Hornby: the anti-Adorno?

I had meant to read a couple short selections from Nick Hornby's Songbook that were germane to recent discussions (and humorous as well). Hornby is one of the few critics to write convincingly about why it's ok to love pop music. And given Simon Frith's sense that we should develop a critical language that allows us to sort out the good from the bad, the banal from the clever, the fresh from the stale (easier said than done, of course, when it comes to value judgments), I thought of the following:

"And yet I suspect that there is a musical, rather than pathological, explanation for my early dalliance with Zeppelin and Sabbath and Deep Purple, namely that I was unable to trust my judgment of a song. Like a pretentious but dim adult who won't watch a film unless it has subtitles, I wouldn't listen to anything that wasn't smothered in loud, distorted electric guitars. How was I to know whether the music was any good otherwise? Songs that were played on piano, or acoustic guitar, by people without moustaches or beards (girls, for example), people who ate salad rather than rodents...well, that could be bad music, trying to play a trick on me. That could be people pretending to be The Beatles when they weren't. How would I know, if it was all undercover like that? No, best avoid the whole question of good or bad and stick to loud instead. You couldn't go too wrong with loud.

"The titles helped, too. Song titles that did not contain obvious heavy-rock signifiers were like music without loud guitars: somebody might be trying to part you from your pocket money, fool you into thinking it was something it wasn't. Look at, say, Blue, by Joni Mitchell. Well, I did, hard, and I didn't trust it. You could easily imagine a bad song called "My Old Man" (not least because my dad liked a song called "My Old Man's a Dustman") or "Little Green" (not least because my dad liked a song called "Little Green Apples"); and God knows you couldn't tell whether the record was any good by listening to the &$*&#@ thing. But the songs on Black Sabbath's album Paranoid, for example, were solid, dependable, immediately indicative of quality. How could there be a bad song called "Iron Man," or "War Pigs," or -- my cup ranneth over -- "Rat Salad"?" (20-21).

Reminiscent of our discussion this past Thursday on the merits (or not) of repetition, which also had me thinking of those walking, repetitive, ostinato figures heard in the background of "The Rite of Spring" at times, consider this:

"I discovered, sometime during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and that the rock riff is nutritionally essential -- especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day. Nirvana, The Bends, and The Chemical Brothers restimulated my appetite, but only Led Zeppelin could satisfy it; in fact, if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I'd choose Zeppelin's 'Heartbreaker,' from Led Zeppelin II. I'm not sure that me going 'DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG' would enlighten him especially, but I'd feel that I'd done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks." (22)

More seriously, and explaining why I thought to put this lyric on the handout last week, here's Hornby's take on Aimee Mann:

"What makes listening to Bachelor No. 2 such a treat is Mann's sinuous, Burt Bacharach-like melodies and her verbal facility. "Ghost World" has the kind of lyrics that people don't write very often: simple, direct, sweet, resonant -- in other words, proper lyrics, instead of tenth-rate poetry. 'Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech / With college out of reach / If I don't find a job, it's down to Dad and Myrtle Beach,' runs the first verse; I've read entire first novels that cover similar territory less effectively. (The song, an achingly pretty lament for a nothing-happening teenage summer, also offers a respite from all the typical Mann finger-pointing)" (162)

And here's Adorno, Keats, and some of the questions of our course reconstituted in a discussion of pop music and lyrics:

"This frequently happens in pop music, of course -- all sorts of people knock up a neat tune and then can't furnish it with anything but a few tatty secondhand lines about eagles flying and love dying -- but one is struck here by what seems like Mann's inability to tame and control her melodic gift. It is, perhaps, the curse of the trade. 'All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,' Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me (if I could write music, I'd never have bothered with books); music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like Mann, find that, even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring toward the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so infallibly human, all at the same time. Maybe it's only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt on a bad day." (49-50)