Groove: an aesthetic of measured time

As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.

Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.

Before getting into the Adorno of it all, let’s start with Abel’s explanation of the social work that he sees groove-based music doing. Abel argues that, like modernist art music, groove is a reaction to the totalizing rigidity of capitalism, as exemplified by the ever-present clock. However, while modernism resists the disciplinary strictures of clock time by rejecting predictable rhythms entirely, groove repurposes clock time as a source of communal pleasure. Abel cites George Lipsitz’s argument that the rhythm of popular music is a coping strategy for industrial workers. Blues, country, R&B, rock and hip-hop were all originally blue-collar musics, and they use regular rhythm to “measure out doses of pleasure instead of units of labor” (p. 113). Abel also cites Ingrid Monson’s quotes of jazz clarinetist Don Byron about how groove makes time itself feel pleasurable. The bottom line of Abel’s argument is that groove alleviates our alienation by humanizing measured time.

Abel lists four crucial elements of groove: metronomic time, syncopation, multi-level meter, and a backbeat. (Backbeat is really a combination of syncopation and multi-level meter.) Meter is not so much a pattern of strong and weak accents as it is an oscillation between poles.

What this implies is that at the heart of meter is a cyclical motion or wave comprising a motion of ‘to-fro’ or ‘away-back’ (p. 106).

This is like Philip Tagg’s model of loop-based harmony.

Anyway, Abel goes on:

What is required for successful generation of meter is not equal time intervals but an equilibrium, ‘a mutual complementing, a mutual interpenetration, a mutual balancing’ between the ‘one’ and the ‘two’ of the metric wave. This sense of balance will be a more reliable and more real measure of time than a metronome, rigid adherence to which always threatens to destroy the musicality of meter (p. 110).

Uh. Prince and J Dilla would like a word. Perfectly metronomic time can groove just fine. Mark Abel is a jazz guy, and jazz guys tend not to like electronic music. Anyway, this is beside the main point.

Music’s temporality means that there can never be exact repetition: the tones may repeat but time cannot. A repeated phrase necessarily takes on new significance due to its new position in relation to the metric wave. Repetition of the tones, far from threatening boredom, is actually the most effective way of generating that wave (p. 110).

You can build waves on waves by adding new elements, repeating them, breaking the pattern, repeating the break, breaking the meta-pattern, and so on, to any degree of recursion you care to try.

Highly repetitive, metrically organised music, does not, paradoxically, disorient the listener as to how many repetitions there have been. Rather, each repeated bar or period carries with it the number of its repetition, directly given, rendering conscious counting superfluous: ‘its entire past is preserved in its present and given directly with it’ (p. 111).

People can feel when the eighth or sixteenth or thirty-second repetition is coming up even though they almost never count beats and bars.

Because groove music is “about” time itself, melodies and harmonies are there to assist with your timekeeping, not to be “interesting” in and of themselves. Groove is built around sequences of short, discrete events rather than themes.

It is less the case that each musical event is positioned in relation to the groove, than that each musical event, through its temporality, makes a contribution to the articulation of the groove (p. 242).

Elegantly put. Okay, so groove is wonderful. Why did Adorno disapprove of it so intensely? Abel spends most of the book struggling with this question.

Adorno saw popular music as a transmission vector for fascism. His 1941 essay ‘On Popular Music’ argues that pop songs are standardized containers that songwriters simply fill with interchangeable content. In “art” music, the form and substance of the music interact dialectically, but pop music is too formula-bound to allow this interaction. Adorno was unmoved by the improvisational aspect of jazz, because he argued that soloing over a preset form just disguises the form’s essential rigidity. The jazz improvisor “is permitted to tug at the chains of his boredom, and even to clatter them, but he cannot break them”, as Adorno puts it. As a commercial product, pop music represents the machine age’s subjugation of individual subjectivity, the authoritarianism of an imposed collectivity. The roots of jazz in marching band music are an obvious manifestation of fascism, but its roots in dance are just as authoritarian. If you are doing synchronous movement, then as far as Adorno was concerned, you might as well be marching in lockstep.

So what should musicians do if they want to resist totalitarianism? Adorno adored Beethoven, but he recognized that we can’t write music like that anymore. Western tonal harmony is inadequate to express the oppression and alienation of the world. If we are going to make music that doesn’t just imitate or reproduce the alienation of capitalism, Adorno believed that we would need the austere atonality of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Adorno was more concerned about harmony than rhythm, but Abel points out that modernist composers use formal asymmetry and extreme rubato to undermine any feeling of groove just as effectively as they undermine tonality.

The problem is that high modernism did not exactly take the working class by storm. Adorno was aware of that. He admitted in The Philosophy of New Music that if a composition is too dense and complex, then everything starts sounding interchangeable, making the music relate “indifferently” to time. Abel sums up the irony: Adorno advocated for modernism because it successfully overthrows the shackles of collectivity, but the qualities that make it able to do so also keep it from communicating with non-specialist listeners. When I was in grad school, I heard some composition students doing a recital of their work. One person stopped his wildly atonal piece because he said he had messed it up and needed to start over. I was sitting there thinking, how could anyone possibly tell?

Adorno wanted musical form to emerge from the ‘inner necessity’ of the content, without being bound by any preconceived strictures. In 1961, he proposed une musique informelle, literally “formless music”, which rejects both the oppressive forms of the past and the rigid totalism of serialism. He was anxious to free music from any kind of collectivity. The logical conclusion is to have a totally individualized music, where everyone is chasing their compositional idiosyncrasies or at home alone reading scores. If the collective is always hostile, then it seems as though the only way out is loneliness. That sounds to me like a bad tradeoff. Fascism is definitely bad, but loneliness is arguably worse.

Adorno was also aware of the irony that predictable form creates the possibility of improvisation, and that unpredictable forms confine performers more tightly to the score. In Bach’s era, performers freely embellished and varied the music in much the same way that jazz musicians treat showtunes now, but by the twentieth century, scores had become as prescriptive as possible. Abel says that Adorno failed to recognize that not only do pop songs invite interpretation, but their compositional process is itself often an improvisational and collective one. The bright line between composers and performers that Adorno takes for granted is a feature of European classical music, but not necessarily jazz, rock, or hip-hop. Tight and rigid grooves make it possible to coordinate musical activities without needing to specify everything (or, really, anything) in advance. Abel argues that grooves are not so much imposed “from above”, but rather that they are jointly created by participants. This ties into the participatory ethos of the Black cultural movements that have given rise to all the best groove music.

Abel’s bottom line is that groove does the liberatory work that Adorno hoped that high modernism would do:

Groove is the praxial, concrete, aesthetic figuration of an emancipated, collective temporality. Praxial because it avoids the contemplative and individualistic representation of time through narrative in favour of a collective making of time. Concrete because it uses as its raw material the abstract, alienated time of capitalism rather than an ideal liberated time. Groove is an aesthetic practice which, through the mimetic grasping of the measured time of capitalism, achieves a praxial figuration of a liberated temporality (p. 256).

Groove and high modernism emerged at the same time and in response to the same social forces. Modernism defies listeners’ expectation and memory capacity in order to keep their attention on the present moment. Groove focuses listener attention on moments in ordinary time, rather than helping listeners escape from it. I like groove better.