What's Wrong With Rap - Part I

Maybe there should be a question mark at then end of that headline - "What's Wrong With Rap?" - I don't know. But, maybe not. I'm not really sure, to be honest. But what I think I'm going to try to do here is describe my experience listening to rap this week, my reactions to it, and then offer some gestures at an interpretation for those reactions.

What's inspiring this post is a note last week from my compatriot on this site. He wrote it in response to my post about the ungrounded nature of many musical preferences, suggesting that part of the reason why people reject whole genres, whole artistic corpuses, is that there's just too much krappenmusik out there - by which I really, really hope he meant crepenmusik - too much crap to sort through. So, we listen to a little of this, a little of that, to find out which of this or that has too much crap as to be worth our time searching for the good stuff, and also which has enough good stuff that my search for the really good stuff will be enjoyable in spite of how hard I have to look for what's exceptionally good.

This description seems both reasonable and accurate to me. It's why I, myself, am not drawn to rap or to much pop music - because so much that one encounters is bad that the energy necessary to discover and cultivate an appreciation for what's good in the genre is just too high relative to what's required in other genres. And similarly, it's part of why I've fallen for opera, and why orchestral and symphonic music is so pleasurable - so little effort is required to find what's good.

But as reasonable as that account sounds, I think there's a fly in the ointment. The described process is one whereby we listen to the music according to how easy it is, in a given genre's or artist's massive set of artworks, to find what's good in that set. Such a process, however, seems like it would recommend, inevitably, our listening to what can broadly be described as Western Classical music. (Start with Bach, and start naming whichever 'composers' you know - their music is what I'm talking about.) It would make such a recommendation because it is so very easy to find good music in that genre, and further, the difference between the energy required to find the merely "good" music and the "excellent" music in this genre is almost negligible. We know which artists are great, we know, in general, which of their works are their best, and gaining access to that knowledge if you don't already have it takes almost no energy at all. And what's more, the genre supplies a near-endless number of good pieces - and a very large number of great pieces - such that one might listen only to Classical music for one's entire life and never find oneself bereft of something pleasurable.

Perhaps that overstates the case, but I think the point is clear. What then, might suffice to explain this phenomenon? There are several factors, I think.

• The genre is much older than contemporary genres, so it has had more time to establish its standards and for versions of those standards to be questioned.
  
  
• There is an entire academic industry devoted to arguing about what should be culled and included in the Classical canon.
  
  
• A significant musical education (even if non-academic) has always been a necessary condition on producing Classical music that anyone would listen to. And so those composing in the genre must have been, on average, significantly more intelligent, more dedicated than what is necessary to produce music in contemporary genres that people will listen to.

These factors, I think, conspire to produce an easily accessible body of knowledge that accurately recommends great music, without our having to sift through very much bad music at all.

Anyway. What's the fly here? If the process by which we pick those genres we'll excise and those we'll embrace is the one that will most easily result in our having pleasurable listening experiences, then, as I said, it isn't obvious to me why Classical wouldn't be the most popular genre on offer. Except this: it isn't. Indeed, it may be the least popular genre in today's audial pantheon. The most popular genres are what can causally be called "pop," "rock," "rap," "hip-hop," and the like - genres all that have almost no established structure for delineating between the good and the bad, and so hardly any authoritative canon to speak of. (Well, maybe you can have both.) These are genres where one can spend countless hours sifting through schlock, and even then find little in the way of excellent music, or at least, relatively little compared to Classical - little, indeed, when compared even to opera or jazz. Given what seem like strong incentives against what have proven the most profitable genres, and those in favor of Classical, any interesting question arises: what gives?

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd guess something like this. While accurate and reasonable, my comrade's explanation of how we choose our music seems not to account for a pretty essential, yet antecedent, step: the inculcation of taste. The process Ross describes is reasonable entirely, if you aren't already biased against, say, Classical music, or biased in favor of this or that contemporary genre. Which is to say, it's reasonable entirely if you haven't been antecedently indoctrinated to one standard of taste or another. ("'Taste' tends to equal 'bias.' There's a controversial thesis, at least for the hipster-non-hipster out there.)

