AEM038 Little Women

If I learned any­thing as an Anthro­pol­ogy major in col­lege, it’s that when we speak of “human nature” we’re almost always talk­ing about cul­ture. Count­less ideas and insti­tu­tions deemed nat­ural for the human spirit are in fact part of a com­plex web of learned vocab­u­lary. Take the West­ern notions of con­so­nance and dis­so­nance, the sup­port­ing base of musi­cal tonal­ity. It is in no way appar­ent a pri­ori that cer­tain tone com­bi­na­tions are pleas­ing while oth­ers are unre­fined or dis­agree­able. Clearly, tonal­ity is as much a con­structed sys­tem as ethics, some­thing which is pro­duced by (not before) human inter­ac­tion and dis­sem­i­nated, with con­stant re-adaptations, from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. An invo­ca­tion of the musi­cal phi­los­o­phy of John Cage is appro­pri­ate here: “The first ques­tion I ask myself when some­thing doesn’t seem to be beau­ti­ful is why do I think it’s not beau­ti­ful. And very shortly you dis­cover that there is no rea­son.” This quote has always haunted me because I think it pen­e­trates the prob­lem of the ques­tion of music. What is and is not music, the obses­sion with exclu­sion­ary divi­sion, has marked every stage of West­ern musi­cal his­tory. Com­bin­ing Cage’s chal­lenge of tra­di­tional aes­thetic bina­ries (reflected in tonality’s con­so­nance and dis­so­nance) with the insights of anthro­po­log­i­cal thought, we see that the res­o­lu­tion of this his­toric prob­lem is to nul­lify the binary by look­ing beyond our present cul­tural sys­tems and imag­in­ing new sys­tems await­ing to be forged. It shouldn’t be as scary as it sounds. As Cage puts it, “I can’t under­stand why peo­ple are fright­ened of new ideas. I’m fright­ened of the old ones.” Doesn’t the very health of our cul­tural spirit depend on an under­stand­ing of where we have been and where we can go? Are we to remain for­ever trapped in an out­dated mode of think­ing about sound? There are plenty of artists that under­stand this imper­a­tive, but the larger cul­tural land­scape must rec­og­nize that sound is sound and must be reck­oned with in any context.

Brooklyn’s Lit­tle Women under­stand the issues at stake here. The quar­tet, com­prised of Dar­ius Jones (alto sax­o­phone), Jason Nazary (drums), Travis Laplante (tenor sax­o­phone) and Andrew Smi­ley (gui­tar) deal in sounds that present a real chal­lenge to tra­di­tional notions of beauty and plea­sure. It takes about 1 sec­ond of lis­ten­ing to A-side “[1] Unti­tled” from the Teeth EP to hear what I mean. A water­fall of high-pitched shrap­nel comes rain­ing down with­out warn­ing. The drum­mer sounds like a robotic octo­pus gone hay­wire. It’s not all sonic war­fare here, how­ever. About a minute in, some seri­ous rhyth­mic uni­son inter­rupts the free-jazz tapes­try being woven pre­vi­ously. Another minute goes by and sud­denly the rhythm sec­tion has dis­ap­peared. We’re float­ing in a sax­o­phone cloud assem­bled by Ornette Coleman’s long-lost evil brother. A roar­ing punk sec­tion rips us out of that zone. Prov­ing that “out” music doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean patho­log­i­cal melody-aversion, the last few min­utes of the song ride out on a pretty seri­ous hum-dinger (well, before dis­solv­ing into another atonal freak-out at the end for good measure).

At this point, some of you faith­ful read­ers may be ques­tion­ing my com­mit­ment to this Cagean Zen phi­los­o­phy of “every­thing is beau­ti­ful.” After all, there are cer­tainly some parts of the song we just lis­tened to that would really stretch the essence of the word “beau­ti­ful.” Isn’t the point rather that ugli­ness has its place in music along­side its glo­ri­fied Other? It’s impor­tant to remind our­selves here of the pre­car­i­ous nature of cul­tural ideals with large amounts of stock. Our the­o­ries of musi­cal­ity and aural plea­sure are like an anes­thetiz­ing dis­trac­tion from all the direc­tions we artists and art con­sumers have to choose from. Who said music had to be beau­ti­ful all the time? Or is there even a trans­for­ma­tion effect, where beauty becomes dis­pleas­ing and the base reclaims the upper hand? Wal­ter Ben­jamin proph­e­sied that man’s aes­thetic telos was to find beauty in its own self-annihilation. The ques­tion then remains: Why can’t there be a place for the grat­ing, the deranged, the vio­lent in our musi­cal universe?

As a per­fect exam­ple of the grat­ing, the deranged and the vio­lent in music, let us now turn to Side-B “[4] Unti­tled” from the same EP. The song starts off with a dis­so­nant (gotcha!) foghorn which at one point inex­plic­a­bly begins duel­ing with bag­pipes (not actu­ally). After a minute or so of this raw bleat­ing, the main event begins. Some­one fin­gers a sax­o­phone almost inaudi­bly while the remain­ing band mem­bers whim­per into micro­phones like scared chil­dren. This con­tin­ues until these grown men (not Lit­tle Women) are scream­ing like pos­sessed lunatics. Then, they growl like ani­mals and slowly die out. It’s sick, dis­turb­ing and incred­i­bly pow­er­ful. I find the the­atri­cal­ity of this piece really inter­est­ing. It’s a forward-thinking com­po­si­tion that intro­duces new realms to me. If you find this stuff intol­er­a­ble, I don’t blame you. But before you write it off as “unlis­ten­able” or what­ever, think about the lan­guage you’re using to describe these sounds. Think why you’re turned off by it and what this has to do with your learn­ing of a cer­tain sys­tem of musi­cal signs. Invok­ing Cage again, “If some­thing is bor­ing after two min­utes, try it for four. If still bor­ing, then eight. Then six­teen. Then thirty-two. Even­tu­ally one dis­cov­ers that it is not bor­ing at all.”

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — (1) Untitled Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — (4) Untitled Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]