Bill Martin - Avant Rock: Experimental Music from The Beatles to Bjork

Advance Praise for Avant Rock

An invigorating, broad-minded survey of pop musics experimental fringes....

Martin addresses excellent analysis to a smart selection, including Cecil Taylor, Sonic Youth, Jim ORourke, John Zorn, Tortoise, the New Klezmir Trio, and Game Theory (one of many artists whose chess obsession he discusses). Martin relates their music to parallel developments in philosophy and literature, citing influences from Adorno and Debord to Nabokov and Harry Crews, and manages the neat trick of combining the sharp personal enthusiasms of underground rocks fanzine culture, with the cooler head of academic explorations, so that the reader perceives why rock enthusiasts have stuck with it all these years....

A trenchant and witty exploration, several cuts above typical surveys written in the wake of the alternative era.

Kirkus Reviews

A warning to the reader: Watch your wallets, because Bill Martin is very good at what he does. He makes the supposedly esoteric music he covers in Avant Rock sound like so much fun, so full of possibility, wonder, invention, and mischief, that his readers will want to instantly buy all the albums he writes about so persuasively.

Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune rock critic

In the era of the Backstreet Boys and limp Bizkit, Britney Spears and Eminem, its unfashionable to talk about the music of ideaseven (or especially) among people who write about popular music for a living. Bill Martin refuses to accept this, and he dives into the deep end of what he calls avant rock to write with the insight of a superb critic, the perspective of a scholar, and the passion of a fan.

Jim DeRogatis, Chicago Sun-Times rock critic Author of let it Blurt: The life and Times of Lester Bangs

Avant rock

THE SERIES IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

VOLUME 3

SERIES EDITORS: BILL MARTIN AND KERRI MOMMER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

Matrix and line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory

Humanism and its aftermath: The shared fate of deconstruction and politics

Politics in the impasse: Explorations in postsecular social theory

Music of Yes: Structure and vision in progressive rock

Listening to the future: The time of progressive rock, 19681978

The radical project: Sartrean investigations

Cover photos:

Sonic Youth: Chapman Bachler/Getty Images

Bjrk: Sin/Andy Willsher/Corbis

This book has been reproduced in a print-on-demand format from the 2002 Open Court printing.

To order books from Open Court, call 1-800-815-2280.

Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company.

2002 by Carus Publishing Company

First printing 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 315 Fifth Street, P.O. Box 300, Peru, Illinois 61354-0300.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martin, Bill, 1956

Avant rock: experimental music from the Beatles to Bjrk / Bill Martin: with a foreword by Robert Fripp.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8126-9939-5

1. Rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title.

ML3534 .M411 2001

781.66dc21

2001059315

To the memory of

Toupee

landscape architect, moral exemplar, hard worker, originator of the philosophy of Superbism

Table of Contents

Contents

T he act of music is the music.

Words dont, and cant, convey the experience of standing in the presence of music when music goes on download. So, why spend time and effort attempting to describe an experience inherently beyond our capacity to articulate?

One answer might be: because we are an Academic Ologist. And how much more might this be so were we also a Lefty Academic Ologist, even one given to reading weighty tomes by Ologists from the Gallic realms?

A second answer might be: because we have been so moved by music, and in awe of the effects music has generated in our lives, that we seek to make sense of a radically life-changing experience. Part of this search for understanding is through interrogating all that we can learn of the activities within the act of music. Perhaps we think our thinking out loud; even engage in discussion with whoever will listen, in the hope that they might confirm for us what we already knowthat music is a quality, as if an act of grace.

But if we were an Ologist, particularly a lefty academic ologist of the Gallic persuasion, we would know that the conditions which surround the act of music may be, can be, and nearly always are, prejudicial to music appearing in our fallen world. If I have learnt two things in the forty-four years since I took up a guitar, they are these:

Music is a benevolent presence, freely, readily and directly available to all.

Music enters our world despite the characters that play it, not because of them. And if I have learnt one thing in the thirty-four years of being a professional guitarist and aspirant musician, it is this:

The music industry is not concerned with music.

Fundamentally, Prof. Bill is trying to explain, to himself and his readers, why the music that has touched him holds the value for him that it does. In doing this, he is too generous to those he likes and too dismissive of those he doesnt. Bill Martins heart is in the right place, and his head follows. The head is an interesting head, and takes me places I wouldnt otherwise go. But his heart is what I trust.

ROBERT FRIPP

Thursday, 1st November, 2001

Chateau Belewbeloid

Mount Juliet, Tennesee

B efore all else I must thank my editor and friend at Open Court, Kerri Mommer, for her enormous patience and encouragement in this project. My thanks, as well, to the rest of the folks at Open Court, especially Jennifer Asmuth.

In the past few years, and thanks to the publication of music of Yes in 1996, I have had the good fortune to hear from dozens of serious rock music listeners and musicians from many corners of the globe. I am deeply appreciative for our communications.

Among my closest friends with whom I have discussed music for many years, I would especially like to thank Garry Rindfuss and Chelsea Snelgrove.

I have also benefited greatly from the thoughts of a number of rock intellectuals, in particular Robert Fripp, Christoph Cox, Deena Weinstein, and Jim De Rogatis.

The debts that I have to the larger intellectual community are too many to enumerate. I am thankful for a departmental and university environment that has encouraged my explorations of rock music, without imposing narrow academic categories. I am also very thankful for the large group of encouraging interlocutors in the institutions of philosophy and other intellectual pursuits.