Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

For me, a big part of being a writer is hating other writers. I don’t mean envy of other writers. I have as much work as I want. I mean that I have a much harder time reading others’ work for pleasure, because I unconsciously edit as I read, and I'm a merciless critic.

Every clumsy sentence leaps off the page. Every poorly chosen adjective, or incomprehensible metaphor, draws my eye back again and again no matter how many times I try to simply proceed to the next page. If a paragraph could have lost two sentences, those are the only sentences that register with me. It’s an affliction I’m certain is shared by others who make their living with language, but that certainty doesn’t make it any easier on me.

Be assured this problem transfers all too easily to music. I love songs in languages I don’t speak (Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, and Yoruban all appear in my record collection), or songs where the lyrics are incomprehensible. When I can understand what the singer is on about, more than half the time the song is ruined for me, because once again I find myself editing. I imagine myself tapping the songwriter on the shoulder and saying, “Not that metaphor. Try this. End this line with this other rhyme instead.” Etc., etc.

This is one of the primary virtues of death metal. Its vocalists strive for incomprehensibility. One of my favorites is Will Rahmer, of the band Mortician. His voice is hardly recognizable as the product of a human throat; it’s a phlegmatic rumble that’s been described as sounding like a backhoe biting into mud and gravel. To me, it sounds like bass-amp feedback. It’s only barely possible to follow their songs with lyric booklet in hand, and I’ve only tried that once, because they mostly sing about gore movies they’ve watched, and that gets old just about as fast as you think it would, maybe faster. Ignore the lyrics, though, as Mortician virtually invite you to do, and they’re great. Their songs are fast, intense, rhythmic beatings that never last long enough to wear out their welcome.

The same thing is true of prog rock. I think one of its great virtues is that the instrumental interplay so thoroughly distracts from the silliness of what they sing about. When I first started listening to Yes, I was told by many friends that their lyrics were among the most laughable in all of rock. I’m sure that’s true—a few glances through the booklets to Relayer and Tales From Topographic Oceans have been wince-inducing. I’ve found Jon Anderson’s vocals surprisingly ignorable, though. I’d worried that the high pitch of his voice would make him impossible to block out, but in fact there’s so much going on from every other corner of the mix that he recedes into the background almost immediately.

I wish jazz would stay away from the employment of vocalists even more than it does. Jazz singing is bad enough, but really, there are few punishments worse than hearing a free jazz blowout dragged into the depths of tedium by somebody’s “poetry,” especially when that somebody is one of the musicians. Saxophonists, generally speaking, are not philosophers, and it’s unfortunate that they feel the need to prove it so often, and so publicly. And scat singing needs to be done away with, too, as long as I’m ranting here. So does whatever Thomas Buckner calls his hiccuping ululations. If I ran the world, jazz and improv would be purely instrumental musics (except maybe for Ami Yoshida).

I’ll shut up now.