Comments on The Banjo and the Back Porch

LOLZ. oh shit, i just spewed my double organic sustainable soy chai latte cooler on my reclaimed macintosh keyboard.

youre kinda right, eric--there will always be a need for straightforward acoustic music. you cant be all radiohead all the time, right? but just bc nigel goodrich isnt overdubbing the london symphony orchestra through thom yorkes laptop doesnt mean the music isnt sophisticated or modern.

the point Youre a Sixth Grader makes in that other comment thread is the better one: good songs are good songs, period. some people have a hard time w knowing those songs werent written by teeth-gnashing ironicists, and thats their problem.

That's true. The good songs will always be good songs, no matter what the popular (or available) media is.

also, please dont forget the distinction between hippies and rednecks.

all that acoustic stuff is just fronting... the production on Joanna Newsom's album is so good, I wouldn't be surprised if she had one of those Robocop machinegun arms.

also, please dont forget the distinction between hippies and rednecks.

That's a good point, since there's really two levels of nostalgia at work here. One is for an idealized genuinely pre-modern (or redneck) way of life, while the second is just for the hippies' '60s psychedelic free love fest.

why nostalgia, though, eric? if music isnt "progressive" then its "regressive?" if its not made on laptops then its archaic? thats a false premise.

Well, in a way it's kind of a future-nostalgia for the post-oil age...but seriously, this kind of traditionalism or revivalism is inherently nostalgic in that it borrows/maintains/resurects an idealized past. You can't go back to the time before the electric-guitar; that's nostalgia. But I don't think that necessarily makes the music either progressive or regressive, more or less advanced, because the music is more than the medium on which it's delivered.

This is a good reason why we need to be drilling the hell out of the earth for more oil...so I can avoid psychedelic hairy hootenannies. To prepare for the worst though, I'm gonna start growing my facial hair out and practice my fingerpickin' skills now so I'll blend in when it all goes to shit. I just can't decide who to follow though, the rednecks or the hippies...I may have to go with the rednecks, I just can't take california girls who sound like developmentally disabled harp-playing elves, I know I'm the minority on this.

eric, thats like saying taking a walk is like going back to a time before there were cars, or playing records is like going back to a time before CDs. total fallacy. these things all exist concurrently. so do words, scales, notes, all the stuff that music is made of. they were around back in ancient greece, so is all music nostalgic for pythagoras?

If it draws on ancient greece to the exclusion of modernity, then yeah, it's nostalgic for Pythagoras. If it incorporates ancient traditions into modernity, then I guess no. But what's wrong with nostalgia anyway? It doesn't make any of this less valid art, it just makes it nostalgic. That's not a pejorative, it's just an attribute. Taking a walk in a landscape free of cars is like going back to a time before there were cars; taking a walk across capitol hill is not.

There will always be movements w/ leaders and followers, if this particular movement (which has not and will not break the mainstream unless its through a band like Avett Brothers, who are writing accessible modern pop songs behind the "old timey" acoustic trappings) is not to your taste there is plenty of other stuff going on right now. I've gone thru phases where I'll try to find and listen to as much 70's female songwriter stuff or 60's psych rock, and after a while you end up listening to the psychedelic equivalents of Candlebox, Creed etc. - followers who aren't working hard, who aren't beholden to songwriting, who are just smitten with the outfits or aesthetic. There is definitely a me-too element to this current thing as well, with people going from midwestern emo to backwoods folk hollerin..

It's important to look through the trappings and recognize talent - Ys is a really wonderful album, as is Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, both filled with great songs that talented people sat down and worked really hard on. That is what we should be rewarding as listeners.

Well put, YAASG (and jz @1, and me @2), but I don't think that makes the popularity of certain aesthetics any less culturally significant.

were gonna have to ATD on this, eric (thats "agree to disagree"). just bc im not seeing any cars on my walk doesnt mean ive forgotten they exist. just bc a band doesnt include electric guitars doesnt mean theyve forsaken them. in the avetts case, they were a rock band before they decided to strip down their approach. also, they occasionally use electric guitars. its more about the sound they want to achieve than a throwbacky sense of nostalgia.

you might not mean it pejoratively but thats what it implies: "if youre not living in the present, youre living in the past." its not either/or at all. painting with oils doesnt necessarily harken the romantic period. or if it doesn, it doesnt stay there within it. if anything theres a recognition of a past era and an expansion beyond it in the present tense.

Not living in the past, but rather yearning for it, impossibly. It's not necessarily a bad thing in art. But it is my mistake to imply that nostalgia precludes an engagement with the present, since it is itself a form of engagement.

I'm gonna take the devil's advocate position here and say that all western-based music relying on scales and notes IS nostalgic for Pythagoras, regardless of how futuristic the band dresses.

Unlike language, modal music theory really hasn't changed since ancient Greece. And modal theory is all over contemporary music--the same exact tones that were used back in Plato's day. The only thing different now is the medium on which those tones are presented.

Considering the tons of music out there created with no regard to scales, notes, or words, why *wouldn't* music made using ancient theory be considered nostalgic?

And, hell, the word nostalgia itself derives from the ancient greek—this shit is layers upon layers.

