"Like a Rolling Stone” will not always be the #1 song of all time. Or, The 0s and 1s have it.
On my red-eye flight from Las Vegas (where you can smoke in the airport) to Minneapolis (where it was 20 degrees below zero when I landed!!!) I read this quizzical passage:
"Where lies the boundary between meaning and sentiment? I wondered. Between memory and nostalgia? America and Americana? What is and what was? Does it move?"
It could be from an incredibly self-aware story in No Depression, but it's not. It's from an article in Harper's by Donovan Hohn called "A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, progress, and the meaning of tools."
I have to admit that I really do not know how to use tools very well. Earlier this summer I cut the arms off my couch to fit it into my room, but the workmanship was somewhat shoddy and really, destruction is much easier than creation. But tools have always been a part of my life. My father owned a lumber yard, which I worked at thoughout my high school summers, much to the chagrin of the yard's real workers, I imagine. Plus, the Baumgartens are a farm family, many of my uncles living in the same fertile valley in southeastern Wisconsin my family did (which is where I'm typing this right now). I spent many summer days digging through barns filled with retired farm implements and curious whatsits made out of metal, wood and springs. So, whereas most people under the age of 40 would have skipped over Hohn's 18-page story, I dug in.
Hohn spends the story skipping around the Midwest, hitting estate auctions and tool museums, talking to Galoots--the self-given name of tool fetishists--trying to answer the questions posed above. The questions take Hohn from pre-industrial societies concerned with function over form to post industrial society where function has been perfected and the self-sufficient artisan has been replaced by the consumer, reliant on machinery and outsourced labor. The result is a society where traditional tools are more novel than necessary, leading to companies like Stanley reinventing the same tools with different bits of rubber attached and maybe a new and exciting sports utility knife that folds out from the handle to satisfy the customers want of something new. Hohn isn't damning the modern, but he does make some good points about the beauty of work (the type that strains your back not your eyes) and the culture that that work creates. And all I can think as I'm eating my pretzels is how much this reminds me of music and rockism. Here is what Hohn writes after referencing a Karl Marx quote that reads, “Estranged from labor, the laborer is self-estranged, alien to himself”:
“For the most serious tool aficionados ... the hegemony of mind and machine over hand and matter entails an estrangement more profound even than the one Marx imagined and estrangement not only from self but from time. Old tools imply an entire way of being, an artisanal cosmology.”
Replace “tool aficionado” with “rockist” and “old tools” with, say, “the acoustic guitar,” and this could be a thesis about Nick Hornby. Mind and machine over hand and matter = laptop over guitar. Those old coots who love their handsaws and have nothing but disdain for robotic assembly lines in Japan are neighbors to the man who says that a guitar-led band has soul, while a band that clicks and buzzes with Grooveboxes and Moogs is writing the soundtrack for a lifeless wasteland. Rockism, of course, is more complex than this, involving celebrity and the lipsync and more, but the question of instrumentation is a big one. And speaking as someone more in tune with the strum than the click, I’m curious to know exactly where that boundary between meaning and sentiment is. And something tells me that Rolling Stones' Top 500 Songs that came out last month is probably a good measure, it’s glossy pages the equivalent of a worn tool shed filled with hundreds of hammers and bow saws that are wondrous, rusty and mostly useless. I’m not going to say anything about that list except that most acts on it did a great amount of physical work to create their songs. Guitar strumming, drum pounding, bass slapping or tamborine clapping were involved in probably 95 % of those songs–I don’t have the issue on me right now, so I might be off, but I can’t imagine by much. Fans of electronic music would find little of interest here and that’s a very telling fact. Electronic music (or elements of it in other genres) is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and as a tool it is much more meaningful than most of the music on Rolling Stones’ list.
Why? Because we’re now a nation of button pushers. Working smarter, not working harder, is the ethic of the day. Who needs James Brown live when we can loop “baby, baby, baby” over and over again and get it perfect every time. Mr. Brown might have been "the hardest working man in showbusiness,” but he’s no match for binary code. Any emaciated under-exercised pale cube jockey will tell you that.
Of course, I'm a sentimental bastard and you will never ever take my copy of Blonde on Blonde away. Well, at least not until I get it on my iTunes.
"Where lies the boundary between meaning and sentiment? I wondered. Between memory and nostalgia? America and Americana? What is and what was? Does it move?"
It could be from an incredibly self-aware story in No Depression, but it's not. It's from an article in Harper's by Donovan Hohn called "A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia, progress, and the meaning of tools."
