ADOR OH NO!

A few days ago, while unpacking and leafing through a box of old books retrieved from storage, I discovered to my dismay that I had gotten comfortable on the sofa and was already two whole pages into reading Adorno.

I escaped an hour or so later through a gap between the chapters, feeling much the same as I have during all previous encounters with history’s grumpiest philosopher: bruised, tired, vaguely cross at both him and the world of unending horrors that he reminded me we all live in. But also with the irritating feeling that I'd caught a glimpse of something too interesting to not subsequently spend too many waking hours trying to understand.

And to cut to the chase — and to cut out a thousand very confused words where I tried to explain the route I took to get here — ultimately this led to me thinking a lot about the pop song as 'an object of contradiction', and how that fits with other, ongoing thoughts I've been trying to get my head around about what it means to make music 'less productively'.

A CONTRADICTORY SAD BANGER

Here is an example of a pop song as an object of contradiction. The same afternoon I read Adorno I encountered the recent Charli XCX song House. And it is hard to imagine a more perfect cultural artefact to demonstrate the contradictions of modern pop music. This song is, has or does all of the follow:

• Incredible microtonal work combining precise electronic music production with acoustic instruments
• BUT, for all of that dissonance, it still has a repetitive chorus hinging on a simple classic move from Cmin to Fmin and back again
• Features one of the most-talked-about hyper pop stars of the moment
• BUT - she doesn't even start singing until the 2 minute mark of a 3 minutes song
• The opening two minutes is spoken word by John Cale from The Velvet Underground??
• Somehow feels disposable but also displays an incredible amount of attention to detail
• It sounds a bit like 90s nostalgia
• It sounds a bit like Deftones
• It sounds a bit like Tim Hecker producing Colin Stetson
• It also sounds like it could only be Charli XCX
• It is weirdly experimental while being instantly accessible
• It is all surface but also repeated listens reveal hidden depths
• It is a banging 3 minute pop song
• It is also technically the soundtrack to the new Wuthering Heights movie which seems to be, by all accounts, a quite bad 'smooth-brained', class-blind fumble of the novel which is nevertheless enjoying box office success. In other words: this song is an advert

This bundle of contradictions is the song. You can't separate out just the audio bit and think of it as being remotely the same thing as the whole.

An interesting side-effect of thinking about songs this way is the degree to which it instantly neutralises the looming horror of 'AI Music'. Not from its actual, material effects, unfortunately, as I feel that no matter how soon the bubble bursts there will still be a long period ahead of us where this stuff gets forced down our throat. But from an artistic perspective, it is almost laughable how ill-equipped the fundamental building blocks of AI Music are when compared to these actual artistic, emotive, social, political, human forces that are contained in a good (or bad!) pop song. The friction is the art. And the context in which that song exists is an integral part of what creates meaning. It is as if all the good, dramatic stuff of a song is found within the compelling struggle between a '1' and a '10' tangled up together yet pulling in opposite directions, whereas the AI equivalent would simply present us with the statistically-average beigeness of a '5'.

I find this reassuring. The AI slop music being churned out by companies like Suno is not just souless trash, but statistically average, entirely compromised and uncontradictory souless trash. So let's lean into contradictory music.

And I am not articulating anything here that is particularly novel or profound for anybody who has ever made music. Think about a distortion pedal for a guitar. The whole point of using one is to add signal-destroying noise to a the signal you are trying to produce. You cannot resolve this contraction, you have to accept it as just one more constantly fluctuating dynamic that sits in relation to all the other constantly fluctuating dynamics that, in combination (and opposition!) you call a song. This is the grit not just of creative expression but being alive, isn't it?

...BUT WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH MAKING MUSIC 'LESS PRODUCTIVELY'?

I actually spent entirely too long trying to properly answer this question, but you'll be relieved to know that at this point I've decided to cut another thousand or so words that documented the painful hours where this line of thinking dragged me back into the sullen embrace of Adorno and his concept of 'negative dialectics', and me trying to tie that to degrowth communism, and a kind of cyclical making and unmaking of music in a way that really did not want to come together at all. You're welcome.

I feel like tucked away in there somewhere is something super useful when it comes to deliberately applying contradictions to music making, but it's not yet ready for prime time. So let's just say for now approaching music as a thing that actively chooses to fight against itself is another useful little idea to keep in mind the next time I, inexplicably, decide to spend lots of time thinking about making music instead of, y'know, just simply making it.

That's it. Enjoy the rise of spring. See you next month.