Genres

Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in a series, After the Election.I have studied music since I was a child, but in my memory there is one singular moment in which more was revealed to me about the potential of the art form than in any other event in my life. I was an undergrad student at Webster University, where I was studying music history and piano, when this metamorphosis happened. It was very simple: I was working on an assignment in the music building’s computer lab, half listening to a conversation between my friend Shumpei, a Japanese composition student, and one of the composition professors. Shumpei, for his senior project, was writing a symphony, and he was describing the work to the professor, saying that he was fleshing out this or that part of it on that particular day. The professor was intrigued by this project, especially because in today’s composition programs, most students are working in electronic, atonal, or highly-specialized experimental composition. For Shumpei to be writing a symphony was very strange. Then the professor posed the question that was immediately and permanently seared into my mind. He asked, “What’s it about?”It had never occurred to me that classical music could be “about” something. Clearly operas were about something, and program music was about something. But instrumental works? It seemed insane to me. My first thought was that the professor was joking, being facetious, testing Shumpei with an obviously rigged question. But as the conversation unfolded, I started to become attuned to a new plane of meaning in music. I became aware of its essence.I share this anecdote not only because it continues to resonate with me today in my work as a historical musicologist, but also because it frames the way I associate music with contemporary historical events. Whether one likes it or not, Trump’s election is the most significant, unexpected, and potentially transformative political event that has occurred in the adult life of a person my age. I am not saying this in the affirmative or the negative—I am merely being dialectical about it. It is going to produce a new political terrain. Neoliberalism is under siege, the Democratic Party has fractured, the category of “president” is changing, and, most importantly and ideally, the Left has a new position from which to critique—and hopefully overcome—capitalism. From a Marxist standpoint this is truly an interesting situation.I have found myself listening to Beethoven for the past week. At first I did not question it, for this is typical of someone in my line of work. But as I started to realize that I was listening almost exclusively to Beethoven, I began to wonder why this was. As I have thought about it for the past few days, I find myself contemplating not only Beethoven, but the French Revolution, Hegel, and subjectivity. I don’t intend to descend too far into philosophy here, but I will point out that for Adorno, Beethoven’s music represented a particularly sensuous, philosophical image of society. He believed that in Beethoven’s music resided hope and transformation, that his music personified the emerging human quest for consciousness, becoming spirit. “Art is more real than philosophy,” Adorno wrote in his fragments on Beethoven, “in that it acknowledges identity to be appearance.” This means that, to put it reductively, art’s forms, like those of society, are subject to change, that the whole is mediated by the individual parts, that the totality can become something greater than itself, something non-identical, something other.What will Trump do? I don’t really know. I want to believe that he wont be that bad, and that, in opposition to him, we will witness the first revolutionary Left that has existed during any of our lifetimes. In my opinion, this possibility—as the sectarian, dead “left” has shown in the past decades—could not have existed if Clinton had become president. The code word here is “revolution,” and it always must emerge in opposition to something. Trump is the better opponent.My point with all this is that I look to Beethoven’s music for hope, because it was truly revolutionary in every sense of the word—its forms, its relationship to tonality, and, of course (!) its dialectical relationship to the French Revolution. His music is living proof that spirit cannot be extinguished. Beethoven during his lifetime (1770-1827) witnessed the rise and delay of the possibility of freedom, and this had a profound impact on his development as a composer. In no other body of music can one bear witness to such dizzying moments of hope and despair.The Eroica asked what it would mean if a particular interval resolved upward instead of downward, allowing the listener to observe as the status quo of form was broken apart before their very ears, melodies conversing and intertwining, down literally becoming up. The fugue of the op. 110 piano sonata contemplates, among other things, what would unfold if a theme was inverted, played as its own negative. The counterpoint and orchestration of the “Harp” quartet is sublime, especially in the last 90 seconds of its first movement, which contains gestures that continue to legitimately blow my mind. The late quartets investigated tonality to its full potential, so much so, in fact, that most music for the following 75 years was a form of sublimation, trying to catch up to what Beethoven did. This is distilled in Josef Danhauser’s 1840 painting Liszt at the Piano, which shows Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt playing at the keyboard under the consterned bust of his great predecessor, a symbol of Beethoven’s domination of all of his 19th century pupils.To invoke the opening to this essay: What is music about? It is about humanity and possibility. It is an image of ourselves in which the rules do not have to apply, allowing us to work through our desires, our fears, our fantasies, and our losses. I conceived of this playlist as covering a range of classical works that I consider to have significant moments of beauty and freedom, but due to the lengths of the movements I would have selected, as well as the fact that for me, Beethoven is *the* subjective composer, I decided to make this a Beethoven Essentials, of sorts. These are some of his most inspiring flourishes of autonomy. I have listened to Beethoven this week because, if we were living in a sonata form, we would be in the development. There has been a thesis and an anti-thesis, and there is hope. Things are changing, whether we like it or not. It is up to us to determine how we recapitulate.

