1(a): The meaningful and the meaningless

For about as long as I’ve been writing about music, I’ve argued that there are so many literate, intelligent, profound lyricists out there – should you care to look – that no-one who truly loves music need ever waste their time listening to the trite, empty sentiments of lazy lyricists who happen to knock out good tunes, or be paired with a decent guitarist, say.

Does Definitely Maybe (1993) really give you more of a visceral rush than Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), with its endlessly resonant social criticism? The same goes for creative arrangers, and so on. In this series of columns, I’ll be looking at those artists who act as conduits for the avant-garde – not so much (or not often) presenting their experiments as ends in themselves, and sometimes pushing music forward by collaboration rather than personal experimentation (the Bjorks and Bowies), but in any case proving there’s no real separation. I’m specifically interested, here, in the occurrence of “meaningless sounds and words” in avant-garde music; just why do singers (and musicians armed with samplers) record sounds and lyrics that are openly gibberish, beyond what we might recognize as surrealism’s slow release of hidden meanings?

Meaningless As Avant-Garde Strategy

Sigur Ros - ( )

With its intuitive soundings and lack of “real” words, the parenthesis album by Sigur Ros – ( ) – stands out as an extraordinarily democratic gesture; its dozen (or fewer) distinct vocables sound like innumerable phrases in Western European languages. Doubtless it has emotional resonance for listeners from many other cultures, however guttural their consonants. If you want to get technical, it exploits our innate “pattern recognition” faculty the same as a Rorschach test; we’re more inclined to see meaning than meaninglessness, and in doing so, we learn about our needs and desires.

Mogwai - Young Team

This kind of ironic “meaninglessness” is also important to another post-rock band, Mogwai. Opening their debut album (Young Team, 1997) with the translation of a foreign language review, Mogwai demonstrate colossal hubris by implying they’re ever after going to live up to the claim: “If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this…” The significance of that phrase has been overloaded, with time: Yes, Mogwai strive to evoke natural forces, something beyond the human, but it’s in the use of other translations and transformations that they foreground the textural qualities of a voice, and the paralanguage that is tone and rhythm; check out the Japanese vocals on ‘I Need Horses’ (Mr Beast, 2006), the words vocodered to unintelligibility on ‘Hunted by a Freak’ (Happy Songs, 2003), the numerous backward vocals and partly submerged narratives (Young Team, 1997), and – most provocatively? – the sample of the voice saying “please hold the line” (CODY, 1999) that is a kind of metonym for failed, or endlessly thwarted communication.

Mogwai - Ten Rapid

Sometimes this is playful – see the decontextualized conversation about Marvel comic villains (Ten Rapid, 1996) that makes you wonder why someone’s laughing about “killing millions of people…!” Elsewhere – ‘Dial:Revenge’ (from Rock Action, 2000) is an endorsement of Gruff Rhys of SFA’s own project to reclaim languages that are considered beyond the purview of popular music; and by extension, the dominant Anglocentric culture. If Welsh is “un-pop”, and “exotic” (e.g. sub-Saharan) languages only titillate our ears for connoting great distance and difference, how much are we limiting ourselves?

Is “post-rock” avant-garde? Most people would say not, knowing how quickly its crowd-pleasing formula became stale. Are these strategies avant-garde?

Mogwai - Rock Action

Well, they’re not new – if that’s what you find yourself objecting to – but it’s still at the outer limits of normal practice, and I’d argue that any artist makes the choice to push themselves to re-discover old things as much as they push themselves to discover genuinely new things; whether you then consider those artists (e.g. Mogwai) avant-garde in themselves (rather than avant-garde sounding, on occasion) may simply be down to how enthusiastically they explore the legacy available to them, and/or recombine those old strategies… even if they haven’t gone so far as to devise an entirely new tonal system, or exploit the possibilities of new instruments in new ways. (There’s another potential tangent here, about what’s meant by “dated” – presumably, when a musician takes new instruments or techniques and uses them like the old ones, rather than experimenting to discover which tones fit which part of the composition…)

Faust - The Faust Tapes

From The Beatles’ White Album (under the influence of Yoko Ono), through The Faust Tapes, to DJ Shadow and then a whole generation armed with samplers, “meaninglessness” often takes the form of “decontextualized” snippets. ‘Revolution No. 9’ is composed of fragments too small to construct much of a narrative, but it’s a lullaby compared to the deliberately irritating or abrasive sonic collage by Faust. Somewhat less random, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (1996) presents samples of varying degrees of obscurity, or various shades of meaning, diving on some putative graph towards pure sensation: the movie character protesting about his arrest… to the sample of “the clock on the wall says a quarter past midnight…” later looped and distended into a DJ’s battlecry, “a quarter past midnight… midnight… muh-muh-muh-MIDNIGHT!”, which acquires an almost mythic resonance, referring to some mysterious witching hour neither today nor tomorrow, but between the days. Other artists have made this gradual shading into meaninglessness the closest thing you’ll find to a narrative arc on their “difficult” / Wire-friendly albums: Scott Walker’s The Drift (2004) provides historical notes as clues for some of its lyrics, and other quotes on the sleeve hint at a free-association of ideas around “silver”, “horses”, and so on, but as the clues become more scarce we’re plunged into a turbulent subconscious not our own. With deep irony, Walker credits only one line to another artist (in spite of the lines marked as dialogue), ‘JA-DA / JA-DA / JA-DA, JA-DA, JING-JING-JING’ sung with a jauntiness and smoothness that suggests it’s meant to be seductive. To what species?!

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