This is a song called “Rated X” by Miles Davis. And I’m pretty sure that most of you are going to hate it.
Kind of a difficult listen, right? You might never want to hear that again. But I’d like to convince you that you should. In fact, I’m hoping to convince you to listen to it many more times.
How will I do that? By telling you a story…
When I was a senior in high school, I had an English teacher who was a Bob Dylan super-fan; he hung a picture of him in the classroom. On his urging, I purchased “Blonde on Blonde,” Dylan’s ambitious electric double-album, gave it a spin, and found it… horrible. I mean awful. Bob couldn’t sing, his voice was nasal and flat. The music was sharp on the ear, often metallic and clanky. Songs drifted through endless verses and choruses with no change, sometimes over ten minutes.
I reported to my teacher, with that confidence that only teenagers have, that “Bob Dylan sucks.” I explained to him that the songs were long and boring, they sounded “old” and didn’t have the kind of hooks I was accustomed to, and worst of all, “he can’t sing.” My teacher looked back at me with a smirk, like I had just told him gravity pulls you up not down. He stated flatly, “What he does is more than singing. It’s beyond it. You just don’t get it.”
You just don’t get it.
Those words haunted me. Because I knew enough about popular culture to know my teacher was probably right, and I was wrong. Bob Dylan was a legend, even I knew that. He was revered, decades after his best albums had been produced. And yet, to my ears, it was inhospitable nonsense. How was that possible? One of two things had to be true: either there was a massive conspiracy to adore an artist who transparently sucked (and I’m still not convinced that’s never happened), or… I was missing something. My teacher was in on a secret, a hidden world of deep, rich experience that I was barred from accessing.
There was something else, too. I was a high school teenager, which meant my musical diet had consisted largely of extremely processed, over-compressed rock and roll that assaulted the senses and hit you with hooks as fast as possible. Not all of it was bad–I still love Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine and The Offspring–but I was just starting to get old enough to sense that something was wrong with it. I consumed it voraciously, and sometimes really enjoyed it, but it passed through me with a kind of mercenary efficiency. Albums I loved one year rarely appeared in rotation the next. I had a weird feeling that in thirty years, nobody I listened to was going to have their picture hanging in a high school classroom.
I used to go to record stores and get irritated that none of the artists I liked had box sets, or commemorative “Legend” re-releases. All the music that did get that treatment seemed “old” and “boring” to me. But how was that possible? I could clearly hear that Limp Bizkit was a million times more fun and exciting than, say, Neil Young. One was fun, energetic, aggressive, LOUD, catchy, and the other was quiet, plaintive, nasal and required extreme patience. I just could not process that the latter was better than the former. It was like arguing that dirt tasted better than french fries. Had the whole world gone crazy?
You just don’t get it.
And then I had an idea. I started to wonder if, perhaps, the music I was listening to was essentially audio candy, and Bob Dylan and the like were more akin to vegetables. When you’re young, “all candy no vegetables” sounds great, but as you age, the thought starts to turn your stomach. Kids want stimulation, but adults want nutrition and substance. I started to consider the possibility that my ears were junk-food addicts, and my English teacher was trying to feed me broccoli.
So I forced myself through “Blonde on Blonde” over and over again. For years. I told people I liked it, but I didn’t. Secretly, each forced march through it was agonizing, and I yearned to snap Sugar Ray or The Red Hot Chili Peppers from my CD carrying case and blast my ears full of that sugar I had raised myself on. Sometimes I would give up and tuck the CD away, but then my English teacher’s words would come back to me…
You just don’t get it.
…And I’d imagine the secret world of deep, meaningful audio experiences he was a member of. The thought drove me nuts, so I’d fish “Blonde on Blonde” out and try again. This lasted well into college. By that time, I had–like most of us–discarded nu metal and pretended to never like it in the first place, but its replacements were only marginal improvements. My ears were still chasing candy. Real nutrition, real meaningful musical, wasn’t connecting.
I don’t remember the “eureka!” moment exactly. I just know that one day I turned on “Blonde on Blonde” and it didn’t suck. And then I thought it was pretty decent, then it was great. My ears opened up and finally heard what everyone else was hearing: the sly wit, the artful construction of images and characters, the defiantly anti-blues performances, and the limber power of Dylan’s backing band. And the songs. Holy hell, the songs: the perfect marriage of tight songcraft and overflowing poetry. Suddenly, Bob’s imperfect singing was a feature, not a bug. I couldn’t imagine some cheeseball crooner cheapening these lived in, leather-worn relics of the real world with traditional singing.
