In Defence of the Moment

I've had a quote rolling around in my head lately. It's not something I find particularly offensive but I somehow feel the need to respond, in spite of the fact that the person who wrote the words has been dead for 25 years. In his essay, 'Let's Ban Applause', written in 1962, the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) wrote:

"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

This makes perfect sense when taken in the context of Gould's own life and work. Having played his last concert in 1964, he then restricted himself to recorded output (and later composing/conducting). He retired to the studio and the editing suite and left the applause to the Beatles.

So what about the rest of us? Specifically in this case, what about those of us who eke out our evenings writhing and sweating on some corner stage in a near-empty pub in Nowheretown or Nichtsdorf and yelling out our punk songs to anyone who will listen? I suppose I have an unfortunate tendency to be too uncritical of people I admire. But something jars with me on this one.

Firstly, to begin this debate, we need to argue that punk music can be categorised as art. This is not necessarily an easy task, or a very pleasant one. The whole point is that it isn't art. But, at the same time, it is. There's no getting away from that. Once you open up the gates of what constitutes art, of course, you can find yourself in the situation where even drunken football chants are accepted as some distant vocal cousin of free jazz. But any form of musical expression is art, a human creation designed to translate our experiences into content which will be presented to (and interpreted by) others.

Collins Dictionary doesn't help me much on this one. Under 'art', the four leading definitions are:

1. skill
2. human skill as opposed to nature
3.creative skill in painting, poetry, music etc.
4. any of the works produced thus

The word 'skill' is definitely an obstacle here. Joey Ramone could sing, in a sense, but he was no Maria Callas. Paul Simonon is a fine bass player until you compare him to Charles Mingus. But I think we've reached the point where both the Ramones and The Clash can be accepted by mainstream western culture as constituting the A-word. If all that this says is that our standards are dropping rapidly as we nosedive through the 21st century then, well, let's slip through the gates before they close again. But it does suggest that art is now a more inclusive term than Collins allows and, for want of anything better to do on this rain-swept Berlin night, I think we have just enough legitimacy to argue the matter out with the late Mr Gould.

So, Glenn. (I'm going to take the liberty of carrying this out on first-name terms). You talk about art having a definite purpose. Already, I suspect, we're on rough ground. The idea that art has a fixed role to play has been largely discredited by the tyrannies of the 20th century who deployed it almost solely to express and reinforce political world views, from phoney Nazi realism and equally phoney Socialist-Realism, right through to D-Ream cavorting onstage to "Things Can Only Get Better" in support of Tony Blair's New Labour in 1997. Art is basically stories, the communication of experiences or feelings, even if we use metaphors and images and abstract devices to open them up to varied interpretations and wider meaning.

Of course it could (and should) be pointed that individual stories do make us feel something and can be taken as smaller parts of some greater vision, your state of "wonder and serenity". However, if we take as an example the paintings of Edward Hopper, these are individual scenes, captured moments which are designed to express a greater truth, to make apparently mundane landscapes seem desolate and threatening, worrying or unsettling. The urban landscapes show us how detached and isolated we are. But they also belong to the moment. I'm not interested in the painting 'Nighthawks' because it forms a part of some larger body of work, or even because it makes me understand something of the nature of how lonely and impersonal life can be in a city. I am interested in it because I enjoy peering in the window at the four misfits in the bar, to wonder what they are talking about and to feel something of the melancholy of that precise moment. It's strangely romantic, and to wire this in to broader notions of a life's work loses what I think is soul of the picture. It has a spirit which comes from the spontaneous, natural feel of its composition and the four characters frozen forever behind the glass screen. Any functional purpose it has is, at best, a side-issue.

