Monday, January 09, 2006
white rainbow
If sincerity is the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one's own self, we can see that this state of personal existenc is not to be attained without the most ardous effort. And yet at a certain point in history certain men and classes of men conceived that the making of this effort was of supreme importance in the moral life, and the value they attached to the enterprise of sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years.
-Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 1973
Why is sincerity so important in pop music? I can feel when someone is conveying glossy emotions, usually through how they sing, their cadence, the breaths in the words. Heart and thoughtfulness like to play tough but its the recognition of sincerity and how authentic it is in a singer's voice that makes me listen harder. Or rather, turn it up. One of my favorite albums last year was Jamie Lidell's Multiply because there was a balance of squiggly electronics (harking back to his Super_Collider days) and an Otis Redding realness that warms me. And realness is relative, but still real, that is to say a state of actuality, of being. Put your pencil down Adorno, pop music is more complicated than we think. Bun B has been putting it down for years and he's one of the few Houston MC's I can stomach because you can hear--truth as invisibility--the sincerity in most of what he says. Nas, John Lennon, TV on the Radio: a list without end.
But then, I've also always liked plastic sensibilities: a post-sincerity. Those who are shades of gray: The Beta Band, Kool Keith, MF Doom, Cafe Tacuba, Hot Chip and a thousand more. Musicians who can blend goofy pathos with bigger ideas and still stay 'true' to themselves. I like Saul Williams' idea to replace weed with LSD in rap and maybe then we can explore broader concepts: masculinity as elastic, brown and black folks wanting to play guitars, weak beats, World Music, the rise and fall of lyricism in hip-hop, electronic music without software.
I love software.
We should really talk.
