Lou Barlow: Goodnight Unknown, part 7

One More Thing...

To: Scott & Monty
From: Brian

Oh, look at me going all out of order/off topic here. I know we are, technically, still in the midst of the Stephane Wrembel convo, but I found myself having one more thought about the Lou Barlow debate.

Specifically, I wanted to answer Scott's post in which he said, "The era of album artwork, liner notes and production credits was merely a blip in the history of recorded music." Last week, I started reading How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, which starts off waaaaaaay before rock & roll (and a little before recorded music, in fact) as a way of examining the history of American popular music from an angle other than, "The Beatles are Year Zero of 20th-century pop music, and that is good."

The thing that made me think about Scott's post was that there is, arguably, not a single minute in the history of contemporary popular music (ie, anything the springs from the African and/or African-American root) that does not have a string visual component for the listener to latch onto. Sure, there may not have been enlightening liner essays from Leonard Feather accompanying early Scott Joplin sheet music, but there certainly were images on the cover, visions of what sort of dances would be done to the music, and once we get into minstrelsy...well, there sure as hell was some deeply coded visual information to go along with that.

In fact, I think one could argue that the rise of mass-produced recordings actually decreased the visual component of the listening experience. I'm specifically thinking that early music (and here we can really go back as far as we like, historically) was almost never listened to alone. It would be played live, either in a public space like a concert hall or a private living room, and there would be a good chance that there would be dancing to go along with it. The listener would always see the musician(s) (in a less-mediated way than MTV would later provide), and race, class, clothing, and so on would inform the music. (I'd also add that if you go to any older opera house or concert hall, the visual gingerbread packing every inch of available wall, ceiling and floor space makes most LP cover art look limited.)

So basically, I'm positing that we might actually be in a non-visual "blip" moment right now. Listeners have rarely listened with their eyes closed, and I bet there's another path to rejoining the eye & ear around the next bend.

See my vest,
Brian