by Lin, Marvin
But isn’t time universal and static? In its practical definition, time is used for sequential coherency, to measure duration and intervals of events, for quantification purposes. We treat time, socially and culturally, as if it were a given, “in the nature of things,” something that’s simply relegated to the background and used as an organizing principle — time for this, time for that, make time, waste time, save time, schedule time, spend time, kill time. It makes sense from a practical standpoint: by synchronizing time and treating it as universal around the world, long-distance communication can be organized and movement controlled.
Operational definitions, however, fail to answer one troubling philosophical question: What exactly is time? Is it a dimension through which events occur in sequence, as Sir Isaac Newton believed? Is Immanuel Kant correct by calling time an a priori intuition? Classical mechanics says time is universal and constant, but if it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that time shifted from the medieval, Judeo-Christian view (in terms of salvation) to its current secularization (as natural history), are we expected to ignore time’s conceptual instability and the social and cultural baggage dragging behind? And if even the definition of the second has changed — from being 1/86,400 of a day, to the time of a one-meter-long pendulum swing, to 9,192,631,770 transitions between the hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom — is there any absolute standard with which to assess the passage of time?
Maybe not. When Albert Einstein published his theories of relativity, stating that time is actually dependent on the relative motions of objects — that is, a properly functioning watch on a jet will literally mark time more slowly than a watch in a little rowboat (a phenomenon called “time dilation”) — not only was time repositioned on a single continuum alongside the three dimensions of space, but his theories dealt with time as an abstraction, not as an absolute.
Here’s what I wonder: If “time” is an abstraction that can be so easily redefined, so easily mutable, could the same be true about music? And what implications might this have on albums like Kid A?
* * *
It’s 2002, two years after Kid A was released. I’m riding in a 1991 Buick Park Avenue with a couple friends on our way to band practice. Pretty standard setup — two guitars (primarily) and drums. After playing together in various bands throughout our formative years, we did what many bands tend to do: we fucked with the formula. To us, this meant being strictly improvisational with an emphatic stress on collaboration — that is, we spent more time trying to predict where the music would go through visual and sonic cues than by trying to be “virtuosic” or by “composing.” If we wanted to play organ for one song, we played organ; if one of us started barking like a dog, the rest of us would be howling by the next measure. I didn’t really know what we were doing, nor did I know what to call our specific brand of music. All I knew was that, despite acknowledging that we weren’t necessarily tearing up the rule books, it felt completely different from the song-based approach of our previous bands.
Anyway: we’re heading from Minneapolis to Rochester, where our practice space (a.k.a. my parents’ basement) is located. I’m sitting in the backseat, reading the prelude to a book entitled Musicking, by New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small.
Small starts the book harmlessly enough, describing various settings and occasions centered around music — in a supermarket, on headphones, for a housewife — but he soon begins assessing the difficulties that surround the idea of music itself. “What is this thing called music, that human beings the world over should find in it such satisfaction, should invest in it so much of their lives and resources?” After setting up why there are no satisfactory answers to such questions as “What is the meaning of music?” and “What is the function of music in human life?” he proffers his own explanation:
Those are the wrong questions to ask. There is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing “music” is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely.
This was one of those rare EUREKA! moments for me, a complete paradigm shift, my very own ontological train crash. All my hang-ups about the “commodification” of music — the interest and subsequent boredom aroused through repetition, the so-called “power” that music possesses, etc. — were all becoming clearer in my head. Even the methodology of our band started making sense to me: We weren’t simply making some “thing” called music — there was no end product or clear goal, no characteristics that could be attributed and enforced. And judging by how often we meandered and fumbled in live settings, we weren’t really performing any “songs” either. Rather, we were emphasizing music as a verb, music as something that we “did.” We were musicking.
* * *
Applying Small’s concept of musicking to improv/free/automatist-based musics, like my band, is simple enough, but applying it to Radiohead, a group so entrenched in the virtues of composition, isn’t quite as clear. To gain a better understanding, we first need to ask: What is it about Western culture that continually reinforces the notion of music as a thing rather than an activity?
According to Small, “This is the trap of reification, and it has been a besetting fault of Western thinking ever since Plato, who was one of its earliest perpetrators.”
The fallacy of reification, in its most basic definition, is to treat an abstract belief or hypothetical construct as if it were “real,” as if it were a “thing” (reification is, in fact, a fancy word for “thingification”). Reifications are so omnipresent in Western history that they appear not only commonplace, but “in the nature” of things. We reinforce it every day in our language: love makes us do weird things; time heals all wounds; music touches our souls. Nicholas Cook, in his essay “Music as Performance,” points to this linguistic bias too: “[The] basic grammar of performance is that you perform something, you give a performance ‘of’ something.” We, therefore, speak of music and performance rather than music as performance, under the assumption that the two exist independently of one another.