The key, though, is that the path of easiest listening resistance, while it may explain why we listen to what we listen to once our sense of taste is in some sense 'fixed', doesn't really explain how we come to have the fixed senses of taste that we have - if those senses be fixed at all, that is. Indeed, I think that the real question (and an open one, if you please) is this: in light of what seem like ceteris paribus reasons in favor of (say) Classical, what 'theory of taste formation' would explain the fact these reasons do not seem to be ones to which people are responsive?

[Okay, so we didn't get to the "Aaron listens to rap without opening a vein" part. Call that Part II of this series.]

A Discerning Ear for Taste

In the last six months, I've cottoned to the varied expressions of musical arts in a way that I've never cottoned to them before. I've made opera a monthly excursion, and I make a point to read at least a few articles about the composer and libretto of the performance I'm attending (so far, for the curious: Verdi's "A Masked Ball", G&S's "The Mikado", and just two weeks ago Puccini's "Girl of the Golden West"). I bought a new, entry-level high-fi sound system (for the curious, Vienna Acoustic's Haydn monitors, a Marantz P8003 integrated solidstate, and some very-fine-indeed cable on loan from a benefactorial professor), with abuncha CDs from as many genres with which to acquaint myself. I now try to acquire electronic copies of scores for the performances that I listen to, in order that I can learn to read through the performance, much in the way that the composer wrote it and the conductor (and musicians, for that matter) read it.

In all, the experience has been, if not cheap, unadulteratedly wonderful. And doubly so for the fact that I cannot foresee its end. My life, in short, is happier. And that, because I have a deeper appreciation - which is simply to say, a more deeply moving experience - of music every time I listen.

Now, you'd be right if you guessed the following two things (though, it'd be odd if 'guess' accurately characterized how you came to believe them): first, I have what, at one time, could've been described as a relatively extensive musical education; second, I didn't listen to much music before now, apart from whatever was on the local public radio station. The first, I won't detail, except to say that I can read music and play more than a few (but far fewer than many) piano scales. The second, though, may require some explanation. I didn't listen to music as a child in no small part, I suppose, because when I was at the age when children come to want to listen constantly to music, my family just didn't have any on. So, I never knew what music my parents took to, until much older, and I had little acquaintance with any popular music until I was of an age to find it distasteful. Or rather, maybe a theory of popular music enjoyment has to begin at a time when one accepts unquestioningly the soundness of popular music as a form of artistic expression. This, I think it's obvious, never happened for me. Consequently, I never listened to popular music when I was young, and by the time I was in middle school and therefore old enough to begin enjoying the pop-y ballads and whatever was on the radio, I just didn't enjoy it.

All of this resulted in an odd, but interesting, feature of my musical outlook (or whatever): I don't have preferences. Or at least, I don't have genre-, instrument-, singer-, or whatever specific preferences - which is to say that I don't prefer things in any of the ways that I recognize a lot of other people as preferring music. A few examples. Out of hand, for example, I don't dislike rap. And I don't, out of hand, enjoy classic rock. I don't hate Cher, or Madonna, or Lady Gaga. Just as I don't love Dire Straits, the Beatles, or Willie Nelson. And it's this way for everything. Or, almost everything. There are some styles at the boundaries of what count as music that I find myself having an impossible time appreciating. Hardcore punk (or "Screamo" as it's aptly nicknamed) grates my audial sensibilities in a very unappealing way. It frightens me, for one. And how, as an expression of art, it differs from an expression of rage is almost never obvious. But that's a different post. My point here stands: even with Screamo, I think I could appreciate whatever is supposedly good in it, if someone would just point to what I'm not seeing.

