Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  There is another route between genres. It’s the avant-garde path—a kind of icy Northern Passage that you can traverse on foot. Practitioners of free jazz, underground rock, and avant-garde classical music are, in fact, closer to one another than they are to their less radical colleagues. Listeners, too, can make unexpected connections in this territory. As I discovered in my college years, it is easy to go from the orchestral hurly-burly of Xenakis and Penderecki to the free-jazz piano of Cecil Taylor and the dissonant rock of Sonic Youth. For lack of a better term, call it the art of noise.

  “Noise” is a tricky word that quickly slides into the pejorative. Often, it’s the word we use to describe a new kind of music that we don’t understand. Variations on the put-down “That’s just noise” were heard at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, during Dylan’s first tours with a band, and on street corners when kids started blasting rap. But “noise” can also accurately describe an acoustical phenomenon, and it needn’t be negative. Human ears are attracted to certain euphonious chords based on the overtone series; when musicians pile on too many extraneous tones, the ear “maxes out.” This is the reason that free jazz, experimental rock, and experimental classical music seem to be speaking the same language: from the perspective of the panicking ear, they are. It’s a question not of volume but of density. There is, however, pleasure to be had in the kind of harmonic density that shatters into noise. The pleasure comes in the control of chaos, in the movement back and forth across the border of what is comprehensible.

  Cecil Taylor is a master of this kind of music—perhaps the master. Since he first made his mark, in 1956, with the hard-hitting post-bop album Jazz Advance, he has built up a large catalogue of recordings, yet he remains well off the grid of pop culture. When you first see him, you have the impression of a crazy man pounding a piano to pieces. The cascade of tones saturates the ears. But once you get over the dynamism of his hands and fingers, you feel the dynamism of his mind. At the beginning of one of his improvisations, a short run of notes spatters across the lower or middle range of the piano. It’s seldom couched in traditional jazz scales: it may be a rising-and-falling chromatic pattern, or an angular figure running around a minor triad, or some more abstract sequence of intervals. The development of these ideas shows a voracious intelligence; they are thrown into different octaves, turned upside down, smashed apart, mutated into song. In an appearance at the 1998 Texaco Jazz Festival, Taylor fell into an unusually lyrical mood: his Hammerklavier sound suddenly faded in the latter part of the set. Some young jazz types left in apparent boredom. But it was in that long, soft epilogue that you could hear the symmetrical beauty of his melodies most clearly.

  Taylor is viewed with suspicion by many people in the jazz world, and perhaps with good reason: he comes off more as a self-willed improvising composer than as a jazz democrat. Still, pianists like Matthew Shipp and Marilyn Crispell have followed his lead in importing modern classical harmonies to jazz. The radical saxophonist John Zorn has made a move in the opposite direction, building up a catalogue of works for classical chamber groups and orchestra. Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton are two other jazz people who have blurred the line between improvisation and formal composition. They have replicated, to a disorienting degree, the fragmented sound world of serialism, which ordinarily relies on laborious contrapuntal procedures. And because of the relative spontaneity of the approach, jazz atonality sounds rather more sensuous to the ear. This, of course, is not what Schoenberg had in mind when he introduced the twelve-tone system. He said that it would ensure the supremacy of German music for another hundred years; he did not think that it would generate cool chords for jazz.

  Can rock also go free and atonal? This possibility opened up in the late sixties. The Beatles cited Stockhausen as a model and hired an orchestra to play ad libitum on “A Day in the Life.” The Byrds modeled their hyped-up guitar work in “Eight Miles High” on space-age Coltrane. The Velvet Underground placed surreally pretty fragments of pop amid firestorms of overlapping guitars. And Frank Zappa borrowed abrasive harmonies from Edgard Varèse. Many seekers of avant-rock gravitated to New York; they rumbled behind punk in the seventies, and pooled resources at the end of the decade in a movement called No Wave. After crossing paths on various occasions in the late seventies, the core members of Sonic Youth—Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo—came together in 1981, at a nine-day event called Noise Fest. Steve Shelley joined as the drummer in 1985. It’s a measure of Sonic Youth’s oblique relationship with rock-and-roll-as-usual that the band has been stable and prolific for nearly twenty years.

