Journalistic intent.

It’s not all about the music – wa oh

First example : it is about the music.

In my previous post I started to write about my problem with current popular music ; the somewhat debatable use of the millennial whoop – so called : https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/?p=21727 and ended up at the point that I wanted to argue that music is, overall, much worse than it was – say when I was a lad and music was somehow more important to me than it is today.

I edited a lot out of that post when I realized that most of what I had to say was personal opinion, to my mind personal opinion counts for very little when it comes to music and I may have been falling into the same trap that many blokes of my generation do which, crudely expressed, is that everything after a certain time is essentially crap. In my case I also fell into the classic trap of letting my confirmation bias go to work with finding a Youtube video that supported my opinion rather than challenged it : the immediate problem with that approach being that you can prove or disprove/deny any opinion that you have.

A note to readers. From reading my posts you might assume that I deliberately try not to write as though i’m writing an academic essay because, in the past, I have been there, done that and found the whole process deadly dull and constraining. Recently, I helped a junior colleague with an essay that he was writing for the course he was taking. It was a tough subject to start with and had more twists and turns than the average politician and each twist needed, I felt, both engaging narrative and tight referencing : the former so that it was readable by a non academic and the latter to make it past an academic supervisor.

My advice and guidance if we can call it that was to point him towards the essay writing model given, on his teaching website, by Dr Jordan Peterson. Although it was through trying to follow his work that I decided to start this blog and kinda/sorta became a writing and photography based blogger : iv’e never thought of myself as a writer but have always preferred Stephen Fry’s snarky description of blogging as being graffiti with punctuation……except that I still have days where my grammar, punctuation,syntax and sentence structure are poor. Dr Peterson’s work in setting out a structure for his students to write acceptable essays was mostly what I encouraged my colleague to shoot for although it should be obvious that i’m trying to write engaging and entertaining posts – not academic essays.

With reference to my millennial whoop problem though I thought that where I needed to be was somewhere in the middle and at least be able to refer to writers and musicologists that knew what they were talking about…..or at least bullshitting more effectively than the norm !. Where I got to, at least in my own mind in that post, was an understanding that I could only ever be talking about my own opinion which, as I said before, I don’t rate as being worth much but worse ; that what I was really talking about was what I enjoyed, or used to enjoy, and what I thought was dross. I apologize if it seems that i’m going in circles but there is maybe a valid point to be made when I refer to the question that annoyed Dr Peterson so much except that instead of asking the question about God and belief i’m asking something similar which is to ask what do we mean when we say that something is good or bad/better or worse when talking about music and how can we justify or support our argument ?

It’s easy to find any number of Youtube channels all saying the same basic thing : that music is now and has been getting worse for some time. One of the first videos I came across was the one in which the presenter tried to justify his argument by referring to the one research study that focused on measurable features of music ; features such as lryical complexity, quality of timbre, loudness and so on. I thought at first that it was valid and according to that metric then music could definitely be shown to be worse – except only (perhaps) if it was those features and only those features that were the important ones. Nobody would be surprised to hear, on that metric, that music seems to have a golden moment during say the classic rock years with bands such as the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin etc etc.

I did however try to dig down into that view a bit further and what I found to be opposing views that the attitude and opinion that music is getting worse comes mainly from the generation, my generation, that listened to and enjoyed one or other of those bands and the other side of the counter argument is that those boomer generation listeners simply don’t understand modern music and it’s more youth orientated genres.

The, now infamous, question that Dr Peterson was asked – do you believe in God ? – prompted the now equally well known reply : what do you mean by God and what do you mean by belief ?. Asking my own question here – is music better or worse than it was ? should provoke the same kind of response and in this case I can only say with some certainty that wile I can’t tell you what God is I can sometimes take a punt at what God isn’t. In my example of music I wouldn’t even dare to tell you what is good but I might, once again, take a punt at what I think is worse although my example would be to tell you to listen to me in the shower ( I don’t play an instrument and certainly can’t sing) A slightly weaker example is my own response to the noise that sometimes comes from next door – doof doof doof or sometimes doof doof doof doof – that’s what I regard as not even being musical ; just irritating noise.

