I wish I could say I was surprised by the New York Times report detailing allegations that the singer-songwriter Ryan Adams offered to mentor young women, before pursuing them sexually and turning nasty after they turned him down. His ex-wife, the musician and actor Mandy Moore, described him as “psychologically abusive”. When the musician Phoebe Bridgers began a relationship with Adams after he offered to mentor her – at the time he was 40, she 20 – she said he quickly became emotionally abusive and manipulative, “threatening suicide” if she didn’t reply to his texts immediately.
Stories like these are eminently familiar to me and many other women who work in the music industry. Surely to men, too, although if they talk about them, it’s rarely to us women. The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms, partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure – but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core. The male genius is the norm from which everyone else deviates. He sells records, concert tickets and magazines. And because he resembles most of the men who run the industry, few of them are in any hurry to act when he is accused of heinous behaviour, lest their own actions come into question.
The concept of male genius insulates against all manner of sin. Bad behaviour can be blamed on his prerequisite troubled past. His trademark sensitivity offers plausible deniability when he is accused of less-than-sensitive behaviour. His complexity underpins his so-called genius. As I wrote for this paper in 2015: “Male misogynist acts are examined for nuance and defended as traits of ‘difficult’ artists, [while] women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art.” This was after, in response to an interview request, Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek told a crowd that I was a “bitch” who wanted to have his babies. Note, too, how many female geniuses are dismissed as divas, their art depicted as a symptom of disorder, their responses to mistreatment and calls for respect characterised as proof of an irrational nature.Other writers have written about the very idea of what genius meant, has meant, and means has changed over the centuries. I can't really remember any Ryan Adams songs, and it took a few years to not confuse Adams with Bryan Adams, whose songs I know and don't necessarily love.
That the music industry is not particularly egalitarian doesn't seem like a big shocker, I'm afraid. But what I find in writing about music and the way people write about music is that ... well ... Leonard B. Meyer was pretty accurate in saying that the Romantic era has never really ended and that by the time he wrote that observation in the later part of the 20th century it seems that it "still" isn't over. The Romantic notions of genius, the artist as some kind of prophet-priest stand-in and the great man who is not necessarily bound to the petty and parochial moral strictures of others isn't all there was to how people thought from the Romantic era on to our time, but the Romantic artist-hero cliche seems to permeate writing about musicians who say and do very, very badly.
Andrew Durkin's Decomposition was a mainly disappointing book but if he was trying to articulate a set of arguments against the ideal of the solitary rule-breaking genius that's had coin since the Romantic era I was on board with that particular mission decades before I read Durkin's book. I've been pretty anti-Romantic in my interests and sympathies ... though as I get older I can appreciate that some fantastic music was written in the 19th century. It's just that I find Richard Wagner's views abominable and even if I can overlook his vitriolic anti-Semitism I simply don't see that claiming that art can do for religion what religion can no longer do is necessarily a more virtuous alternative to the perceived vices of religion and religious orders. It seems pretty damned obvious by now that when the arts get treated like religion that more or less the same kinds of systemic abuses get perpetrated by the clergy of the art-religion as get perpetrated by more formal religion. Or as Eric Cartman riffed on the matter in a South Park episode whether it's Catholic priests or a Sandunsky the abuse looks pretty much the same.
Although I can sort of appreciate bids at insisting on a kind of listener response theory that helps imbue music with what feels most inspiring about music, I am not sure this is going to work. Take this conclusion in a piece at The New Yorker that discusses the Ryan Adams coverage and events:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ryan-adams-and-the-perils-of-the-rock-genius-myth
...
Part of the problem is that music thrills and bewilders us in a way that can feel at odds with natural laws, so we instinctively codify and exalt its creation. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what happens to a person when they hear a song that they love, and what sense, if any, can be made of that strange, glorious melting. When I look at my own record collection, I see a desperate monument to my desire for that feeling—for some fleeting brush with the sublime. There are neurobiological processes to point to, and loads of social and cultural cues that help explain and unpack fandom, but the experience itself is such a hard thing to hold on the page. Never being able to fully explain it in a concise or useful way is a big part of why I first began writing about music, and why the work remains interesting to me. There’s a little bit of God in it.
But mystifying the creative process also allows for the genius myth to expand and endure. When nobody can say for sure why a certain melody is so satisfying, or so evocative, or so pleasurable—and this is criticism’s grandest prerogative, to somehow get close—we inevitably begin to imbue its creator with supernatural strengths. Ergo, people get away with things, for horrifyingly long stretches of time. It seems essential that critics remain vigilant about who is being granted leniency, and for what. But I also wonder if there’s a way for critical discourse to make more room for the receiver—to give more credit to our own consciousness, and the magic it makes of sound. That communion, after all—between player and listener, in which both parties create something extraordinary together—is just as sacred. Perhaps we can start to look for the genius in there instead.
Art religion by another name ... is still art religion. I can appreciate why Adorno had it out for bourgeois art religion, despite not being particularly Marxist and despite loving the art of music as a practice. I love writing music and I like to listen to music. What I don't think music is, necessarily, is divine. The people who make songs are people not even "just people", people who are no better in any respect than people who don't make music or can't enjoy music. That Adorno comes off in his writings like an elitist chauvinist anti-Slav jerk doesn't mean he can't be right about some things. Art in administrative cultures, he proposed, sold the illusion of freedom and expression as a balm for the lack of any of those things in the lives of most people. The rock star life, as Jacques Ellul indirectly put it, is the surety for contemporary society being what works. Ellul went so far as to say that art is the thing that most assimilates us into technocratic societies and tells us it's okay. The artists live a vicarious "freedom" for us and we buy the products. Take Adorno and Ellul together and the indictment of what Adorno called the culture industry could be pretty severe indeed.
