Dada Reads_March 2023
Good Writing x Music & Community: Matthew Schnipper on the soundtrack of grief, Zadie Smith on 'Tar' and intergenerational disagreements, Sam Valenti on the future of canon...and more
Dada Strain’s occasional reading recommendation round-up, maybe useful for your weekend - maybe beyond. Quality of writing and ideas are the primary qualifiers, mostly current or newly surfaced pieces. Always music-, culture- and/or community-related. No hot-takes set to grow cold when headlines change, but story-telling or philosophical thinking I believe will have a shelf-life. Or might at least seed long shelf-life conversations. Forever searching for alternative sources, but, yes, obvious publications are included.
Matthew Schnipper, “The Sound of Grief” (New Yorker, 2/9/2023) - Matt is someone I’ve known professionally (and to a lesser degree, personally) for over a decade — an excellent music writer/editor and lovingly indulgent, open-hearted/-minded listener. A life-long musicker in the best sense of the word. We shared the Grateful Dead before the Dead revival became generationally hip. Through mutual friends, I knew that Matt’s young child passed away unexpectedly a year or so ago, but I had no idea about the details. This excruciating piece provides them. But on some level, the details are almost beside the point. At the center is the question: what is an appropriate soundtrack for tragedy, when the the tragedy happens to people who’ve been expertly soundtracking their entire lives? Can there even be one? These are questions that I myself struggled with throughout late 2021 and 2022. Which is why there was a familiarity reading Matt deconstruct an unimaginable loss, parse the numbness, and go looking for an understanding of death inside of sound. Only to find that even music, the thing we love most in this world and which some of us declare forever undefeated in the face confusion, may not be enough to offer solace. An incredible piece of philosophical and personal writing.
Shea Tuttle, “Letter of Recommendation: Community Bands” (New York Times Magazine 12/4/2022) - A wonderful first-person account about the mental-health assets of playing music, delivered from a pandemicine perspective. Recovering from COVID, Tuttle picked up the trumpet for the first time in two decades, in order to recover. Hers is not a particularly complicated story but one that needs to be told over and over, so people process its underlying truth: that the healing power of communal music-making is not anecdotal, but very much real. “Somehow community band did what I knew music could do when I enrolled in college, before I changed my mind about my future: It saved me. It drew me out — of my home, of my head. It taught me how to breathe again.”
Vinnie Sperrazza, “All the Things” (Vinnie Sperrazza’s Chronicles, 12/10/2022) - I use Christopher Small’s term musicking a lot here, as it’s key to a definition of what constitutes the music community Dada Strain is trying to sketch. My friend/occasional colleague Matt sent me this piece by Sperrazza, a Brooklyn-based drummer of some note, as a great first-person take on what the wide world of “jazz” should look like, not just the health of its business and top echelons, but its many downstream tributaries. By Sperrazza’s own admission, the point he’s making is (like mine and Tuttle’s) “not terribly profound,” but it is deeply important: even music takes a village. And while it’s “jazz” that Sperrazza keeps referencing, his point is broader. “Music is simply an activity; it’s as natural for a human to make music as it is for a human to walk. The music the human makes is an expression of the human’s existence; we hang the word jazz on a certain kind of music, on the music made by jazz people. Anything that jazz people do is jazz, enriches jazz.” This, in a nutshell, is musicking - and it’s everybody’s.
Zadie Smith, “The Instrumentalist” (New York Review of Books 1/19/2023) - Ostensibly, this is a review of the Oscar-nominated Tar, in which Cate Blanchett plays (I guess - I’ve not seen the film) an overbearing globally renowned maestro at the intersection of mid-life crises and contemporary battles. But Smith’s piece is more interesting than that: not simply an outline of opposing generational sensibilities, but an indictment of both Smith’s cohort (mine too) and the kids coming up from behind, as well as an admission that all these indictments are natural and inevitable, exactly the kind of broad consideration that makes all of Smith’s recent culture/music writing must-reads. “The old are vampiric. The old hoard resources. They use status and power and youth itself to distract themselves from the inevitable. The young are always right in their indictment of the old. The boomers were right about the Greatest Generation; we were right about the boomers; the millennials are right about us. Still, one wonders how these same millennials, stuck with a name that seems to enshrine the idea of youth itself, will now deal with the imminent loss of their own. Up to now, when it came to generational combat, they’ve been right about everything, as every generation is in its own way, only ever missing that one vital piece of data about time and its passing: how it feels.”
Sam Valenti IV, “The Death of Canon and the Remaking of the World” (Herb Sundays 1/29/2023) - This post by a long-time friend (and occasional co-conspirator) is a worthy thought-starter about whether canonization is possible in 2023, and if so what it means. Sam’s piece is hardly spotless: It trusts loud “influential” voices and informed ideas whose generational outlook and self-satisfying tech-/media-friendly positions are often more personal desires than even-handed perspectives. It cites so many divergent elements in search of a unified theory of culture, there’s not enough thread to sew it together. But inside the morass, there are also central underlying truths that hard to find elsewhere: about the increased “focus on ethics more than creativity” and “global responsibility” being carried out inside the critical POV currently being developed, and about “the collective time-melt [that’s] led to an increased distrust in institutions” for whom canon-making is a through-line to stockholder residuals. Sam is definitely a lot more hopeful than I that some traditionalists and centrist-friendly oddballs can still build an informed canon in real time. But he’s also skeptical enough, and his thinking wide enough, that reading this feels like the beginnings of a real argument about what stays and what gets left behind. There are also ideas here are the seeds of a critical conversation about so-called taste — neither good (which I don’t actually believe exists), nor bad (which is just as subjective as “good,” and can popularly turn if given enough time) — but how it’s a stand-in for cohesive, personal POV. And that’s where canon-building fully wanders away from historical aesthetics, approaches politics and ongoingness.
Chris Richards, “I Felt Uneasy About Reunion Nostalgia. Until It Came For Me.” (Washington Post 2/23/23) - Another would be “review,” this one of the Numero Twenty festival that took place in LA in mid-February, produced by the reissue label Numero Group, and featuring ‘90s slowcore, indie and post-hardcore bands such as Unwound, Tsunami, Karate and Rex. Yet as the hed indicates, Richards’ best bits aren’t about the music per se, but the feelings it generated with its limited audience — specifically, about how it feels to be in the cross-hairs of nostalgia when you’ve spent your career railing against its “lazy U-turn[s]” and “psychic dead end[s].” This is not a continuation of a “my music is important” conversation, but a reconsideration of, in Zadie Smith’s words, “how it feels” when popular indictments are reflected back on you. The great thing about Richards as a music critic is that he is (mostly) not precious of his position, especially when circumstances and evidence demand that he think again. Where he ends up is an incredible, physiological space, of music as muscle memory. “Music tells our bodies the truth. Sometimes our brains pick up on it, too. And truth was, if you grew up on any of these bands, Numero Twenty promised a reconnection with a certain era, but ultimately offered a reconnection to yourself….Instead of a tomb, nostalgia became a trampoline — something you could jump onto with both feet, rebounding into an open future.” Like Sam Valenti’s reconsideration of canon, I’m not 100% sure I buy it. But I for sure know there’s a truth here.