AlexO's response to Leila's
Blood, Looms, and Blooms made me chuckle. AlexO wrote:
I listened to the album on MySpace. What a weird musical style and the whole album is so unusual. I see a pattern developing: As with most of your musical recommendations, I walk away confused: not quite sure whether I really love the album or not caring for it at all. It's the most unsettling feeling.
This is a very interesting response. On one hand, I feel that I've succeeded at something (or perhaps it's that Leila has succeeded): If someone were to tell me that an album is weird and unusual, I would almost certainly be interested in it. Then again, however, I did not intend to confuse anyone with my recommendation of
Blood, Looms, and Blooms; I only intended to share something I think is special. I can try to explain why I am drawn to music like Leila's. I've said some of this before:
There is a part of me that wants to eradicate—
crush, kill, destroy; out, damn'd spot, out!—any sort of music that strikes me as being safe or easy or ordinary. I'm not sure when this urge began, but I know that it burned brightest when I was in a band. Being in the multi-purpose solution and playing hundreds of shows with other bands built in me a fire so strong and tall and bright that almost every encounter I had with live music was a kind of slow and steady torture, one that could only be quenched when our band took the stage to release all of this aggression and violence through our own music. It was a different experience for the others in the band, I'm sure. I, however, held a murderous contempt for any sort of music which I found to be lacking soul, lacking nerve, lacking reason.
At the same time, however, the multi-purpose solution was an attempt to create pop songs. In college, I was interested in something very different. I majored in English, but when I wasn't reading Bukowski or Whitman, I was studying "experimental" music with my good friends, Todd Steponick and Michelle Harris. We created our own independent course, Dangerous Music, and spent our free time researching guys like John Cage, David Tudor, Marianne Zazeela, La Monte Young, and others in the 1960's Fluxus community of artists. On campus, we were fortunate to have the space and resources to play and record our own music, which we created using a mix of electronic, acoustic, found, and homemade instruments. We took the ideas of "experimental" and "dangerous" music from John Cage. Cage was interested in chance operations, setting up a situation with certain limitations (often time constraints or a fixed number of musicians) while not knowing the outcome. In Cage's world, success and failure were less important than simple acts of "purposeless play." Cage wrote (and I devoured):
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Those were very liberating thoughts for three restless, dissatisfied college kids. (I still believe that stuff, by the way.) Cage also introduced me to the idea that music is
happening all around us, all of the time, and we can enjoy it by simply taking part. He talked of being an
active listener, and he blurred the lines between artists and audiences. Studying John Cage in college, I am sure, helped me here at
Stereophile.
When I was much younger, before college and before the band, in my bedroom with a small GPX boombox, I'd listen to nothing but Top 40 radio. I'd stay up late and scan the radio waves for pop songs, and I'd record my favorites onto countless cassette tapes, being especially careful to press Play and Record quickly, simultaneously, so that no part of the song was lost. I memorized these songs, of course. I memorized entire albums. There was a time when I could have sung you all of George Michael's
Faith, all of Madonna's
True Blue, all of Whitney Houston's creatively titled,
Whitney. Cameo, Billy Ocean, Lisa Lisa, and Janet Jackson were my best friends. I wanted to be MC Hammer. The first albums I ever purchased (for a penny, from the BMG Music Club) were the Beastie Boys'
Licensed to Ill and INXS's
Kick.
For folks from the New York City area, there was also a weird musical phenomenon known as Latin hip-hop, or "freestyle." I was all about that shit. Johnny O, TKA, Cynthia, Stevie B, Noel, Safire. Those were my party-people. Every now and then, "Maria" erupts in my mind.
The girl was from the projects. She had long brown hair and a body beyond compare. She had a boyfriend (a drug-dealer), but I didn't mind because she wanted to be with me and I had to set her free! During lunchtimes, in Hawkins Street School's asphalt playground, I'd recite these lines and more to all the pretty little girls.
And even before TKA and Casey Kasem, I was attracted to the noise of late night basement parties in Newark's Hyatt Court projects, red lights flashing and red cups filled with strange drinks and thick clouds of stinking smoke, where "Boogie Wonderland" faded into "Todo Poderoso;" disco, funk, salsa, and soul were the sounds that rained all around me.
There are so many genres of music, but, for me, things generally break down into just two; for me, it's all either pop or noise. Pop or noise. And I love them both. My favorite musicians and artists—the ones that speak to me directly, in some profound and almost painful way—are those, like Sonic Youth, Grupo Folklorico, Miles Davis (as I write this, I'm listening to
In A Silent Way), Neil Young, and now Leila, who seem to share this affinity for pop and noise, who marry the two seemingly conflicting energies to create one meaningful whole, who strive to wake to life's possibilities.
So, yeah: If I recommend an album, I suppose you should expect the music to be somewhat unsettling (in a good way!), or, at the very least, a little bit demanding.