The things that come to light about men like Ryan Adams or R Kelly or Michael Jackson make it seem as though the last thing we want to do is elevate musicians to the role they have been elevated to. I mean, at the risk of giving a possibly lame counter example, the musicians you come across in church services aren't rock stars but they are musicians and they make music of a sort where if you're not bringing your own participation to the music the music in a very real way isn't going to happen.
It's not like singers in opera weren't like rock stars in the sixteenth century. The rock star impulse has always been around. The potential failure of standing against the rock star impulse with a listener response approach isn't that we don't need that approach in pedagogy or theory, it's that it's not clear that in the United States that level of musical literacy is going on. It is in the sense that people are musically literate enough to know what they like.
But if criticism's grandest prerogative is to somehow get close to saying for sure why a melody is satisfying criticism hinges on that element of music which is least appealing to writers on music and writers of music in many cases, theory. Theory in music is, as a music theory professor once put it to a class I was in, pretty much entirely after-the-fact descriptions of what people have found "works". This is not just in the sense of what the "rules" are for solid counterpoint or effective harmony but what "works" in the sense that people have loved the music enough to keep coming back to it.
But there remain facile and ultimately stupid bromides about how writing about music is somehow like dancing about architecture. I frankly don't believe Gene Kelly couldn't have danced about the Chrysler building. Martha Graham could have found a way to use dance to describe a building. There are axioms in writing about music that are not attempts to preserve what is mysterious about music but curtain pulling gambits to keep mysteries where they are profitable. I don't mean to sound conspiratorial in putting it that way. What I am trying to say is that as objectionable and tedious as many writers and musicians find theory, theory won't demystify what makes an appealing melody appealing, but what it can potentially demystify is the mechanics of how such melodies come together and, taken up with cognitive research, give us a clearer sense of what our minds do in interpreting music that leads us to embrace one song and forget another.
In other words, the journalists and academics who, on paper, and quite literally on the page, inveigh against the male cult of the genius who are nevertheless not interested in completely demystifying the technical and theoretical approaches to music-making as far as humanly possible are condemning the cult of the Romantic male genius in the worst possible kind of bad faith.
Power ballads are not that difficult to unpack. You play a mid-tempo stew of I-V-vi-IV chords and have a crooning/mumbling pentatonic melody with gooey lyrics in a lower register. You maybe set this up with some slow harmonic rhythms at first, sit on the tonic and don't get to a new chord until you're about to shift into a new structural unit. When you do you set up for the big soaring four-chord chorus, though. And then you jump into said chorus with abandon and let the chord changes evoke the feelings that thanks to generations of song-plugging many people are operantly conditioned to shed tears to. You maybe wail passionately what you sang in earlier verses an octave higher with a pinch in the throat or you scream stuff to add emphasis. Kurt Cobain mastered these formulas and sold a lot of records, a lot of records.
But the risk of demystifying these kinds of musician techniques is that the mystique of the artist can wither. There's a risk that the aura of Kurt Cobain evaporates if we look at the songwriting technique and music in technical and theoretical terms. The problem isn't that, per some Roger Scruton canard, we'll discover that, oh, the voice-leading is bad. That's its own kind of bad faith absurdity. Cultural conservatives too often invoke an 18th century ideal of contrapuntal and harmonic writing when they want to impugn pop music and then, woah, suddenly it's just so fantastic that Schubert used mediant key relationships and broke free of the 18th century norms. Look you scolds, you can't just declare that breaking all the rules of the 18th century as mediated by 19th century pedagogy is somehow awesome when it's classical music but that 20th century onward pop musicians can't break the rules and also be considered heirs to the Romantic era legacy. That kind of double standard is a separate topic I might vent my frustrations about later. What I'm trying to articulate at this point is a proposal that critical-literary and academic conventions have everything to lose and nothing to gain by truly demystifying music as an art form. Music educators, by contrast, could gain a lot.
If we could teach every one how to read music the upshot might not necessarily be that everyone would venerate Mozart (why should they? I like Haydn and Hummel better, personally). If soemone who might otherwise be under the thrall of a musician can play and write the same stuff then perhaps in this imaginary and can't-really-exist world someone could hear a Ryan Adams song and say "That's not that hard. I know a dozen people who can do that much."
That's more what I'm trying to get at by way of demystifying music as an art. We could talk endlessly about how genius is a social verdict and get into discussions about what forces and interests catalyze such verdicts. We could do a lot of talking about demographic designations as to what or who is or isn't genius in what context and why. We could try to argue that the cult of the genius is patriarchal but that might leave out other considerations.
We live in an era that seems to have a residual Romantic commitment to the idea that genius is individual rather than collaborative even when we recognize genius that emerges from collaboration. We can read endless gushing about Lennon and McCartney that stops well short of observing that the Beatles were a corporate product, and not just in the sense of being a collective of creativity greater than the sum of its parts. Leonard B. Meyer pointed out that we had transitioned into an era in which art was developed by teams and committees. Another way to put this is to say that we have lived in an era of popular song, full of songs that are often put together by teams but that are tethered in imagination to individuals or small groups. We tend to evade the corporate aspect of the patronage system. Sure, pop music could be against capitalism and so on, but here Adorno and Ellul had cold water to throw at us, reminding us that you ultimately can't separate the product from the production system by just insisting that it could be more. I think an answer to this concern is to point out that repressive patronage systems have always been with us in the fine arts and that folk arts (not folk art in the post 19th century political activism version, but the traditions of countless never-professionals) could be an alternative to the high art systems.
Fortunately the boundaries between all these categories of musical life are a whole lot more permeable and unstable than journalists and academics tend to remember to say they are.
I am not sure that music will get demystified in this way I'm imagining or that it can.
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