  Sonic Youth’s guitars don’t twist and shout—they chime and blend. The strings are retuned to unusual pitch collections, melodies are honed to roughly hummable fragments, harmonies slide out of sync and accumulate in dreamy clusters. More often than not the songs fall into an A-B-A structure in which the B section is pure anarchy. That pattern isn’t a Sonic Youth invention; Led Zeppelin had foisted it on a mass public with “Whole Lotta Love.” But Sonic Youth give their noise an arty sheen. There’s no druggy delirium or macho stadium swell; instead, there’s a bemused, straight-faced exhibition of extremities. Moore and Ranaldo sometimes lay their guitars down on the stage and poke at them with blunt instruments. (That technique originated with the experimental collective AMM, whose 1966 work “After Rapidly Circling the Plaza” is the Don Giovanni, the Kind of Blue, of noise.) Gordon, with her electric bass slung over her dress, adds a hint of rock glamour, although her voice—at once fierce and fatigued—drips with downtown disaffection.

  The no longer youthful members of Sonic Youth have set aside the old rock-and-roll mission to broadcast breaking news about youth culture. Instead, they have more of a jazz mentality: they invite you to check in from time to time on an act that stays aggressively in place. It wasn’t always so. Not long ago they were being acclaimed as prophets of grunge. They’d signed with Geffen Records in 1990 and had persuaded the label to sign their opening act, Nirvana. Their records from that period were jittery, marred by self-conscious attempts at punk-pop hits. Sonic Youth are back on track with a new record, A Thousand Leaves, which is loose, spacious, psychedelic. The band even shows a hint of classical hauteur on a recent series of independently released EPs, which are designed to look like fifties-era avant-garde artifacts. These discs carry the legend “Musical Perspectives”; they’re printed in Dutch, French, and Esperanto, and have songs titled “Anagrama,” “Improvisation Ajoutee,” and “Stil.” Modernist intellectuality is being mocked and also slyly appropriated. Sonic Youth are now writing, in the best sense, classical music.

  FRANK SINATRA, 1998

  People always assumed that Frank Sinatra’s voice was a projection of his personality—that the voice and the man were one and the same. In fact, there was a long, quiet struggle between them. The trumped-up legend doesn’t jive with the underlying steadiness of Sinatra’s musicianship. We should remember his startling intelligence as a singer—the way he husbanded his good but not necessarily great voice into something joyful and profound. We should remember his phenomenal breath control—the way he spun out long, luxurious phrases without seeming to stop for air. (He used to swim laps underwater, thinking about lyrics all the while.) We should remember his vocal courage—the way he saved his voice at mid-career by making virtues of the cracks that had appeared in his technique. We should remember his love of language—the way he dramatized words, brought dry polysyllables to life. (No other singer could make so much of the word “unphotographable.”) And we should remember his love of complex orchestral arrangements, his instinct for matching his voice to the instruments, his graciousness toward his regular players. The sweetest moment in Gay Talese’s classic Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is the singer’s greeting to Vincent DeRosa, the great L.A. studio horn player: “Vicenzo, how’s your little girl?”

  To some extent, yes, the voice was the man. Sinatra’s “swingin”’ songs act out in musical
terms his Vegas persona. But the flip sides of those songs—desolate torchers like “In the Wee Small Hours,” “It’s a Lonesome Old Town,” and “September of My Years”—seem to come from nowhere. The source of that low, lonely thrum hasn’t been identified by Sinatra’s multiplying biographers; it may not have to be, because it was a musical effect, an expression of the baritone art. The voice was veering in the opposite direction from the legend: Sinatra was a lean young man who grew wealthy and stout, but it’s his younger voice that sounds plump and it’s his older voice that sounds thin and hungry. He knew all along—or at least until his effortful last years—that his voice was all that counted in the end. Now the voice is the only real thing we have left: the bright, sad man on the record player.

