fuckYEAH.minor.works

RATATAT

Okay, so I’m not really this music writer or anything but with the release of Ratatat’s genuinely superb LP4 and Brian Howe’s perversely obtuse review of same which appeared on Pitchfork I felt compelled to compose an apologia for these pioneers of the musical minor.  Lucky for me, my good friend Brandon is both an especially adept music critic AND a fellow contrarian in his assessment of the New York duo’s oeuvre and thus it must be said that much of what I’ll write here was developed via a running text-message conversation we’ve had over the last couple of days.

The first thing that nearly everyone gets wrong about Ratatat, including Howe, is the significance of their first, eponymous LP.  To be sure, Ratatat is a significant recording and the sheer power and rocky-rolly-electroey awesomeness of its blistering first track, “Seventeen Years,” is undeniable.  But Ratatat is ultimately an apprentice work, functioning more as a harbinger of the considerable talent of these young musicians and the new musical ground that they were just beginning to discover.  Everything that is great about this early release hovers right at the surface, ready to be mooned over at the first listen.  It’s sorta the musical equivalent of a boy who has just discovered masturbation; for him, sex = orgasm and Ratatat opens coming all over the place. 

That first encounter with the climactic is certainly exciting, but the real joys come with a bit more mastery of craft and fortunately it didn’t take long for Ratatat to figure this out.  With their second LP, Classics, the band made the first of what Brandon described as a series subtle reinventions that have come with each of their releases, not excepting their collections of rap remixes.  This aspect of the band’s progression is one of the more infuriating of Howe’s misreading (mishearing?) of Ratatat’s output:  “[Ratatat’s] sound— slick electro-pop infused with hip-hop— emerged fully formed on their 2004 self-titled debut, quickly making them a highly recognizable brand, and six years on, it retains the vitality that made it click in the first place.”  Never mind the fact that Ratatat is anything but fully-formed, this suggests that Stroud and Mast simply developed a formula and have stuck with it unswervingly through each release.  This is so demonstrably false to anyone who has given any of their three post-Ratatat albums a more than cursory listen that it is almost laughable.

Even more puzzling is the fact that the last suggestion, that Ratatat has retained the “vitality that made it click in the first place,” is completely belied by Howe’s generally disparaging comments on each of the band’s latter three major releases.  As Howe frames it, Classics is just a “fiercer” version of Ratatat (I guess he’s talking about the panther sample?), LP3 is more of the same and LP4 is described in terms of barrel-scraping.  That last is a pointed allusion to the fact that LP4 is composed largely of material recorded during the same session in which the tracks of LP3 were laid down.  But seriously, so the fuck what?  There is certainly a similar feel to the two recordings—as there is amongst all of the band’s work—but this is more attributable to a sorta auteurish identifiability to the band’s sound than any sort of compositional laziness.

Indeed, LP4 strikes the attentive listener as a fully-realized and elegantly constructed whole, with its own musical/emotional profile that is distinct even from the admittedly related LP3.  In fact, the heavily emotional tone of the album is more reminiscent of Classics than it is to LP3’s more theoretical bent.  Interestingly, one of the things Howe complains about is the oddball exotic instrumentation of many of the tracks.  Again, this is one of the things that lends a cohesiveness to LP4, which Howe seems to have missed.  Even more significant, to my ears, is the sense that I got that perhaps some of these more unusual choices may have been in part inspired by Wes Anderson’s score to Darjeeling Limited.  In both cases the listener comes away with a sense of a sort of counter-imperialistic, pop-appropriation of some musical other.  Mentioning this to Brandon, he pointed out the bittersweetness that permeates much of the album (and it needn’t be mentioned, any Anderson movie).  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the DEVASTATING (again, this is Brandon’s word and it is PERFECT) strings that come in after the long, intense buildup of the album’s superb intro.  And this emotional devastation pops up again and again throughout the album (in tracks like “Drugs” and “Sunblocks”) and it is unquestionably one of its great strengths. 

Curiously, in an otherwise second-rate review of Classics that also appeared on Pitchfork, Sam Ubl suggests that the album sounds as though its trying to be a soundtrack to a Wes Anderson movie.  As Ubl frames it, this is somehow akin to the band desperately trying to reach above its station.  This reactionary bizarreness aside, it is useful to consider how Ratatat and Wes Anderson are in certain ways doing a similar thing within their respective mediums.  On the MySpace page of the cross-coastal rap mashup 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers (comprised of Philly rapper Zilla Rocca and Yakima, WA producer Blurry Drones), the duo explains its genesis as being made possible by the successful integration of rap and rock/pop musical elements, which, in turn, were made possible by the rise of the internet and the sorta encyclopedic knowledge of music styles that it afforded.  In a lot of ways, there is a similar thing going on with both Anderson and Ratatat.  In both cases you’ve got artists who are demonstrably in love with their chosen mediums and who have amassed a mind-boggling frame of reference in their respective histories.  Combine this preternatural literacy with a penchant for disrespecting boundaries and you’ve a sense of what makes these dudes tick and why their shit is pretty fucking awesome.

