by Peter Berryman
Prat Like That
Two weeks ago, my music partner Lou and I stood in a New York hotel hallway, lost in the bustle of an arts conference, waiting for one of our two ten-minute performance slots and talking with a goth-clown-musician-actor friend. Our showcases were to take place in one of the meeting rooms opening off the hallway. Suddenly, from the room next to ours, the crash wail thud-thud of a rock band erupted. The door to the rock room opened and closed a few quick times to let someone in or out, allowing the full catastrophe to roar out the door and down the hall like a tsunami. We knew that our goose was cooked if our ten minutes were up against that, because even Hilton walls aren't thick enough to blot thermonuclear rock.
Our friend turned to me bug-eyed and said sincerely, "I don't get it." Maybe I was in the mood to have these words mean more than they otherwise would have, but to me he meant he truly didn't understand how such volumed sound could serve any human purpose whatsoever, let alone an artistic one. And, by extrapolation, he wondered how people into this kind of sensory torture deal with other aesthetics. Do they turn the brightness knob up on the TV until their eyeballs bleed and all images dissolve in the glow? Do they use so much hotsauce and blowtorch mustard that they can't tell if they're eating cheese or flamingo?
That's what my friend's "I don't get it" meant to me. It was the loud music he didn't get, but also its bewildering value gestalt that he was reacting to.
Most everyone has experienced this exasperated, baffled, visceral, negative, and overwhelming reaction triggered by one kind of music or another. Lately someone here in Madison told Lou and me that a friend of his had said to him, "I'd rather have a root canal than sit through a Berryman concert." That's a passionate critique. Everyone has heard someone say "I hate folk music" or "I hate jazz." I put "I hate folk music" into my search engine on the web and got 166 hits. "I hate jazz" gave me 185, and "I hate rock" provided 979 bingos, though I suppose some of them could be "I hate rock candy" or "I hate Rock Hudson."
Back in December I received an email from folk music fan Karen Carlson with the URL of an article that appeared in The Times of London on the fifth of that month. "Folk music? Sounds like hell, culture minister says" was its title, so I had to read it.
It turns out there was a debate within the British government about a law which makes it okay for two musicians to sing together in a pub, but not three. Someone observed it was crazy that Michael Jackson and Madonna could team up and sing in a bar, but "...three people singing Somerset folk songs..." would be breaking the law. Kim Howells, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, spoke up: "For a simple urban boy such as me, the idea of listening to three Somerset folk singers sounds like hell." Not that it would be merely unpleasant, or not to his taste, but that it would be "hell." As you might imagine, this crack didn't go over too well in English folk music circles, regarding the folk-music-rich county of Somerset. The great Martin Carthy, whom Lou and I had the privilege of meeting and hearing last summer at the Old Songs Festival near Albany, and who has long been one of the most influential musicians in English folk music, said of the Howells comment: "Musicians have a tough enough time without a prat like that."
Regarding "prat," says the online Dictionary of Slang and Colloquialisms used in the United Kingdom, by Ted Duckworth: "prat Noun. A fool, idiot or objectionable person. Originally meaning the buttocks."
At first I thought Martin was referring to the boorish statement as a prat, but after looking it up and finding prat to mean buttocks, now I think maybe he was referring to the guy himself.
Anyway, the point I'm eventually trying to make is that there are STRONG negative emotional reactions to music which, judging by their strength, seem to be based on more than the music itself. Isn't it odd that so many people (including me, but I'm trying to quit) use the word "hate" when it comes to music? My dad hated Sinatra, Elvis, and Dylan. He hated their music, but it always seemed to me that he also hated them personally because of it.
My friend and I in the Hilton hallway were boggled by the whole imagined lifestyle and aesthetic that requires a sensory channel to be overloaded (and soon damaged) in order for its art to be appreciated, whereas those folks would probably agree with Howells about folk music and hell more because of their assumptions about the folk music lifestyle than any musical considerations. People who are asked why they "hate folk music" more often mention lifestyle issues than musical ones. From discussion groups on the web:
"I HATE FOLK MUSIC, but before you stone me to death with Teva sandals and protest banners..." "...I hate folk music. It's just a bunch of hippies whining about crap they wish they could change, but they're too stoned to do anything..." "...I hate folk music because those people are posers living mundane lives..."
It's all related to that old rock and roll question, do you live the life or just play the music? We in the audience assume the musicians live the life, whatever we imagine that to be, and often make judgments about the music based on our feelings about the lifestyle.
Of course, I'm more level headed than that actually, and I do like a lot of rock n roll. Critically speaking, what I objected to about the Hilton band was that those folks no doubt don't vote, signal for turns, or walk their dogs enough.
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