The Narrative of Music

For those who didn’t know, over the past year I spent roughly 6 months working, in some capacity for the music website Pitchfork. Four of those months I spent as an intern, and two of them I was brought on part-time as an assistant editor. For much of the six-month span I did a lot of work in the Forkcast section of the site. The Forkcast section is, essentially, the area that Pitchfork uses to highlight new bands, or new music and videos from already established artists that aren’t quite high-profile enough to make the News section, like an interesting Dâm-Funk live video, or a new track from Brooklyn duo Blondes.

What I realized during my time there is that dance music, as an entire genre, has largely slipped by me.





I started out in music late. It wasn’t until about 12 or 13 that I really started listening to any sort of music at all. I didn’t have an older brother to guide the way for me; my older brother was 12 years my senior and wasn’t into any music scene at all. My parents liked music, but were very much products of their era, my dad loving the Allman Brothers and other jammy, bluesy sounds, and my mom into 60s and 70s era singer-songwriters. As far as modern music went, I very much had to make my own way.

I wasn’t a huge fan of things on the radio, so I started out listening to some truly awful stuff because it was “alternative”-- Your Korn, your Limp Bizkits-- which eventually morphed into more critically acceptable alternative territory by tracing the genre’s roots to acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden.



Radiohead had originally been signed to a major label deal in the post-grunge follow-up that would spawn 90s wimp rock, the watered down, soccer mom-approved, harmless version of grunge that would be fairly big until teen-pop blew it up in the mid and late 90s. By the year 2000, however, Radiohead had of course moved on from “Anyone Can Play Guitar” into their iconic second and third albums, The Bends and OK Computer. They were just months away from releasing their fourth album, Kid A, which would be their most defining artistic statement in a lot of ways.

Kid A was the first album that got me into the indie music counter culture, really. I decided to review it for my high school newspaper, mainly because I vaguely knew of their tentative connections to that early grunge era; I had a MTV curated sampler of early and mid 90s rock music that included “Creep”, as well as featuring both Rob Zombie and the Cranberries.

Kid A is electronic music-influenced, of course, with more than a pinch of debt to Warp Records stalwarts like Aphex Twin and Autechre. The record is also dance music influenced, most obviously on the darkly frenetic “Idioteque”.

I loved Kid A immediately and probably could have followed the band fully down the rabbit hole of electronic music , but I only dabbled, checking out band member recommendations like µ-ziq and Lali Puna, but not going too much further. Instead, as a kid who was only now weaning himself off of frat rock, I gravitated towards bands that had more in common with “Optimistic” than “Idioteque”, quickly educating myself on the indie rock scene that Radiohead hadn’t truly been a part of, but had nonetheless dramatically influenced.

There’s a term for that—“rockist”—that I didn’t know of at the time, but was fairly apropos. That’s not to say that all I listened to was indie (well, okay, for a few years it was), but over the subsequent years I slowly took to a variety of other genres. I dabbled in metal-influenced bands like Sunn O))), Mastadon and Boris, took a look at a few hardcore bands like early Blood Brothers, dabbled in light electronica like the Notwist and the aforementioned Lali Puna.

Many critics have a specialty, a music scene that they’re particularly into and follow more deeply than any others. Some guys are deeply into the UK dance scene, others specialize in hip-hop, and some stay abreast of current pop trends, both on the charts and off. I’m not like that. I spread myself thin, gathering surface impressions of everything but never diving too deeply in. But, while this toe-in-the-water sampling of genres gave me the impression of keeping my taste well rounded, I soon realized at Pitchfork that dance music had eluded me. And, strangely, when listening to dance music that others were gushing over, finding myself completely underwhelmed.

There’s nothing wrong with not liking a certain genre of music, of course. Some people just can’t stand country, regardless of how great soulful crooning over a slide guitar can sound. Others don’t get hip-hop, with the fact that, hey, you know, man, it’s just talking over a beat. But as a person who has long attempted to pay more than lip service to the idea of “listening to everything,” I found my tepid reaction to just about any sort of dance music I listened to interesting and worth consideration.



My first thought was that I simply didn’t know, yet, how to appreciate dance music. That sounds like a simple idea, but it’s more complex than it may seem on the surface. Each broad genre of music requires different consideration when you’re thinking about what is “good.” In a pop song, the elements that you’re considering are different than the elements that you’re considering in a hip-hop song. You’re not going to be asking Nas if he thinks his vocal harmonies are interesting enough in the chorus, and you won’t ask Rihanna if she has enough internal rhymes in her second verse. You won’t ask the guys from Grizzly Bear if their bass is sick enough, and you won’t ask Diplo if he thinks that chorus hook is radio-ready or not.

