I Can’t Sing about It, I Gotta Talk about It
A music writer makes the case for writing about music—and gestures toward the source of meaning-making.
Review by Charlie Clark
This is a review of a book about music nerdery, so let me start by talking about the 37-second opener on Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker (2000, his solo debut), which is entitled “(Argument with David Rawlings Concerning Morrissey).” The track is two guys in the studio, tuning up and arguing about whether “Suedehead” is on Viva Hate (1988) as well as on Bona Drag (1990). They know it’s on Bona Drag, because it was a single, but Dave swears he looked the other day and it’s not on Viva Hate. The argument is settled with a $5 bet.
This is the kind of conversation you might overhear in any record store—if you’re the kind of person who hangs out in record stores. That’s what the track means: it’s a secret handshake between record store guys. Adams is telling you that this album he’s recorded, Heartbreaker, might sound like country, but it’s alt-country; it’s country by and for guys who are into Morrissey. Like he sang on “Faithless Street,” back when he was still in Whiskeytown, “I started this damn country band ‘cause punk rock was too hard to sing.”
If Joel Heng Hartse is right, then this kind of exchange is at the heart of what it means for pop music to be pop music. Dancing about Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do is his defense of popular music discourse, of the whole world of pop analysis and commentary, against the charge that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” He aims to blur the boundary between the criticism and the creation: “…[W]riting about music is, in a very real way, to make it, to participate in building a world where it matters.”
Henge Hartse makes the case for this elision in a chapter-length history of the reception of Weezer’s Pinkerton: “…by the time someone like me is writing about Pinkerton in 2021, I’m not writing about Pinkerton anymore; I’m writing about twenty-five years of people writing about Weezer after Pinkerton.” Pinkerton is not just an album and Weezer is not just a band: they are two nodes in the sprawling network of attempts at meaning-making that is popworld. Without the critics’ negative reviews, the Pinkerton-obsessed fanbase, and the “anti-Pinkerton” Green Album, nothing about Weezer would be what it is.
Writers are one section of the interpretative community that makes pop possible, enabling it to mean what it means, or indeed, to mean anything at all.
Pop music needs writers, says Heng Hartse, because it depends on its interpretative community for its very definition. He shows how any attempt at stylistic definition rapidly deconstructs itself: “If all pop music has to have a beat, what about Suzanne Vega’s popular a capella single ‘Tom’s Diner’? If it has to have lyrics, what about surf rock?” Pop music is defined by its audience and the musician’s pursuit of that audience: “An investment in the pop world and a desire to create music in order to be interpreted by it… seem to be more apt criteria for a definition of pop music than any particular musical characteristics.” In other words, you know you’re making pop music “when you get your picture on the cover of the Rollin’ Stone.” You know you’re listening to pop music when the country singer namedrops Bona Drag. Writers are one section of the interpretative community that makes pop possible, enabling it to mean what it means, or indeed, to mean anything at all.
Heng Hartse doesn’t make this point, but another reason why pop music needs writers is because musicians are so frequently terrible at talking about their own work. Try reading any interview with god-level producer Rostam Batmanglij—“One of my favorite moves is to slow a song down… I feel like you really can experience the groove.”—excruciating, but not atypical for an artist of his caliber. David Foster Wallace once tried to explain why “[g]reat athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination.” His hypothesis was that the essence of athletic genius is a Zen-like unselfconsciousness: there is no one who can explain what it’s like “repeatedly putting a ball in a court’s corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching,” because there was no one there at the time. Socrates thought poets were like the oracles who, under divine influence, “say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” Perhaps musical genius involves a similar sort of ekstasis; I wouldn’t know. At any rate, as long as great musicians continue to offer post-game-interview-level commentary on their work, there will be a place for music writers.
The popworld of the past is another country; its interpretative community has dispersed.
Undergirding all of Heng Hartse’s theorizing about popworld is a theological perspective. Granted that discoursing about music is permissible, where does the impulse come from in the first place? What is this “something that drives us not simply to experience these cultural practices and artifacts we love, and not even simply to enjoy them, but to participate in and become part of them.” Heng Hartse doesn’t go into detail, content to leave the idea largely undefended, but he points to lots of clues that “all human meaning-making endeavors are variations on a theme, and that theme is the transcendent, seemingly divine, ineffable thing that the Greeks and early Christians called logos.”
All this discussion—roughly, the first half of the book—should delight the citizen of popworld who is better at talking about music than performing it. It would serve admirably as the manifesto for Dancing About Architecture Quarterly (“Asking ‘Does this rule?’ since 2022”). The second half of the book, an anthology of Heng Hartse’s own music writing from the past 20 years, is a bit of a letdown, not because there’s anything wrong with the writing itself, but simply because it’s no longer au courant. The popworld of the past is another country; its interpretative community has dispersed. It’s a rare piece of music writing that remains worth reading and commenting on for decades. Still, Henge Hartse’s “Attempts” inspired me to check out Luxury, revisit The Weakerthans, scour the internet for the obscure Britpop album at the center of the essay “Invisible Balloon,” and yes, keep “dancing about architecture” myself.
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
Dancing About Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do was published by Cascade Books on February 7, 2022. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