  KURT COBAIN, 1994

  When Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the band Nirvana, killed himself on April 5 with a shotgun blast to the head, major media outlets gave the story wide play and warmed to its significance. Dan Rather, on the CBS network, led off hesitantly, his face full of dim amazement as he read aloud phrases like “the Seattle sound” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But ABC ventured bravely into interpretation, explaining the phenomenon of grunge music to “people over thirty” and obtaining one man-in-the-street reaction. “When you reach that kind of fame and you’re still miserable, there’s something wrong,” a long-haired stoner-looking dude observed. And NBC’s correspondent ambitiously invoked “the violence, the drugs, and the diminished opportunities of an entire generation,” with Tom Brokaw, the network anchor, appending a regretful smirk. This was only the evening of the first day: the newsstands were soon heavy with fresh musings on the latest lost generation, the twilit twentysomethings, the new unhappiness.

  From the outset of his career, the desperately individualistic Cobain was caught in a great media babble about grunge style and twentysomething discontent. His adamantly personal songs became exhibits in the nation’s ongoing symposium on generational identity—a fruitless project blending the principles of sociology and astrology. He was loudly and publicly tormented by his notoriety, his influence, his importance. Everything written about him and his wife, Courtney Love, seemed to wound him in some way

  Yet he chose a way of death guaranteed to bring down a hailstorm of prying analytical chatter far in excess of anything he had experienced while he was alive. This is the paradoxical allure of suicide: to leave the chattering world behind and yet to stage-manage the exit so that one is talked about in the right way. This was also the paradox of Cobain’s pop-star career—his choice both to reject the mainstream and to attempt to redirect it. He thought he could take the road less traveled and then persuade everyone to follow him. It’s amazing he got as far as he did.

  MTV, the video clubhouse that brought the Nirvanamania to fever pitch, identified the band with a problematic category called “alternative.” Alternative culture proposes that the establishment is reprehensible but that our substitute establishment can coexist with it, on the same commercial playing field. It differs from sixties notions of counterculture insofar as no one took it seriously even at the beginning; it sold out as a matter of principle. MTV seized on the “alternative” label as a way of laterally diversifying its offerings, much as soft-drink companies seek to invent new flavors.

  Alternative music in the 1990s claimed descent from the punk-rock movement that crisscrossed America in the seventies and eighties. The claim rang false because punk in its pure form disavowed commercial success, a disavowal that united an otherwise motley array of youth subcultures: high-school misfits, skateboard kids, hardcore skinheads, doped-out postcollegiate slackers. Punk’s obsession was autonomy—independent labels, clubs installed in suburban garages and warehouses, flyers and fanzines photocopied at temp jobs after hours. Some of the music was vulgar and dumb, some of it ruggedly inventive; rock finally had a viable avant-garde. In the eighties, this do-it-yourself network solidified into indie rock, anchored in college radio stations and alternative newspapers. Dumbness persisted, but there were always scattered bands picking out weird, rich chords and giving no thought to a major-label future.

  Nirvana, who enjoyed local celebrity on the indie scenes of Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle, Washington, before blundering into the mainstream, were perfectly poised between the margin and the center. The band didn’t have to dilute itself to make the transition, because its brand of grunge rock already drew more on the thunderous tread of hard rock and heavy metal than on the clean, fast, matter-of-fact attack of punk or hardcore. Where punk and indie bands generally made vocals secondary to the disordered clamor of guitars, Nirvana depended on Cobain’s resonantly snarling voice, an instrument full of commercial potential from the start. But the singer was resolutely punk in spirit. He undermined his own publicity campaigns and used his commercial clout to support lesser-known bands; he was planning to start his own label, Exploitation Records, and distribute the records himself while on tour.

  The songs on Nirvana’s breakthrough second album, Nevermind, walked a difficult line between punk form and pop content. For the most part, they triumphed, and more than that they struck a nerve, not only with kids but with people in their twenties or older who recognized the mixture of components that went into the music. Dave Grohl, the dead-on drummer who kept Nirvana on an even keel, had a pragmatic view of the album’s appeal: “The songs were catchy and they were simple, just like an ABC song when you were a kid.” Cobain was a close, direct presence, everyone’s friendless friend. The songs, despite their sometimes messy roar, were cunningly fashioned, switching in midstream from meditation to melee.