Jason Gubbels provides an excellent overview of the music that served as the building blocks of the blues, which, by extension, made it the foundation for much of American popular music. You should check out the entire piece. He also points out that much of this music was marketed as blues when it originally was released following the turn of the century, but that twelve bar blues didnt exist until the 20s. Quote:

"Blues" itself became a hip marketing term attached to song titles in an attempt to stay current with an evolving musical culture, often taking the place of what before might have been "rag" or "stomp"...Many of these early blues performers were never strictly blues artists -- Mamie Smith came out of vaudeville, Blind Blake picked ragtime guitar, and plenty of Mississippi Delta blues singers incorporated country music and current pop songs into their repertoire. So while we largely lack historical recordings demonstrating the origins of the blues, the reality is that plenty of blues performers continued to cut examples of pre- and proto-blues material during their recording sessions.

One cannot listen to Slayer without intent. When you listen to Slayer, you are not just listening to Slayer, but committing to a philosophy—the mere act of listening to Slayer situates you as a bearer of dualities: reflective, yet aggressive; grizzled, yet tender. Of all the American thrash metal bands that came out of the ‘80s, Slayer has been one of the most enduring, and for good reason. They are the a dependable machine. Frankly, they slay. Built on the partnership of guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, as well as bassist and singer Tom Araya, most of Slayer’s discography boasts a remarkably united sound, consisting of a perfect blend of grimy guitars, kerosene-fueled solos, and bone-crushing percussion. Between their macabre themes and hellish garb, their demonic affect is total. Araya’s howls are so iconic by now that, for many, his voice *is,* categorically, metal itself. And being a fan of Slayer has social currency: when you encounter someone in public wearing a Slayer shirt or sporting a Slayer tattoo, you can be reasonably sure that that person is sick as hell. Here are a few essential tracks that go right to the deep end of the inferno.

This playlists/post was originally supposed to highlight the Shoegaze Love Songs station from Pandora, as that’s a pretty great concept. Shoegaze, a genre of rock that sprang up from the UK in the late ‘80s and sought to negotiate the distance between Phil Spector’s wall of sound and the Velvet Underground’s columns of noise, may have ostensibly made love as its central lyrical focus, but it was a opaque, narcotic and disheveled take on the subject. Saying that shoegaze bands made love songs is like saying that Master P made rap songs about starting small businesses. It’s true, but it misses the point. Still, it’s interesting to look at it from that perspective, and it would’ve been the subject of this blog post if not for the fact that Pandora is a radio service and the user is unable to view tracklisting. For a high-concept, edutainment that seems like an achilles heel. But we love shoegaze, and we hope you do (or will) as well. Here’s a good beginners guide from Ella Fraser-Thoms at the Guardian.

