The Current Comeback Tour Trend: Not Reunions, Not Reinventions (Not Addressing the Issue.)

by Ari Abramowitz
15 May 2007

A few weeks ago, The New York Times had a curious piece [A TimesSelect subscription is necessary to view the article -ed.] by the estimable BEN RATLIFF [pictured left], a writer I truly admire for his analytic focus on music, itself, and his sincere love and knowledge of a wide range of music that spans everything from death metal to his specialty, jazz. But he drops the ball here. In the piece, he writes about the many “reunion”-type concerts that have been sprouting like mushrooms in recent times.

Between THE POLICE, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, THE PIXIES, GENESIS, JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, and the sort-of SMASHING PUMPKINS (though he didn’t mention BLACK SABBATH w/DIO), not to mention the ever-continuing ROLLING STONES, EAGLES, ALLMAN BROTHERS, etc, we are apparently in a live music world dominated by “old” bands. The thrust of the piece was that we should not worry about any validity or credibility issues with the old bands and just embrace them for their own greatness of sound.

That’s all fine and dandy, but who said there was a problem? Who said that it’s not OK to embrace bands for their own greatness of sound? And, if there is any problem, who said that the problem rests with 20-year-old (or older) bands playing concerts? As someone whose first concert was PINK FLOYD at Brendan Byrne in 1987, I know I never raised any objections. I don’t remember hearing lots of complaints when The Pixies played their shows a couple of years ago. No one was complaining at the recent Sabbath and STOOGES shows. I’m sure there are some people who perpetually engage in “the bien-pensant hand-wringing about how reunions smell fishy” that Ratliff mentions, but based at least on how well these shows have sold and on my experiences at some of these shows with older bands, I have to wonder if many of these bien-pensants are largely straw people. Sure, some older bands have disappointed (sorry, BLUE CHEER), but so do many young bands. So what?

Ratliff shares a couple of thoughts that somehow fall flat. One is that even if a band like Rage Against the Machine has lost some of the political relevance it may have had during its heyday, we should just enjoy them as they are. He confesses that “I realize that this view might seem to decontextualize music, and even depoliticize it… But isn’t it more accurate to see music as music, and not as philosophy or policy?” Of course it is. Who said otherwise? Is there some sort of pre-existing, celestial orthodoxy that dictates that music should be contextualized and politicized? And if Ratliff truly feels that music may be better appreciated as itself, why does he have to sound so tentative about it? Why is the thought presented as a question, rather than as a statement?

It seems as if he’s almost scared to come out and say what he’s trying to say, as if he anticipates some punishment and is therefore softening his stance as much as possible. If you feel that hearing music as music is a preferable, more “accurate” way of experiencing music, then why not go straight to the heart of the issue and address the sacred cows of constantly contextualizing and politicizing music? This wishy-washiness is the main problem with Ratliff’s piece and it unfortunately appears a few times.

He gets it closer to right earlier in the piece, when he notes about Rage Against the Machine that:

Many of the band’s fans wanted to hear the sound of a metal chair bashed on a concrete floor rather than be alerted to new methods of revolutionary praxis… the band’s sound eclipsed the higher brain functions at least for a few minutes at a time.

Again, this is stated as if it is some new revelation, or even a heresy that must only be uttered in hushed tones, but this is what music is supposed to do—take you beyond your normal cerebral cortex into some other space. This should be clear, even obvious, but it’s not. Why is that? Who told us that this transcendence is not what it is all about? If you want to reach for the sublime, listen to music or take in some paintings—experience art as art. If you want to learn about “new methods of revolutionary praxis,” whatever those are, go to your nearest Marxist bookstore and buy whatever they’re selling. And don’t forget to pick up another Che Guevara tee on the way out.

Towards the end of the piece, Mr. Ratliff, usually as independent as any rock journalist in the business, disappointingly introduces the by-now-cliché observation that rock is becoming more and more like jazz: a still-resonant form capable of supreme enjoyment, but less and less capable of true renewal. He goes further by emphasizing that “most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us.” What it is they have to teach us is left unsaid, but I might hazard to guess that it has something to do with making good music (aren’t musical forefathers always with us, pretty much by definition? So why is now any different than any other time?).

But what’s frustrating is that Ratliff comes up with a quasi-Freudian suggestion here and doesn’t finish the thought. In fact, he swings back in the opposite direction. He seems to link the increasingly jazz-like nature of rock, i.e. that it is a traditional form, relatively locked in its ways, with the fact that many of rock’s forefathers are still around. The unstated suggestion seems to be that it is the forefathers’ lingering presence that is correlated to the increasingly stuck nature of rock. But the stated point is that it’s all a good thing: “they have something important to teach us.” Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It’s unclear and it’s just kind of left as is. Either way, we’re left without an answer to Ratliff’s thoughts, because they go in different directions: do older bands contribute to developing music by teaching us something important or are they impeding development by dragging their sets for too long?

This is a vitally important question, because the answer would address the crux of the article. But, of course, that crux is left unstated: that current bands might just not be as good as they used to be. This is a gigantic statement, one that may or may not be true, and one that Ratliff is points towards throughout the piece, but backs away from every time. As he’s concluding the piece, he writes, “If there are lots of great bands in the next 10 years, we won’t feel we need an Arcade Fire reunion. If there aren’t, we will.” Considering that most of the piece is about how many reunion shows are going on right now, what does this statement suggest about music of the last 10 years? Connecting the dots, it sounds like Ratliff is suggesting that there have not been a lot of great bands over that time period and perhaps that’s why we feel the need for all these reunions. It’s right there, but why doesn’t he actually say it?

Instead, Ratliff retreats into the mushiness from earlier in the piece: “If you’re still looking for something sacred, it probably can’t be found in [the reuniting bands’] values or politics or cult significance. It’s in you: it’s your own reaction to how they sound. Nobody can take that away from you.” It’s the same problem as earlier: who ever said that the sacred can be found in a band’s values, politics, or cult significance? Is it just an accepted truism at this point? Is it written in some sort of music DNA? Even if certain people did exclaim it to be so, who says that everyone accepted those terms?

No doubt, some people capitulate to the image and identity-politics marketing that is ubiquitously employed in the music/fashion complex/marketplace, but why is that assumed to be the privileged mode of thinking? Of course the beauty of music is in the listener’s reaction to how it sounds. This, too, should be obvious, yet it’s not. Why? And why, again, must the very consideration that is actually the music—more than postures surrounding it or the self-proclamations of importance—be stated like some sort of revelation? Is this also part of the super-saturation of image marketing, identity-politics, fashionable rebellion, and Marxist signifiers? Why isn’t it obvious that it was ALWAYS about the music? Unless, of course, some music—and the way it SOUNDS—doesn’t stand on its own.

The only people trying to take away that essential experience of loving music as music are those that assert that music must contain the “right” messages, the “right” opinions, the right “values, politics, or cult significance.” This is the final offense: that Ratliff is consoling those that demanded conformity to their orthodoxy by saying it is now officially OK to like music, as music. But that’s what many people had known—and had lived—all along. Ratliff is now consoling mostly the people who asserted in the first place that Music alone is not enough—that extra layers of signification and socio-politics have to be layered on top in order to make it “important.” But, yet again, that’s a touchy subject, so the article doesn’t touch it with a ten-foot Stratocaster.

Filed under newspapers music criticism