FEATURED CD: Miriodor - Mekano

[Baribrotzer]

Sure, the ubiquitous "principle of authenticity" - which I condone myself as well. In their various outsets and antics, both The Shaggs and Beefheart/Magic Band purveyed it - or indeed Robert Wyatt on generating his rendition of "jazz" and "soul", which arguably came out as the most idiosyncratic, original and wholly personal pop/rock music of all time.

There's one difference, though:

From Trout Mask on, Captain Beefheart wasn't trying to be anybody but himself - although some of his earlier music did seem like an odd, inaccurate attempt at straight-up blues/R&B. I don't know Wyatt's career well enough to pinpoint when he stopped trying to do jazz or soul music, and just started being himself without worrying about genre - although none of what I've heard, going back to Soft Machine I, sounded like soul music at all, and only peripherally like jazz. And I think Talking Heads pretty quickly realized that even working with Bernie Worrell, they couldn't ever do anything but a sort of strange white-boy art-school version of funk. All of them, though, could play music fairly well - they were just better at creating stylistically original work than at copying others correctly. And I suspect none of them ever tried all that hard to make music that sounded exactly like other peoples' music, or sounded like anything but what they heard in their heads.

But the Shaggs, on the other hand, were always trying to be Herman's Hermits crossed with church camp singalongs, and wound up doing something else because they really were inept.

[Scrotum Scissor]

the Shaggs, on the other hand, were always trying to be Herman's Hermits crossed with church camp singalongs. They wound up doing something else because they really were inept. Beefheart, Wyatt, and the Heads, though, could all play music fairly well - they were just better at creating stylistically original work than at copying others accurately.

All true.

The Shaggs ended up as firmly original as they did without even being aware of that virtue; whereas the others mentioned essentially found a way to "let it out". There's a quite significant difference there, I concur.

Then what about those "progressive" or ANY artists who apparently spend most of their time scrutinizing how to best avoid the "letting out"?

[Baribrotzer]

Then what about those "progressive" or ANY artists who apparently spend most of their time scrutinizing how to best avoid the "letting out"?

Because if you're trying to make a career of it, the way to succeed is to fit into a genre and sound like the other artists in that genre.

"Progressive" artists, though? I don't know. In a way, the whole process of becoming and being a "good musician" works against developing an original voice: You learn how to play your instrument well, in the sense of knowing its established techniques and stylistic history and knowing them thoroughly. You either develop your ear until you know what you're hearing and can reproduce it, or learn to read music quickly and accurately, or both. You learn music theory, either formally, or by playing a lot of cover songs until you have an instinct for how music goes together, a sense of "if I do this, it will sound like that.

All of which means that if you fall in love with, say, the Beach Boys' harmonies, you can duplicate them exactly, rather than taking from the Beach Boys the idea of vocal harmonies, then developing your own take on them. If you admire Tony Banks's songwriting, you can hear how his songs go together, hear what kind of chords he uses and how he moves them, and do something similar yourself. So what you come up with runs the risk of being a pastiche of what you love. But how much of you is in it? Hard to say.

One difference between rock music and other types of music, though: In most kinds of music, change and innovation comes from master musicians - musical geniuses who've mastered their entire idiom top to bottom, still feel unsatisfied, hear something that goes beyond their artistic present, and create that something. That's pretty much the pattern in jazz and classical music. But in rock, new ideas come just as much from primitives of a sort, from people who have more interest in getting the sounds inside their heads out into the world than in mastering their craft.

[Scrotum Scissor]

One difference between rock music and other types of music, though: In most kinds of music, change and innovation comes from master musicians - musical geniuses who've mastered their entire idiom top to bottom, still feel unsatisfied, hear something that goes beyond their artistic present, and create that something. That's pretty much the pattern in jazz and classical music. But in rock, new ideas come just as much from primitives of a sort

With this I partly agree. But not fully. Although obviously as rock is (or at least used to be) a "popular music" medium, the creed dynamic of established idioms would imply that there were originators and ardent followers, with the latter often MORE commercially/popularly successful than their heroes (just think of acts as disparate as R.E.M., Metallica or Nirvana, all of whom more or less confessed to having "stolen" much of their own sound from lesser known names) - and this all being an accepted rule of the game. However, during the approx interim 1966-74 or so, circumstances deemed things somewhat different; The Beatles, Beach Boys, the Stones, The Who, Dylan, The Byrds, the Airplane etc. - these were some of the leading trademarks of rock/pop music yet also complete innovators continuously taking risks while still at their popular peaks. Granted there haven't been too many examples of that contrarian dynamic afterwards, With the exception of perhaps only a handful of artists like Radiohead or Björk.

Of course, one of the great ironies (and some would even say tragedies) of so-called progressive rock was that its hallowing of pure creativity as defining virtue - perhaps even at the cost of technical proficience - pretty much halted as the concept became an object of mercantile affinity.

[Baribrotzer]

Although obviously as rock is (or at least used to be) a "popular music" medium, the creed dynamic of established idioms would imply that there were originators and ardent followers, with the latter often MORE commercially/popularly successful than their heroes (just think of acts as disparate as R.E.M., Metallica or Nirvana, all of whom more or less confessed to having "stolen" much of their own sound from lesser known names) - and this all being an accepted rule of the game.

In rock, though, the bar for originality doesn't have to be all that high. And at least one of those bands were partial primitives:

• Part of REM's early sound came from Pete Buck not being able to play much guitar. He only knew a few standard chords, and couldn't play riffs or leads at all, so he worked with what he had - those chorused arpeggios on chordal suspensions seem to have come from just experimenting with "unknown" chord forms until he found a sound that he liked, one that lead into another chord or followed from the last one. Now they may have stolen from, I don't know, some other Athens, GA band. But at a time when alt-rock consisted mostly of rackety punk, their understated moodiness was new and different, and much of it came from Pete being a musical novice and having to devise something that worked within his limitations.
  
  
• Metallica, I don't know much about. They may have stolen from Anvil, who infused metal with punk urgency - at the time a new thing. But Anvil had a silly stage show and attitude, whereas Metallica were angry and serious. It wasn't so much a musical difference, as a difference in emotional tenor that resonated more with audiences.
  
  
• Finally, Nirvana never made much of a secret of picking up things from the Melvins and from Crackerbash (an obscure Portland band who anticipated the grunge sound by a couple of years). All three bands played a punk/metal fusion as did Metallica, but turned around the other way, with metal's brutal guitar attack added to a punk base. Except Kurt Cobain could and did write pop songs, whereas (the Melvins') Buzz Osborne or (Crackerbash's) Sean Croghan either couldn't, or didn't want to. (Also, both Sean and Buzz looked like orangutangs, which might have been a factor in their bands remaining obscure.)