About once a year, almost on cue, my mother and I have a polite and good-natured disagreement about the Beatles. It usually goes a little like this:
Me (baiting my mother): The Beatles are still one of my favorite bands. I love how they developed their craft over time. [To a present third party] But me and Mom differ about what their best work is. I think Sgt. Pepper's is our only area of overlap.
Mom (falling for my bait): I just have such great memories of the earlier records. We had so much fun with that music.
Me (fake-furious rant): How can you say that? The Beatles can't be taken piecemeal!! Theirs is a story of constant growth and experimentation that binds their entire catalog together. You need Please Please Me to appreciate what comes after, but the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be have no competition. Would you rather have "P.S. I Love You" or "Oh! Darling"? "I Saw Her Standing There" or "I've Got a Feeling"? "A Taste of Honey" or "Get Back"?
At this point, I would sit (because I would have undoubtedly stood to maximize rhetorical effect), secure in the knowledge that my musical structuralist thesis was sound. There was meaning and order to the universe. I understood how musicians, true artists, had an arc, a telos, which they would achieve chronologically.
That all changed yesterday.
Interestingly enough, it was during my last rehearsed rant of Beatles structural coherence that my mother mentioned that Mumford and Sons had released a new single. Brilliant! I thought. I had fallen for that band hard.
And as I've gotten older, busier, and less hip, I fall for bands less and less frequently. Requiems for my coolness aside, that's a lot of pressure on the new bands I've grown to love over the past half-decade. I had heart palpitations the day several years ago when I read that Mumford and company were parting ways on an indefinite hiatus.
What tragedy! I thought. This can't be. They've mainstreamed a powerful form of musical expression. Mumford quotes freakin Shakespeare for crying out loud! Don't do this!
And a joy that matched such pain powered a 24-hour smile when I learned that they were producing a new album.
And then I heard the album.
This is not Mumford and Sons. This is the worst kind of musical melting pot of uninspired influences and musical choices. Rolling Stone uses words like "subtle" to politely (and positively with 3.5 stars) describe this album as evidence of a maturing sound.
Perhaps. But only if maturing means their stardom moldering six-feet-under as bottom-feeders wait for the perfect vintage recycled sound. Or if maturing means that Coldplay (sans Chris Martin) and the latest "rock" act from Simon Cowell or L.A. Reid had a child, and that child was an unresponsive teenager convinced of his musical genius as he strums 3.5 chords on his acoustic guitar with his door locked and a yearbook open to his eternal crush (not that I speak from experience here).
What made Mumford and Sons so good was their powerful difference. Stage-rocking, banjo-tastic difference. And that's all gone in this album.
Obviously, this rattles my belief in telos to its core. This is the Yellow Submarine I always try to forget or artfully dodge in my structure of artistic coherence. If I agree with Rolling Stone and other critics that this is the kind of album that sends artists in a new direction or artistic expression, than I will become too depressed. Because where does that direction lead? Millions for Mumford and masochistic solo-listening parties for me. I must think of this as an aberration. I must embrace a larger paradigm shift, that art lacks structure. I must embrace that perhaps there is no coherence to a musical catalog.
It is only with my embrace of this postmodernist maelstrom of playful meaning making that I can hope for a return to form for Mumford and friends. At which point, I'll forget Wilder Mind and once again proselytize for convenient narratives of genius at work, reaching to the highest echelons of polyphonic bliss.
Me (baiting my mother): The Beatles are still one of my favorite bands. I love how they developed their craft over time. [To a present third party] But me and Mom differ about what their best work is. I think Sgt. Pepper's is our only area of overlap.
Mom (falling for my bait): I just have such great memories of the earlier records. We had so much fun with that music.
Me (fake-furious rant): How can you say that? The Beatles can't be taken piecemeal!! Theirs is a story of constant growth and experimentation that binds their entire catalog together. You need Please Please Me to appreciate what comes after, but the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be have no competition. Would you rather have "P.S. I Love You" or "Oh! Darling"? "I Saw Her Standing There" or "I've Got a Feeling"? "A Taste of Honey" or "Get Back"?
At this point, I would sit (because I would have undoubtedly stood to maximize rhetorical effect), secure in the knowledge that my musical structuralist thesis was sound. There was meaning and order to the universe. I understood how musicians, true artists, had an arc, a telos, which they would achieve chronologically.
That all changed yesterday.
Interestingly enough, it was during my last rehearsed rant of Beatles structural coherence that my mother mentioned that Mumford and Sons had released a new single. Brilliant! I thought. I had fallen for that band hard.
And as I've gotten older, busier, and less hip, I fall for bands less and less frequently. Requiems for my coolness aside, that's a lot of pressure on the new bands I've grown to love over the past half-decade. I had heart palpitations the day several years ago when I read that Mumford and company were parting ways on an indefinite hiatus.
What tragedy! I thought. This can't be. They've mainstreamed a powerful form of musical expression. Mumford quotes freakin Shakespeare for crying out loud! Don't do this!
And a joy that matched such pain powered a 24-hour smile when I learned that they were producing a new album.
And then I heard the album.
This is not Mumford and Sons. This is the worst kind of musical melting pot of uninspired influences and musical choices. Rolling Stone uses words like "subtle" to politely (and positively with 3.5 stars) describe this album as evidence of a maturing sound.
Perhaps. But only if maturing means their stardom moldering six-feet-under as bottom-feeders wait for the perfect vintage recycled sound. Or if maturing means that Coldplay (sans Chris Martin) and the latest "rock" act from Simon Cowell or L.A. Reid had a child, and that child was an unresponsive teenager convinced of his musical genius as he strums 3.5 chords on his acoustic guitar with his door locked and a yearbook open to his eternal crush (not that I speak from experience here).
What made Mumford and Sons so good was their powerful difference. Stage-rocking, banjo-tastic difference. And that's all gone in this album.
Obviously, this rattles my belief in telos to its core. This is the Yellow Submarine I always try to forget or artfully dodge in my structure of artistic coherence. If I agree with Rolling Stone and other critics that this is the kind of album that sends artists in a new direction or artistic expression, than I will become too depressed. Because where does that direction lead? Millions for Mumford and masochistic solo-listening parties for me. I must think of this as an aberration. I must embrace a larger paradigm shift, that art lacks structure. I must embrace that perhaps there is no coherence to a musical catalog.
It is only with my embrace of this postmodernist maelstrom of playful meaning making that I can hope for a return to form for Mumford and friends. At which point, I'll forget Wilder Mind and once again proselytize for convenient narratives of genius at work, reaching to the highest echelons of polyphonic bliss.
Amen. See also: new Pearl Jam. Boo.
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