So, my first thought was that I simply hadn’t tuned my ear to the elements of dance music that set one nine-minute dubstep remix apart from another. As I listened further, trying to accustom myself to drum n bass, rave, dubstep, UK garage and other dance genres, I found it simply not working. I could listen to Caribou’s “Odessa” a hundred times and never figure out what has caused it to be a near-unanimous selection for 2010 year-end lists.



What I figured out, after a long time thinking about the issue, is something that I call the “narrative” behind music.

I grew up listening to pop, then rock, then indie, and eventually coming to mix all of those genres together, while incorporating various new sounds when they would strike my ear—I’m a big bluegrass fan now, for instance. The thing that all of this music has in common is their narrative.

In a pop song, a rock song, an indie song, etc., they are structured in such a way to encourage quick changes, whether they be melodically, harmonically, rhythmically or, usually, a combination of all three. Consider even the most basic pop song structure, that of Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus. That is, in essence, the narrative of a basic pop song.

While many songs across the genres listed two paragraphs ago mess with this narrative, they still adhere to the basic idea of it, that being that melody, harmony and rhythm must change in short order to maintain a listener’s interest. Across all of those different genres of music, the narrative is—at its most basic—change. Even within a 90-second punk song, the narrative is change.

In much of dance music, however, change of that kind is not nearly so important. In reality, it’s not of importance at all. Consider renowned dubstepper Burial, and his 2007 album Untrue. The second track on Untrue, “Archangel”, is a spectacular tune that folds in haunting synth swells to accent a warped, soulful vocal and a woozy rhythm. At four minutes, it lasts about the length of your typical pop song and, given the vocals that fade in and die down at periodic times, seems structured like a pop song, too.



Over the course of the album, though, Burial does little to break outside of this atmosphere he has created with “Archangel” and its short intro. The rhythms are tweaked only slightly, capturing the same basic essence as “Archangel”, the vocal samples sound roughly similar when they crop up and the synth tones tend to remain in a narrow range that cultivate similar images over the course of the album’s 13 tracks. Though the faux-structure of “Archangel” may have teased at it, the musical narrative of Untrue was not change.

Two albums—hell, two tracks—by the same artist, more clearly illustrate the differences in narrative and how my narrative upbringing has affected my music listening. Keiran Hebden records under the moniker Four Tet. In 2003 Hebden released Rounds, a rather spectacular electronic album. “Hands”, the first song from that album, uses a lot of the same elements over the course of its six minutes, but these elements change quickly from moment to moment, not staying in one place for too long.



This year, Hebden released There Is Love In You, and the track “Love Cry” is often named as a favorite from the album. Compared to “Love Cry”, “Hands” is positively ADD. “Love Cry” slowly builds, based on a single rhythm, and periodically drops in new elements—a haphazard line of dial tone sounds, a looped vocal sample—over the course of its nine minutes.



The fact is, I vastly prefer “Hands” to “Love Cry”. And it’s precisely because they’re from different musical narratives. “Hands” is more akin to the change narrative I’ve grown up with and become acclimated to. While “Love Cry” is from a dance music narrative, one based more building on and subtracting from a sturdy foundation than making structural changes.

As I mentioned before, there are plenty of people who don’t enjoy certain genres of music, but this is based less on narrative than it is on musical elements. People who don’t like country tend not to enjoy the vocal affectations or the immediately identifiable instrumentation. Those who don’t like hip-hop may not like the foul language, or the lack of organic instrumentation.

But bringing people into the fold of these different genres of music is easier than pulling someone out of their musical narrative. It’s like acquiring a taste for an IPA when you usually drink lagers. The foundation for the acquisition is there, it just requires exposure and an understanding of that exposure. But attempting to move from one narrative to another is more difficult, because the basic understanding of music has to be adjusted for the change to take place. It’s like trying to suggest a vegan diet to a lifelong omnivore. It’s not that it won’t happen, but it takes a certain amount of work and effort on the part of the omnivore to make it happen and, even with that work, there are no guarantees of results.



There are other narratives, too, aside from the foundational narrative and the change narrative. Genres like jam rock and jazz are based more on a communal narrative that focuses on the act of listening to musicians listen to each other as they play. And because of this I find myself having similar difficulties getting into a Miles Davis or Grateful Dead record as I do an acid house record.

Many critics limit their scope, specializing in a certain area. Much more specialized than narrative, or even genre, they get down into the nitty gritty of a scene. That’s not to say that they expose themselves to different scenes, to different genres, or even different narratives, but their focus will primarily be on their scene. My listening habits have always spread across genres and scenes. The next step for me, is to spread myself across narratives. I grew up eating a lot of steak, but I suppose I’m not adverse to trying out the vegan lifestyle.