Below the Neck
Starting with a quote...
Today I realize that the Rolling Stones hit closer to my authenticity sweet spot than the Beatles do. With their impulsive, blues-based sound, the Rolling Stones captivate me in a way that's similar to the Shaggs. The more carefully crafted artistry of the Beatles, on the other hand, delivers colossal rewards to millions of listeners, just not to me. This has no bearing on whether one band is superior to the other. I feel great admiration for the Beatles' masterful musicianship...but not the thunderbolt of love. (My coauthor, on the other hand, warms to the above-the-neck perfectionism of the Beatles more than the coarser, looser energy of the Stones).
This is from Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas's book This is What it Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. I'm still plodding my way through it, and this passage reminded me of something I had to write for a class I had for the creative arts program in high school. The prompt was something like "What is Good Art to You?"
Unfortunately for this essay, I didn't save that paper, but I'm grateful because I don't know if I would want to read it again. This was probably written in 2006. I was really into old-time, bluegrass, and Mississippi hill country and delta blues music. In this creative arts program, there was a lot of emphasis placed on "mastery" and expertise, and I was a musician who was easily bored, refused to practice, and wanted to listen to Old Crow Medicine Show's first album instead of understand what made John Cage an artist.
What I do remember of this essay, I think it was classified by our teacher as a manifesto project, was my preference for grittiness and rawness in music above all else: above virtuosity, talent, complexity. I was even over guitar solos at this point in my life.
I may understand now that what appealed to me was this music "from the neck down," as Rogers explains it. From the book, "neck down" music bypasses "the circuits that restrain our social behaviors, delivering music that sounds as though it comes straight from the heart, guts, or hips." Now I do love virtuosity and technical talent, and I'm much less militant about such a "below the neck" honest style of music somehow being more pure. After all, and I hope this is a refrain, all music is there for you to love, and it's all on you to justify why you love it.
I wonder if this was a mutual resistance I had to the Beatles when I was younger, which I'm only now starting to grow out of. A lot of that dismissal was based on friends of mine who insisted the Beatles were the origin and most high form of musicianship, and I just didn't believe them or care. I just wanted to listen to my Epitaph Punk-o-Rama compilations and not have people leer at me and say that was "low art" or something like that.
But what I also think I was sensitive to was that I started to learn I could tell what musicians, producers, and engineers were trying to do. I could hear the mechanism of music making. Certain music started to seem prescriptive, and what I think I moved toward was music that seemed impulsive, emotional, and maybe even accidental.
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