100 Albums to Listen to Before the End, 3

From the Pixies to the Zombies

My selection of aural masterpieces concludes below (part one, here, part two, here), but first some thoughts on…

Good and Bad Music

The difference between good and bad music is quite simple, although it demands selfless sensitivity to discern. Putting aside questions of technique, all second-rate songs, like all second-rate art, say (on a level which precedes or surpasses language) ‘I love myself’. It doesn’t matter if the song is upbeat or downbeat, conventional or experimental, to fully inhabit a bad song, to feel as the composer or performer did they played, is to feel a certain kind of self-love, a certain kind of self-indulgence, a certain kind of narrowness or closedness or cut-offness.

A ‘certain kind’ means that, just as there are different kinds of self, there are different kinds of good music—and personal tastes that naturally err this way and that—and different kinds of bad music—for the form of the self is particular. Everyone, for example, can identify self-loving songs which have long passed their sell-by date. Take this quondam number one for example:

It’s almost inconceivable that anyone still values this, because the ‘social self’ which it reinforced has long since passed on. Anyone still alive who did somehow ‘enjoy’ this mess would be inhaling nothing more substantial than the fumes of that most subtle form of self-love, nostalgia.

Or take this classy head-banger. This is also appealing to the ‘social self’—rural Nepalese are unlikely to dig it—but its principle attraction is to something a little deeper than just ‘yeah! us!’;

Here, a certain kind of self seeks relief, or recognition. There’s little aesthetic appeal—death metal, thrash metal and the like are, like hip-hop, club music, experimental jazz, modern classical and postmodern pop, about as close to anti-music as you can get. The appeal with such ‘music’ is principally in offering an emotional sop to the self of the listener. In the case of ‘nuclear assault’ the appeal is to rage, or more accurately — given that so many hard metal fans are counter-intuitively ‘sweet guys’ — to repressed rage. To everyone else, it’s unintelligible noise.

The Beatles and the Stones are a classic example of the difference between self and unself in music. Although the latter produced a handful of good songs,¹ their output was almost entirely self-regarding, infused with me, while that of the former me-lessly absorbed something beyond the self, the other. Even when John Lennon (whose surface self had the arrogance of greatness) sang ‘I am the Walrus’, he was saying that ‘I’ am something strange, indefinable, impossible.² This is why and how the Beatles sang so often of real, unsentimental, love, while the output of The Rolling Stones was negative and cynical (‘I am a monkey’ / ‘I am a devil’ / ‘I am a street fighting man’ / ‘I can’t get no satisfaction / ‘I need, I need, I need…’). When the Stones did write about love they produced syrup (such as the revolting ‘Angie’ and ‘Wild Horses’, which are also pitilessly bleak).

One might also compare the work of the great Elliott Smith — or any other superb sad song, such as Nina Simone’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes? or Geechie Wiley’s Last Kind Words — with any one of an almost infinite number of self-pitying downbeat songs which are, at heart, disgustingly self-indulgent. For Smith, Simone and Wiley there was just pain, while for Drake, Bright Eyes, Whitney Houston, Sufjan Stevens, Billie Eilish, The National, Harry Styles, and anyone who has ever covered Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, there is ‘oh pity poor me’ or ‘how emotional deep I am’. Me, me, me, me, me, me.

Other fruitful comparisons might be between Beethoven, sublime in his majesty, and the bombastic Mahler, or between the raw, playful spirit of The Jam and the insular brutality of The Clash (not to mention the pitiful childishness of Oasis), or between the purity of Brian Eno’s late seventies compositions and the interminable wallpaper music of modern ambient corp-music (Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, the Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society, etc, etc.). Or one might compare the early, self-soft work of artists such as, say, Paul McCartney, Bob Marley or Lou Reed, with their own later renditions of their own songs, debased with the effort and fake-depth of the now hardened self.

The experience of listening to selfish music is not unlike the experience of being in the company of selfish people. One has the nauseating feeling, being talked at by them, not just that that one is excluded from the whole moment, that their self-regarding self is sucking you into itself, but in so doing one’s own self is turning into a caricature of itself. You are becoming like them, like a thing which asserts itself — and which, therefore, can only assert a thing. You might want to cry out, as I sometimes do, ‘Stop! You are turning me into a thing!’ This is why one feels somehow soiled after a conversation with pure ego, because you have been nightmarishly reduced in its company. It requires great presence (and great generosity) to keep oneself silent before egoic noise.

Which brings us back to great music, which somehow, magically, expresses selflessness, and therefore silence, something beyond my noisy concerns and yacking needs and rowdy desires, something bigger than sound, something smaller than movement. There is stillness at the heart of great music. The stillness of nature which (all too tragically) music must stand in for in houses far from fields and rivers. The stillness of the songbird can be heard in beautiful music, the sense that (notwithstanding lyrics which claim otherwise) it is not a song for the future or the past we hear, rather the sound of eternity, which is only ever available to hear in the quality of the moment.

All this explains why ‘guilty feet have got no rhythm’ (because there is no presence in the corrupted heart), why people who once loved great music find it distasteful to listen to when their selfless hearts have hardened or died (because ego cannot bear to encounter lack of ego), why songs that are universes apart appear the same to people without selfless taste (because the self cannot discern the selfless quality which separates them), why it is so easy to identify the dreadful music that other people listen to (because their selves are dissimilar from mine), why rational argument will never change poor taste in music (because attachment to selfish music, like attachment to selfish ideology, is deeper than rational thought), why shit music rarely becomes back into fashion (because the social component of self never quite reproduces itself) and why music, over the last thirty or forty years, has died (because we live in a hard, nowless, selfish, hyper-rational hell).

Let’s return to paradise then. Unfortunately, now that we only have recorded music to listen to—live music is dead, and the days when everyone could play an instrument or sing are long, long gone—there is something corpselike in the experience. Like plucked flowers,³ recorded music smiles, but no longer laughs. But. At least I can get sparkling intimations of what lies beyond my self …or I can if I can put that self behind me. Then, faced with great music which isn’t ‘to my taste’, which provokes an irritable judgement, I can let get of my self, inhabit the piece, give myself over to the song and, in a surrendered state, experience something actually new here…