New Jersey singer and musician Jack Antonoff fronted the band Steel Train for a decade with only a small cult following before pivoting into an unlikely career as a producer and songwriter behind Hot 100 hits by platinum pop stars like Taylor Swift and Lorde. It all began when he joined The Format’s Nate Ruess in a new project, fun. The band’s second album, Some Nights, launched “We Are Young,” an anthemic track that became one of the biggest pop hits of 2012. Ruess followed up the album with a solo project while Antonoff fronted a new band, Bleachers. But Antonoff went on to gain most of his success behind the scenes.Antonoff’s early outside credits include co-writing with Canadian indie pop heroes Tegan and Sara, including a track on their 2013 breakthrough album Heartthrob, and a bonus track for Carly Rae Jepsen’s Kiss. He also landed a big hit for Sara Bareilles, helping her write the Grammy-nominated, triple-platinum single “Brave.”By then, Antonoff and girlfriend Lena Dunham were rubbing elbows with a number of Top 40 stars, including Taylor Swift and Lorde, who both began seeking out his ear for nostalgic ‘80s pop sounds and confessional lyrics. Antonoff co-wrote several tracks on Swift’s 1989 and also her recent hit duet with ZAYN, “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.” He’s frequently collaborated with Lorde, both on her recent hit “Green Light” and on the second Bleachers album, Gone Now, due out June 2nd. He also collaborated with Grimes on “Entropy,” from the soundtrack for Dunham’s HBO series Girls.Though he sings in Steel Train and Bleachers, Antonoff’s Terrible Thrills series defers to stars like Tinashe and Charli XCX for their own spin. His affinity for female voices and perspectives has served him well as a songwriter, and ultimately, he might be happiest when handing the mic to a woman, even on his own records.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Butch Walker scored his first hit as the frontman of Marvelous 3, who recorded the alt-rock smash “Freak of the Week” in 1998, before he launched a lengthy solo career as a singer-songwriter with a cult fanbase. But over the last two decades, Walker’s most widely heard work has been as a producer or songwriter. With his lyrical wit, his bottomless well of guitar licks, and his ear for big catchy choruses, he’s a pop punk power player who’s helped with Fall Out Boy’s comeback as well as singles for Bowling For Soup and American Hi-Fi. But his versatility and work ethic have also made him a crucial collaborator for pop stars like Katy Perry and Pink, hard rock bands like Sevendust, and even country singer Keith Urban.