Christ, what a bunch of brainiacs.

now were getting into semantics, and nobody likes semantics.

except me!

nostalgia implies a certain willful redirection into the past, brendan. just because music employs the same notes and tones as pythagoras first postulated doesnt mean it pines for lutes and orgies (insert sting joke here). music necessarily employs those building blocks, not voluntarily, bc they resonate the most. even indian/eastern scales use the same notes. i think.

now were getting into ethnomusicology, and nobody likes ethnomusicology.

I LIKE ETHNOMUSICOLOGY.

It is an error to refer to anything as Pythagorean music because music did not and does not belong to Pythagoras, the Greeks, or any time period. The Pythagorean system was simply a set of observations on pure mathematical, geometric, and physical characteristics.

It is style to which everyone should be referring. But style, no matter where or when, is always a confluence of place and time and the whole stack of places and times preceding the moment of composition. Every style is a throwback, but it is a throwback to extramusical forms and extramusical observations which, at the time of composition, are irreversable and inescapable in that they inform the composer even beneath his own cognizance.

Hi, guys! We are having so much fun up in here!

Oh, wouldn't it be cool if it were gnostalgia instead? Like, literally "a pain for Knowledge."

Or T-Painalgia, literally "a pain for T-Pain?" Like, "I used to be in love with a stripper, but now I'm not, 'cuz you can't step into the same strip club twice?"

RAPPA TERNT GNOSTA

Western scales and notes and music theory are based off math, which is why I brought up Pythagoras, aka 'the father of mathematics'. I think that's totally relevant.

jz - in terms of semantics, for one, my name is 'Brandon'. Ha. But secondly, what you're implying is that there's some sort of "musical truth", aka a mythical tone that resonates across cultural and societal conditioning. Not only is that completely unprovable, but it's not true.

Concepts like harmony don't even exist outside of western music. Chords, for example, are based on tonal triads, which don't occur in eastern scales. And with Indian scales, shit gets even more complex because there's like 38 notes in the scale, none of which properly resolve to notes on modal scales.

When you hear "world music" guys play with Paul Simon or whatever, they're making adaptations to their music to work within a western context. They didn't just stumble on some mythical notes--they made one-sided compromises.

shit, i knew that would happened. brandon, i was at home taking gravity bong hits during that day of music class.

seriously, thats some school. but i will say this: despite all the tunings and scales and names givent to them by different cultures, theres a universal sense of euphonics, that which is pleasing to the ear. its the reason why music is a universal language, however new agey that phrase might be.

there must be an academic term for that. until i figure it out ill just say yeah, man, yeah.

Have to say, I play an acoustic guitar as well as an electric (which I play a lot less often.) As far as amplified music goes, the technology to produce an amplified acoustic sound that resembles the unamplified sound is more sophisticated than the pickup system on the electric. The comment about Joanna Newsom's production values alludes to this -- getting a "true" sound and capturing things like room ambience is a still-evolving craft. You'll notice that the guitars on a lot of those old Alan Lomax recordings sound pretty crappy.

Furthermore, given how much of modern music uses recycled music in some form, from turntablism to sampling to the contents of most of the commercially available looping programs, it's hard for me to see how somebody who chooses to write a new song on the banjo is mired in nostalgia while the DJ who mixes sections of 70's disco hits into the rhythm track of their never-touched-by-human hands creation is on the cutting edge. Whatever.

I mean, if you're using your wooden instruments to write songs exclusively about sharecropping and coal-mining disasters in spite of having grown up in the suburbs, yeah I suppose you might be accused of being on a nostalgia trip. But seriously, when the oil runs out y'all will be glad we didn't burn all the "old timey" instruments, just like you'll be thankful that there are still singers who can sing on pitch without the aid of vocoders.

i'd like to point out that artists mentioned here, like joanna n., devendra, and grizzly bear, have a wide emotional spectrum. their songs aren't centered around some blissed-out moment of ecstatic ignorance. you're confusing real artists with your abstract idea of a hippie world-music happy times jam session.

also, using older technology doesn't necessarily make an artist less modern. witness duchamp's trebuchet, early 20th century painting, some of anne hamilton's installations, etc.

if you want a retreat from the problems of modernity, look no further than the coked out dance floor at a dj fucking in the streets night, or the drunken loudness of a garage rock concert at the comet.

in conclusion, this is more evidence of eric grandy's being a narrow-minded hipster. please get rid of this guy and hire a real music journalist.

@11 to call psych 'psych rock' is revisionist. cease and desist.

@28, what exactly am I revising?

And, "Cease and desist?" Come on.

While I could add some adjectives like eloquent and raucous, I think that "Acoustic, folky, good time shit" is one of the best descriptions of the Avett Brothers I have ever heard.

The hipsters can debate the hipness of these and other bands. The academics can talk of progressiveness, influence, and impact. I will sit back and enjoy the music of the Avetts and others that elicit feelings from within.

After all isn't that at the point of art?

Isn't art a communication or expression which results in an emotional reaction? And if we like that reaction, we might call it "good art", as if there is a bad version.

All I know is that the Avett Brothers do that for me and a shitload of other people. I put in a CD and it makes me feel good. I go to a show and it makes me feel great. I like that. If you don't. Fine. I am not here to win some hipster popularity contest. Nope, I just want to have a good time. If you can agree with that then you would probably like the Avett Brothers.

My suggestion: have your first helping live. Then be prepared to buy a couple CDs after you go shake hands with the band and tell them thank you.

"psych rock" is a contemporary term to describe "psych". Sorry "dude", you must be new.

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