Repetition and Difference: the Groove, the Song, the Body Susan Fast
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Repetition and Difference: The Groove, the Song, the Body Susan Fast Years ago John Blacking wrote that music begins with a Astirring of the body;@1 and Jacques Attali made the bold assertion that music Ais rooted in a comprehensive conception of knowledge about the body.@2 When I hear music or when I have performed it, I move out of what Victor Turner calls indicative or everyday time into the subjunctive, that is, not only into a new ordering of time, but into a world of possibility, a fictional world of, as Turner describes it “as if.”3 When I watch musicians performing, I learn what they think the music means, or what it does, by observing their bodies move. Blacking speaks about the experience of music in similar terms and suggests that coming out of everyday time and into musical time may bring us back to our bodies in a significant way, making us once again conscious of them, reconnecting us with somatic experience. The consequences of this for Blacking are profound: A[music] can make people more aware of feelings they have experienced, or partly experienced, and so restore the conditions of fellow-feeling, a body awareness, educability and plasticity that are basic to the survival of the species."4 Charles Keil takes up similar issues in another way, insisting that “the power of music lies in its participatory discrepencies,” by which he means the particular ways in which musicians’ bodies interact, engaging listeners and suggesting ways in which their bodies might become part of the process.5 While it is particular combinations of timbres, rhythms, grooves, melody, etc. that accomplish our kinetic responses to music, it is probably the regulation, or the creation of time in music that allows us to experience our bodies outside of the everyday. And while all music is kinetic, in groove-oriented music the kinetic qualities are almost always foregrounded. David Lidov theorizes that the more foregrounded the rate of pulse, the more overtly somatic the music. Subordinated rates of pulse, conversely, suggest a Acontained or introverted factor of the somatic state.@6 Even though Lidov theorizes out of his knowledge of classical music, I think his ideas are useful in thinking about groove-oriented popular musics.7 What I particularly like about Lidov’s ideas is that he is willing to take interpretive leaps, which many musicologists and music theorists are reluctant to do. He suggests that8 the variables of pulse are speed and intensity. Speed is exciting. Intensity is involving. The values of simple pulse are fairly obvious: strong foregrounded pulse as in folk dances and marches controls movement directly. The values of compound pulse are less obvious. Compound pulse integrates two or more sets of values according to the relative intensity of the levels of beat within the same flow. So, for example, “subordinated rapid beating within a predominant slow pulse indexes an inner, contained excitement. Subordinated slower beats, hypermetrical accents over predominant fast measures, index a relatively calmer framework in which the faster action is perceived.”9 Thus, what Lidov call compound pulse, works on multiple levels of physicality, an idea that I think is particularly important in thinking about groove and the body. Still, it would be difficult to argue that the examples Lidov give work the same way in every piece of music, or, indeed that they work in the way he suggests throughout a single piece of music. Grooves, while repeated gestures, are understood within the context of a song’s unfolding, experienced in and through time; their significance, their meanings, what they do, how they act on the body, change over the course of a song. This is a dynamic process. By this, I don’t mean to suggest a teleology—we don’t necessarily experience a groove as “progressing,” especially in funk, as Anne Danielsen has so convincingly demonstrated in her work on that genre. But we do experience “difference” as grooves are repeated throughout a song, even as we experience difference in the repetitions of everyday life, as Deleuze and Lefebvre have argued.10 Sometimes this difference is experienced because quantitative changes are made in the repetition, such as new instruments or new gestures being added, and sometimes because qualitative changes are made, such as the relationship to an “event” that takes places within the song (Lefebvre argues that “Sooner or later [repetition] encounters the event that arrives or rather arises in relation to the sequence or series produced repetitatively. In other words: difference.”11) I think that this difference can best be understood in terms of how grooves act on the body, and this is my particular interest in the study of groove. But before going any further with this, I want to ask the question “what body?” What socially situated body? Are there ways to talk about grooves in detail—these essentially “abstract” musical patterns—while still keeping subjectivity in the picture, and, importantly, without essentializing the social body? How do we talk about race or gender and groove in non- essentialist ways? Does a focus on groove tend to privilege certain social bodies and exclude others? I think here in particular of how often in popular music women are singers and not instrumentalists—is there a way to draw these women into a discussion of groove? Do we understand groove as being created through instruments, primarily through a rhythm section in popular music, or through a rhythm section plus horns? Do we think of what the singer does—I mean singers other than James Brown—or the soloist, as occurring separately, “above” the groove, or as an intricate part of it? Or are there universals in our physical comprehension of some aspects of grooves, which might render socially-situated discussions moot? In my work on Led Zeppelin, I began to explore these issues and here I want to recount some of the work that appears in my book on that group, and then try to push the ideas about grooves, songs, and social bodies a bit further with respect to other popular music.12 I’ll center this discussion around one particular Led Zeppelin song, “The Wanton Song” from the album Physical Graffitti. The riff in this song can be thought of in three different ways: 1) a repeated pattern that is one measure long 2) the three-fold repetition of the pattern followed by a cadence (4 measures) or 3) the eight measure pattern that includes 2 cadences, one at the end of each four measure unit. Within the space of 16 measures (the time it takes to repeat the longest cycle once) we already have three different ways of understanding repetition in this song. The basic one measure pattern is immediately understood in three different ways: as a meaningful repeated gesture in and of itself, as a gesture that makes up two different larger units, and in that capacity, as a gesture that leads to two different cadential patterns (i.e. as a gesture that leads to something), and, once Robert Plant begins to sing, as a gesture that defines and regulates the singer’s stanza (in the case of this song, I would argue that the relation of Plant’s vocal to the groove is to pull in an opposite direction from it: his singing is sustained against the rapid fire instrumental, creating some stasis over the quick motion of the instrumental—how might we think of this in terms of the body?). Once we hear the “B” section of the song (there is no “chorus”), we also hear the pattern in relationship to this event, as an absence (that is, we understand that the main groove doesn’t occur throughout the entire song), and, for me, at least, as bound up with desire and longing, since I think the riff based sections of the song are most physically powerful and I impatiently await their return. It is the one-measure pattern, understood in the context of its repetition, that would probably be considered the riff proper for many people. It consists of guitar and bass doubling a melodic and rhythmic pattern that contains three especially note-worthy features: 1) a flurry of activity at the front end of the measure, followed by near silence (leaving aside the vocal for now, if possible), 2) near melodic stasis during this rhythmic activity, with the exception of the octave leap, which occurs on the last sixteenth of beat two—an incredibly weak part of the beat, the octave leap accenting it and then leaving us in silence 3) the overall low pitch and initial orientation to the downbeat, both of which I think are key factors in making the gesture feel “grounded” and powerful. Since my initial work on this song, I’ve thought further about this idea, and have come to the conclusion, for now, that riffs such as this one that are situated at a low pitch (and there are many Zeppelin riffs like that), as well as being beat oriented, might physically ground us because we feel them related to the lower parts of our body, our core, that keeps us balanced and stable. The Indian concept of the chakras is based on this notion: the first, or root chakra is located at the lower center of the body, at the perineum, and is linked to among other things, our ability to be grounded and present in the here and now. On the bass and snare drums, John Bonham articulates the riff in a slightly different way, keeping the sixteenth-note feel by swinging the eighth-notes, and mirroring the octave jump in his articulation of the back beat on the snare (this is probably not a conscious mirroring, since playing the back beat on the snare is very common in rock drumming, but it works in a particularly synchronistic way with the rest of the riff in this case).