The Critical Asshole: Listening to...

To be honest, it wasn't a completely uninspired discovery. Many is the night after Kelly leaves the apartment that I troll about on iTunes hoping to hear in a 30 second sample clip something I've never heard before—something that will capture and hold me. We're all sensitive to certain stimuli, mine is auditory. I surround myself with it—be it at work, on my daily jog, in the car, the shower, my bed, on the couch toking on unknown and mysterious green (you get the point). As a result, I have heard an enormous amount of music, both good and bad, and most of the time I'm pretty accurate in determining the difference between the two.

It in fact was an evening of said mucking about on iTunes that I came across Canadian singer/songwriter Leslie Feist's new single "1 2 3 4." I first became familiar with Feist from her debut album Let It Die while living in Austin. I was listening to a lot of Canadian music (indeed it seems that we are experiencing a “Canadian Invasion” of sorts—but that is another blog post for another day). I remember first listening to the album the entire way through while cleaning a crowded apartment I shared with my (now ex) girlfriend. Her breathy, yet expressive, voice and the undercurrent jazz leanings from the record struck me as being very anachronistic in a musical landscape that was then being filled with the likes of music from an incendiary white rapper and sensitive pop boy bands. This new song however, “1 2 3 4” was a rollicking, bittersweet, festival of light coasting on all sorts of different aural and emotional plains. Utilizing what sounds like the choir from Polyphonic spree, as well as deft trumpet and banjo musings, the song bounds on in a perfectly pop time frame of just over three minutes. Voilà!

If I sound emphatic in my description, it is only because the song is truly wonderful. The song reminds me of all the trendy, young Dallas folk that live and work around the area that (though disappearing) is known as Deep Ellum—hipster guys and gals with horn-rimmed glasses going to the bars and coffee shops that once housed the music from bands like Tripping Daisy and the Toadies. It’s sophisticated, poignant, and hits the exact way a pop song should. I heard it and knew this was something special. I listened to the album in my car for weeks. I told all my friends about it—and then that fucking iPod Nano commercial started playing.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t in any way mean to admonish Apple for using this kind of music in their ad spots. Nor do I not think that the Apple iPod Nano is not a worthy product for such fantastic marketing—quite the contrary. I realize the part that Apple’s creation has played in revitalizing the music industry and I am thankful, but this whole situation with the Feist music video just proves a point about the particular cultural niche that music in the U.S. inhabits.

Music is a product—no better than a Ford Mustang or a fucking Happy Meal. I take that back…music isn’t even a product anymore—it’s a backdrop to sell products. Gone are the days when teenagers gather together simply and only to listen to an album from start to finish. We get our fix in repetitive sampling of drum tracks in the club scene and from the latest Michael Bay movie. People are content to get their taste in music from commercial sources because we’re not getting it anywhere else.

I guess what is disheartening is that the lines between life, art, and commerce are now indiscernible. I'm not completely innocent from these feelings. I chuckle at a good Super Bowl commercial. Hell, I've been known to drink the nectar and worship at the altar of St. Arbuck's on more than one occasion. I know many people with great taste that do as well. The difference and the benign quality that separates these people from the masses is that these commercial venues supplement an already voracious appetite for an art that is suffering from the equivalent of global warming. We benefit from the privilege and luxury of a free market economy, but where do we draw the line in a situation that both provides us the wealth, freedom, and leisure time to enjoy music, and simultaneously suffocates it under its own empirical weight?