.

Really the terms "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical" are a way of reducing literature to the element of "story." Literature, or at least fiction, is story. Which brings me to my real subject, although I will leave it with a series of questions, questions I pose in all sincerity, even if the reader probably knows how I would answer them. Must fiction's core identity ultimately be understood in terms of story, however much other elements are also emphasized? In an era when the need for story seems to be quite well met by films and television, should fiction writers also be pigeonholed as storytellers? Couldn't they simply be considered "writers," some of whom tell stories to meet particular artistic goals, others of whom essentially discard narrative, taking fiction closer to the model of lyric poetry--without quite crossing the line? Couldn't fiction do without "story" altogether?