How Music Sounds

What's the old line: writing about music is like dancing about architecture? ;-)

The one big fault I can find with Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, which I finished t'other night, is that it didn't give me much clue about how any of the bands sounded. I am familiar enough with hardcore and punk and emo and postpunk to catch the flavor of it. But what Azerrad's most interested in is the social environment bands existed in and/or created around them.

Writing about the music itself would be much harder, and potentially less rewarding. But it's too bad one doesn't see that kind of writing more often. I suppose part of the drawback is that you might have to use more music theory geekspeak, and so many people aren't really familiar with that any more. I certainly wasn't up until a few years ago.

For instance, who knew that so many songs on 69 Love Songs were in very standard 1-4-5-style chord progressions. Not me. If I'd sat down and thought about it, I might have realized: that intense singability that many of them have might have suggested that Merritt was using a lot of standard song architecture. But the variety of instrumentation and melody and the different voices he builds on that has the effect of concealing or distracting from it, at least for me.

Someone on the web (I'm not going to paste the link, being lazy--it's easily Googlable) has created a chord archive for a big chunk of Merritt's work, so I downloaded the pages for 69 and i a while back and printed out some of my favorites. Which is what got me thinking about the standard-pop chord progressions therein.

Funny: this song with a 1-4-5 or 1-6-4-5 chord progression is a country song, while this other one, same or similar chords, is cabaret, and this one is synthpop.

Off the top of my head, I guess Azerrad got me most interested in Husker Du, Beat Happening, and maybe Minor Threat and the Minutemen. My brother was heavy into The Replacements, so I've heard more by them .... I can honestly say, I feel like they "should" grab me more than they do.

But since it IS hard to talk about how music sounds, and since Azerrad only does that fitfully, I guess I may have to dig up some actual albums by those folks.