There is an alchemy that occurs when music is made. There is no formula, though. You cannot, for instance, take man + guitar + harmonica and get Bob Dylan every time. You cannot take sweeping samples + beats that feel like they grew up from the ground and into your soul + rhymes about Shaolin Kung Fu and get the Wu-Tang Clan every time. Even if you could come close to recreating that kind of magic in music, there is still the unpredictable variable of the listener. I love A.A. Bondy, but I don’t love every “folk” singer-songwriter with a guitar. I can barely come up with a handful of artists who could fit that category that I much care for. (And I have a hard time thinking of Bondy as a folk singer at all due to the loaded concept that term has come to engender over the years.)
The thing about music is that it is not a science. It’s human, living, changing thing. The musician brings her background, her emotions, her voice, skill, style, attitude, etc. The listener brings his experience, preferences, mood that day, memories, etc. Sometimes it all manages to fall into place and the listener finds several points where he connects to the artist’s music, whether it is through a sentiment in the lyrics, the way that E chord transitions into that Am chord or just the way the singer’s voice goes a little thin at the end of that verse. But many times, for whatever reason, there is a failure to connect.
This all makes me wonder why the major labels have had this habit of trying to milk (or even create) a genre when one act hits big or why album reviewers insist on
comparing X to Z. The A.A. Bondy: Bob Dylan comparison would be an obvious one for me to point out. If I had to choose someone to compare Bondy to, I’d more likely go for Neil Young, but I’ve never seen anyone else draw this comparison. And just now, I found a 1994 Rolling Stone review of the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen that compares Dulli and Co. to Pearl Jam. What?
I understand the human brain’s need to categorize things, but I think it serves an artist much better if she is judged on her own merit, without anyone else’s baggage to haul around with her. This is one of my favorite aspects of the internet revolution’s effect on music: the ability to judge an artist’s music on the artist’s music. Obviously, I enjoy writing about music, but it is first-hand experience that makes music such a lifeforce in the world. You won’t get pumped up or moved to tears by reading how Ian Felice of the Felice Brothers sounds just like Bob Dylan (is there anyone who artists are compared to more often than Dylan?). You can only experience music properly when you meet it head-on.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BZQ6iuJ2kM]
