ASPIRING to ART the Concept Album and Audience-Artist Interplay

ASPIRING TO ART The Concept Album and Audience-Artist Interplay Alex Kasner PWR 2: The Rhetoric of Bass Guitar and Musical Revolutions Dr. Rod Taylor December 2, 2009 Kasner 2 In the opening pages of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Dagney Taggart anxiously pulls at a cigarette, preoccupied with business models and profit margins of her family’s railway syndicate. In her unease, the train ride seems uncomfortable, her passion at odds with her state of mind. As she pauses for a moment, a sound begins to fill the air. A faint whistle by a mechanic in the corner begins to blossom into “a symphony of triumph...[embody]ing every human act and thought” (Rand, 1). The melody escapes its humble presentation, its “tension of purpose” resolving into a song of “deliverance...[from] ugliness and pain” for Dagney (Rand, 1). Though she has never heard the music before, each sound is as instantly recognizable and compelling to Ms. Taggart as a childhood lullaby. With each passing phrase of the music, the din and hiss of the train settles into a comforting pattern in line with the concerto. Music brings order to life out of the mechanistic din, and Dagney connects with the contours, timbres, themes, and narrative of art for one fleeting moment. The use of song for inspiration is nothing new, but in our modern approach towards music, we are more likely to treat it as the alien noise of a relentless train ride then an object of intense concentration. iPods and earbuds, programmed to shuffle, provide soundtracks to our lives as we rush from one destination to another. Just as a locomotive spits off steam and blasts sound, our music is a byproduct of motion that is to be heard but not listened. When the way we approach music so drastically shifts, is the enveloping term “music” still adequate to describe all variations? The diminishing of fixed concentration and study of songs also relieves music of its necessity to communicate ideas and emotions to its listeners, reducing it to a means of preserving the celebrity of the performers and to a subliminal static for the listeners. As the critical ear turns away from musical creation, compositions have no need to embrace their previous aesthetic function. Music is no longer subject to the judgment of what Immanuel Kant deems the Kasner 3 “intellectual faculty” of aesthetics and to the heavy mantle of artistic aspiration (qtd. in “Kant: Aesthetics”). Similarly, the age of commercial music recording offers little in what one might concretely refer to as artistic creation. Production for the masses has often intuitively been paired with a simplicity of form and content. Current pop singles dominating all measures of commercial success are acknowledged as “low in communicative function...articulated with ordinary language,” but quantifying exactly what such a phenomenon really means on a more academic level is a difficult task (Frith, 270). Music that aims first toward a higher level of artistic fulfillment alters the way in which the audience approaches it and fundamentally changes the way in which we are affected by music and view its composers. In the modern age of commercial recording, it is tempting to dismiss complex, thematic works as financial suicide. Yet how then do we explain away the glaring exception of concept albums: a development in composition during the 1970’s in which rock albums “were sculpted into complex, multi- movement works on a scale that was unprecedented in their stylistic tradition,” while rewarded with “an intensely devoted fan base” and “lavishly remunerative deals” (Keister, 433)? During their brief existence, concept albums represented a period in which music products could both remain authentic to their defining artistic characteristics as well as viable as record-label productions. The first essential analytical step is identifying those artistic characteristics present, not simply in concept albums, but in the broader scope of artistic musical productions. The three most prominent aspects in such an examination are technical virtuosity, cross-artistic collaboration, and thematic narrative. I aspire to use these perspectives not only to argue that concept albums constitute artistic creations, but that this elevation toward artistic character alters the way in which the listening public approaches both musicians and their craft. Kasner 4 Listeners view rock artists involved in this process not simply as entertainers but as both heroes and allies, while their conceptual works take on a new ability to act as vehicles of progressive social change. As is the case with most non-militaristic revolutions, the emergence of the concept album followed a Tocqueville description of social revolutions as slow transformations over the course of several generations (Boesche, 86). Early attempts at crafting cohesive artistic products focused less on stories than conveying general sentiments or moods. Some of the first incarnations included Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours and The Ventures’ Colorful Ventures, as albums linked not through any melodic or lyrical cohesion, but rather simply by presenting songs meant to centered around the topics of late-night isolation or the color wheel, respectively. However, this model was drastically altered when The Who, led by principal songwriter and guitarist Pete Townshend, crafted the first “thematically based album,” Tommy (Barnes, 3). The tale of the messianic blind, deaf, and dumb pinball wizard was an instant success on all fronts when released in early 1969, as critics lauded the album as “the most important milestone in [popular music] since Beatlemania,” while audiences helped the work fly to #2 on the UK Charts (Sanders, para. 1). What followed was a rather unique history, as the concept album as a medium produced a decade of great commercial success before suddenly disappearing into obscurity. Following Tommy’s release in 1969, bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and David Bowie all produced mainstream concept albums, and each experienced their own distinct type of success. Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon were commercial smash hits, the latter setting a record for longest time spent on the Billboard 200 Charts, while Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust shot the singer-songwriter to stardom on the back of his following tours and stage persona (Werde, 12). Kasner 5 But as quickly as the movement began, it seemed to come to a crashing halt in the early 1980’s with the advent of punk rock—a stripped down reaction to what was deemed the bloated excesses of the concept album movement. Modern music is left only with fleeting glances of the movement in albums that either retain the original conceptual form but sacrifice commercial success, like Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, or commercial extravaganzas that had very little unifying concept, typified by Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown (Jones, para. 3). Over the past decade, critics have turned their eyes toward the 1970’s and concept album movement, attempting to defend the merits and innovations that these works introduced to the public. In keeping with their contentions, it is not simply adequate to discuss what makes concept albums good music, but what makes music good art. Technical Virtuosity “There is no art without practice, and no practice without art.” – Protagoras No artist stumbles onto success out of sheer fortune and circumstance. The architect commits himself to years of studying of form and function, the painter to the creation of tones and perspective. The musician as artist is no different: music theory classes and instrumental exercises of arpeggios and scales are taught not to stifle creativity and conform composition but to provide artists the capacity to capture their visions. Dedication to practice and study usually acts as a barrier to entry: listeners are quick to label classical musicians “virtuosos” and “artists” because they are assumed to have participated in both “rigorous[ly] practice[ing]” and “absorbing a long...tradition” (Pareles, para. 4). This assumption, however, is not implicit in popular rock recordings: their deep entrenchment in the “anti-establishment” and counter-culture Kasner 6 of the 1950’s and 1960’s put rock musicians in the trenches more than practice rooms (Pekacz, 48). Yet the emerging concept albums of the 1970’s bear more in relation to classical virtuosity then their more immediate predecessors. These works possess a deliberate argument made through ethos and allusion to classical works that lends both the musicians a virtuostic authority and the albums a more ‘classical’ feel that we traditionally associate with ‘high art.’ In many circumstances, concept albums bind themselves to their classical and neo- classical predecessors quite explicitly. The influence of Stravinsky is central to Genesis’s extended piece “Supper’s Ready:” the “bassist and guitarist perform an extended instrumental ostinato...with displaced accents quite similar to [the] Rite of Spring,” while vocalist Peter Gabriel lends lyrics of apocalyptical visions (Keister, 442; Figure 1). The result, stresses Professor Jay Keister, is a musical product rendered artistic by borrowing “music of similar sophistication” (442). In fighting for their place as art, concept albums promote authenticity through association. Just as the traditionally artistic method of composition requires study of previous masterworks, so does a band like Genesis wish to include itself in that process. Certainly more common, however, and perhaps more promising as a basis

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