FUCK YEAH RODERICK HUDSON!

okay, so i recognize that a discussion of Henry James—unarguably the greatest american novelist, EVER—in a forum devoted to minor works might seem inapposite at best, but a big part of what makes henry james as fucking awesome as he is is the surfeit of minor works littered about his career.  a useful point of reference is another one of my very very favorite artists in the history of everything:  Gustave Flaubert. 

the similarities between these two men are legion:  they were both independently wealthy and thus did not have to rely on their writing—or anything else, for that matter—in order to feed themselves; they both saw themselves as Capital-A ARTISTS in the most rarefied sense of the word; each writer in his own way redefined the heights that could be achieved by the novel, and this is in the 19th century, when the novel was THE dominant literary form (and in which it arguably reached its apex as a form).  but what is more instructive are the differences, and in this instance there is one big one:  Henry James wrote an enormous body of work consisting of over 20 novels, more than 100 stories and novellas, major studies of American and european literature, travel writing, and of course the legendary prefaces to the New York Edition of his works in which he left posterity an unprecedented view of the process of a master at work.  Flaubert, on the other hand, has left us five novels—one of which was left incomplete at his death, another is more of a bizarre drama than a novel, per se—two novellas that would be classified as juvenilia, and a collection of three tales.  this paltry output of course reflects Flaubert’s legendary devotion to style, finding and using only the perfect word—le mot juste—every time.  thus it took him YEARS to finish each of his novels.  he famously read over 200 volumes in the process of researching his historical novel Salammbo. 

essentially, Flaubert was not willing to create a piece of literature that he didn’t think was perfect and of course we should all be grateful for that on the strength of Sentimental Education alone.  James, on the other hand, was always trying new shit and some of it turned out awful.  infamously, in the middle of his career, he decided to give up novel writing for a career as a dramatist.  the problem was he was a TERRIBLE DRAMATIST.  the point of this, though, was that James, in his way, like Flaubert, in his own way, realized that he was given two very great gifts:  the talent for creating literature and the means to devote his life to doing it.

everybody knows (if only by reputation) James’s famously complex and subtle late novels, like The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassador, but before he got to the mature phase of his career he wrote a great many phenomenal books that nobody’s ever heard of.

Roderick Hudson was the first work by Henry James I ever read, and though I have to recognize Portrait of a Lady as a finer work, the former novel is still my very favorite.  even at this early stage of his career, James was hitting all the important thematic issues of his later work:  Americans in Europe, the idle rich, the artist and creativity …  though the work doesn’t have quite the narrative complexity of his later work, it moves with a briskness and energy that is more or less absent from those more famous novels, and you still get such lovely sentences as:  “Cecilia met him in the early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination of horticultural odors.”

what more could you want?

nyrb

with every intention of devoting to this project all due seriousness, i began rereading one of my favorite little novels, Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude (more on Hamilton and this book in a later post).  it occurred to me that this book and several others that i consider appropriate for discussion in a forum devoted to all things minor were all published—usually, though not always, as reissues—by NYRB, the publishing venture of the New York Review of Books.

anyone who pays any attention to publishing of the more literary sort will be familiar with the attractive, colorful, uniformly-sized little paperbacks put out by this increasingly vital house.  i remember a conversation i had with a friend with whom i worked at a bookstore at the time in which he remarked that NYRB is sorta the book publishing equivalent of the Criterion Collection.  of course he was right in the sense that both entities look for important, if sometimes overlooked works from around the world and then issue them in attractively designed packaging, usually bundled with illuminating additional content, and that each undoubtedly endues the works it issues with an imprimatur of respectability.

but there is an important difference, i think, in the sense that for better or worse, the Criterion Collection has become the de facto arbiter of canonicity for motion pictures in this country, whereas with NYRB, one gets the sense that they are out there quite specifically to bring non-canonical literature to the world.  of course there are exceptions:  Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is certainly canonical (if very little read), as is Dante’s Inferno; but aside from these relative aberrations, the editors of the Review seem to go out of their way to find literary gems that have somehow managed to remain safely under the radar.  this becomes nowhere more evident than in their habit of finding forgotten bits of brilliant errata from otherwise highly exposed writers:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s influential translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Henry James’s The Other House are just a few that come to mind.

