The love that loves the love that loves the love...

This week, I’d like to get a little bit meta and write about music writing. In this age of blogs, there is no shortage of music writing and criticism out there for consumption. But what makes music writing good? Or is writing about music even worthwhile? Elvis Costello once famously compared writing about music to “dancing about architecture,” concluding that it is “a very stupid thing to want to do.” A clever turn of phrase, Mr. Costello, but I beg to differ. I believe that expressive, passionate writing about a song or piece or album has the potential to truly transform a listener’s perspective. Admittedly, a lot of music writing fails to achieve this. Reviews often, in striving for objectivity, achieve a dry, almost meaningless result. And less objective writing is often rendered trivial by excessive use of shallow personal impressions. The line between these two extremes is certainly a difficult one to walk.

One man who walked it successfully was Lester Bangs (you may remember the name from Almost Famous). Bangs is widely recognized as among the greatest rock n’ roll writers of all time, and I highly recommend picking up Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a collection of Lester’s writings first published in 1987. The first review in this collection is a 1979 essay on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and it really opened my eyes to this terrific album. I had purchased the album years before, and had never really liked it. I had been bothered by the nonsensical lyrics, particularly Van’s incessant repetition of two- or three-word phrases. For example, from the song “Madame George”: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves.” What on earth is he babbling on about? Yet after reading a few paragraphs from Bangs’s column, I approached such lyrics with a new perspective. Bangs writes:

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along…It’s the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.

Now, one might write this pseudo-mystical explanation off as nonsense itself. Yet what strikes me as so effective about Bangs's writing here is how it fits the music—its mood, its rhythm, its essence—perfectly. It is difficult to evaluate this claim without hearing any of the songs from Astral Weeks, so below are a couple of tracks, as well as a link to the text of the Lester Bangs essay.

Track 1: Astral Weeks (filesavr)

This title track is probably my favorite cut of the album, and before I sign off I'd like to point out a moment in this song that I particularly enjoy: the transition from chorus to verse. The lyrics of the chorus are as follows:

Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
To lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

As the chorus begins, buzzing, trembling strings are added to the texture, creating a sense of tension and restlessness. As Van reaches the chorus's final line, the strings are removed, releasing the tension and leaving behind a sense of peaceful arrival that wonderfully fits the lyrics of rebirth.

Track 6: Madame George (filesavr)

Lester Bangs Column