9 days

Between my Fanboi first post and the second.  Throughout writing it, I could sense how dry the whole thing was coming across, yet I didn’t do anything to stop it.  I didn’t like was doing, but instead of scrapping it, I kept just choking it up and putting it off another day.  Final result?  Well, it’s there, and I’m just glad it’s over.

I think I need to stick to a more flighty metaphorical or characterized conceit next time, because no one’s really looking for a chordal analysis anyway, right?  I have to remember that I’m allowed to espouse a POV here.  This is a blog, not a conference paper.  And it’s my blog, not like stereogum or something, whose Scott went to my last blog to comment that I was being too opinionated.  It sort of scarred me.  Anyway, fuck that.  I’m still an approval whore, but there are better ways to go about it than pandering to my imaginary audience of intelligensia.  Once again, b.l.o.g. — people are just as interested to hear the voice behind the post as the content itself, right?

Egh, I’m done.

Reflecting on reflexing, and the outsider/insider dichotomy

Fascinatingly, much of my “Introduction-to-the-field” class today focused on self-reflexivity in scholarly writing.  Apropo, anyone?  It’s like they were secretly already reading my blog.  Anyway, the discussion involved an interesting element concerning the advantages and disadvantages to perceived insider/outsider status.  A lot of the writing for this week involved a explication of the advantages and disadvantages of either status.  Predictably, a vocal identification as a music scholar usually places one as an “outsider” from the practicing music community.  (Gotta love a quote by Shostakovich – quite the insider – in one of the readings, which I’ll paraphrase: Imagine there is someone cooking eggs, and others eating the eggs.  Now imagine there is someone standing nearby talking about how the eggs were made and how they’re eaten.  This is a musicologist.)  While such an identification in the so-called field allows one to be honest about who they are and what they are doing, there may be a lot to be gained by falsely posing as an insider.

Enter me, fanboi-cum-manboi.  As one who’s usually participated on the far-flung fringes of the indie and techno blog communities (fringes in themselves to begin with), I can’t lay claim to any sort of insider status in the community.  I was hoping this blog could act as a sort of bridge to that gap, allowing me to be a visible outsider, yet at the same time participate in a virtual community.  Of course, I already figured that the writing-about-writing would be alienating to any non-scholars or writers in the community; what I failed to consider was the potential for privledged access that a perceived non-scholar status may achieve.

As an experiment, then, I’m going to separate out what was intended to be one blog into two: what’s been achieved here thus far (finding my way as a self-conscious writer and “outsider” to the music community), and a fanboi with no aspirations beyond good pop music criticism and cultural cachet (aspiring to “insider”-dom, however successful or not it turns out).  I don’t seek to preserve the dichotomy as such – obviously, the two terms are not in opposition – I hope that my chronicling of the process here will work to tease out the benefits and costs of trying my hand at music blogging, as well as the difficulties encountered in the process.

Voilà: Fanboyisms

“This is what I don’t want people to see”: Clearing the dust

Thoughts leading up into this post:

So that was the introduction; that was easy.  But now this is my fanboy blog, it’s time to talk about music, and this will be my first post.  I will have it be about a song near and dear, one whose brilliance bowls me over and leaves me stammering.  It will be unclear and messy, but let’s have at it.  How about The National’s “Fake Empire”? [lyrics] As the election nears and our economy is crumbling, this song about hazy-eyed wandering in a dream state (a dream nation-state?) seems more appropriate than ever.  The song’s double meanings abound; it could be just as easily interpreted as a starry-eyed date in a blossoming romance. Hell, I can even copy and paste what I’ve already put up on songmeanings.net (see link). Yes, I’ll write about that.

Wait, no, I won’t write about that.  The meanings are too entangled with themes from the rest of the album, and frankly, I don’t have the time right now for this sort of discursus through the enormity of the text that is Boxer.  (What do I expect?  A 20-page literary deconstruction?)  Let’s start off with something simpler, more poignant.

