:: Transposition ::

Friday, June 25, 2004

The appeal of music is multi-faceted. Some artists lure us with stunning instrumental innovation, others with gritty energy, still others with erudite lyrics bordering on inscrutable. Often it is not the music itself but its progenitor or fellow fans that pique our devotion. One sure-fire way, and this goes well beyond the topic at hand, to garner a following is to produce art with which others identify. The Darwinian landscape of popular music has seen this born out time and time again.

There are two kinds of identification at work, one I believe more prevalent than the other, more potent kind. The first is vicarious identification, a.k.a. escapism. It's an inextricable bedfellow to bombast - the Hulk Hogan persona we adopt in front of the mirror before a shower, the SATC-inspired window-shopping for Manolos. Don't dismiss this too quickly as unrelated to identity, for it is the tapping of the listener's alter-ego that results in the remarkably swift path to his or her heart and wallet. The list of the careers in the music industry alone funded by this urge could fill the seats of a hundred sold-out arena tours*.

The second identification is more direct and profound. It is deep recognition - the echo of an experience or emotion, a bonding between commiserators or celebrators. This is why so many Betty Ford patients have an affinity for Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All", and why androids idolize Kraftwerk. It's why stalkers just love "Sunglasses at Night" by Cory Hart.

Mmmm. Everyone has felt like that at some sociopathic point in their lives and when they did, Cory was there, a pillar of solidarity.

For myself, music tends to prompt the former identification process often, and the latter rarely. The topics that do typically tap the second type are common ones that transcend background and place (substance dependency, being a robot, stalking), but the broader the human trait at hand the less specific it feels to me, and thus less poignant. There seems to be a dearth of aural entertainment glorifying the life of bland upper-middle-class office drones, so I make special note of the instances where some particular minutia prompts a visceral reaction stemming from sharp empathy.

I encountered one today. My life is highly dissimilar from that of a working-class Englishman on the dole, much as it is from a soybean farmer in Arkansas or a club-hopping aristocrat in Ibiza. As such, my enjoyment of The Streets' stories is part curiosity, part amusement, part appreciation, but not much recognition. On the track "Such a Twat" from his latest album though, there's a moment of consonant understanding. In the midst of recounting his drunken exploits from the night last, he offers apologies for the shoddy reception of his mobile phone to his mate on the other end. After the call drops for the second time, the song's beat stops cold, as Skinner seethes over dead silence:

The unifying frustration of poor wireless coverage. That's a shared aspect of our lives with which I can truly and completely identify, and just one of the reasons I'm anticipating seeing him this Wednesday.

*An important footnote: I am not in any way implying that the artists in question are themselves presenting a facade or being disingenuous. They may be (Vanilla Ice) or they may not be (Tupac). As I am talking about what draws the fans and not what drives the musicians, I am making no distinction between these extremes.

Posted by morland @ 07:05 PM

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