If Susan Blackmore's
theory
of memes is correct, and I think it is, then songs are
actually using humans to write themselves. More specifically,
songs use humans as host organisms in order to spread their
memetic components, the way fig wasps use figs to spread their
genes. (Richard
Dawkins hipped me to this analogy.) Sometimes it's to
the host's selective advantage to be used in this way - see
Mick Jagger or Missy Elliott. Sometimes, though, memes reward
their human hosts with material hardship, social ostracism
and ill health - see the miserable life stories of Billie
Holiday, Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk.
My own experience of songwriting is that all of the effort
lies in being relaxed and in the moment, to be minimally distracted
so I can receive the memes continually bubbling up into my
consciousness. They come all the time, effortlessly, whenever
my brain isn't busy, as I suspect happens in the heads of
just about everyone. Most people just ignore these little
tunes as they come and go, or whistle them absently, or hum
them, or tap them out with their fingertips. To be a musician,
the challenge is to be in a place, physically and mentally,
where you can pay attention to your memes, and to memorize
or otherwise store them as they flicker in and out of your
awareness. Repeating the idea to yourself helps, since rehearsal
is the way that a short-term memory gets turned into a long-term
one. As the neurobiologists
like to say, neurons that fire together wire together.
It's possible for a sufficiently experienced musician to
compose a song entirely 'on paper' (which really means 'played
on the brain's internal hearing simulator with no outside
assistance'.) It's almost always better, though, to involve
the rest of your body in your compositions. It's an especially
good idea to start with the voice, or tapping your foot, or
putting your fingers down on an instrument, since the brain
does a lot of its thinking with the motor areas. Songwriting
by jamming, screwing around, tossing an idea around in a repetitive
way, alone or with some people you know well - these are all
highly effective strategies. You really want your prefrontal
cortex out of the way for this period, the loosening up, the
efflorescence. You'll bring your consciousness back later,
for the pruning - the editing, the rejection of possibilities
and alternatives. Songwriting by improvising into a tape recorder
or Pro Tools or whatever recording medium works great too,
because then you don't need to be concerned about documentation
or editing at all, you can devote your full attention to not
paying too much attention. This takes some practice, because
microphones unnerve everyone at first, but after you do it
enough times the recording tool becomes a friendly presence,
a sketchpad or polaroid camera of sound, and you can relax
into the desired egoless state.
So if it's not the musician's conscious mind, who's doing
the writing? First of all, I think it's important to clarify
how much musical composition is a form of collage. Every piece
of music you've ever heard shares the same basic set of melodic
and rhythmic motifs, scales, chord progressions and so on
with most of the other music of its time and place. Different
Mozart sonatas all operate within the narrow stylistic constraints
of Baroque-era Europe; different Wu-Tang Clan tracks all operate
within the narrow stylistic constraints of nineties East Coast
gangsta rap, etc. All musical memes are unique, like all humans
and marine snails are, but all pieces of music are narrow
variations on broadly similar themes, again like humans and
marine snails. The memes meet and recombine in human brains
like genes meet and recombine in the reproductive organs.
In recent years and in Western countries, we have this rule
that if you're the person who writes one of these things down
first and copyrights it, then you own it. The problem is that
what the composers are writing down is very likely to be an
amalgamation of whatever tunes they've been hearing a lot
lately. Jonathan
Lethem knows what I'm talking about!
Fair enough for pop musicians, people in the middle of the
road, people writing in genres, you might say, but what about
the real mavericks and weirdos? What about Charlie Parker,
Thelonious Monk, Bill Monroe, Igor Stravinsky, Sonic Youth,
Cecil Taylor, Björk? All of these musicians are floating
in a smaller and more personally-defined memepool than the
rest of us, but no one operates in isolation. Bird and Monk
had nearly all of their ideas in the context of a small set
of song forms borrowed from showtunes and pop. Bill Monroe
was effectively fusing two existing genres, appalachian and
blues, and all of his songs follow a narrow set of conventions,
specific and unusual though they may be. Stravinsky, Sonic
Youth, Cecil Taylor, Björk - all of them have their community
of inspirations and critics, even if it's a small circle.
Most of us find genuinely original music, based on
completely novel combinations of sounds, to be unlistenable.
Okay, fine, you say, everybody is plagiarizing from everybody,
but we can agree that Paul McCartney 'wrote' Yesterday, right?
Even if that just means it happened to coalesce in his head
first and not in someone else's? I would say, that's not what
we mean by 'writing' anymore. A more accurate word is 'transcribing',
and we don't think of court stenographers as 'writing' the
trial. I pick this particular song because Sir Paul claims
that Yesterday literally came to him in a dream - he woke
up, rolled over, grabbed his guitar and his notebook, and
out it came. I genuinely believe that people have all kinds
of great ideas in their sleep; what makes Sir Paul special
is that he keeps a guitar and a notebook next to his bed,
so he's able to get this kind of gift from the memes under
his fingers, rehearsed into long-term memory and written safely
in the notebook in the brief interval before it dissipates
irretrievably. How many people are that careful to keep records
of their thoughts? I'll bet if you know anyone who's that
attentive to themselves, they're probably really good at something.
Musicians are notorious drug abusers, and who could blame
them? There's a pervasive romantic myth that drugs subdue
the superego to unleash the roaring Byronic genius within.
The reality is a lot more complex. Most musicians I know use
drugs to disinhibit themselves, but it's a delicate balance.
I've never met a musician yet whose playing was actually improved
by being drunk or high or whatever. The buzz has to be perfectly
calibrated to subdue the ego without impairing attention or
fine motor skills too much, and that kind of precise titration
is difficult when you're doing it illicitly in the club's
bathroom between sets. People always come back at me with
the many famous junkies scattered through the sad history
of jazz and rock, but it seems to me that they sounded as
good as they did in spite of their habits, not because of
them. When Coltrane or Jerry Garcia were playing high, you
could tell, because they sounded uncharacteristically like
ass. The junkie myth is a tragic side effect of musicians'
longstanding recognition that new ideas are not to be found
in the conscious mind. I'm hoping that as we come to understand
the brain better, musicians will realize that heroin isn't
a good method for dissolving the self, that yoga and meditation
work a lot better and are a lot healthier besides.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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