Music I used to like #15: The perpetuation of the wickedness of perfection

The question is, is 'perfect' too good to be true? The question was aired in the vague vicinity of Miles Davis, The Marvelettes, the Beatles, Steely Dan and … Lloyd Barnes.

Horace Andy: could he BE more … agreeable?

‘PERFECT’ IS AN AWFUL WORD, in music as in life. Perfect incentivises trying too hard. It engenders anxiety and neurosis. It encourages the idea that ‘less than perfect’ is devoid of value. Most disturbing of all, perfect inclines to a system of value that extends beyond the human. It’s one thing for an apple to be perfect, quite another to apply the word in the same way to something that aspires to the condition of art. Apples are really not the same thing as humans or their art — but I’m guessing you knew that.

I am not quite old enough to have known Plato personally but I imagine he’d also have a thing or two to say about all of this. And given that he isn’t here to argue the toss — and while I humbly acknowledge that my understanding of the Platonic Ideal and the tricky work done by its perfect shadow Forms may well be less than, er, optimal — I do feel inclined to make the point that very little successful creative work proceeds from aspiring to some sort of cooked-up anti-shadow of the Platonic model, in which a meticulously worked-out plan results in the delivery of perfect shapes from the loading bay round the back of the hyperuranion (the hyperuranion being the B&Q of the heavens in which the entire stock of objects held in storage on the premises are ideal in their form) for later assembly through the labours of great mortals and the slaves under their meticulous direction, and so on. It is entirely true to say, I think, that in the creative acts made every day by even the most talented individuals, things very seldom come out the way they were planned to; or that they are anywhere close to ‘ideal’ in form.

Very seldom? How about ‘never’?

Because that isn’t how artistic creativity works. With all its little dependencies on contingency, accident, serendipity and even staged spontaneity, art is actually anathematic to that kind of planned exactitude. That shit is what designers do. In music, the most collaborative and abstract of all arts, this is even more the case than it is in literature or architecture or dance or visual art or even theatre, and in the related realm of TV and cinema and now the production of video games. In music, it is not expected that everything will go to plan, so musicians sometimes don’t bother with making one, beyond agreeing to turn up and play. Certainly, musical outcomes rarely match their blueprints in every detail — unless it’s classical music. And that is why it’s called ‘classical’ music, perhaps: because it is music defined by its characteristic of having been ‘designed’ and ‘perfected’ as an authored work first, before any actual playing takes place; it is a form of music in which the outcome is envisaged in every tiny detail ahead of the moment of making, the piece only proceeding as it emerges from a pre-drawn blueprint: the score. You have a conductor who interprets the score and then coaxes the sections of the orchestra through the stages of familiarisation with parts and then assembly of parts. And boing! There it is: the blueprint-score manifest exactly as it says it should be in the composer’s original dots and squiggles; just as Bach, Schubert, Webern, Gershwin, Lloyd Webber and their peers pictured it. Perfect. A carefully nuanced and finished rendering of the Ideal.

I sense that you sense a big ‘But…’ coming down the tunnel. There isn’t one.

However — and it is a big ‘however’ — it is plainly ignorant to think of an orchestra labouring together with a conductor to assemble a classical piece as if they were a regiment of head-scratchers struggling to construct an item of flatpacked furniture, by following the score’s instructions very, very closely, swearing occasionally, squinching thumbs with the allen key provided and then standing back to admire their handiwork when the object is complete, because it is freestanding and doesn’t wobble — it is ridiculous to imagine that this is how classical music gets made (even if it is a bit). And it is equally, if not even more absurd to insist that in the no-less-authored but usually much less pre-scripted world of ‘popular’ music, the end product never comes out the way it was originally conceived to be. Well, that’s not true either. Because in the digital world we all now inhabit it is possible to envisage and then reproduce the exact same thing you just envisaged, should you choose to, by banging instructions into an ordinary laptop keyboard and waiting for the processors (and of course AI, should you elect to be so disgraceful) to go to work on the delightful moment’s thought you had that morning with your eggy bread. Upshot? Music that sounds as sterile and mechanical as music that has been cooked up with half a mind over breakfast. An ideation of music. We all know what that sounds like.

Yet still, still you hear the awful p-word being used to evaluate music, as if the point of music were to achieve a state of perfection, and if not perfection then a state of perfectedness at some pinnacle point of objective aesthetic attainment. Perfect? Perfect is not for this world. Perhaps in another one the facilities exist where music can also be a materially reified thing, an object you might hold up to the light in the presence of others and invite them to look closely and touch it, in the full knowledge that the thing they’re touching feels exactly the same way to them as it does to you. And is objectively without blemish. Perfect.