While this Platonic conception of music has been perpetuated throughout history — particularly in the Romantic idealism of musical “autonomy,” in which music becomes divorced from social relations and regarded as a floating “thing” that exerts mysterious powers (think the bombastic music of nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner) — it finds its most tangible reinforcement in Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, which is itself a form of reification. Here, we can envision music on a conveyor belt, in a pressing plant, repeated infinitely as a product for mass consumption. Because we’re not fully conscious of the relationships involved in commodity exchange, Marx argued that we become alienated from the product and even start fetishizing it as if it had inherent value. As French theorist Jean Baudrillard put it, “We make believe that products are so differentiated and multiplied that they have become complex beings, and consequently purchasing and consumption must have the same value as any human relation.”
By conceptualizing music as a thing, we assume that albums like Kid A should be judged not in a cultural context but according to its own value system, self-contained and removed from social relations. Never mind the socio-political implications or the aesthetic traditions with which it negotiates; never mind its conception or reception; never mind our interpretations and intellectual biases that influence how we listen to, talk about, and even purchase music. Here, Kid A is viewed as successful purely because of its notes and rhythms and the seemingly magical combination of the two, a synthesis that somehow, someway, was perfected and subsequently channeled. Music becomes sanctified, and the artist deified. Music becomes “just music.”
Reification works wonderfully in a vacuum, but once we put ourselves (i.e. the audience) in the picture, the idea shatters. In fact, this is where music gains a clear temporal dimension. If music is not a “thing” but an “activity,” the phenomen
on we call music must extend beyond the notes and rhythms, beyond being “just music.” Some groups in Africa, such as the Douala of Cameroon, don’t even have a word for music, as the idea of musicking is so ingrained in their social practices that there is no need to delineate a term for it. But in Western society, the ideological divisions between artist and audience, producer and consumer have become so pronounced that we overlook the fluidity of these relationships and the music itself, negating the relationship between music and time. But how we listen to music, how we consume music, how we experience music over time is crucial to understanding just how fluid our conception of music, like time, really is.
In his essay “Deforming Rock,” Mark B.N. Hansen attempts to tackle this temporal relationship in terms of listening:
Radiohead returns the question (what is music?) to the domain of listening. If, in the wake of its experimentation, any sound (noise) can potentially become music, what makes a sound music has something fundamental to do with the body, with the process through which sound is embodied. What Radiohead learns, in a sense, is that music is the embodiment of sound. Put another way, it learns that music is a temporal object.
Hansen asserts that accounting for “music as a temporal object whose origin is listening” makes any constructed binary — rock vs. electronica, music vs. noise, authentic vs. artificial — pointless, because if music “comes into being through the embodied process” of listening, then what sounds are used or what classifications are employed are inconsequential: it is the act of listening that makes music quintessentially “music.” That is, “listening quite literally produces the music.” This notion of listening-as-performance is at the heart of Small’s concept of musicking: he wasn’t simply talking about the performance of music; he believed that when we “do music,” we are creating meaning, affirming identity, celebrating humanity, and creating structure for our experiences, whether as an artist or listener. In other words, we are together articulating sets of relationships that create the very “meaning” of the work.
While it’s easiest to see this temporal embodiment of sound in works that depend wholly on audience participation/interaction (see: The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, Francisco López’s Buildings [New York], or John Cage’s 4′33″), “Kid A the album” can also be reoriented as a musicking process the moment we conceive of it, not as a “perfect” ten-track set of sacred music that shall never be violated, but as both a documentation of Radiohead’s dynamic songwriting methodology and something that can and will be reprocessed, remixed, and recontextualized in a perpetual, ever-changing cultural dialogue. This is exemplified not only in the many commissioned remixes of their music, but also in Radiohead cover bands (The Karma Police, Rodeohead, The Vitamin String Quartet), in the musicking efforts of so-called prosumers (Jaydiohead, YouTube remixers), even when we sing, say, “Morning Bell” in the shower.
Here, music starts looking more like a script, rather than a text. As Cook observes, “Thinking of music as ‘script’ rather than ‘text’ implies a reorientation of the relationship between notation and performance.” Indeed, it’s easier to envision Radiohead “musicking” when the very foundation of the music — the so-called “text” — becomes “a series of real-time, social interactions between players: a series of mutual acts of listening and communal gestures that enact a particular vision of human society.” Just compare the studio versions of Kid A songs with their live interpretations: how “Everything in Its Right Place” transforms into an extended “jam,” how the second verse of “Morning Bell” becomes more dramatic and performative, how the title track’s lyrics are sung rather than processed, how “Idioteque” hinges on Thom’s frantic dancing for its heightened spectacle. Can you even imagine what a text might look like for “Treefingers”? The script, then, serves to remind us not only that change is of music’s nature, but also that change is nature.