Anyway, I don't think it's so interesting that my musical tastes turned out this way - it seems natural, after all, given what I was working with. So, what has been interesting about all of this? Watching other people talk about their tastes, that's what's been interesting. As near as I can tell, most people have little room in their lives for music that doesn't come after whatever they like now. Which is an impolite way of passive-aggressively saying: lots, and lots, of people hate lots and lots of music for, as near as I can tell, absolutely no reason. "I just don't like how it sounds," is the most common declamation. What's odd about that reaction, though, is how unimpeachable its utterers take it to be. Really? I mean, saying that you don't a piece of music because you don't like how it sounds is just saying that you don't like piece of music because you don't like that piece of music. Which, for those keeping score out there, isn't a reason at all.

So, what gives? I mean, that this tautologous expression, and its variants, get treated as unimpeachable reasons for rejecting certain songs, certain genres, has to say something about the culture of music appreciation, doesn't it? My guess is that these sorts of phrases, aren't treated as reasons, per se, justifying why people don't like a certain song or whatever. Rather, when a person uses a phrase like, "I just don't like how it sounds" in what's normally the 'justification slot' in a critical conversation, what he's really doing is invoking a certain kind of critical etiquette. What kind? The kind that restricts the acceptable response from the questioner (the one who asked, "Why don't you like this song?") from further pressing the respondent for reasons justifying his distaste.

If this response really is just an invocation of etiquette, and how I've described it really is how the etiquette works, I think it would go a long way towards explaining why it appears that "I just don't like how it sounds" gets treated as an unimpeachable justification of distaste. To illustrate, suppose that that response really were an unimpeachable reason. How could the questioner reply to it? Well, he couldn't. After all: the reason is unimpeachable. Now, suppose, as I do, that "I don't like how it sounds" is just an invocation of a rule of etiquette that prevents the questioner from politely pressing the respondent any further. How might the questioner respond? If he wants to maintain polite conversation, as conversations about musical taste most usually are, the respondent can say nothing further - just as he can say nothing further in the case of the unimpeachable reason.

It's probably a lot harder to say just why we've developed this etiquette. My rough-and-ready stab is that most people who listen to music have biases that they don't want to investigate - genres, artists, what have you that they haven't really appreciatively listened to, and for no good reason. But being a biased consumer of anything is kind of embarrassing, and we develop etiquette for efficacious reasons - which include avoiding embarrassment. So, it's my guess that this sort of etiquette is a cover for an otherwise embarrassing bias. A bias which the etiquette allows us to treat in the same way that we treat those things we've listened to appreciatively and rejected.

I wonder, though, how common is this kind of experience with other people's musical preferences? My limited sense is that it's pretty common, because almost everyone listens to music and there's an intense social pressure (for reasons I have no clue about) to be able to say whether one likes or dislikes whatever he's listened to. But then, perhaps it's less common than I think - and indeed, more isolated that I've experienced. Thoughts?

The Grotesque

A few nights ago, I watched a French film entitled Irreversible, by Romanian director and screenwriter Gaspar Noé. Noé develops the narrative by ordering the forward-moving scenes in reverse chronology, much in the way of Christopher Nolan's Memento. So, the first scene of the narrative depicts the final ten minutes of the story, minutes (say) eighty through ninety; the second scene depicts minutes seventy-one through eighty; and so on, until we see the first nine minutes of the story when the film ends. [To help clarify some of the terminology, let's call the plot as told in reverse-chronologic scenes the narrative and the plot as told in standard chronology the story.]

[SPOILER THREAT LEVEL: Severe]

Anyone who's heard anything about this film has at least heard about Monica Bellucci's nine-minute, uncut, steady cam rape scene. Suffice it to say: not easy watchin'. In addition, the first twelve minutes (or so) includes the most brutal depiction of a murder that any film has ever exposed me to. Now, if I were to ask you which character you thought the murder victim was, which would guess? And the murderer? Since the plot involves the rape of a female character, your stock assumptions about who takes revenge upon whom would be correct: respectively, the rape victim's boyfriend and the supposed rapist.

