Experiments

The other day as I was driving home, I heard the song "Run Run Run" by the Velvet Underground come on the radio. For those not in the know, it starts out as a slow jaunt with the words "run run run" repeated in monotone -- not one of their best works. At a little over the minute, right when the repetition really starts to grate, a single screeching, dissonant guitar note breaks through the main melody, setting up a short solo. I've never really noticed this moment before, since it's pretty standard for the band, but for whatever reason it made me pause this time. Here was a moment that I really enjoyed, in a way that felt very familiar -- like I said, it's a standard Velvet Underground technique, and something that's been copied since -- which at the time it was written, was meant to be a shocking experiment. In the 1960's, there were people who would have been legitimately upset at hearing it interrupt their song. The idea that what sounds pleasant and inoffensive to me would have been taken as an ugly mistake not too long ago is a very strange one, which I'd never really thought much about before.

What this effect shows is that music is more cultural than we realize. People tend to think of certain kinds of music as having certain innate meanings, such as major chords being happy or diminished 7ths (the kind they play when the dead villain's eyes open up in movies) being scary, when it's actually more complicated than that. Although a lot of how music affects us is ingrained and instinctual, enough exposure to a certain musical idea can change the way we react to it, meaning that what sounds enjoyable to some people is unpleasant to others. In fact, the exposure effect is so strong that certain kinds of music that were once considered objectively wrong are now almost standard. One of the most extreme examples is Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," now a nice, harmless piece of background music for many people, which caused actual riots on its first performance in 1913. Another example is the avant-garde jazz of the 1950's and 60's. According to some of my more musical friends, artists like John Coltrane played chord progressions that should by all rights sound terrible, or at least confusing -- they just did it so much and were so influential that by now most of their music just sounds nice, even on the first listen.

Something we tend to take for granted about the current electric, mass-media age of music is that we are almost all exposed to traditionally "wrong" ways to play music, without ever thinking much of it. People who've never heard Stravinsky or Coltrane still live in a world where the experiments of those kinds of musicians have percolated into the wider musical culture, with all the artists they influenced incorporating formerly avant-garde elements until they become common. In addition, between satellite radio, movie and TV soundtracks, and the Internet, the average person probably just hears a lot more (and more varied) music today than at any time in history. You can go through a whole day now without ever experiencing silence. Naturally, this means that people's minds are much more open to different kinds of music, to the extent that this album was made by one of our most popular living artists.

In all seriousness, the fact that you can hear Yeezus on the radio does pose an important question: is there anything people won't listen to these days? After all, the music that was shocking ten or twenty years ago seems tame, or even cliched, today. In 2013 a band called Swans came out with The Seer, one of the most traditionally "unpleasant" pieces of music ever recorded, and as far as I know no one even complained. In fact, a lot of them bought it: The Seer, a 2-hour dronefest that features random bursts of dissonant noise, endless animal screeching, and a very scary album cover, charted in the Billboard top 100. Death Grips has 200,000 fans on Facebook. Imagine dropping either of those bands into 1913; people would start World War I a year early. Today they're something you can put on while you're writing college applications. Based on that and the fact that I can't remember any music within my lifetime that really upset people for more than its lyrical content, I think we might have reached a point of maximum experimentation -- we've just burnt out our own ability to be upset. In some ways, that's a shame. Maybe it would be fun if we could reset the clock and experience music that's really surprising. As long as we survived the riots.