In one of the best-known works of English poetry, John Keats begins 'Ode to a Nightingale' with the lines:

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,"

He goes on, from the perspective of a man stood alone in a darkened forest listening to nightingale's song, to announce:

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;"

Our words and our deeds, however, are trodden down by these hungry generations of humans. We don't possess the immortality of birdsong, just a few scattered ideas which we try to record in any way possible before the next crop comes through. Like Hopper's painting, I think the poem's power lies in how well it evokes a particular scene and the melancholy of one particular lost night some 200 years ago. The broader, abstract point it makes about existence is only still with us because we, another hungry generation, can still relate to the mortal narrator.

Now to get to the fun part, Glenn. The "momentary ejection of adrenaline" which you ascribe to live performance and the desire for praise and applause. For those of us aforementioned thrill-seekers who find our fun in sweating on tiny stages, rolling around on pub carpets and singing songs about bridges or women or neither or both, this ejection of adrenaline is the whole point. The purpose, if you will. Does this de-legitimise the entire process? Are we cast down into the artless pit because these moments of possibly connecting through lyric or melody with two or three (at an optimistic count) kindred spirits are precisely that: moments?

Salvador Dali, writing to Federico Garcia Lorca to criticise his Gypsy Ballads, suggests that:

"(The minute hands of a watch) only begin to acquire real value when they stop pointing to the hour and, losing their circular rhythm and the function assigned to them arbitrarily by our intelligence... escape from the watch and become a new bodily joint."

That is to say, our minds assign each piece of art with an unnecessary 'purpose', without allowing them to stand and exist in and of themselves.

I suppose at this point I should admit to something: what our bands are doing all over the world can perhaps today, charitably, be called art. But it is also a kind of therapy. Yelling things over a knackered PA or cutting your knuckles over a fifth-hand Fender Squire is a means of channelling the aggression and frustration which human beings accumulate every day just by coming into contact with the world. But it is not entirely without direction. The songs may range between 20 seconds and 3 minutes in length, not so much ejections as ejaculations, indeed, pouring out unclean thoughts or stories set to a rhythm and a melody through which we hope to communicate that precise feeling to someone else. But even the most basic punk tune sets out to move a listener in a particular way, regardless of the lyric. (That, Glenn, is why I managed to spend all day today on my cleaning shift listening to incomprehensible Spanish bands without tiring of the experience). And like all other art, it's entirely open to interpretation. We as listeners don't necessarily need the lyrics to be able to form some kind of attachment to the music.

But what we are doing is certainly not a "gradual, lifelong construction" of anything, and even if it were I very much doubt that the end result would resemble wonder and serenity. Individual songs can form part of a broader whole, which is why we record albums and why we think carefully about the order and inclusion of tracks so that it forms a coherent catalogue of individual moments. And if a band or a musician stays around long enough to build up a significant back catalogue, what we usually end up seeing is a series of progressions, musically and lyrically, as the artist grows older and shifts focus at different stages in his or her life. Variations, I guess, to use your classical terminology.

Maybe, Glenn, this all says something too. It is possible for art to function as a mirror for the human condition by the steady, consistent weaving of a state of wonder and serenity. But for some of us, the wonder is in the moments, and the fleeting experiences which furnish our lives and which we express through these small ejections of adrenaline. When we turn the tape player off for the last time, what we leave is not some carefully constructed silk web of sound, but the dirty footprints of our passions and fears and loves and losses, borne out over the course of one life.

I know what you're going to say. You're going to point out that all this article consists of is a series of scattered quotations and lazy personal interpretations of great works, selected in a half-arsed and haphazard manner with the intention of disproving a theory articulated by one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. You'll tell me that I'm just bored, that it's raining too much tonight for me to take a walk beneath the tracks just so I can write another song about it. And you'll point out that these words belong solely to the moment, to 4.30 a.m. in the miserable early Friday Berlin half-light, that nobody else should read them, and that this is a million miles away from being art.

But maybe someone out there will acknowledge that momentary ejections of adrenaline can have a place in the world, and that it would be a mistake to write them off without understanding that the sum total of these brief songs can have some kind of anarchic, ill-plotted value which is different to but no less valid than your careful constructions.

And if they happen to sound good too, well, that's a fucking bonus.