Now, I don’t listen to an album track and judge it based on it’s lryical complexity, timbre or loudness – the measurable features that one or more Youtubers have focused on as evidence of worse, Rather than that cold approach, which I see as little more than cheap accountancy bean counting I think I try and answer my own question which is why do I like this and dislike that – and it’s obviously nothing to do with some objective metric but something that is purely subjective and varies over time in that music that I enjoyed in my twenties I can barely tolerate today – enter our man Bonio !

When I went into my deep dive on this subject I found one, useful but unsupported, comment that we tend to enjoy music that we heard, and therefore enjoyed or at least found significant in association with good or otherwise significant episodes in our lives. In my case I can tell you about the kind of things I was doing and enjoying when I first heard Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd) Physical Graffiti (Led Zeppellin) and many others. I probably don’t have an such memories with the endless use of click tracks, the millennial whoop and (C) rap style ‘noise’ because I have nothing good to associate it with.

Example two : A tale of two teachers

Music has much less importance now compared to a time earlier in my life and my musical tastes have definitely changed over time. Nowadays i’m happier to either not have music playing at all or only to dip in and out of familiar bands & tracks once in a blue moon : it’s not the same with literature though – a recent example being that I bought a book that is part of a series, got through the first 50 pages only to then chuck it in the corner.

Most days I assume that there was a huge administrative error in the primary school that I attended up until I was ten or eleven ; I don’t know how it happened but I was found to have somehow passed the eleven plus exam and thus was sentenced to attend the local Grammar school. The first big change in my life was that my friends all failed so I was immediately separated from my friendships and never really made new friends at that first school. I was only there for two terms because my parents chose to move house at that time and I ended up at a school that I thoroughly detested to the extent that mu wildest fantasies were about burning the place down.

At that first Grammar school we had an excellent English teacher : at the end of a class he had the practice of reading to us and if memory serves it was all about learning how to think of the spoken version of something written. The book he was reading from was The Hobbit by J R R Tolkien and our teacher had at least 3 voices that he regularly used, first, he had a fairly neutral narrator voice but on top of that he had a big Gandalf voice and a Gollum voice that could have been the model for Andy Serkis some 30 years later : whatever, it got me reading Tolkien and within a couple of years i’d already read LOTR.

At the second school one of the first teachers I met was the English teacher who, on our first meeting, asked me what books I had read and he was appalled when I said that one of them was Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He immediately disparaged it as merely a story for children and not the sort of thing that I should have been reading. In his class – I had to endure him for years, what we read and what we studied seemed to me to be deadly dull, wordy and worthy where Tolkien had succeeded in engaging my interest. Much later in my life I would walk much of Middle Earth – the many parts of New Zealand that Peter Jackson’s crew used in the film trilogy. Today of course iv’e read and re read the Lord of the Rings multiple times multiple times and got something new from it on every reading for instance that when I read it again while in New Zealand I read it as a great outdoor expedition/journey.

Recently, I was looking around for some fairly easy reading to entertain myself with after my heavy work outside and working backwards from some Youtube videos that came up as recommendations I took a look at The Witcher series by Andzrej Sapkowski and that first purchase was the book that ended up on the floor, mostly unread and almost immediately got downgraded to the book swap pile in the local telephone kiosk that serves as the book giveaway point : to be completely honest I found it to be utter dogpoo. To the best of my knowledge the entire series is aimed at an adult audience – obviously that section of the population that enjoys the fantasy genre.

Having almost instantly chucked out one book I still needed something reasonably easy but engaging to read so I had another look at Phillip Pullman’s second series of books – most people may be familiar with the Dark Materials trilogy and the more recent Tv/film adaptation but maybe less so with his Secret Commonwealth – the final part of which I think is due out this autumn.

Alongside reading I also dipped into the several available (Youtube) interviews with the author himself and some of the actual video clips from the series : for some reason my copies of the DVD’s have somehow become corrupted or otherwise degraded. In one interview video that I watched it’s obvious that Pullman doesn’t like Tolkien – or as he put it – the big Tolkien and the little Tolkien’s that followed him. I can see what he’s getting at as since Tolkien’s work any fantasy writing seems to always come with Dragon’s, Wizards, Elves and Dwarves etc etc in fact it’s hard to think of a swords & sandals novel that doesn’t have several or most of the usual characters.

