Almost done

As you can see, the tiling is done; all that's left to do is grout, seal and install a door.

Day 3: Dead Milkmen, RC's Mom

Huh? you say. For those of you who aren't from Philadelphia, didn't go to college in the 90's or are not aficionados of the punk rock scene, you probably wouldn't know the Dead Milkmen. Even if you did, you might not remember this track, the second off of 1988's Beezlebubba, which includes the following lyrics:

Gonna beat my wife
Look out!

Wife beatin'
Mistreatin'
Wife slappin'
It happens


(Sung in a soul/funk style).

At first, I didn't recognize the song (or who it was by), and was thus a little horrified (I'm not big on domestic violence, to say the least). And I was a bit confused, as I figured it had to be an ironic commentary on something, but I couldn't remember the context. Then I recognized the deconstructed funk groove and the James Brown-esque caterwauling as the creation of the idiosyncratically humorous punksters that are the Dead Milkmen. And I remembered the context; in 1988, Brown was briefly jailed for, yes, beating his wife (this was in his violent PCP phase), so the song is indeed an ironic commentary.

It made me think of how some music is so topical as to be rendered unlistenable unless it's within a specific context. The Dead Milkmen track is odd, derivative and offensive unless you understood when and about whom it was written (and then you might still find it offensive, but that's just a matter of taste!). So, in a way, it doesn't really stand up to the test of time.

Is the test of truly great music whether it can be taken simply as music, out of any existing context? I thought immediately of pieces like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique; if we detached the music from the narrative of the artist's opium induced haze and obsession with his beloved, does the music stand up? For me, it certainly does; there is a musical progression that's both organic and logical that takes place over the course of the movements, from the yearning of the first two movements to the ominous rumbles at the end of the third that foreshadow the increasingly violent and macabre expression of the fourth and fifth movements. Sure, it's more fun to listen to that last movement imagining witches cackling and skeletons doing a grotesque round dance, but the music would work on its own regardless.

That's narrative context; what about historic context? Do we need to know that Beethoven had conceived of his Eroica Symphony as an homage to Napoleon (or even that he had Republican leanings) to enjoy the music? I think not. And that is, in large part, what makes that music great; it needs no context, because it is empirically powerful and moving.

As a more modern example, I thought of the film scores and event-specific pieces written by John Williams (and if you haven't figured it out over the last 8 months of this blog, I'm a huge Williams fan). His film music is magic in the context of the movie it was written for, but I find them just as inventive and evocative as pure music. And I don't need to know that "Summon the Heroes" was written for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; it's just a great orchestral fanfare, however you look at it. It's timeless.

Sinatra is timeless, as are the Beatles; I think Billy Joel is timeless, Elvis Costello. I suppose some of this is a matter of taste, but I feel like it goes beyond that; the best music of any genre has a freshness and an immediacy about it that exists regardless of when or for what reasons it was initially created. I'm not a big reggae fan, but I find a lot of Bob Marley to be utterly timeless. I wonder what music others think have stood the test of time?