A Question of Words...And Music

[howard male]

No, not as in - words and music by Lennon and McCartney, but as in - words and their use in describing music.

Far the past eight years, half my weekly income has come from a word game called Definitials. Firstly for the Mail on Sunday (beggars can't be choosers - I tried all the broadsheets first) and now for Radio Times. The idea with DEFINITIALS (a collision of the words define and initials) is that you can take a word and define it using its letters as a starting point, creating a kind of self-defining acronym. For example:

DRAGON - Dangerous Reptilian Arsonist. Gorges On Nubiles

DOGMA - Deity Orders Grown Men Around

Those are two of my favourites. A less successful example was:

WORDS - Way Of Really Defining Something

Less successful because, of course, words don't really define anything, they merely stand in for things. They are arbitrary symbols. For example a 'tree' could have just as easily been called a 'gliff'. We just learn the established code and go along with it. A tree is an infinitely complex large plant which can look eerily menacing at night or friendly and sublime in the daylight. 'Tree' doesn't really begin to sum up a tree! But at least we have all agreed to agree that a tree is a tree. When it comes to describing music and sounds we are in a much more approximate and subjective universe.

In music nothing is as definite as a tree. Sound is the most intangible medium for an artist to work in and the most inscrutable medium for a writer to describe.
What an easy time the film or book critic has of it! They just describe the plot, the characters, the director's or novelist's track record, and then round off their two hundred words with a yay or nay. The works they are paid to describe and grade for us are simply facsimiles of the real concrete world we inhabit already. The story, the people that inhabit it and their interactions, have already been written using words, so all the critic has to do is offer a synopsis and a judgment.

What I find frustrating about much writing on music, is that usually any attempt at describing the sounds being reported on has been abandoned in favour of simply saying who this or that band most sound like rather than what they actually sound like. So that unless you know the sound of the band(s) they are being compared to you are none the wiser. I know it's easily done, we all do it - " Well they sound a bit like the White Stripes but with a female vocalist and a cello player..."

But for me the challenge of writing about music is finding a way of at least attempting to describe the indescribable - the sonic jigsaw puzzle of musical elements that comprise the forty five minutes to an hour of organised noise that has either left me indifferent, excited or asleep.
The possibly apocryphal rock n' roll anecdotes cribbed from the Internet, the line up of the band, the fact of whether this is their first or fourteenth album - all this can be found elsewhere. The only genuinely original thing a critic can contribute to the pot, is a subjective response to the music and a bit of scene-setting if it's relevant.

When I wrote the review of Tom Waits Hammersmith concert for this website last year, and decided not to fill it out with song titles (for who really cares about the set list other than those who were there and those who wished they'd been there) suggested that readers could find information on the set list etc elsewhere, Charlie posted a response asking 'where?' I didn't know where, but I knew the information was sure to be available, elsewhere, fairly easily. My point was that I didn't want to waste my time and some people's attention span by putting something in my review which could be accessed elsewhere. Sure enough, within ten minutes Alan had found it (or has an extraordinary memory) and posted it, and Con had annotated it, to King Charlie's precise requirements.

Of course, with world music, the music writer's job becomes even harder. Because with most pop music there's one other thing the time-pressured hack can fall back on - discussion of the lyrics. Usually this means proclaiming their flawless brilliance or their stultifying mediocrity. How rare is it to read a balanced review of an average album? I think there is a fear amongst some critics that unless they praise something to the sky or hammer it into the ground the resulting review will be dull to read. Thus every film, book or album is either a masterpiece or a pile of crap.
Again I disagree with this philosophy. Good writing is good writing. I rather enjoy the balanced review of the average album, because I know it must have been harder to write. The lexicon of words available to describe exultation or disgust is ostensibly far richer and dramatic than the vocabulary available to sum-up indifference or boredom. Therefore a little more wit and bluff is required to conjure up the required word-count if the album under examination is inarguably average.

Perhaps, on reflection, the film and theater critic is more guilty of this particular hysterical response to reviewing. How many quotes does one read every week proclaiming a movie to be the comedy/drama/thriller of the month/year/decade/millennium (delete as applicable)?

When I read an album review I want to read that the reviewer thought the snare drum sounded like a pencil beating on a biscuit tin lid, or the guitar sounded like it was being played at the bottom of the ocean. Writers sometimes forget that prose is a visual medium as well as a communication medium. I want to read lively, inventive prose not a re-juggling of the press release - something which, after all, is now available to us all via a mouse click.

We are living in a time when the nature of criticism could and should change. Journalism could become more expressive and prose-like. There could be as much art as information in the report of a concert or the review of an album.
Already the boundaries between documentary and fiction have been blurred with the rather awkwardly named docudrama or even worse named genre: Faction. But both are ways of taking the dry facts we can all access easily and turning them into something more subjective and potentially interesting - making a tree something so much more than just a tree.