I enjoyed my second or third read through of the Secret Commonwealth and i’m quite amused by the Catholics who regard it as being deeply anti Catholic – I think that they are really missing the point. What I came to this whole section with today though stems from having tried to read one of Sapkowski’s books, binned it and asked the question ; is this kind of literature getting better or worse ? (than Tolkien say). My problem is that while, in my opinion, the actual Tolkien was an excellent story teller he did rather ‘close the genre’ or at least lead it to an obvious end point thus most Tolkien-like fantasy is, kinda/sorta a copy of a copy of……

Some odd conclusions ; wa oh !

This is one of my posts in which the things iv’e chosen to talk about don’t seem to have a direct connection and therefore should be handled in separate posts : I happen to disagree (as always eh ?) but lets gibe this a go.

First, it’s my opinion that my generation has lived through the years when popular music was in some kind of peak period and I would suggest that that time is over. Many or most of the musicians of that time, whatever their genre, are now retired or in many cases actually dead. Music itself seems to be dominated by a very small group of parent corporations that largely control the game and don’t seem to cope well with the rebels and outsiders as we once had : the production of music today seems like the production of any other commodity and is tightly orientated towards profit and I would suggest with output (quantity) over originality (quality). Once again this only my personal opinion and no radios or Ipods were damaged in the writing of this post.

Second, I would suggest that all forms of music have their day and then are set aside in some way or other : this being as true (or not) with classical music just as it is with modern/popular music. I hope that in fifty or a hundred years a bunch of spiky rebels will still get together with some very retro instruments and get up on a pub stage somewhere to crank up the old Marshall’s (Amps). Equally I hope that larger musical groupings come together for a while – as with the more recent orchestras and the temporary orchestras like the ones that composer/musician Hans Zimmer put together and play a mix of music to a live audience even and maybe especially when that covers anything from Bach to Ennio Morricone and Howard Shore.

I suspect that as with music literature also has it’s day and futhermore that most books that are written today won’t get many readers and won’t survive on the bookstore shelves for very long and only the most read will end up in a dusty corner to be forgotten. The reality is that reading isn’t common, especially among men, whom have largely turned to the internet and Tv for their entertainment – this is very true of my own very limited genre.

I would like to finish this post with some thoughts that relate Philip Pulman’s work to that of the writer that he seems to dislike ; J R Tolkien.

I’m such a Tolkien nerd that I follow Youtube channels that focus on his stories and in one of these videos there is a suggestion of historical timing that directly relates the ages (epochs or eras) Tolkien was writing about to our own. In that view the times and history of Middle Earth is also our own history and we are in a later age. Tolkien mostly wrote about his ages or periods of Middle Earth from the beginning of the first age – that’s his creation story or Ainulindale up to the end of the third age which is the final events of The Lord Of The Rings – after that we are into an age that Tolkien started to write about and then abandoned.

That age, the fourth age of the world, is largely the beginning of the age when most of the characters listed earlier have largely disappeared and it’s only men that remain. One way of reading about this age or era would be via George Martin’s series Game of Thrones which is a series of books that I quickly gave up on because I never really cared about any of the characters – unlike Tolkien’s characters.

Some readers and Tolkien scholars argue about the major events and timing of the later ages including which age we are currently in – the arguments seem to be whether our age is the sixth or seventh and which world events we can tie in with that concept. One example is that the birth of Christ is an historically important event in itself and marks the transition between the fifth and sixth ages and some argue that we are in a (largely) post Christian age thus the seventh age of man. A few hundred years ago that would have been deeply heretical !

The events of the third age, that end with the war of the one ring and it’s destruction, are, in many peoples reading, the cornerstone of fantasy literature while I maintain that LOTR is a kind of line drawn under the whole genre unless somebody comes up with something that he haven’t seen before – I happen to think that author Robin Hobb comes the closest but is hardly known today.

Pulman clearly doesn’t like the big Tolkien or the little Tolkiens that hung on to his coattails but I think he falls exactly into writing fantasy novels for an age that is recognizably our own and it’s main characters are mostly men and their Daemons (aspects of anima/animus perhaps) Angels, Witches and a host of characters that are regarded as folklore made real.

For the end of my post I would like to suggest that Pullman has kicked open a new age open to fantasy (rather than science fiction) and it’s one that is ripe for new characters (apart from the undead/zombies) and new stories – at the moment it’s only film that is doing that. My last point is that while it’s true that much of fantasy writing over the years has been geared towards children or a young adult audience I say fine and maybe good writing met in childhood will encourage the buggers to read and think rather than…….

Wa oh.