Sometime in
the second century after Christ, the Greek author Longinus left behind for us a
cryptic philosophical work. Its title is commonly translated into English as On the Sublime – and if you’re
unfamiliar with the concept, we can think of the “Sublime” as “that which is
excellent beyond customary description”. Simply put, it’s a circumstance where
some item, thing, idea, joke, insight, color, shape, form, void, essence has
obvious greatness, even perfection, but understanding why its perfection works defies our ability to use words to tell
ourselves how it does so. No wonder
that Longinus continues to confuse and frustrates students of Greek (by the
way, the Greek title for On the Sublime
is περι ‘υψος, pronounced “Peri – Hoop – Sauce”, which will be the name of my
basketball blog should I ever create one), or even the souls that approach his
work in English – it attempts to describe that which, by definition, cannot be
easily described.
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| Up here! The Sublime's up here, assholes! Why isn't anyone paying attention? Suits me for not assigning a final in Sublime class. |
Which is what we’re doing today, through the medium of modern
music. Specifically, tunes from about 1977-85, in the context of recent deaths.
First, an
aside about the sublime, through the medium of humor, which traffics in the
sublime by nature. Confusion of meaning, genre, definition, referent, all these
stand among the building blocks of humor. Considering the puzzling nature of the sublime, a familiar instance might be useful. As an example of a sublime joke, an
example from the Dave Chappelle Show, in the skit of the “Player Haters
Ball”: the situation is that the “Haters” are presented with pictures of celebrities,
whom they then “roast”. All is well until they react to an image of Rosie
O’Donnell:
“She wears underwear with dick holes in ‘em” is an amazing
joke, and apparently unscripted (you can see the other comedians cracking up immediately before the cut).
But if you think about the logic behind the joke, it makes no coherent sense.
Obviously the celebrity’s sexuality (homosexual) is in play. But what has
caused the hole? Is the joke insinuating that O’Donnell possesses a penis, and that
it has worn through her underpants (which penises do not do)? That she has cut
holes in her underpants to which to pass a penis, real or fake? Or has the
penis bored through from the outside in some fashion? Probably best to not
fixate on the permutations, because they are not the point. The holes form a sort
of fractal, a logic problem, that is best experienced as an impression from a greater whole, and the shock
of the initial impression matters more than the precise travel from A to B.
Yes, we have no problem labeling this joke “sublime”, although perhaps we are
no closer to answers.
Now one key
to approaching the sublime is recognizing that the Sublime does not encapsulate
the “excellent”, or the “well-crafted”; it is commonplace for objects of
intense craftsmanship, expertise, and devotion to not fit the parameters of the
Sublime, though they may deserve acclaim and general approval. Longinus and
others from the ancient world who percolated on this topic (and perhaps later
ones, as my knowledge of intellectual history ends with the Goths: Visi-, not
Anglo) admitted that even works considered “failures” could still be sublime –
one need only think of a work of media one loves despite its obvious flaws. And
we all could.
In line
with our context, let me present an item from category one (brilliant but not
sublime): Metallica’s “Creeping Death” from Ride
the Lightning.
A hyper-competent song, with memorable music, a suitable yet
creative metal theme, in this case the biblical plagues, and fine musicianship.
But if you look closely, the seams of its construction show and can be broken
down and nitpicked. The lyrical structure is nothing special; the bridge
perhaps slows down excessively and becomes repetitive, as do the component
words. That said, none would question its basic excellence as a representative
member of its genre. A classic, but not sublime.
From
category two (flawed and yet with a hint of the sublime), Black Sabbath’s
“Never Say Die”, off the album of the same name.
In this case, the production
comes through as a mess. The main riff is suspiciously off time, Ozzy’s vocals
slightly off key, and the instrumentation much more mundane than our above
specimen. Yet the overall package transcends its broken parts in a musical
Gestalt. The weak yet professional inter-weaving of the vocals and the music, and the
undoubtedly faked energy behind it all, create a whole greater than the sum,
and one of my favorite songs from the band’s later years. It helps to
comprehend the similarly fragmented nature of the group at the time as mirrored
in the track; the band split soon afterwards.
Capturing
the sublime involves surrender to the law of diminishing returns: the larger
the framework you draw, the harder the sublime becomes to capture. No wonder
that the instant of the Chappelle joke succeeds where songs tend to fail. Often
the sublime pertains to a single element of a larger whole. On one slightly
hazy evening on a colleague’s balcony, an inebriated enemy of mine, in an
unpredicted moment of appreciation, affirmed that the color of my shirt was
sublime. I could not help but agree: an off-blue, neither deep, sky, nor
powder.
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| This is the first Google Images search result for "transcendent blue". |
An odd moment. But it remained one element of an otherwise nondescript
formal shirt, whose sleeves, cut, and buttons escaped no constraints of the
shirt genre. So with that aspect of the sublime forward in our minds, to the music
of the dead.
