Pointed Things
Some new and old music and books and films about it
Years ago, Constant Lambert wrote about “the appalling popularity of music”. The present age, he avowed, “is one of over-production. Never has there been so much food (of music) and so much starvation… never has there been so much music-making and so little musical experience of a vital order.” O Constant, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
~ Neville Cardus, On Over-production, 1974
Good music writing is good writing, you needn’t know the music to enjoy the things a writer can do with the words that relate to it. At its best, to paraphrase George R. R. Martin, it’s a song of fire and ice. The fire of passion, the ice of knowledge. A true marriage, then, of the shameful and the respectable. I was reminded of this the other day when Hayley, out at some op shop we didn’t know existed, messaged me “want this?”
Well, “yes! please.” I knew there would be something of interest in its pages but had no idea what Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus CBE (3 April 1888 – 28 February 1975) would have to tell me. It turned out that Cardus was a music critic (and cricket writer) for the Manchester Guardian (what became The Guardian) from the 1920s through to the 1970s, and wrote about the conductors he heard - there are sections on Karajan, Beecham, Barbirolli - and the important composers of the period, especially Sibelius, Mahler and Strauss (as well as the best short description of Schubert’s composing life I’ve read, one that gives the orchestral music its due).
Cardus’s writing on Mahler begins with a review of a performance of the 4th Symphony by the Halle Orchestra in 1927, in which he lists the composer’s defects and states
“His Fourth Symphony is perhaps the least tedious of all the nine he published, because it is the least pretentious. In this work Mahler’s naïve melodic invention goes well enough with a naïve theme; in the later interminable symphonies his naïveté is positively banal and ridiculous”.
Cardus, in 1927, is dismissive of Mahler’s ability to write symphonically at all - “Mahler’s finest music is in his songs” - because the composer can’t transform a theme, can’t develop an idea so it transitions into another. And, for sure, this “one damn thing after another” quality of Mahler’s writing kept me from absorbing the symphonies for years. Songs like ‘Wenn Mein Schatz Hochzeit Macht’ were indeed easiest… at first.
Because, by 1930, Cardus is discussing a performance of the 9th and saying things like “We have from the cultural point of view been in this country too late in the day finding Mahler; in his context amongst the great composers he provides a bridge which, had we crossed it at the right time, might have landed us long before now in a position to look intelligently at modern music.” He no longer mentions the composer’s limitations, and is intimately acquainted with his special abilities and techniques. Cardus became an life-long advocate for the work of Mahler, “a composer of immense range, worth endless study as musician and music-maker”. I appreciate the honesty of Donald Wright, the editor of Cardus on Music, in including that early dismissive review. It tells us that Cardus’ positions at any time are sincerely held. Similarly, in 1939, Cardus compares a recording of Don Juan (1888) to Richard Strauss’s “pitifully empty later work”, then in 1966 reviews Die Frau Ohne Schatten (1919) with the easiest exposition you’re likely to find of the plot’s quasi-Jungian transpositions, and explains the older Strauss’s mastery of onomatopoeic motifs, nature effects, and other objective correlatives of the opera’s visual world.1
The “Symphonic Fantasy” is Strauss’s 1946 instrumental remix of his favourite opera, a work tricky to stage due to scenic requirements like the fish in a frying pan, held over a fire, that turn into singing children.
The critic today struggles with the oversupply of music, but Cardus, in the first half of his career, only heard new compositions when an orchestra performed them, studying the score to understand what he heard, with the occasional recorded reminder on 78rpm discs, a fairly imperfect method of reproduction compared with today’s LPs - surface noise was more prominent, and a 12-inch side only played for 5 minutes. So that 1939 recording of Don Juan was a 2-disc set, and Bruno Walter’s 1947 recording of Mahler’s 9th was released on 10 discs.
Some of Cardus’ best writing is about Sibelius, as when teasing out the meaning of the 5th symphony from a single hearing; “Sibelius strips the orchestra of all reach-me-down tricks of of emotional and pictorial suggestiveness. This orchestra is capable of giant dynamics, but never of the sound and fury that signify nothing.” In the finale of the 5th there’s a recognizable pop/rock/trap chord change, played loud, long before such simple repetitive sequences became part of popular song.
