The poetics of rock

I’m teaching at Montclair State University because of Adam Bell, a fellow self-taught rock and pop musician turned academic. Adam loves to quote The Poetics of Rock by Albin Zak, and rightly so.

Zak’s major point is that rock is an art form about making records, and that the creativity in making records is only partially in the songs and the performances. A major part of the art form is the creation of sound itself. It’s the timbre and space that makes the best recordings come alive as much as any of the “musical” components. We need some better language to describe the different components that go into making a rock record, or any kind of recording.

Albin Zak understands studio productions to consist of three layers (24):

• The song: melody, harmony and lyrics, the components that can be notated and copyrighted.
• The arrangement: the specific combination of instruments and singers used to realize the song in the studio. The line between arrangement and composition is muddy in practice, but arrangements can’t be copyrighted.
• The track: the timbre and space of the recording itself. Recordings can be copyrighted, but they’re separate intellectual property from the song.

Zak cites Milton Babbitt’s consternation that, when asked in a survey who their favorite composer was, students responded with John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Babbitt had no problem with the merits of Lennon or Dylan; he was bothered by the category confusion between composers and songwriters (50). A classical score specifies the way a work should be performed in exacting detail. A song is more of a foundation on which to build a performance. When Jimi Hendrix recorded “All Along The Watchtower,” he was performing a song that Dylan wrote, but the two recordings are profoundly different music experiences. The Bear McReary version that appeared in Battlestar Galactica is another experience altogether. All three are the same song, but not the same piece of music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YanjY9CsPDQ

The Hendrix version is the best known, and rightly so. Most casual rock listeners will identify the song as being “by” Jimi Hendrix. This is partially because we tend to conflate authorship with performance. Dylan himself was a major influence on our expectation that singers are mostly performing their own material. But identifying “All Along The Watchtower” as being a Jimi Hendrix song is not wrong.

BTW, here’s Babbitt lamenting that his music for synthesizer can’t be performed anymore because the synths don’t exist. But in the same breath, he talks about how the magic of electronic music is that it’s so easily realized as a recording.

Look, when I turned to the electronic medium, not only was I fascinated by it—I’m gonna use that cliché, the challenge because it was—I had to work for years before I could manage that instrument in any way that I regarded as satisfactory. But the truth is that I did like the notion of walking into that studio with a piece in my head and walking out with a completely performed work in that little tape under my arm.

So what is the work? The part that can be notated? The part that can be performed? The part that actually is performed? Or the part that exists as a recording? Or the recording as played by a DJ, mixed in with other recordings? I’d say all of the above.

Half the music I listen to has never been notated, and probably couldn’t be. A case in point:

Outside of the narrow confines of the classical music world, we’ve all developed a consensus that the recording is the One True Song. This morning, a student of mine praised a band he had gone to see live by saying that they sounded “as good as the record.” This is no mean feat! The recording studio gives you control over the finest nuances of the music that live performers can only dream of.

When Zak says “the poetics of rock,” he means the poetics of production, not of songwriting or singing or guitar solos. His phrase is even more apt for the music that has come along since rock: disco, hip-hop, EDM. A song like “Call Me Maybe” carries 95% of its meaning in its soundscape. The melody, chords, lyrics and beat are all banal. But the sound of the song is a colossal stack of meticulously tuned and crafted layers upon layers upon layers. The arresting strangeness of its soundscape practically demands a simple rhythmic and harmonic framework; otherwise it would simply be overwhelming.

Another student wrote this on her class blog:

Garage band is really amazing!! I have always recorded music from an electronic keyboard so when I started using garage band in class, a whole new world opened up. The only frustrating thing that I found was how simple it is to create really good sounding tracks. All I had to do was pick three different instrument recordings and I got a great track. While that was really cool, it made me wonder where the importance of having musical skills has gone. With garage band anyone -with or without musical skills- can create a pretty good sounding track. If that is so…what is so great about creating good sounding tracks?

That is an excellent question. But it relies on some mistaken assumptions. The distance between a pretty good sounding track and “Call Me Maybe” represents the virtuosic mastery of the studio itself as an instrument. You can certainly go from beginner to okay-sounding with GarageBand much faster than you can with a guitar, but mastery isn’t any easier to attain.

Let’s go back to “All Along The Watchtower.” Why is the Hendrix version so much better than Dylan’s? Hendrix is a better guitarist, but that hardly matters; plenty of great guitarists make bad albums. Hendrix is a more palatable singer, but not by much. The real difference is that Hendrix is vastly better at playing the studio, at creating a soundscape on tape. Dylan writes magnificent songs, but his studio chops are uneven at best. Some of his albums sound great; most sound okay; several sound dreadful. Hendrix’s vision of timbre and space was decades ahead of his time. He also wrote a few great songs in his short life, but you rarely hear them covered. Take away the Hendrix sound, and you take away most of the magic.

The art of sampling is all about finding poetically-produced sounds and deploying them in new contexts. One boom-bap beat is much like another, but a James Brown snare does not sound like a Led Zeppelin snare. In a world saturated with recordings, I think it makes more artistic sense to engage on the sonic level. The Battlestar Galactica version of “All Along The Watchtower” is a creative enough arrangement, but if you want to really get some fresh juice out of the tune, sample some of Jimi’s guitar and drum sounds and build a new track around them. In fact, maybe I’ll go do that right now.