Sorry, but in this world we cannot know how music is experienced by others, because music goes on inside other people as well as you and you are not living the lives of those others. Music in this world, above all its other attributes, is resistant to objectification, even at its most ‘seeable’ and in its greatest tactility; even then it is sternly abstract and will ultimately always slide out of your sticky fingers as the Falstaffian realisation dawns that music, like Honour, is but… a sound. It is air.

Kind of blue, yes. But kind of perfect? Miles Davis is far from sure.

The last time I heard a record described as “perfect” was a few weeks ago, and it was the usual one. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Yawn. Pass the spittoon etc. Kind of Blue is a completely marvellous work, one of the pinnacles of 20^th-century artistic achievement, but it is absurd to describe it as ‘perfect’, not least because there really isn’t very much else you can compare it to, precisely, to ascertain what it perfects — other than Miles Davis’s other efforts from around that time. So, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain: each of them was made within 12 or 13 months of Kind of Blue, before or after: one contains the toughest hard-bop going, although it is hard-bop with an audible ‘modalism’ in the soloists’ approach — ie linear playing relating to scales rather than to harmony — that smooths out a little of the pointy astringency of that group when bopping hard, yet it is still patently hectic music from a very different neuro-sensory place to Kind of Blue; the second, Porgy, is a sort of concerto based on an opera (with passages of obviously modal playing by the solo trumpet / flügel); the third is primarily an orchestrated concerto based on a concerto, which has never quite come off for me as a musical project, except as an advertisement for Davis’s attractive sense of taste. None of them are really like the ruminative, modalized, reverberant, paced modern jazz that serves to float Kind of Blue away from its hard-standing — by which I mean that the sound-pool Davis and producer Irving Townsend settled on for the instruments to be borne up in at Columbia studios in New York in April 1959 is huge, dark and possessed of a really rather delicious natural reverb. You can say that the recording is an ’object’ of exquisite taste, technically superb, deeply authentic and a brilliantly conceived and realised innovation which never fails to evoke a reflective mood in its listeners. But you can’t say it is perfect. The only object you might say it perfects is its own idea of itself, and that is just a silly thing to say.

‘PERFECT’ IS OFTEN applied to pop music too but in a slightly different way. ‘Perfect pop’ is a sort of Platonic ideal that can be realised (contrary to what Plato’s rules say about perfect forms) in the service of a nostalgic longing for simplicity and ingenuousness and the return of youth. In this sense, ‘perfect’ is adjectival by association with an idea about music rather than of a musical form, and it addresses not only the deliciousness of the music itself but also the way it captures a feeling and sensibility belonging to the past, or perhaps the realm of the ‘ideal’, always with melody and sometimes with cheek. The great girl groups of the 1960s are often cited as examples of perfect pop, music that frequently expresses an inclination to embody itself according to the feminine principle, rather more than its opposite. The Marvelettes’ “Please, Mr Postman” is to me the soup and the nuts.

But guess what, blokes get more than their fair share of ‘perfect’. Of course they do. Not least because the masculine sensibility is always partial to an absolute. The summa cum laude of all 1970s high-end American recordings is widely considered to be the “perfection” represented by Steely Dan’s ultra-buffed Aja album (1977), which is notable in my mind for some great drumming, some fairly classy songwriting — yet far from their best — and saturating levels of incredibly refined studio-production technique. All intensely masculine. But not perfection.

Come on. Is the argument now that perfection resides in the lacquered, even quite featureless technical quality of this production style in its swanking LA sonic suiting? Or is it that the songs wearing the suits are ‘perfect’ manifestations of the suit-wearing songwriter’s art? Foof, I don’t know. Actually, yes I do. Perhaps if Aja is perfect then perfection is the account we give of Steely Dan’s only boring record, the one where you find yourself listening to the hifi, because the hifi is what’s doing the talking here.

The Beatles? Well, yes, they were an early summation of all that pop music can be — but not quite everything, not if you think about it. Still, the Beatles were and always will be the best, and though they do not rank among my favourite examples of postwar popular music to actually listen to, that doesn’t mean they weren’t the topmost. Of course they were. Weren’t they? I mean, Revolver — if ever there was a perfect expression of what pop music could be, as it crossed the threshold into its next evolutionary form, rock, then Revolver is it. It is melodic, it rocks, it challenges, it has style and panache and mystery and meaning and it kicks the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in the behind in just about every respect other than elaborate multi-instrumental arrangements played by people sitting down, and self-pity. Okay, and “God Only Knows”. Pet Sounds is nigh-on unbeatable in those first two respects and maybe the third as well. In fact it’s perfect. The Platonic Ideal, you might say, if you were really asking for it.

