I was listening to "Heaven" by Midwife & Amulets earlier today. It's 16 minutes of droney loop music. Not exactly my cup of tea, so I skipped ahead after ten minutes to see if any kind of variation might be on the horizon to justify the time I had spent waiting for something interesting to happen. This was to no avail, apart from some distortion to vary the texture a smidge.
As someone who makes electronic music, perhaps my complaining about repetition is ironic. I think I enjoy some music that could be classified as "drone," such as "Broken Wings" by Cowboys & Monsters. The difference between this piece and the previous one, as far as I can tell, is that this one only lasts for five minutes and has some cool beats to boot.
Anyway, my disappointment with "Heaven" got me thinking: What is it about this kind of music that certain people appreciate?
My initial thought is that this repetitive music is appealing because people want something to focus on. We live in an age of TikTok, infinite-yet-fragmentary commentary on X, DJs playing 30-second clips of music at sports events, and all the other usual things that social critics emptily moralize about.
The capacity to focus is not appreciated, even though it is essential to a rich interior life.
Aldous Huxley wrote an enduring (with some adjustments) passage in The Perennial Philosophy back in 1945:
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold history's record for all of them. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. . . . It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music. . . .
Had to look up "corybantic," I'll admit.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of other repetitive types of genres, like psychedelic/doom, but you may have to be high to appreciate the monotony. I also think of Meshuggah, who have enormously repetitive songs but they are rhythmically too interesting to be considered monotonous. Being able to hear those riffs over and over again lets you get a good feel for them and it allows them to merge the two tempos at the end of a measure. Hah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbMwMWK494
"Being able to hear those riffs over and over again lets you get a good feel for them..."
DeleteYes! I am inclined to think that not all repetitive music is uninteresting or, worse yet, that it indulges immoral traits like addiction. (I watched a video of Roger Scruton talking about pop music, and to my understanding, he made the latter point.) Some good things are worth repeating, and our appreciation can grow with the repetition in parallel.
Thanks for the Meshuggah link! I first heard them about 13 years ago, but I'm afraid I still find myself having a hard time appreciating their music. Maybe one day I'll be a real metalhead lol.