Music as Soul-Stirring and Music as Wallpaper

Speaking of music (as we were last week), Wordplay has had plenty of interesting listening experiences with playlists in public places, including Starbucks. Our official stance on music in public places is that, if it isn’t really, really good, it should at least be unobtrusive. Many places today play whatever they’ve got at such earsplitting volume that whether or not it’s to your taste, it forces itself on your attention. Since people are usually in coffeehouses to read or talk, this doesn’t seem designed for the customer’s comfort, but whatever. Customers only keep Starbucks, Panera, Kroger, and other places in business—no need to worry about what they like and don’t like.

However, it’s not all bad news. Starbucks, in particular, can apparently switch from one playlist to another with ease and occasionally does a good job of mixing it up. It’s been a while since I got really discouraged with one of their playlists, but it did happen recently when they decided to play all Elton John 16 hours a day. It’s not a slam at him to say any playlist does better with variety, and a steady diet of anything can get old quickly. My understanding is that they were commemorating the release of the film biopic of his life, but I would have done this by throwing a few extra songs of his into the mix along with some of those of his contemporaries—just enough to give a flavor of the era.

It’s quite possible, though, for me to hear the same songs many times without really hearing them, because for me, they’re just the background to whatever else I’m doing. Once in a while, I’ll realize that I like a song that I don’t know the name of, or I’ll wonder who the artist is. If you want to identify the song or artist you’re listening to in Starbucks, you can do so with the Starbucks app and Spotify. If you don’t have that, you have to do it the way I do, by typing into Google whatever you can decipher of the lyrics. Most of the time, you’ll find it on the first try, but not always. There is one recent indie pop song by an unknown artist whose plangent melody I really like, but since I only know one partial line, I haven’t been able to track it down. The chorus is either “All I heard was silence” or possibly “All I had were filings,” and the only thing I can come up with is a very different song that isn’t the one I’m looking for.

The other day, I heard a song that’s drifted through Starbucks several times recently, Noel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” which is, of course, a classic from the Great American Songbook* (actually, the Great British Songbook; see the note below). This version has a particularly powerful and expressive vocalist, and I became curious to know who it was. I was too late to ask the barista, who could have looked it up while it was playing, and the suggestion I got to check the playlists on Spotify didn’t work because there is apparently a new (and entirely different) song by a newer artist that pops up on playlists in its stead. I spent an hour that morning listening to various versions of the song—not a bad way to while away an hour—before coming across Lena Horne’s version. I’m not certain the one I heard is the same as hers, but the vocal is similarly powerful and almost, one might say, life-changing.

Starbucks is hit and miss with its music, but sometimes they strike gold. Although there is a tremendous variety of music on the playlists, it manages to sound corporate about 75 percent of the time, at least to me. There are exceptions that make you sit up and listen, but otherwise, it’s music as decor—which I guess is exactly what they have in mind. If I wanted to hear opera one minute and “The Streets of Laredo” the next, I guess I’d have to move to San Francisco and hang out at Caffe Trieste, if indeed it’s still there. Many things that once were seem to be fading with the times.

*Although Lena Horne was American, Noel Coward was British. Wordplay regrets the error.

Thus Spake George Jones

After last week’s post, a tribute to Greek tragedy as seen by a bot, I started thinking about some of the Greek tragedies that I myself have read. Last week’s brief sampling of a play written by a graduate student’s bot featured so many familiar motifs that I started thinking about the genre’s essential plot elements. I can tell you this: in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, family strife plays a major role. If it’s not a wife killing a husband, it’s a parent killing a child. There are grand passions, grand betrayals, clashes between affairs of state and private duty, reunions after long separations, acts of revenge, occasional acts of loyalty (which seemingly never go unpunished), matricides, filicides, parricides. In short, Greek tragedies can be gloomy affairs, no matter how great the themes they are exploring.

I’ve concluded that Greek tragedy was the country music of 5th-century Athens. You know it’s true. If there’s any species of high art more calculated to have you crying in your beer by the jukebox at intermission, it’s the works of the ancient tragedians. Some of you Generation X and Yers may be scratching your heads doubtfully, and in a way I don’t blame you, because regardless of your familiarity with the ancients, you may never actually have experienced country music the way I did while growing up. While the plays of Classical Greece may be frozen in time, coming to us across an immense expanse of time and distance, country music has changed since my youth. Back then, in the heyday of Conway Twitty, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Porter Wagoner, and others, many of the songs I heard on country radio were painful to listen to. I don’t mean sad, I mean painful.

