Johnny Owl
Group: Members
Posts: 20
Joined: Oct. 2005 |
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Posted: Oct. 22 2005, 17:54 |
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Surfing (yes, I like it) this forum and auditing real life opinions, I have come to the conclusion that, to predict if you'll like or not Light and Shade, or any other "new" album by Mike for that matter, it all comes down to a formula which I will call, if you permit me, the Johnny Owl's formula. This formula is simple: the degree of enjoyment of a MO album is directly proportional to the What The Fuck?! Factor (abbreviated, WTF?! Factor) and inversely proportional to the age of the listener. We can schematize this as follows:
Degree of enjoyment of a "new" MO album = WTF?! Factor / Age
Now, you will say, WTF is the WTF Factor? First of all, it's composed of two parts. In fact, the ?! notation after the WTF is chronological and should be experienced like it's written. First we have the ? (question mark) part, that is, the core of the WTF. Basically, it's that strange feeling you have when you listen to a piece of music for the first time and, in your mind, you go like "What the fuck is going on here?". Pay attention please: this feeling is totally "neutral", no good or bad feelings (yet) - I use fuck here only because I like the sound of that word and also because it adds a certain power to the sentence, no hostility involved. It's just a sensation of strangeness, like a funny taste in your mouth: the landmark of a diverse piece of music, which has the power to evolve into good or bad feelings. So, after this strange feeling, usually after a few moments, you *may* pass into the ! (exclamation point) part: here one could experience somatic sensations like thrills down the spine, cold sweat, even a lump in the throat, etc. This is definitely the sign of the goodness of a piece of music. If you reach the ! part, you just can't go wrong here: the music rocks you.
Let's be precise here. It rocks *YOU*. It's subjective. It may rock a little less another person, or not rock at all - persons that just stop to the ? part, and (don't/can't: you choose one) proceed to the ! one. But the ? part is inescapable: you can't avoid it, it's objective. Even if you won't like the piece of music, at first listening you'll still be like "What the fuck is going on here?". And then, if you're stuck at the ?, you'll generally be like "I don't like this (insert nasty espression)", while if you reach the !, you'll be like "Oh My God I Love This". So you can see that the ? part of the WTF factor is universal, everyone experiences it. We may ascribe fluctuations in the ? part to the so-called casual error of social research: one could say in his/her mind the utterance stated above with various degrees of strangeness (for example, from the mild "What is this?" to the stronger "What in the name of the lord is going on here?") but the validity of the ? part of the WTF factor isn't nullified in any case. Obviously, this only happens with MO albums, to various degrees - every MO album, even the dullest one ever. It only happens with MO because what you hear from MO is something always diverse, and also because it's very rare to find Mike-like genius (melodic songwriting, kick-ass guitar, world music, insanity, etc) in other albums by other artists nowadays, artists that nonetheless are worshipped by every cloth-eared nincompoop out there. With MO sometimes you don't reach the ! part immediately, but after a while (here, the time lapse between ? and ! is the period during which the album "grows" on you). In this last case you generally won't have thrills, or sweat. You'll just have a general feeling of renewed pleasure towards the music, like a discovery. And that's fine too. Maybe even better, in the long run: because the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Anyway, what is, really, the relevance of the ? part of the WTF factor? After all, it seems just a neutral measure of the "diversity", the "strangeness" of a music track, and not of its "beauty". Well, let me say that this "strangeness" is the necessary condition of any true work of art. "Aesthesis" means "sense perception". The aesthetic object is NOT familiar: it's distant to us, and this very fact attracts us, if we are open for it and give it a chance. The aesthetic object is NOT a memory, like when one says: "This song is beautiful because it makes me recall a special period of my life". A memory is familiar, while the aesthetic object is something completely new. This also means that to judge an aesthetic object we have to leave all prejudices aside. After 9/11, the musician Stockhausen said that the attacks, and the image of the twin towers crumbling down to earth, were works of art. Later he clarified: "Lucifer's greatest work of art". Anyway he didn't have to, IMO - he was speaking absolutely (from Latin absoltus, unrestricted). But let me explain. In fact, what is the purpose of any work of art? Its purpose is obviously to attract some kind of attention, otherwise it wouldn't have a meaning, would it? Better, its purpose is to create some kind of SHOCK. In this sense, Stockhausen was right: 9/11 has obviously had a profound "neutral" impact on the entire world (acting like a perception, a sensation), PLUS it has conveyed a meaning (a concept, a memory) which can be seen as either positive (from the terrorists' point of view, for example) or negative (from the Occident's).
So we have a distinction between a "neutral" impact (perception) and a positive/negative meaning (concept): this seems to me exactly like the distinction between the ? part of the WTF factor (neutral strangeness) and the ! part (I like this/I don't like this). Now: how do we *measure* this WTF factor? At least the ? portion of it (since reaching the ! part, liking it or not, may vary considerably between people: it's tastes and "De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est"). Well, in social sciences and, specifically, social research, it is a known fact that one cannot measure the intensity of a perception directly: the human psyche is unfathomable, so the perception has to be measured through opinions, and the means by which opinions are expressed, that is, the spoken or, in this case, written word. We also know that we can't use an objective meter to "measure" perceptions, but we can use one of the so called self-anchoring scales (Cantril, 1965): personally assigning a score in the range from 1 to 10, for example. Namely, in this case, to facilitate our work, we can define a point of maximum and a point of minimum presence of the ? factor throughout Mike's Discography, so to virtually create a "meter" by which we can compare his works.