Over the past few years, 1990s nostalgia has assumed many forms: Twin Peaks reboots, Trainspotting sequels, Tupac holograms, the ubiquity of A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde on hipster-taco-joint playlists. But while we’ve grown accustomed to 20-year retro cycles reviving the sounds and iconography of our youth, there’s one seemingly outmoded 1990s phenomenon that’s made a surprising comeback: All your favorite indie-rock bands are signing to major labels again.The great promise of the internet was it rendered the traditional music industry unnecessary and irrelevant. Independent bands could mobilize their audiences online, while small labels could get music out to wider audiences than before. Certainly, the early-2000s ascent of bands like Arcade Fire and Spoon seemed to reinforce the idea that ambitious artists no longer had to trade up to a major record label in order to connect with a mass audience. The internet—and all the alternative media and new distribution channels it introduced—could provide a back road to stardom that allowed bands to bypass the usual soul-destroying music-industry machinations.Fast forward to 2017 and it seems that line of thinking has gone the way of the mp3 blog. Arcade Fire’s latest album, Everything Now, was released through Columbia Records, whose roster also now includes ex-indie darlings LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, and Amber Coffman (formerly of Dirty Projectors). The War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding bears the Atlantic Records logo. Death From Above 1979 just released Outrage Is Now!, their second record for Warner Bros. Grizzly Bear left Warp Records for RCA. So why are established indie acts more willing to make the leap these days? The most plausible explanation is these artists need major-label resources to retain visibility in the streaming era, just as their 90s forbears needed them to land rack placement at Walmart. But if the end goal—greater exposure and, ideally, revenue—is the same as it ever was, one aspect has changed: These days, when a beloved indie-rock band signs to a major label, no one bats an eye—if they even notice at all.Thirty years ago, signing to a major label wasn’t a mere gamble; it was an ideological purity test. By its very definition, indie rock drew a line in the sand between those who were committed to a self-sustaining musical ecosystem free of corporate interference, and those who were willing to ingratiate themselves to the marketplace. In courting a wider audience through a major-label deal, an aspiring band would effectively have to say goodbye to a chunk of their core fanbase, who would reflexively write them off on principle. Tellingly, writer Michael Azerrad’s ’80s indie-rock-history bible Our Band Could Be Your Life concludes the chapters on its major-label-bound subjects once they trade up, reinforcing the widely held belief those artists made their best music while on indies.However, Sonic Youth’s 1990 signing to DGC effectively heralded a new era where upgrading to a major came to be seen as a savvy, insurrectionary career move (and Steve Albini will never forgive them for it). Among the bands to follow their lead was, of course, Nirvana, and after their 1991 DGC debut, Nevermind, became the biggest rock album in the world, the hand-wringing over corporations co-opting the underground only turned more intense, as more and more major-label A&R reps infiltrated clubs to hand out business cards—and more and more indie bands actually called them back. To read the alternative-music press in the 1990s was essentially to be subjected to an endless series of articles featuring artists mulling over the choice between selling out or staying put. Before long, holdouts like Fugazi, and Superchunk were vastly outnumbered by the peers who signed on the dotted line. And if the majors couldn’t sign Pavement, they’d just scoop up a band that sounded exactly like them (hello, Sammy!).Sure enough, none of these ‘90s major-label hopefuls came close to putting up Nirvana numbers. And predictably, many of their stories proved to be cautionary tales—following their one ‘n’ done stints on a major, bands like The Jesus Lizard and Archers of Loaf unceremoniously returned to indie-land and never regained their footing, before eventually petering out. For the likes of Superdrag or Hum, the best they could hope for was to score their 15 minutes on 120 Minutes (or 30 in the case of Urge Overkill). Others, like Texan psych-rockers Sixteen Deluxe, simply went from obscurity to, well, even more obscurity.But in hindsight, there’s as much reason to celebrate the ‘90s major-label feeding frenzy as bemoan it. The moment yielded generational touchstones (Hole’s Live Through This) and cult classics (Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime) alike. It saw bands acquiring the means to boldly embrace their true calling—see: Cornershop’s evolution from Merge Records noise merchants to the sitar-psych visionaries of Woman’s Gotta Have It, or Shudder to Think stepping out as a math-rock Queen on Pony Express Record. For the likes of The Posies and The Melvins, it provided just enough over-ground exposure to nurture loyal fanbases that have stayed with them for decades. Or in the exceptional case of The Flaming Lips, it led to a long, wildly unpredictable evolution that continues on Warner Bros. to this day.This playlist is a chronological collection of 50-plus major-label dice-rolls from ‘90s, perhaps the last moment in music history when A&R reps gazed upon artists as inherently strange as Ween and Daniel Johnston with dollar signs in their eyes. (Alas, some of the more curious artefacts of the era—like Boredoms’ Pop Tatari, or Royal Trux’s Thank You, or The Geraldine Fibbers’ Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home—aren’t available on Spotify.) The songs here span Sonic Youth’s Goo to Modest Mouse’s Sony debut The Moon and Antarctica—which technically came out in 2000, but feels like a perfect capper to the ’90s era that birthed them (and a prelude to the early-2000s web-abetted indie uprising that spurred their biggest success). So now, with all due respect to Sebadoh: gimme corporate rock!