And that has just reminded me of a conversation I once had with a man who, though admirably resistant to the genteel perfections of Pet Sounds, insisted, no, really, he demanded that I listen to him and if not share then certainly respect his view, and he would go down hewing on his last available hill in his defence of the only perfect rock long-player ever made, The Stooges’ Fun House. And it is when we arrive at this dreary, bibulous drooling that we awaken ourselves fully to the obvious truth that the word ‘perfect’ only has a real-world context and application to music when you are three sheets to the wind down the pub.

Except when I nearly said the word to my wife last week, when we were agreeably intoxicated in a Christmassy kind of a way and were winding down at the end of a long day and were looking for some music to play not too loudly in the front room in continuation of my effort these past three or four years to overcome my terrible inflicted deafness to music (it comes and goes but mostly it goes).

“Darling,” I said. “I’ve just thought of some music that I think might be just about listenable, if we don’t have it on too loud. I don’t think it would kill me…

“Go ahead,” said J, who is ever accommodating when it comes to my struggle with my brain. “What though?”

“I don’t know why I suddenly thought of it, but it popped into my head when I was thinking about something else.” And I went on to explain that this music has lots of space around its constituent instrumental parts, it is dark and slow in tempo, it has vast depths of field — the artificial reverb in which the music is suspended is of the wettest, saturating kind; the singing voice at the centre of all that slosh, sometimes self-harmonising, is as dry, clipped and structural as you imagine a singing voice ever being — and the songs are fabulous. “It’s Horace Andy, from 1982, I think. You know Horace … I think it might be just the job for right now. I really don’t know why I hadn’t thought of trying this before, because it’s a fantastic thing…”

Indeed J does know Horace, because he was the most striking guest of all the voices on what has long been declared as J’s favourite album, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines. But it isn’t Blue Lines I’m thinking of, or Protection which followed it. It is Horace’s own masterpiece from the previous decade, an album of such dowdy outward complexion — the cover photo looks like a Xerox, the typography on the back appears to have been put together with a John Bull printing set — and yet such exhilaratingly hollowed out depths in its internal cave system that it has over the years become a cult object among reggae fans in the UK, helped in part by its very limited and periodic availability in this country.

It’s called Dance Hall Style and it dates from that very specific moment in Jamaican music history when electronics began to accelerate their dominion over production method but, critically, hadn’t entirely taken command of the reggae palette. Dance Hall Style is part-electronica, part-analogue instrumentation and mixdown tech. And here’s the curious thing: it isn’t a Jamaican record at all, it’s American; an American reggae album that drills deeper and more privily into what the language of reggae can express than just about any Jamaican reggae you can think of, other than the extraordinary music that made up the life’s work of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

Dance Hall Style was created in and distributed from White Plains Road in the Bronx NYC on the Bullwackies label, Bullwackie being the nom du dub of the label’s venerable proprietor Lloyd Barnes, an expat Jamaican endowed with phenomenal gifts at a mixing desk. Andy (real name Horace Hinds) was an inveterate nomad, having spent significant time as a young man in the UK and the US and recording prolifically for Bunny Lee and before him Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd, the imperious owner of Studio One.

But last week nothing of a historical or biographical nature was said as we sat in our own silence and Horace hiccupped and burped his extraordinarily mannered, light, even juvenile, tenor in and around the caverns of the Wackie’s sound, riding brand new versions of seven old songs, some his own (oddly, John Bull only lists six of them on the sleeve) — and I heard it all, every attenuated hi-hat skim, every guitar chop, every ripple of organ and spit of drum machine … and the vast spaces in between them: super-compressed, ultra-bright top end, subbed-out bottom, only Horace in the middle frequency range reeling out his familiar tunes with apparent new relish, while Lloyd Barnes, Bullwackie himself, carefully dug out new forms in time and space. They seemed ideal.

We got all the way through it without uttering a word, J’s eyelids lolling at half mast, mine going the other way. And there was more silence after the echoes faded, every loop of which my brain, compliant for once, had allowed me to enter without undue distortion tearing at the walls, sullying tone and tonality, blackening my mood. It was me that broke the silence.

“Fucking hell,” I said, eloquent as ever. “Fuc-king hell, that is a … brilliant, brilliant record. I heard every note of it, the whole thing. Every note. Sounded great. Huge, huge… Oh my goodness … It really is the perf- … the …uh, the puh- … um, the … an absolutely … uh, my favourite reggae record.”

“Really?” said J, hauling her eyelids up half a millimetre. “You really liked it that much?”

Nick Coleman is the author of three books which take music as their environment: ‘The Train in the Night: a Story of Music and Loss’, ‘Voices: how a great singer can change your life’ and ‘Pillow Man’, a novel — all three are published by Vintage / Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Counterpoint in the US. A fourth book, ‘Dreaming Music: Adventures in Time, Memory and Silence’, is to be published by Vine Leaves Press in 2027

To follow soon: Music I used to like #16: ten ‘perfect’ records, that really are not