Speaking of the maximum presence of the ? factor, the candidate seems pretty obvious to me. Which record by Mike is the strangest, the most bizarre, the most shocking, ultimately the most electrifying/annoying (depending on tastes)? Which one is "Lucifer's greatest work of art", as Stockhausen put it? AMAROK, obviously. This dazzling heap of instruments (are they instruments?) playing together more or less disjointed crazy-fast crazy yet SCREAMINGLY BEAUTIFUL melodies ininterruptedly for an hour, interjoined with morse conundrums, Margaret Thatcher and african choirs, that the casual listener goes literally "WTF" in a nano-second, is THE ?. So, a full 10 on the ?-o-meter (which I will call WTF? from now on). I don't think it can be anything else. (well, yes, the "screamingly beautiful" capitals were evidently a manifestation of my subjective WTF!, rather than the neutral WTF?, but who doesn't think/feel so while listening to Amarok 50:24, Africa I: Climax I, is not human).
On the other hand, the minimum presence could be more subject to debate. In fact, one could debate if such lows actually exist in Mike's Discography. Speaking of recent works, I think that Tres Lunas is incredibly melodically "dry" compared to MO standards and I doubt this album can hardly surprise or shock anyone, WTF?-wise, BUT it has a certain atmosphere which I somewhat enjoy, WTF!-wise. So I'll say TL scores 2 WTF? and 6 WTF!. In fact, as a whole, I don't despise it - it's good car background music.
So, quick summary:
Amarok: 10 WTF? 10 WTF!
Tres Lunas: 2 WTF? 6 WTF!
Speaking of Light & Shade, as a whole, 7 WTF? 8 WTF!. This for the stand-out tracks: Surfing, Tears of an Angel, Resolution. I can pinpoint certain locations (durations) in the tracks where I think the WTF?/WTF! scores.
Surfing. 7 WTF?, 9 WTF!, as a whole. 8 WTF? at 3:54. The whole post-climax (from 4:18) is where the 9 WTF! kicks in, for me. Very specifically, there is a certain "sound" that makes my mind go 10 WTF!: that is, the "yi" of "flying" at 4:33. I don't know why, but I love that one. That second seems to contain millenniums: it has a timeless quality, if you will. Also, on the sidenote, there's a recorded mouse click at 4:29 - or maybe it's just a casual click from the audio. Anyway, purposeful or not, that's a neat addition, tematically-wise. This track rocks me all the way.
Tears of an Angel. 8 WTF?, 8 WTF!, as a whole. From 0:40 it gets that majestic TSODE-like quality, which I absolutely love. Specifically, it's 9 WTF? at 03:14-03:49.
Resolution. 8 WTF?, 9 WTF!. The first time I listened to this, I had a genuine blood-chilling 10 WTF? 10 WTF! at 1:00. This sudden "void" after the initial part was simply great. It was like floating while standing still. It's a pity that, in time, with repeated listenings, this wonderful feeling has been worn out. Like every beautiful thing, after all. Here Plato comes to mind. He said that the beautiful in this world is a way to connect to the true immortal idea of beautiful, located outside this world. It's a pity that, in this world, "the beautiful" is trapped within bodies, within living things. Living things which are fleeting, fictitious: beauty fades over time, and dies.
Anyway, you could say that this practice of pinpointing certain tracks and certain locations from the whole is deleterious. A piece of music should be listened as a whole. Ok, but when we want to do research, if we want to proceed scientifically, we have to take samples, meaningful samples. We cannot evaluate every second of the audio, it would be too gargantuan a work, and unpractical. Also, stuff like this needs to be shared. In a forum, like this. Why? Because of the need for universality of the aesthetic judgement. Simply put, to judge something as beautiful, we need others. We need our judgement to be shared, and we need others' judgements. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: true, but universal beauty isn't so. Put in modern terms, universally beautiful is what a community finds beautiful, not what a single artist finds beautiful or, worse, a bunch of record fucking companies "find" beautiful, trying to convince us that the crap that's floating around nowadays is beautiful.
Ok then. All this stuff about the WTF Factor. By now maybe you think I've forgotten something I had stated earlier in my formula. What about the age, you say? Yes, the age. Your age, my age. It's very important.
Why? For the problem of bullshit accumulation, which is directly proportional to the age. Here we have two different but somewhat interconnected meanings of age: age of a single man, and age of mankind. See, the ancient Greeks still remain an unmatched model of beauty. They could do amazing things because, unlike us, they didn't choke under the pressure of all the bullshit we have accumulated in centuries of history. They were like a child: open to experiment, mad at creativity, with no prejudices whatsoever. We, instead, are cluttered with meaningless noise: our creativity chokes under its burden. In platonic terms: they copied the idea of beauty directly from the immortal idea of beauty, while we copy copies of the idea of beauty (since we have to fit into Genres, classifications, and the like). In this respect, MO is great because he simply doesn't care about what's going on nowadays, musically speaking. He just follows his creativity, like a child, experimenting (which is the true nature of art, after all: for the Greek, art was téchne, technique). One could argue if some of his experimenting actually makes some sense (eg: Romance, which is subpar IMO) but he is clearly not afraid to do so, reaching unexpected results (Lakme HAS that cutting edge trance sound, if we want to think in genre terms, coupled with guitars, which is new - maybe the track gets a bit boring, but hey, it's not MO's melody that's playing here).
Ultimately, why "thinking old" = "disrespect for MO"? Because there's this rule: difference causes fear, fear generates hatred. Think early MO: TB being rejected by every record company, being "non-marketable". Just because he had something different to propose. Just because he was the newcomer that the "establishment" feared (=hated).
Conclusions:
1. Being young helps being open-minded, naturally. But one can be old and feel like a young, if he/she re-learns to judge things like a child would do.
2. In the long run, it's better not to belong. Like Mike: "I really don't fit into anything categorisable."
3. If you made it all the way through this stuff, I thank you: here. Try the ZibalTone, it's something from my Child.
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