The Kompakt label deserves some kind of cultural service award for Box. Released in the fall of 2016, this highly welcomed package collects the bulk of Wolfgang Voigt’s output under his GAS alias: the Zauberberg, Königsforst, and Pop albums, plus the Oktember 12-inch. Roughly 20 years after their release, these sublime recordings sound as if they were produced only yesterday. At times throbbing, and at other times profoundly glacial, they hover over the abyss between spellbinding beauty and subconsciously relaxing wallpaper, an aesthetic originally articulated by Brian Eno in the late ’70s.There’s very little ambient music created in the 21st century that doesn’t owe the GAS titles a deep debt of gratitude, and after a 17-year absence, he’s set to redefine the medium once again with his new album, NARKOPOP. Yet as influential as he is, it’s hard to frame Voigt’s output as definitive ambient techno. In fact, it’s hard to cite any album as definitive due to the genre’s ambiguous identity. Like its fuzzy textures and formless expanses, from its very birth, ambient techno exists in a state of nebulousness.Rewind to the first half of the ’90s—when the genre emerged as something of a cerebral chill-out tonic to rave’s relentless pounding, and artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Biosphere, The Orb, Higher Intelligence Agency, Orbital, and µ-Ziq were all creating vastly different iterations of ambient techno. While the Aphex Twin classic “Xtal” is minimal and ethereal in ways that were extremely modern (and still are), HIA’s “Spectral” already felt nostalgic for dusty Jean-Michel Jarre albums when released in 1993. And then there are dub techno heavies like Basic Channel and Monolake—do they count as ambient techno? On the one hand, their explicit debt to dub reggae’s bass culture seems to place them in a parallel universe with it, yet what could possibly be more ambient than the time-expanding crackle, squelch, and hiss soaked into Basic Channel’s “Quadrant Dub I”?Rather than attempt to lock ambient techno into a rigid definition, our playlist embraces this nebulousness. Prepare yourself for a deep and expansive journey, or since this is ambient music we’re talking about, simply press play and forget about it. That’s what Brian Eno would do.

The 20th century saw a verdant tapestry of sounds emerging from Brazil, presenting a rich variety of approaches to the essential rhythmic underpinnings in South American music that constantly evolved with the political landscape of the times. But of the many different styles and perspectives that Brazil has gifted us over the years, none are so enchanting, so tranquil, and so forlorn as the smooth sound of bossa nova music.Exemplified by its jazzy sense of repose and shuffling nylon-guitar picking, bossa nova was coined by João Gilberto in the mid-1950s when he wrote the amusingly slight “Bim-Bom,” a representation of the women he would see passing by the São Francisco river with loads of laundry balanced on their heads, the baskets swaying with their hips in a delightful rhythm. The genre would spawn a cross-cultural musical conversation, with local heroes like Antônio Carlos Jobim and Bola Sete mingling with American converts like Vince Guaraldi and Stan Getz, leading to an increased interest in the genre throughout the ‘60s that eventually culminated in Brazil’s psychedelia-fuelled Tropicália movement.Though those unfamiliar with bossa nova may relegate it to the forsaken category of lounge music, its sound is subtle and powerful, as demanding of its musicians as it is accommodating for the listener, evoking the tender beauty of nature in the same breath that it laments the simple pains and heartbreak of everyday life. It may have fallen by the wayside as Brazilian music continued to blossom into other exciting shapes and colors over the years, but the magic of bossa nova is that its calming spirit can resonate with anybody curious enough to gaze a little more closely into its winsome foliage.

British experimental pianist Tom Rogerson is set to release his debut album on Dead Oceans, but his isn’t the only name on cover—Finding Shore is billed as a full-album collaboration with avant-rock emissary Brian Eno, who threads Rogerson’s meditative playing through pulsating, droning electronic soundscapes. Prior to the album’s arrival on December 8, we asked Rogerson to compile a playlist of his favorite Eno tracks. "Instead of trying to create an Eno Greatest Hits Ive gone for the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, including some of the most iconic songs with which hes associated, whether because of their commercial success or their conceptual influence. Ive tried to even it out so its not too tilted towards any particular decade or style. (NB: Unfortunately, Spotify is missing some of the crucial collaborations, notably those with David Byrne and Robert Fripp.)"—Tom Rogerson