David
Bowie’s music certainly has many spots which a more ambitious reviewer could
catalogue as sublime, but let us focus on one moment. 1977. Burned out at the
start of the Berlin Trilogy, experimenting with electronic music in the company
of Brian Eno, Bowie
begins his album Low with roughly
four minutes of instrumental music, starting with a song called "Speed of Life", and capped off by the opening guitar line of
the second track, “Breaking Glass”:
The same riff repeats three times with minor variations, and
the opening warble resonates with a soulful air, a quality that resounds at
several other times in the space of its relatively few notes. Obviously the
produced result comes from the vibration of several bent strings, but it
carries with it an implied emotion, something that reaches down into the
individual and vibrates inside them as well. At this point the audience has yet
to hear a spoken or sung word, and this repeated line creates the bridge between
them. From this sublime moment we move on to the lyrics, fine in and of themselves,
including the profundity of “You’re such a wonderful person/ but you got
problems/…I never touch you”. I’m not the first person to read this as a wry
encapsulation of modern love, something Mr. Bowie had multitudinous words about.
Onward to a
different type of the sublime in the work of the recently deceased Prince. On
his greatest achievement, Purple Rain,
perhaps his best song is “When Doves Cry” (although I have and will be a
partisan for “Let’s Go Crazy” and the title track). Good luck finding an online
version of it, however, as the estate of Mr. Nelson famously and zealously
guarded his music copyright even before his passing. Enjoy this for the week it'll be up on Youtube:
“When Doves Cry” remains
an odd song in form and timbre; the bass never kicks in throughout even after
the listener expects it, and the second half devolves into a perfectly fine if
not exceptional dance instrumental. You could argue that the entire track fits
our definition of “sublime”, and you are free to in your own forum. But I would
argue that in the depths of this unusual song, its oddest moment is indeed its
most sublime. Think of it as the musical equivalent to the Rosie O’Donnell
joke. Here we are mid-verse, the second verse of the song (starting at :50):
Dream if you can a courtyard
An ocean of
violets in bloom
Animals
strike curious poses
They feel
the heat, the heat between me and you
Transition to chorus
Let’s pay attention to the third line. This song, unlike
many others, clearly aims to be heard and understood by the audience: its vocal
performance verges on simple speech. Via the expectations of us, the listener,
think about the vocal deixis (what
the poetry directs us to envision and focus upon). We see the courtyard, the
flowers, fairly logically connected to one another, and typical romantic
imagery. Then we include animals, apropos of vary little and with little
introduction, and immediately learn that they “strike curious poses” – once
again, the issue of interpretation lingers: are the poses themselves curious,
or do they indicate the animals’ curiosity? Only in the following line do we
receive the explanation for their behavior; without it, the third presents a
puzzle without obvious solution, and a disorientation, via the decomposition of
meaning, which verges on the sublime.
Consider also,
if you have the track available, the manner in which Prince sings the line. He
pronounces “Animals” with a strange emphasis on the final syllable, nearly
eliding the "L"; the rest of the line continues with an elongation of most
syllables, including the final one of "poses". Once the line is over, the diction snaps back to normal. We’re led
into a moment of curiosity as to what precisely is occurring, signaled by
wording and “animals”; in that moment we find the workings of the sublime. This
is even without mentioning the puzzle of why
animals should react in this fashion to human behavior, and why the artist
decided to craft this detail into the song itself.
Finally, an
example from American punk, specifically the band “X” and their song “Los Angeles ” from the
album of the same name. To my knowledge, no members of the band are deceased,
but if rock is dead (a fair hypothesis), certainly punk is the deadest, having
lapsed into self-parody for most of the last 20 years. Anyway, the sublime to
be found in this excellent track (finding out this track was on the soundtrack
to GTA V certainly made my morning) comes in the manner of subverted
expectation, near the track’s very start:
We know that the track is called “Los Angeles ”, and so we anticipate the title,
the name of the city, to be mentioned, a sense only heightened when John Doe sings
“She/ had to leave…”. What will follow should most likely be “Los
Angeles ”, and as a rock song, the delivery of the words “Los Angeles ” should
follow the bounce of the rhythm. However, nothing of the sort happens.
Instead, we
have a sequence of eight “chugs” – well, not actually. We have seven, and the
eighth hit removes a drum and has instead a more muted tone. When we return to
vocal, our delivery defies expectation: the singer changes to Exene, so far
unheard on the track, and instead of following the beat, she wails the city’s
name off-beat, in a different register, slightly after it logically should
occur. The sublime lies in the moment of waiting, of uncertainty, as we stop to
ascertain whether or not “Los Angeles ”
will occur, and in what way.
Perhaps I
have not explained well the sublime. Perhaps the instances of the sublime in
such pieces of music cannot be really recognized as such by others than myself
– certainly critical taste diverges between people, even among widely accepted
masterpieces. And, perhaps most critically, perhaps the effort to explain the
sublime fails to capture what specifically the sublime is, and its key
components. Would then that “quine” (a term I learned from Gödel, Escher, Bach
to refer to statements that describe themselves), and make our analysis,
itself, sublime?
No, I think
not.