I got it.
From that point forward, I looked at music differently. I stopped exclusively chasing the endorphin rush of a big hook and started digging around for people who seemed lost in music. I now knew what something like “Blonde on Blonde” could do to you if you let it in, how you could drown in it and re-emerge a different, more complete person. I started tuning my radar to people talking about music in that way. And from there, I discovered many of my favorite artists, albums and songs of all time. Tom Waits. Aphex Twin. Animals as Leaders. Periphery. Miles Davis. The Dillinger Escape Plan. Autechre. Kendrick Lamar. So many others. These artists were all bitter on first contact (to varying degrees), but I stuck with them, and eventually they showed me spaces inside my mind that I didn’t know were there. If you think about it, music is just a way of organizing sensory input, and these musicians (as well as others) expanded my understanding of reality.
I remember, in particular, when Autechre clicked for me. At first I just heard noise. But then suddenly, I felt like the music was surrounding me, a web of interlocking musical gears (and no, I was not taking anything). This wasn’t sequential music, to be heard from beginning to end, but a simultaneous experience that envelops you all at once. I had to reconfigure how I processed music to get it, but once I did, it was the sonic equivalent of traveling to another country.
I’m worried these experiences are going away. These days, I feel like music has been completely commodified. It is a purely sensory, aesthetic experience: it needs to please the consumer right away, or it can get the hell out. Streaming has made music so cheap and ubiquitous that people have lost the idea that they might need to work, to put something in to the musical exchange in order to get something out. Which makes no sense, if you think about it. We all expect to put effort into a book, or a new TV show. Why do we think music should be so easy? You can’t just passively listen to what you know you like, and you can’t just toss something out because you didn’t get it at first. You have to keep trying, keep pushing, keep expanding your palette, or you are doggy-paddling on the surface of an ocean.
I would like to convince you that a lot of the music you listen to is the same. Even if you think you listen to a wide variety of genres, it all boils down to the same chord progressions, at the same tempo, in the same time signature. The really popular genres of music right now–country, EDM, alternative, hip hop, pop and R&B–are all converging on each other. You may think, as many people do, that you listen to “a little bit of everything!” But you (probably) don’t. You are listening to the same song over and over again, with a slightly different coat of paint and cover art. Songs are compressed into oblivion to make them loud as possible, but they have no dynamic range. Artists are being encouraged to limit their lyrics to middle school vocabulary. Musicianship is at an all-time low, fewer and fewer people are learning instruments or how to properly sing or vocalize, because technology will do it for them.
The worst thing about these trends is that they are self-fulfilling: the more you are trained to hear a narrow range of tempos, melodies and time signatures, the more anything outside of that very narrow scope will seem alien and wrong to you. And the more safe and convenient your music gets, the less potential it has to excite you, push you, change you, or show you something about yourself you did not know. An entire art form, one that has produced some of our most enduring culture and history, is being slowly baby-proofed, sanitized and simplified into oblivion. (I know, I know, this all reads very “get off my lawn.” But my beef isn’t with young people, this transformation is hitting older generations just as hard.)
The good news is, if you do open yourself up a little, it has never been easier to discover something new and challenging. For all their faults, Spotify is an exceptional service that can guide you in any direction, instantaneously. The tools are at your fingertips, and it doesn’t cost you a dime. The music is all out there. I know a lot of it will seem harsh (your brain is literally conditioned to reject new and unfamiliar music), but if you can find a way to push through that impulse and keep trying, you may discover the most precious gift art can give you: a broader understanding of the world, and yourself.
Here is “Rated X” again. Now I’m not arguing that you’re going to magically start liking it. But I do think it’s possible that with everything I’ve just said rattling around in your brain, you might be a little more open to the possibility that your first impression of it is wrong. The things about it that aren’t pleasing to you at first, maybe they’re not bad, they’re just different, and you haven’t had time to adjust to them yet.
Of course, not everyone needs music to be this important, and if it’s not worth it for you, that’s totally fair. But I think there are diehard music fanatics out there who don’t know that about themselves because the current climate makes it so hard to access that part of yourself. This post is my humble attempt to do for you what my English teacher did for me.
So if you think I might be talking about you, consider this an invitation. Wake up! We need you, now more than ever.