I thought of this idea of “giant dynamics” while listening to the present Poppy bought me for my recent birthday, an LP of Guerilla Toss’s Famously Alive. Guerilla Toss are a “punk” band who went largely electronic before I tuned in, and have a rare sound in that they often make electronic music with rock dynamics, not punk dynamics like Le Tigre but classic rock. Specifically, there are some passages on Famously Alive that remind me of The Who, once Pete Townshend was inspired, by Constant Lambert’s son Kit playing him Henry Purcell (1659 - 1695, the first great English composer, and the last for some centuries to come), to beef up his chords, and take the sound of inversions and suspended notes seriously as a way to set up a cadence and bring it home, an enhancement of rock’s rhythmic power. Before too long, Townshend added a synth to the Who’s arrangements, and Guerilla Toss do favour that ARP sound, of big, thick, colourful chords. It’s unusual for a synth act these days to be based more in rock than in R’n’B, the distinction here being the greater dynamic effect of a cadence and the motoric rhythms building up to it.2
There’s a lot more to this gorgeous, glitchy album than this tenuous classic rock connection, mind.
I’m always interested in music that shows ways rock can adapt to the Poptimistic New World Order. When Columbian-Canadian R&B singer Jessie Reyez used a Pixies-esque arrangement for ‘Ridin (with Li’l Wayne)’ last year she had my attention, and I’m also impressed that she toured NZ soon after, playing the Northcote Theatre in September, doing well enough (despite such a complete lack of press coverage that I missed a gig I probably could have afforded to attend) that her album Yessie is still in Real Groovy. ‘Psilocybin and Daisies’, the latest single from new album Paid In Memories, finds Jessie singing over a racing sample from Smashing Pumpkin’s 1995 hit ‘1979’, less explicitly than on ‘Ridin’ but still not family-friendly. Sex, psychedelics, and rock’n’roll in one song!
‘Psilocybin and Daisies’ deserves to be the feel-good hit of a (Northern) summer of rapprochement. That, or assimilation. I’ve been hallucinating a Poptimist dystopia, say in 2084, when you can’t hear ‘1979’ anywhere but you can still hear ‘Psilocybin and Daisies’, you can’t hear ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ but you can still hear ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘Fortnight’, you can’t hear The Who but you can still hear Guerilla Toss.
It’s not that bad.
My favourite bit of local music writing this week was this Substack repost (from 2023) by Isaac “Hahko” McFarlane, about caring too much (and not enough) about being “liked” in the business.
”An incredible amount of people responded to my instagram question yesterday about their anxiety of being blacklisted, shunned or shut out of the industry if they are not ‘liked’. They feared losing work, losing gig offers, losing opportunities.
Almost everyone agreed that being ‘liked’ influences your ability to even get funded by NZ On Air, NZ Music Commission etc.
We often talk about a culture of cover-ups, in-groups and hidden harm in the industry - this is how it starts. With an unspoken pressure to conform as the ticket for entry - an all-consuming soft power of control pressuring people to stay in line to keep getting opportunities.
Have a really hard think about your place in that system - one that sustains and perpetuates itself based on everyone ‘playing ball’ to stay in the game.”
The system McFarlane describes here is a levelling scheme, one that enrolls musicians (and other artists) into a false class, in denial of their poverty, addictions, ignorance, and everything else interesting and dangerous-to-know that should separate them from the classes that exploit them. The really interesting artists always end up a little bit cancelled. Not too much, and mainly for Outsider class actions, hopefully, but my hottest take is that cancellation, or at least the willingness to court it, is a better marker for ability than a place in the charts or regular funding from NZ On Air.
There isn’t a better example of this recently than Frog Power’s new single ‘I Shot Jack Brazil’, social justice mocktivism about a Dunedin cold case that someone failed to refrigerate properly.
During the writing of this post, an interview with Cosmo dropped. Note how perfectly Frog Power’s music works as a soundtrack to Wastoid’s trippy shooting style and Cosmo’s psychedelic imagery.
Also note the garbled telling of the “Dunedin Sound” story in the video description. An earlier action in Dunedin, involving Cosmo and his then-band Coyote’s repainting of a roadside power box dedicated to The Chills with Coyote’s own colours, is mentioned in the latest 33 & 1/3 book, Geoff Stahl’s Boodle Boodle Boodle. There is good music writing in this - Stahl’s prose comes alive when describing the YouTube video of Peter Gutteridge performing ‘Point That Thing’ with The Clean in 2014, to give a sense of how it sounds (“signature chasms” here is spot-on) that made me want to hear it again.