Those were the days of what I would call hard country as opposed to the soft country of today. I’m not an expert on country music but did grow up surrounded by it, as it was favored by both my parents. I often wondered why, because it seemed to me that if you were feeling OK to start with, listening to it would depress you, and if you were already depressed when you heard it, you’d soon feel infinitely worse. It was a mirror of things only half-understood that seemed to be happening around me, and why on earth would I want to listen to reality amplified as a form of entertainment? Not for me the ballads of unfaithfulness and Carroll County accidents—I gravitated as a moth toward a flame to the melodious soft rock of The Carpenters, Bread, Don McLean, and other gentle troubadours of the day.

I may have been absorbed in a romantic haze, but given the choice between that and the utterly too literal realities of the “Harper Valley PTA” variety, I feel sure I would make the same choice again. Nothing wrong with a little escapism in the midst of ugly realities, if escapism is your only choice. I think people do this as adults, too.

Nowadays, of course, a lot of country music is indistinguishable from pop music. Several times, while alone in my car on long trips, I have tuned into country music stations in places like Missouri and Ohio and been wrapped in a cocoon of love by various male baritones all singing of faithfulness and understanding in a way that would have made George Jones cringe. (I believe it was Mr. Jones who lamented the change in country music away from the adultery/murder/prison/drunkenness end of the county toward the kinder, gentler side of the district aspired to today. At least, he once did so in an interview.)

I will admit that some of today’s songs can be sappy (as opposed to starkly depressive as in the old days). Nonetheless, if I’m trying to get somewhere on the road, I’d rather by accompanied by a sympathetic chorus of we’ve-had-our-consciousness-raised good old boys, with an occasional renegade thrown in—mostly alluding to the nobler aspects of romance and human nature—than by a Conway Twitty dirge that might force me off the road into a ditch. It would probably take a listen to both sides of the first two Carpenters albums and a goodly dose of The Little River Band to set me right after that (and that still might not be enough).

Without a doubt, there are high culture advocates out there who see no connection at all between Greek tragedy and Johnny Cash and would sooner drink hemlock than admit they might be accessing the same dark strain of human experience. Personally, I wonder if the distinction between “high” and “low” art is a defense mechanism more than a valid division, but in any case, allow me just to say that Clytemnestra murdering both her husband and Cassandra had nothing on Johnny Cash singing “Delia’s Gone.” If you were in the bar at the intermission of Agamemnon and they started playing that song, you’d be out of the theater in a flash, Chardonnay unfinished, slamming your car door, spinning out, and searching desperately on the dial for a latter-day country music lullaby of the blandest variety to soothe your disordered senses. You might even be desperate enough for disco.

You Are Now Cereal

Phi Beta Kappa featured a post on its Facebook page the other day from Mr. Spencer Klavan, a graduate student who trained a bot to write a Greek play by having it watch many hours of tragedies. He stated that the excerpt in the post was only the first page, but to me, everything that needed to be said was right there on that page, rendering the rest entirely superfluous (though it was all excellent, I’m sure).

With a stage direction indicating that the setting is the exterior of a “Cursed Dynastic Palace,” you know you’re in the hands of a straightforward playwright who’s going to let you know exactly where you stand. And the rest of this one-page mini-play is just as carefully observed, with characters such as long-suffering wife Dyspepsia and chief god Stankrocles (in charge of mathematics and ancestral guilt, that double whammy of random but somehow meaningful jurisdictions) and an authentic Chorus that really knows its stuff: “Welcome home, Great King ! Watch out ! Everything is normal !”

The action is crisp and the verbs active. Dyspepsia carries a big knife, Stankrocles eats a sandwich, the Chorus dances, and Dundertron laughs. There are greetings, warnings, forebodings, dancing, and dead lions. And the climax, in which Stankrocles turns everyone into barley, is as satisfying as you could wish. What else is there to be said after that? You are now cereal. Deal with it. If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell it like it is, no holds barred (someone besides Wordplay), your search is at an end with Mr. Klavan’s bot. The sheer audacity of its storytelling and bold willingness to take risks in delivering a Greek tragedy attuned to our gainful (that is, grainful) times will dazzle you, make you laugh, and take your breath away.

As a drama that captures not only the spirit of an earlier age, but the nihilist zeitgeist of ours, this play cannot be beat. And besides . . . What? What are you asking? Catharsis? Well, what do you want that for? Are you feeling bad? All Wordplay can tell you is, if you don’t get catharsis from barley right now, you likely never will. It’s barley or nothing. And that’s some good fiber, too.