It has been a long time since I have written here. For those
who know me personally the reasons are no doubt obvious—hundreds of pages of
dissertation (only some of which actually made it into the final draft) needed
to come first. But I want to keep writing, to keep practicing my writing, and
to practice keeping on writing, so this is an outlet I would do well to take
advantage of to keep up that practice up when other avenues are not so
fruitful.
While I have a line-up of topics I had already begun writing
about before my long hiatus, I think a return to this forum needs something
new—something that inspired me a great deal while I was absent from this space.
That something is the band The Mountain Goats, who I will write at least a
little about here and probably a great deal more in the time to come (if it
comes).
But before that, another (long) preliminary: I should like
to talk a little about why I think and write about music in such a long,
drawn-out, and overly intellectual way. I’m not sure when it began, but for as
long as I can remember I have always cared about musical lyrics and the
meanings of songs. I listen to a song well enough that I try to interpret it
like a poem—to be able to say what it is about, but also to be able to comment
on what it is about is all about. Thinking about how The Posies’ “Please Return
It” is about the inevitable vulnerability that goes along with all human
relations, is to also think about the extent to which that is true, to gauge
the accuracy and scope of that idea as it occurs in the song and in life, and
to try to understand what particular spin and particular pathos the song brings
to these recognitions. I enjoy exploring this side of music—indeed, to me this
kind of understanding is entirely bound up with my enjoyment of not just music
but virtually all art.
I guess this makes me an inveterate intellectualizer, but
the thing about art is that when it is successful it goes beyond mere intellectualization,
that’s the point of making a work of art rather than an essay or treatise. And
I don’t really mean to disparage intellectualization, as I don’t think there’s
anything wrong with it as such (and tend to engage in it myself), it’s just
that it can be in danger of becoming abstract or arid without something to
liven it up. This kind of position is also part of what makes me an inveterate
Hegelian and makes this a blog about the speculative content of music, because
it is, I think, reaching after a form of reason that is a more thoroughly holistic form
of thought which is the hallmark of the “speculative” for Hegel.