”All four of them are up on a cramped stage, Robert anchoring that iconic bassline to Hamish, hammering away at his drumkit in Mo Tucker/motorik style and occasionally singing. David also chimes in on vocals while playing those famed barre chords to open up the song’s signature chasms, filled in by Peter, who also gets on the mic. Mainly, though, he’s playing his guitar off against his mic, back often to the audience while he crafts the warp and woof of the feedback into something otherwordly.”
I balked, at first, at coming across words like “semiotic” in such an obviously semiotic text.3 When did the 33 & 1/3 series become restricted to academia? Didn’t it used to be random and sometimes far too subjective, like life itself, like pop music? Boodle Boodle Boodle could give us more of Stahl’s subjective impressions, but he has chosen to focus on the post-Boodle “myth” of Flying Nun and the "Dunedin Sound” (two not-so-subtly different things, neither of them as monolithic as the haters and fans thought when shaping the myth). This part of the story is interesting and basically correct - Stahl’s done the myth a favour in describing its subsequent exploitation by champions of neo-liberal entrepreneurship, thus preserving the truth at its heart. That is, that the canonical 1980’s Dunedin bands, and the sounds and the ethos they had in common, and the permissions their examples gave, were useful and needed globally in a way other New Zealand sounds, whatever their merits and local fanbases, weren’t. Though then a very independent label, Flying Nun was the engine of this dispersion, and the #1 chart success of the shambolic-to-incandescent package that is Boodle Boodle Boodle, the crystallization of David’s surfer cool, Robert’s quiet wit, and Hamish’s beatnik exuberance into songs, particularly Point That Thing, which is indie’s Eight Miles High or Sister Ray, was the watershed.
Proof of this can be found in at least one of two new documentaries about Pavement, the most critically successful US indie band of the early 90’s, Louder Than You Think, which focusses on the story of Gary Young, the band’s first drummer, an exuberant Outsider who seems to have been the irritant in Pavement’s oyster that initially caused them to create pearls. It’s hard to believe that Pavement would have become as great without his imaginative prog-rock drumming, equally impossible to believe they could have stayed as great if they hadn’t replaced him not long after their debut LP, Slanted And Enchanted. There’s a scene in this unique and well-made story where the early Pavement, on tour in NZ, are asked (by Andrew Moore, more recently co-director of the great King Loser documentary and bass player in The New Existentialists) about New Zealand music, and they praise The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills, and, “oh yeah, The Bats”. This isn’t some “print the legend” version, but the reality behind it - the 80’s Dunedin Sound did influence Pavement and other influential US rockers (as well as Brit-poppers like The Auteurs and The House of Love).4
It might be going too far to say that we wouldn’t have ‘Psilocybin and Daisies’ without Boodle Boodle Boodle, but I can safely say that the success of Boodle Boodle Boodle, by turning post-punk into loveable indie-pop, made ‘Psilocybin and Daisies’ more, rather than less, likely.
Algorithmic perfection - Grace by Look Blue Go Purple
During his long lifetime, Richard Strauss’s international reputation suffered greatly from “we liked your early stuff better” syndrome.
If I ever try to play The Who at home, Hayley reminds me that they make Boy’s Music that Girls don’t really like. But the best part of their synth-rock sound could always be heard on the various CSI TV series from 2000 onwards. This is probably where Guerilla Toss first picked up Pete Townshend’s dynamic sense, if indeed this is an influence.
Semiotics (n) - the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.
Flying Nun’s 80’s Dunedin Sound music was, via the limitations some critics deplored, cohesive without perhaps meaning to be, in a way that helped define “indie rock” as a genre internationally. Maybe Dave Moore’s recent description of “cumulative advantage” is relevant to the spread of its simpler, memetic aspects.
”Cumulative advantage is the social process, demonstrated in experiments and popularized by sociologist Duncan Watts in the mid-aughts, whereby something that has gained some popularity is inertially inclined to continue gaining popularity: “the rich get richer.” It is the mechanism at play when something goes viral.”