Xiu Xiu, “Yellow Raspberry” [lyrics]  The ZORP of abjection, the beautiful transcendence of ugliness, the shame of Jamie Stewart.  Oh wait, aren’t I reading Kristeva later in the semester?  Maybe I should wait on this one; I’m not up to speed on my source material.  But this could be an initial crack into the text, the music… well do I have anything to say beyond the lyrics, beyond my love for Xiu Xiu?  Don’t you want to say something interesting?  We’ll go back to this at another time, yes, yes, okay.

Evangelista, “Hello, Voyager!” [lyrics] The manifesto of what I’ve deemed to be the “emotional pornographers” of the last few years queer indie rock, the Xiu Xius and Freddy Rupperts and Dead Sciences.  “Tell the truth and be free… this is what I don’t want people to see… But I can see you… You’re dirty too.”  A call to arms, to splay open the wounds of shame and free oneself.  But this song is over 12 minutes long — what about the music?  It’s uh — well there are a lot of instruments, most of which I can’t readily identify.  The structure is piecemeal, impovisatory, the scattered shards of Carla Bozulich’s Roman architecture; sounds rise and fall.  I can’t do this justice; there’s only one word left on my parched lips to say about this song, and that word is LOVE.  You can’t say it with me because I’m not ready to explain why the word is love.

–

Yes, those were the thoughts leading up to this post.  And then, paralysis (analysis paralysis — oh god).  The process begins not with writing about music, but writing about writing, which I’ve always found far and beyond easier.  I’m stuck “up high and ugly, up high and weird” on the meta level, afraid to come down and expose myself by talking about music (“beating off to the escort pages”).  “Let me be free, let me be free, let me be free” — I can only aspire to reach Stewart’s and Bozulich’s level of openness. It’s easy enough to talk about myself, my homosexual inclinations, my dirtiness; this is what I’m doing here.  But Stewart and Bozulich go further, they make music, they perform.  The struggle with performance anxiety in talking about the music I love is why I’ve created this blog, so that I can work through the struggle and live comfortably with my imperfections.  I hope that by clearing the dust here and making bare where I get stuck, I can start to learn to live with the constraints that I’m so painfully aware of here.  “This is my porn collection.”  I feel the need to prove that this music is worthy, is I’m supposed to love, despite my inclinations.  I need to expose the imperfection.  Can I say it here?  The word is love…

Introduction

Welcome to my personal music blog!

There – within the first sentence, I had hangups.  What am I going to call it?  Is this a music blog?  Music study blog?  Music-ology blog?  Music –ology/Theory blog?  Musings of a fanboy?  Wannabe music blog?

My primary aim here is to render any or all of the above imperfectly and repeatedly.  I want to talk about music without any of the hangups that plague my current writing process as an aspiring music theorist.  Academic scholarship is tightly bound for me with anxiety over perfection, coherence, and crafting an oeuvre of work of which I can be proud (and can get me hired, perhaps most importantly of all).

This inevitably, as documented by many others, sucks a bit of the passion out of the writing/describing/analysis.  It’s a passion that I, like many, recognize to be integral to accurately describing what goes on with music and interacting with it.  We rush to the page because we are driven by the musical moment, only to find by the time that the words arrive the moment is gone.  Fear of recreating the canon, getting sucked into fanboy/girl-ism, sounding like a pretentio/prick, or simply of being wrong – all of these have kept me from really writing about the music I want to write about the way I want to write about it.

Hence, this blog.

I articulate right here, right now, a claim that I will not shy from doing any or all of these things.  I’m going to rewrite my canon and gush like a fanboy because that’s how I react as a passionate music lover, and maybe, hopefully, this process will hone my writing in a way that can transform my white middle-class fanboyism into something meaningful for someone other than myself.  This blog is meant to be a PROCESS, never a completed product.  Here’s where I do away with the fear of the product.  This is my working.  This is how I do.