Re: [microsound] Re: being 'political' in non-verbal music - an example?

[Damian Stewart <damian@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Josh Ronsen wrote:
> I don’t think the question is how can wordless music
> have a political meaning, but how can music made that
> is so entrenched in the current economic worldview
> effectively question that worldview.

One gains the ability to be conscious of an environment/worldview/set of 
cultural assumptions when one experiences something else. I make my 
music using technology, yes, but I stay out of the consumption cycles, 
and I try and make it being as aware as possible of the ways I am 
affected by my society. Society teaches me to not care, to be excited 
about trivial things, to hide my emotions. In the music I wrote I used 
to unconsciously reflect these ideas. Now I'm trying to comment on and 
critique it.

The other day I wrote this: http://www.frey.co.nz/frey/audio/frey-loveah.mp3

Ideally you can hear what was going through my mind. If you can't, 
here's some context: it was written in response to a compilation of 
singer-songwriter style songs, heavily lyrical, very 'pretty.' One thing 
that really pisses me off about the whole singer-singwriter genre (lone 
guitarist + 'meaningful' vocals) is that it's pretty universally singing 
about romantic love using complex metaphor to make it seem much more 
sophisticated than it actually is. It's the genre considered the most 
'meaningful' or the most 'human' to some and to me it's impenetrable 
words against harmonically backward music. (Not that Ani DiFranco can't 
move me to tears sometimes, but we're all hypocrites, it's part of being 
capitalists.)

There are lyrics in this, yes; the political content isn't in the lyrics 
themselves, it's in how the lyrics sit against the music/context/genre 
itself. The first verse is basically 'I love you' but with weird, almost 
mentally unstable-sounding emphasis on the 'love', the phrase 
disintegrating into a kind of a throaty strangulation sound. The second 
verse is 'I love you, your breasts are very large and jubbly.'

What is my point? I'm not sure that I have one. Would this music be as 
political without the lyrics? Would it be engaging, would it just be 
'bad music'? Would its meaning be as clear? This isn't really much of an 
example because the lyrics are as fundamental to its parody of the 
singer-songwriter genre as can be. An instrumental version of this song 
would be in many very important ways a different piece of music.

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