  It was in the fall of 1991 that Nirvana took hold of the nation’s youth and began selling records in the millions. It’s best not to analyze this sudden popularity too closely; as Michael Azerrad points out in his book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, the kind of instantaneous word-of-mouth sensation that lifted the band to the top of the charts also buoyed the careers of such differently talented personalities as Peter Frampton and Vanilla Ice. Adolescents are an omnipotent commercial force precisely because their tastes are so mercurial. In the deep dusk of the Reagan-Bush era, some segments of the youth demographic undoubtedly identified with Cobain’s punkish worldview, his sympathies and discontents, and, yes, the diminished opportunities of an entire generation. Others just got off on the crushing power of the sound.

  Cobain was at once irritated and intrigued by the randomness of his new audience. He lashed out at the “jock numbskulls, frat boys, and metal kids” (in Azerrad’s words) who jammed clubs and arenas for his post-Nevermind tours. But he also liked the idea of bending their minds toward his own punk ideals and left-leaning politics: “I wanted to fool people at first. I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n’ Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say.” After the initial period of fame, he let loose with social messages, not as heavy-handed or as earnest as R.E.M.’s or U2’s, but carefully aimed. He was happy to discover that high schools were divided between Nirvana kids and Guns n’ Roses kids.

  The zeal for subversion was well meant but naïve. By condemning racists, sexists, and homophobes in his audiences, he may have promoted the cause of politically correct language in certain high-school cliques, but he did not and could not attack the deep-seated prejudices simmering beneath that language. When he declared himself “gay in spirit,” as he did in an interview with the gay weekly The Advocate, he made a political toy out of fragile identity. And his renunciations of masculine aggression sounded hollow alongside a stage show that dealt in equipment-smashing mayhem.

  The attempt to carry out social engineering through rock lyrics is a dubious one. Rock and roll has never been and will never be a vehicle for social amelioration, despite many fond hopes. Music is robbed of its intentions and associations as it goes out into the great wide open; like a rumor passed through a crowd, it emerges utterly changed. Pop songs bec
ome the property of their fans and are marked with the circumstances of their consumption, not their creation. An unsought listenership can brand the music indelibly, as the Beatles discovered when Charles Manson embraced “Helter Skelter.” Or as Cobain discovered when a recording of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was played at a Guns n’ Roses show in Madison Square Garden while women in the audience were ogled on giant video screens.

  In his suicide note, Cobain gestured toward all these crises, his lack of passion, and his disconnectedness from the broad rock audience. The story underneath is simpler and sadder: he was trying to get off drugs and found himself helpless without their support. He leaned on drugs long before he became famous, and the malevolent media circus of his last few years can’t be entirely blamed for his bad end. Even when he started out, he looked tired and haggard. The rest of the story lies between him and his dealer.

  Killing himself as and when he did, Cobain at least managed to deliver a final jolt to the rock world he loved and loathed. Rock stars are glamorized for dying young, but they aren’t supposed to kill themselves on purpose. Greil Marcus’s invaluable compendium “Rock Death in the 1970s” records 116 untimely demises, only a handful of suicides among them. A transcendent drug-induced descent is the preferred exit. Certainly, the shotgun blast casts a different light on Cobain’s career; the lyrics all sound like suicide notes now. (“What else could I write / I don’t have the right / What else should I be / All apologies.”) He made his death unrhapsodizable.

  The rage we feel at suicides may be motivated by love, but it is the love that comes of possession, not compassion. It is the urge of the crowd to repossess the defective individual. The most mordant words on the subject are still John Donne’s, in defense of righteous suicide: “No detestation nor dehortation against this sin of desperation (when it is a sin) can be too earnest. But yet since it may be without infidelity, it cannot be greater than that.” This sin cannot be greater than our own urge to rationalize and allegorize the recently dead, especially those who were somehow faithful to themselves.