Bagatellen: Denying The Existence Of "Now"

Phil Freeman registers another interesting PDF File over at Bagatellen. It's really weird to read about pop at Bags, as its writers tend to cover extreme forms of music very few people in the world like. Phil comes from a different background, though (from what I could tell from his former blogs: metal, jazz, free jazz and electric Miles Davis) and is a breath of fresh air. I do have to take issue with some of his points, however:

The idea that a record should accurately document a musical performance seems rooted in a psychological need for honesty, and a corresponding suspicion of trickery on the part of pop performers.(...)

The jazz attitude is that performances laid live to tape are evidence that the musicians in question can play a song beautifully every time, and make it new and interesting every time, too. This is, of course, a myth; many jazz boxed sets are littered with flubbed takes and false starts. (Charlie Parker has an entire mini-discography of nothing but this sort of stuff.)

The flip side of this belief is the idea that jazz musicians who assemble their tracks from the best fragments after multiple incomplete takes, or—worse yet—the recording of individual instruments separately of one another, are somehow cheating. As if the process of making albums has an ethical dimension.

That purist attitude does exist, but is not as universal as Phil makes out. The liner notes to Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners acknowledge that the title track is made up of many edits because the musicians simply couldn't play the tune all the way through, and BC is still accepted as a great album. More fundamentally, jazz is a far more interactive and volatile music than most pop, so recording each musician separately or all of them together does make a qualitative difference. It's no coincidence that studio techniques used in jazz got more elaborate as fusion, smooth jazz and electro jazz developed. Compare the "studio trickery" involved in Brad Mehldau's Art of the Trio albums and the more pop/rock-oriented Largo.

Pop music is about the eternal Now. A record is not perceived as having any existence outside of itself. There is no larger context, only the gleaming moment.

I don't understand why the eternal Now (which I'm not convinced pop is all about) closes the pop song onto itself. The hip-hop mixtape is often precisely about settling beefs and other such stuff. The popularisation of certain producers (The Neptunes, Timbaland...) immediately place whoever they are working for in a different continuum. Acts like The Strokes or The White Stripes seem to explicitly not be about an eternal Now.

Phil then goes into a discussion of the Miles Davis/Teo Macero working methods, saying that

Miles and Teo utterly abandoned the idea of “honesty” in recorded music. They chose to assert that the record was the record, a work unto itself, and if a listener felt like hearing interactive performances by a group of musicians, well, that’s what concerts were for.

Certainly, they manipulated the recorded sounds far more than was usual for jazz records at the time (if you consider those records jazz, but that's another debate), but my impression is that they chopped up and juxtaposed blocks of sound and looped others, but didn't fundamentally the interactive nature of the music: they took what the musicians had played together and made something new of it. So the honesty (if you really want to call it that) is still there.