I have to admit that I really do not know how to use tools very well. Earlier this summer I cut the arms off my couch to fit it into my room, but the workmanship was somewhat shoddy and really, destruction is much easier than creation. But tools have always been a part of my life. My father owned a lumber yard, which I worked at thoughout my high school summers, much to the chagrin of the yard's real workers, I imagine. Plus, the Baumgartens are a farm family, many of my uncles living in the same fertile valley in southeastern Wisconsin my family did (which is where I'm typing this right now). I spent many summer days digging through barns filled with retired farm implements and curious whatsits made out of metal, wood and springs. So, whereas most people under the age of 40 would have skipped over Hohn's 18-page story, I dug in.
Hohn spends the story skipping around the Midwest, hitting estate auctions and tool museums, talking to Galoots--the self-given name of tool fetishists--trying to answer the questions posed above. The questions take Hohn from pre-industrial societies concerned with function over form to post industrial society where function has been perfected and the self-sufficient artisan has been replaced by the consumer, reliant on machinery and outsourced labor. The result is a society where traditional tools are more novel than necessary, leading to companies like Stanley reinventing the same tools with different bits of rubber attached and maybe a new and exciting sports utility knife that folds out from the handle to satisfy the customers want of something new. Hohn isn't damning the modern, but he does make some good points about the beauty of work (the type that strains your back not your eyes) and the culture that that work creates. And all I can think as I'm eating my pretzels is how much this reminds me of music and rockism. Here is what Hohn writes after referencing a Karl Marx quote that reads, “Estranged from labor, the laborer is self-estranged, alien to himself”:
“For the most serious tool aficionados ... the hegemony of mind and machine over hand and matter entails an estrangement more profound even than the one Marx imagined and estrangement not only from self but from time. Old tools imply an entire way of being, an artisanal cosmology.”
Replace “tool aficionado” with “rockist” and “old tools” with, say, “the acoustic guitar,” and this could be a thesis about Nick Hornby. Mind and machine over hand and matter = laptop over guitar. Those old coots who love their handsaws and have nothing but disdain for robotic assembly lines in Japan are neighbors to the man who says that a guitar-led band has soul, while a band that clicks and buzzes with Grooveboxes and Moogs is writing the soundtrack for a lifeless wasteland. Rockism, of course, is more complex than this, involving celebrity and the lipsync and more, but the question of instrumentation is a big one. And speaking as someone more in tune with the strum than the click, I’m curious to know exactly where that boundary between meaning and sentiment is. And something tells me that Rolling Stones' Top 500 Songs that came out last month is probably a good measure, it’s glossy pages the equivalent of a worn tool shed filled with hundreds of hammers and bow saws that are wondrous, rusty and mostly useless. I’m not going to say anything about that list except that most acts on it did a great amount of physical work to create their songs. Guitar strumming, drum pounding, bass slapping or tamborine clapping were involved in probably 95 % of those songs–I don’t have the issue on me right now, so I might be off, but I can’t imagine by much. Fans of electronic music would find little of interest here and that’s a very telling fact. Electronic music (or elements of it in other genres) is quickly becoming ubiquitous, and as a tool it is much more meaningful than most of the music on Rolling Stones’ list.
Why? Because we’re now a nation of button pushers. Working smarter, not working harder, is the ethic of the day. Who needs James Brown live when we can loop “baby, baby, baby” over and over again and get it perfect every time. Mr. Brown might have been "the hardest working man in showbusiness,” but he’s no match for binary code. Any emaciated under-exercised pale cube jockey will tell you that.
Of course, I'm a sentimental bastard and you will never ever take my copy of Blonde on Blonde away. Well, at least not until I get it on my iTunes.
posted by Mark Baumgarten at 3:05 PM
2 Comments:
Funny, I happen to be listening to Blonde on Blonde right now.
Dude, I just finished the hip book (John Leland's recently published history of hip that is). Your paragraph about electronic music as reflection of the "information society" reminds me of his. I found that part really interesting, and most of it rung true.
We've talked about our musical roots (yours being the Replacements, mine being Aphex Twin) a lot. I wonder how that reflects your being raised in the Midwest, and my being raised in California, barely three hours from Silicon Valley itself.
I've never ever heard electronic music as lifeless or lazy, because I've been in love with computers since I was a little kid, starting with Oregon Trail, right up to the internet, and I think we got it pretty early out here. I was rocking the 14.4 modems at age 13, dailing into local BBS's to look at awesome pixel art. It was awesome! I knew the rush that came from using *these* tools to explore and express in totally new ways. Electronic music articulated that rush in a way the Beatles never could. It was awesome!
I guess that's why I have a hard time relating to those dudes who think guitars are where it's at.
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