When getting to know someone new I always try to get to know the why behind their personal tastes: music, film, literature, fashion, whatever. The reasons between our cultural and artistic preferences illustrate important parts of our identity construction. In short, they’re reeling in our years, ringing in our ears, whether we know it or not. I’ve always been a lyrically focused person -- listening to 90s pop radio at the height of the boy band era combined with my strange affinity for memorizing other people’s lyrics (faster than my own, these days) probably illustrates a lot about the way I relate to music, romance and artistic production in general.
Do Make Say Think - "Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn"
It’s horrible to admit, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been trying to rewrite “As Long As You Love Me” for my entire life. As I got older I was drawn to hip-hop and Bob Dylan for the same reason: density of lyricism and variation in lyrical delivery, using the play of a language I knew to express something in a language I didn’t, and still don’t seem to have unmediated access to.
I know for a fact that other people have totally different things that they look for when approaching music. Par example: every musician I’ve ever met is more likely to listen closely to the portions of a song that relates to the instrument they favour before listening closely to any other aspects. A drummer is more likely to own and listen to music with amazing drumming with a rate of greater quality than say, a piano player. The same goes for people who don’t play music; some people favour music that’s so bass heavy that it won’t play properly on less-than-amazing headphones and speakers while others could listen to theirs on a 50s AM radio and it would probably sound better.
How can we account for this gap in sonic signification? Or, rather simply, why do people like the music they like? How does music make meaning both sonically and through our relationships with music that we claim as our own? How do our differences in taste inform and enrich our relationships?
By way of exploration I’d like to talk for a second about the fundamental differences between lyrically heavy music and totally instrumental music. To return to my previous example, Bob Dylan. It isn’t likely that most English speaking Bob Dylan fans got into him for anything other than his lyrics. Obviously there are exceptions to the statement. Blonde on Blonde is the record that really pushes Dylan over as legendary for most people because his band was finally sounding like and emoting like his lyricism always had. Essentially he married his form and content in way that made both of them pop right off of the record and back into the human imagination cycle from whence they came.
At the outset of his career, the humdinger folk-singer days, he wasn’t doing anything sonically new at all. “Talking World War III Blues” and “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” by Woody Guthrie are pretty much exactly the same song with the lyrics removed, but Dylan’s beat-poetic approach reimagined Guthrie’s old protest song into something entirely new and differently relevant. (But would someone who didn’t understand the lyrics prefer one over the other? Would it make any difference?)
So what is the essential difference between what lyrical artists do and what instrumental artists do? I mean, because of my upbringing and cultural construction I don’t really have many instrumental pieces that remind of times in my childhood, but obviously there are people that do. Whether it’s the magnificence of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or something by John Fahey or even "Duelling Banjos," instrumental melodies are just as pervasive as poignant lyrics. Perhaps, as with Blonde on Blonde, music signifies most effectively when it seamlessly combines the two. Maybe that’s why Steely Dan and J Dilla are awesome. But there’s something cathartic about instrumental music that lyrical music can never quite capture specifically because it signifies in more, or at least more easily conceivable ways.
Toronto Post-Rock titans Do Make Say Think will be our case study for understanding this difference. Most of DMST’s recorded output has been completely instrumental, branching between different styles and arrangements. Because of the combined sensibilities of its members, DMST can be appreciated as Jazz, Metal, Electronica, Alt-Rock, Orchestral or even pure dainty beautiful folk music. The fact that the band spans these genres over the course of one or two songs can make them jarring and challenging, but at the same time they coax the listener out of the bubble of passive listening because they sound like nothing else that exists exactly because they sound like so many other things all at once. Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn is such an amazing and cohesive album because it is articulate without ever using traditional linguistic words for anything other than song titles. They rely instead on the musical word, the combination of tones and phrases to actually say without ever speaking.
With their last two albums You, You’re a History in Rust and Other Truths, DMST have included vocal arrangements and even all out lyrics on the occasional song, and while this speaks to their diversity and growth as a band, something very different happens when DMST includes lyrics in their music: they become a backing band. On “A With Living,” from You, You’re a History in Rust, Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers lends his sultry folk croon to what, without lyrics, would be an interesting and compelling DMST song anyways. Maybe it’s because of my aforementioned tendency to pay attention to lyrics when they exist, but the second Dekker begins to sing, his voice and its signifiers and moods take over the forefront of the song’s expression and make it into something entirely different.
A second possible explanation for dynamic transformation could be that lyrics are the most unexpected thing DMST could add to a song in order to reimagine themselves as an instrumental band (see last month’s article on Tradition for more about being experimental by being conventional). A third may be that choosing to feature a unique voice on a specific song or album regardless of signifiers or sonics always throws the listener for a loop, because the new voice stands out among the familiar ones. Jaco Pastorius made his entire career by playing bass countermelodies with a specific tone where they worked beautifully but could never properly be articulated by anyone else. The second Jaco is playing on a track, you know he’s there. The same could be true of Dekker’s signature voice.
So it seems that, following the example of Do Make Say Think, one can assert that non-lyrical music can say just as much as even the most dense Dylan song. The language may shift, but both lyrical and instrumental enterprise attempt to push through into Being as such in much the same way that any artistic speech has, whether it knows it or not. I guess what interests me most about how differences in timbre and choice of language is that sometimes the most pervasive and downright incredible artists are the ones whose voice is undeniable without having been trained in order to be so.
It’s all well and good to say that Jaco Pastorius is a titan with an undeniable voice, but his voice is one developed through years of playing and education to go along with his heaping amount of talent. The other end of the spectrum are people like Daniel Johnston, who can’t really be said to be a good musician or a good singer in the traditional sense but is still undeniably articulate in a separate meaningful way, perhaps an even more meaningful way. Even a seasoned Opera lover would probably be moved to tears by a close listening of “Dream Scream.” Punk rock functions on the same premise: it’s an institution of ‘tude, where not being able to play the bass traditionally, but doing it anyway is what makes you legendary (see: Sid Vicious). The refusal to be articulate articulates.
From here, I can conclude that songs all undeniably have a message that is defined relationally against the messages of all other songs that exist, as with everything, but that it is also contained within the moods and layers and voices and ideas that make up the relationships of its sonic components. Whether any of these components are lyrical only adds another dimension of potential linguistic expression to the piece itself.
Next month: The Artist Formerly Known As…
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