Small’s concept of musicking captures this inevitability of change, taking music away from the reductive reification efforts of the media and music industries and places it back into the realm of time. Music doesn’t sit stoically, frozen in time, as if it were simply a product to be foisted upon the masses, as if consumption were an end unto itself. Music brings us through time, forcing us to accept that our tastes will eventually change, to accept that technological and ideological shifts will define how we listen to and react to music in a temporal fashion. As Cook wrote, “It is only when you have started thinking of music as performance that the peculiarly time-resisting properties of works in the Western ‘art’ tradition come fully into relief.” And if listening to music from the last century has proven anything, it’s that the “time-resisting” concepts of the “original” and the “authentic” are leftovers from a bygone era, vestigial remains from the proto-capitalist idolization of the individual, replaced instead by versions and scripts, fleeting performances and transient moments of cultural change.
What we are listening to, then, is not just the change that music engenders, but also that which allows us to experience this change: time itself.
* * *
Revisiting the primary question from the previous chapter (what is Kid A supposed to “be”?) under this new conceit, the desire to classify Kid A was clearly predicated on the reification of music. But by toppling this rigidity, not only is the concept “music is just music” doubly exposed, but so too are the futile attempts to define it as “rock” or “electronica.” Our very motivation to rationalize music, to rank and file, to shrink-wrap and sell, becomes suspicious, revealing more about our economic and ideological slant on aesthetics than the latent possibility of invoking aesthetics as critical insight. (For example, while taste could be just as easily repositioned as an outgrowth of critical thought — that is, taste as discernibility — it is instead considered a form of class or hierarchical distinction: the more discerning you are, the more “pretentious” you are.) It’s the difference between describing what Kid A does in the socio-political sense and simply proclaiming what it is for reasons a, b, and c.
But it’s not worth getting into ontological debates or semantic arguments. Even though Small argues that music does not “exist,” we still treat and talk about music as if it indeed existed. In fact, this is precisely the point. Like the construction of race, music “exists” because of its inextricability from our attitudes toward it. But just because race is considered a social construction, it doesn’t mean we should pretend that we live in a color-blind society. And with our musicking displaced into tangible objects (CDs, LPs, etc.), controlled and regulated by multinational conglomerates, music exists in a very “real” sense, one that can be quantified, measured, and mass-produced.
Rather than advocating the elimination of the word “music,” the idea of “musicking” — whether practicing, composing, performing, dancing, or listening — simply situates music back into a proper temporal context, reminding us of the processes that inform our conception of it and counteracting the notion that music, like time, is universal and static, as if it could somehow exist outside of change. “Musicking” is, in other words, a step toward awareness. Sure, it’s easy to think of Kid A as a product that made its mark in 2000 — a “been there, done that, next please” sort of thing — but this ignores all the relationships that have since been enacted through the album over time. And while we were pinning attributes onto Kid A and trying to figure out what it “is,” we were actually alienating ourselves from the dynamic relationships that produced its significance in the first place, the very processes that continue to shape our reactions to it temporally.
Observes Cook: “To call music a performing art, then, is not just to say that we perform it; it is to say that through it we perform social meaning.” And now, after recognizing the pitfalls of trying to define Kid A, perhaps we can start to see what kind of social meaning has been performed through it over time.
Kid Acclaim
You can’t eat critical acclaim.
Stephen Colbert
/> Needless to say, I didn’t always think of my relationship with Kid A as an activity. Growing up, I believed, like most people, that music was immutable, static, something to be bought and listened to, something that just was. It’s the same way I felt about all that other silly constructed stuff — gender, race, love. When I was filling my formative ears with songs like “Exit Music (for a film)” and “My Iron Lung,” I didn’t care whether or not I was engaging in a cultural process or, as I argued in the previous chapter, that music is an activity, rather than a thing — I was simply identifying, I thought, the musical elements that made the songs “work.” Context didn’t matter because it was “about the music.” I almost had it down to a science: Oh, they should’ve exaggerated the tension with an augmented fourth. Oh, the chorus could’ve benefited from a ride cymbal rather than a hi-hat. Oh, this track should’ve been swapped with the second for maximum flow. Why don’t these artists get that?
A similar essentialist attitude was peppered throughout the media’s reactions to Kid A. When more defined reifications get exhausted, the easiest route is to throw shit on the wall and see what sticks, to grasp onto ambiguity as if there was anything there to actually grasp. Many critics, therefore, chose to articulate the album’s negotiations with pop. The New York Times called Kid A “as musically vast and hard to navigate as mainstream pop gets.” Rolling Stone asked, “This is pop?” and proclaimed it as “a kind of virtual rock in which the roots have been cut away.” Others were left head-scratching: PopMatters said Kid A was “thrilling” but “confusing”; Melody Maker insisted that Kid A will leave you “dazed, bemused, and musing over [its] motives”; and Record Collector argued that it’s “the most coherent, yet confusing album in their history.”