In short, what I'm saying is that the film's story is pretty unoriginal.

Story Plot
ACT I: In which MALE ANTAGONIST harms FEMALE PROTAGONIST
ACT II: In which MALE PROTAGONIST attacks MALE ANTAGONIST.

What makes the film interesting, then, is it's narrative.

Narrative Plot
SCENE 1: In which we see a character is murdered with incomparable brutality.
SCENE 2: In which we learn that the murder victim raped the murderer's girlfriend.
SCENE 3: In which we learn that the murderer is a philanderer and used coke before finding out his girlfriend had been raped.
SCENE 4: In which we see the rape, learning thereby that the boyfriend murdered the wrong guy.
Etc. etc.

[SPOILER THREAT LEVEL: Low]

One notes that all of the past-tense verbs in the narrative description would be future-tense verbs in the story description. So, when we learn that the murder victim was presumed to have raped the boyfriend's girlfriend, we believe in the story that the murderer will avenge his girlfriend. And when we learn in the narrative that the boyfriend murdered the wrong guy, we know in the story that he will murder the wrong guy. What the film is doing, then, is offering us an overdone storyline and showing us just how that storyline normally manipulates our emotions. For senseless violence startles us. But vengeance thrills us and justifies the violence. But philandering and drug use mitigates our sense of justice. And the rape itself becomes all the more horrible, then, because we know that the rapist will not meet justice. Based on this sort of analysis of the plot, I'd submit that Noé's purpose it to point to a problem with standard stories: so much richness in a plot is lost, simply in virtue of the order in which we depict it.

Now my purpose with all of this is not to meditate on Noé's film. It is, rather, to ask a simple question of the film's content: to what extent does the gruesome depiction of certain sorts of human behavior require justification? Reading the negative commentary of Irreversible, I found that in their reviews his critics treated this abhorrence as a sort of cheap, sideshow trick used to startle and enrage his audiences. And as evidenced by these very critics, the 'trick' did just that. But having watched the film, I can't help but think that the repugnance of those two scenes is playing a much larger role in a complex commentary on just how films jigger with our emotions—how willing we are to accept the premises of some films and reject those of others, despite incredible similarity in film structure.

My suspicion is that such an analysis could apply to most other art forms—novels chiefly, and to some lesser extent music and painting. But even so, in the best case scenario for Noé, the disgustingness of those scenes is essential to the delivery of his message. If we accept that premise (or some weakened version of it), to what degree does the moral outrage that watching those scenes motivates in us demand justification? Or does it at all?

After all, when we buy our tickets at the theatre or pay our rental fee (or peel back the first pages of a book, hear the first taps of the baton on the music stand), there's a sense in which we have consented to allowing the author/director/conductor to inspire us with certain emotions and to thereby raise questions about whatever topic is of interest to him. And those who disappoint and satisfy us, we call them respectively terrible and great. But whatever the sense in which the director has obligations to his audience, I would argue that the audience has similar obligations to him—to treat whatever depiction he offers with what we might call a Principle of Aesthetic Charity. Such a principle might require us assume that any director is attempting to point our attention to something better than the base and low. I would also argue that such a principle operates in tandem with a second: The Principle of Coherence, which stipulates that the best interpretation of a work is that which can consistently account for greatest number of the most important elements in the work. And if the most coherent interpretation shows that (say) a director employed certain techniques or depicted certain base and low images that cannot be accounted for under that coherent interpretation, then our obligation to the Principle of Aesthetic Charity dissolves, for it's clear in such a circumstance that the author was utilizing the base and low in just the sorts of ways that Gaspar Noé's critics have accused him.

A corollary, of course, is that if the depiction of the base can be accounted for in the most coherent interpretation, then there is some degree of obligation on the interpreter to accept that depiction. For my part, I do not find this obligation too extreme—but then, there are many human behaviors that I have never seen depicted.