Crazy joy

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Here’s another followup to my post on musical joy. Inspired by a speaker at the College Music Society northeast regional conference, I’d realized that we don’t talk enough about joy in music. True joy, the kind you can’t mistake for anything else when you feel it. (I’m sure we don’t make room enough for joy in most of what we do, but I’ll stick to music here.)

So I realized that many of us might not make room enough for joy when, God help us, we judge some music that we’ve heard. Judgment is such a tricky thing, so limited. The Rolling Stones can’t possibly be great because they’re rock, but Brahms can be supreme because he’s classical. Or, for some rock people, maybe the other way round.

But what’s missing here, as we make our pronouncements, is whether we loved what we heard. So many things seem more important than love. “Oh, I really liked the way they played! But they didn’t repeat the exposition. And the second movement was too slow.” That’s why we have the concept of the guilty pleasure, the thing we love, but think we shouldn’t. As if love (or joy) comes easily, happens to us every day. And as if radiance flooding through our hearts mattered less than an exposition repeat.

(And yes, I understand that in some areas of life, you need to double-check your radiance. Maybe you’re radiant about something really bad for you, or bad for the world. But is there any proof that an exposition repeat matters all that much? And could too much conern for prim minutiae — whether a repeat is observed, whether a song doctor came in to put the final polish on a rock band’s potential hit song, thus compromising its supposed authenticity — could make us repress whatever love was welling up inside us?

I think that might especially happen when we hear more than one kind of music on the same occasion. Once, when I saw a Twyla Tharp event, I could have asked myself which I liked better, the Brahms piano piece one dance was choreographed to, or the Chuck Berry songs Tharp used in another one?

Some people might say I can’t ask that question, because clearly Brahms is better. Or (more reasonably, in my view), because Brahms and Chuck Berry are so different.

But even if they’re very different, even if there’s an abyss between them, one thing stays the same when we hear them, and that’s us. We might react differently in different moods, or to differing performances of Brahms. But over time, those accidents smooth out, and maybe we can come to some conclusion.

I know I did. I liked Chuck Berry. And, moving on from there, with no complications in my heart I can also say (returning to the Rolling Stones), that I love “Rocks Off,” the opening track of the Stones’ album Exile on Main Street, more than I like any Brahms symphony, Even more than I like the Second, my favorite of the four. And even more than when I heard Carlos Kleiber conduct the Second live with the Chicago Symphony, and the players seemed so inspired that I thought they might levitate. And even than when I heard a Furtwängler recording (don’t remember which one) with the finale so exuberant, so fleet that it lost all trace of Brahms’s heaviness.

I’m not saying “Rocks Off” is better than Brahms, in any absolute sense. One virtue of the love test, in fact, is that it keeps me from making any top-heavy judgments. I’m only saying that, when I look at what’s in my heart, I love “Rocks Off” more. I love the way it feels unstable, the way it’s wild and dangerous. And I love that it feels that way in part because it’s played and recorded so roughly. One of the murkiest recordings, I’d guess, of any great rock .

And I love the way the opening riff is repeated, not twice, not four times, but three times, which makes it feel unbalanced. And I love the way the rough sound, and the very nature of electric guitars, makes the simple triads in the song sound like swarms of shouting overtones, so that basic chord progressions — I, IV, V7, as we’d say in classical music — don’t sound basic at all, as they would if a string quartet were playing them.

So that basic chord progressions, mostly using (in classical music terms) I, IV, and V7 don’t sound nearly as basic as they would if a string quartet were playing them. If a string quartet were playing, you might want more variety. But from the Stones, on this recording, each of these chords is a feast.

Especially since the song keeps hovering on IV and V, so much so that the tonic chord often sounds like the one that needs to resolve. That especially is true when, in many places, a brief return to the tonic is marked by a sudden blast of sonic light, propelling the music forward to the next chord change. (You’ll esepcially hear this as the song is ending, as it tumbles toward its final fadeout.)

I’ll continue this post with one about how high art — Proust, Webern, Antonioni  — can drive me just as mad with love.

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The chords in “Rocks Off” are E, A, and B7. The Chuck Berry Twyla Tharp dance was Ocean’s Motion, the Brahms one was Brahms’ Paganini.)

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If you check “Rocks Off” out on Spotify or elsewhere, my vote would be to avoid the 2010 remastering, which I don’t love. Sounds like they wanted to make the murky mix clearer, (why?), and in doing so pumped up the highs. Which then bruised the shouting overtones, so they screech and grate, making for what to me is unpleasant listening.

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Some fine words about joy, from the” Zen Habits” blog (highly recommended):

Remember what it was like to go outside as a child? I do, because I watch my kids every day. They run around, pretending they’re warriors and wizards, ride their bikes like they’re flying, swing like they’re about to take off for the stars.

Kids don’t care about what they “should” do … all they want to do is have fun. And so they play.