I like to get my kicks as much as the next guy.  Who doesn’t like to rip out a quick guitar solo for the nice people?  Prince, in his early incarnation, was not about concision, he was much more about keeping things moving all night.  But the Sign O the Times record was certainly a paradigm shift.  So I like to think about what the guitar solo in It on that record says.  You can listen here, and the solo starts at 1:46.

When it starts, you’re like yes, this man is ripping a solo JUST FOR ME.  He’s into it.  There’s not really been any guitar thus far and now I have some ripping coming my way.  Seven notes in, he stops, takes a breather.  Playing it cool.  Okay, we want more.  We get it, you’re not giving us everything you’ve got right off.  Pacing yourself.  Good move, purple dude.  Throw in a couple of bends up and some high junk.  We’re keeping things intense.  I see your perspective, I get you, I’m with you.

By 1:55, we’re like, okay, here’s a chord change, what’s your move?  Where is this going?  What’s this about?  It was all burning out of the gate, but you gotta deliver.  And he’s like uh huh yeah well I’ve got a little four note lick here that’s gonna get us lower AND THEN HE ANSWERS WITH THE GOOFY SYNTH SOUND.  I associate this synth sound with basketball ball shoes squeaking on a chord.  Maybe MJ’s Jam is my point of reference?  Is that even right?  Anyway, the synth coming in is like, wait, is this even a guitar solo?  This phrase is such a cute little answer to the solo guitar phrase, but who’s in charge here?  I thought this was a ripping solo?  And then Prince repeats the whole thing, and you’re like damn he meant that synth answer.  I’m not sure.  But then we get this very steady rhythmic ascending phrase with a kind of muting articulation.  And you realize, oh huh, he’s wrapping this thing up just as we were getting into it.  Ends with some high junk (like the high cheese to strike out Adam Dunn or Mark Reynolds or Drew Stubbs or something), and it’s just so.

It’s not a guitar solo that’s about blowing you away.  It’s a well-timed tease.  A little taste.  From the beginning, the burning stuff is cut off quick, and that tells you everything right there.  The whole song is a very steady state affair.  And in the middle there’s such an anti-guitar-solo-guitar-solo, a guitar solo with a handy little synth frame not unlike how the guitar solo late in Lady Cab Driver ends.  So complete and perfect.  I’m thinking about this because after we played a killer show last Saturday, there was a dance party, and I offered this in my humble DJing.

This is an unpopular position, I’m aware of that.

I want to think about the good that can come from the active disregard of the classics.  Or: questioning the assumption that the pantheons we are taught are worthy of being liked, or perhaps of being respected.

In general, I get very little pleasure from disliking things.  I recognize that dislike is often the basis of cool.  Think of a schoolyard cool kid, age 8.  You show up with your My Little Pony lunchbox, or Voltron, or whatever, affirming that you like some cultural entity.  Some kid says, “why do you have that lunchbox, the Smurfs [or whatever] are stupid.”  There is no proper response here.  The disapprover has won.  He’s placed himself above you in the scheme of knowing about things while tying himself to nothing.  He can maneuver, but you are stuck in a position of having cared, having posited that something is good.  You’re being earnest.  Irony comes into it when you, aged 17 now, carry the same lunchbox.  The assumption would be “I don’t actually like this cultural thing, and moreover I’m calling attention to it without needing to cut down someone else.  This is an ironic coolness billboard.”

With that in mind, I’d like to posit my thesis and then clarify.  My point: I don’t really care about a lot of canonical figures in music (or art, literature, etc), for example: JS Bach, Beethoven, the Rolling Stones, Dizzy, B.I.G., Brahms, Pavement, etc.  I think, on some level, that they’re not good.  It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with them, it’s that I’m unimpressed by them and refuse to let the weight of countless other people’s judgement make me think otherwise.

Now, I realize that given my introduction, part of what I’m trying to do here is establish a position of coolness by cutting down other people’s taste.  I take no particular joy in doing so, but I want to make sure I acknowledge that off that bat before I continue making a larger point.  My personality has been constructed to seek a kind of coolness based in being outside basic taste.  Resolved.

It’s long seemed to me that one of the big downsides to flogging the canon, particularly to the young & impressionable, is that greatness feels solely historic and/or unreachable.  My position is that each time you sit down to create something, you should have the attitude that you may be writing the greatest thing of all time.  As a listener: the thing you are now hearing could very well be the most meaningful thing you’ve (anyone’s) ever heard.  You may view these as two separate concerns: what does putting down the past have to do with the present’s self esteem*?  I guess to me it has to do with definitions and using them carefully.  If classical music is defined by Mozart and Haydn, you can’t ever write it better than them, and that’s a quirk of language.  But that’s not obvious.  Being a composer has nothing to do with genre, so shoehorning the steady diet of Palestrina, or Stravinsky, or Cage into a young composers’ mind and elevating it to “genius” stature is unhelpful.  Seems wiser to me to present these things as useful models that one can freely like or dislike, just as folks are allowed to be Beatles or Stones fans (but take away the dichotomy for even better results).  Things from the past are just like things from the present, there’s just more scholarship on them and we’ve had longer to understand them.

But we can’t ignore foundational impact.  To me, there’s a big difference between recognizing someone’s impact on the form (say, Haydn & B.I.G.) and actually wanting to listen to them.  Think of an artists’ artist – every American auteur has seen all the 60s New Wave films endlessly but you need not appreciate Truffaut to enjoy Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino.  Part of the joy of being in a culture, particularly today’s super splintered culture of immediacy, is reveling in the nowness of the culture’s creators.  I’ve been thinking a lot about electronic pop created African Americans outside the mainstream in the 70s & 80s, and in this context you need not know where the break beats come from, or how vocoders & talkboxes work**, to feel the visceral implications of these technologies to this music, made by these people, in this time & place.

Sure, Bach and Bartok are good studies for piano and composition students alike.  Sure, the nature of what we understand as a composer’s work today derives from how these composers made these compositions.  But for gosh sakes, let’s be allowed to leave it at that.  If the music of the Bs doesn’t have anything that grabs you beyond instructing you in form, harmony, and phrasing (and lord knows there are plenty of other models too), then let it be at that.  Maybe Schumann & Schubert are like Clementi & Klose with more dramatic biographies.  It’s nothing personal.  I don’t mean to besmirch Bach or Jagger’s names, I simply mean to say that their music is that same as everyone else’s – it is sometimes interesting, sometimes not.  It speaks to some people, not to others.  It may have been cleverly put together or it may just seem that way in retrospect.

It’s an artifact.  It’s nothing until you animate it.

If the masterpieces of other cultures are opaque upon first listen and can be expected to require some acclimation before comprehension is possible, why should it be different when dealing with our own cultural artifacts (problematic as that idea is)?

If you trust me as a listener, as a creative sort, then you have to trust me enough to have what appears to be bad taste.  Let’s say I hate the classics and love the C list, not for spite & hegemony but with my whole heart.  Am I blind?  Perhaps I’m coming from a completely different angle.  Isn’t the best part that we all get to make our own canons, and that these canons change all the time?

* If you’re seriously asking this, trying saying “Fuck [canonic figure x]” some time when you’re in a rut.

** Thanks to Cory I’m hip to this book