in a way, i am writing this post almost as a sort of pre-emptive justification for what will likely be several dozen books published by NYRB that will find their way into this forum.  at first the thought made me uncomfortable, like, if a book is published by a house of this caliber, can it really be considered minor?  the answer should be obvious, though, and of course NYRB is just one of any number of mostly less famous small publishers engaged in the same mostly thankless work.

thanks

defining our terms

when i first derived the idea of internetting about such things, i asked around my literate friends whether any was aware of a term that encompasses works by non-obvious or unheralded writers/artists, or non-obvious or unheralded works by obvious, heralded writers/artists and the best anyone could come up with—indeed all anyone could come up with—was the sufficient, yet ultimately problematic minor works.  the upshot of the term is that it is culturally present; people generally have a sense of what you mean when you say “minor works.”  but as our little tryst with eliot shows us, the terms comes with its own clunky set of baggage.

let me be clear:  sometimes a movie or a novel is justifiably unknown.  taking a cue from my abortive first attempt at this thing, there is a reason why you aren’t likely to see a copy of Watch and Ward—Henry James’s creaky first novel—on the shelf of your local barnes & noble.  simply put, it is an apprentice work that is of merely academic interest.  but the chances are also pretty good that you’ve never heard of his second novel—Roderick Hudson—either, despite the fact that it is an artfully executed and supremely entertaining book.  the reasons for this are complex, but can be distilled into the general observation that the book has very little of the quantum subtlety of the master’s later, more famous novels.

i’m digressing a bit here, but i think it’s important to establish what i am about here in the beginning.  this is as much about the Roderick Hudsons and the Cymbelines and the Disturbing the Peaces of the world as it is about the Stunt Mans and the They Will Have Bloods.  literary/artistic/cinematic fashion is as fickle and impermanent as fashion fashion, yet somehow there are things that are great that never stop being great despite the fact that nobody talks about them.  so yeah, let’s talk about them.

the minor

In “What is Minor Poetry?,” T. S. Eliot laboriously considers the ostensible schism between poets that must be considered great, or “MAJOR,” and those relegated to small, or “MINOR” status.  like much of Eliot’s prose, it is decidedly too long, a little bit constipated, but otherwise worth reading for the eventual flashes of insight that develop.  Eliot’s purpose is only cursorily related to my own here, because he seems intractably wed to the notion that a poet is EITHER major or minor, though within those distinctions there are the subdivisions of those works which must be read and those which can be scanned in anthologies or skipped altogether.  curiously for someone so well read, Eliot seems to conclude that one must read EVERYTHING by Shakespeare and Milton, but that even amongst the very greatest of the other major poets, there are works which one can justifiably overlook (late Wordsworth/early Shelley). 

so, here is i inaugurating something new.  the germ of this little project was my reading of Shakespeare’s pre-Winter’s Tale romance Cymbeline in a class I took last semester.  it was one of only two plays we read all semester that i had not read before—the other being Henry VIII.  Cymbeline is a play with an almost hopelessly convoluted plot that was nevertheless one of the great epiphanies of my semester.  the play was included in the first folio and almost immediately forgotten, that is until the Romantics (re)discovered it and its delightful heroine Imogen.  Hazlitt and Coleridge adored her and passed on their fervor to Tennyson and Swinburne, the latter of whom nearly tripped over himself in hopeless idealization of her perfection.  Perfect Imogen is not, but the play is all the better for it.  Close reading reveals a sneaking and borderline malignant humanity to her that complements her flawed husband Posthumus.

i had the happy fortune to have read Freud’s “Family Romances” in the context of a reading of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe for another class at about the same time as I read Cymbeline.  Freud’s musings on the fantasies that we have of being secret spawn of royalty—or at least provincial gentry—helped me to derive a conception of Cymbeline as a sort of pattern of family romances writ large, culminating in the ultimate family romance of them all:  Jesus as son of the god of the Hebrews (Cymbeline was king of the Britons at the time of Jesus’ birth).

in any event, I may go on more about Cymbeline at another time, but what matters here is that so-called minor works are often very major indeed and their significance is only highlighted by the fact that NOBODY GIVES A SHIT.  thus i dedicate this space to consider/theorize/celebrate overlooked, underappreciated books, movies, poems, plays, comics, or other cultural effluvia.