4.21.2014

What I Learn From Playing Music, Especially Because I Suck



I've been playing guitar since I was 16 when I borrowed a friend's and taught myself the chords to CSNY's "Teach Your Children." Since then, my frequency of playing has fluctuated from not touching a guitar for years to playing every day for months.

In any case, I suck. Really. That's not humility or modesty. It's reality. I am a bad guitar player. I can play the chords; I can wail a blues solo for hours (much to the chagrin of those around me). But I just don't have musical sense. I can't tell if a note goes up or down. I'm not sure if that means I'm tone deaf but I do know I couldn’t carry a tune if my life depended on it. My rhythm is, uh, not terribly rhythmic. Or is it terribly rhythmic? Anyway, I have a poor sense of rhythm, to say the least. 

I pick up my guitar and I play the same damn lick or I strum some (in my mind) Neil Youngish or Pixie-ish surf chords. Usually after that, I don't know what to do. I don't know what the guitar wants from me. I can't hear it and it can't hear me. It's pretty much how I feel when I'm in Paris (which is not very often). I know enough to sound like a moron; I understand less; and once the conversation goes past the preliminary greetings and, perhaps, one carefully construed insight, I'm at a loss. I'm not even conversant in guitar.

But unlike French, I can't learn the language of guitar by playing more. The fact is I hit a wall and it becomes a strange, unwieldy thing in my hands rather than an instrument. Still, I find my reckoning with the guitar, with making music, a constant education  — and not just about the guitar.

There are times, usually when I'm feeling loose and good (ahem), that I begin writing these little ditties. I'll feel a certain inspiration and some lick comes out of me (writing that here, I am suddenly quite taken with this word, lick — a reaching taste, tongue taking in a moment of the world). But even in these inspired moments, I hit that same wall. I don't know what to do next.

But it's not because there's a lack of things to do. The canvas is not blank. It's chock full, filled to the brim. I could do this Steven Stills thing; that VU type thingy; move into that down strum, two string new wave kinda thingy; bang away either punky or Sabbathy. 

As Deleuze says in his great book on Francis Bacon, the artist doesn't come to a blank canvas. He comes to a canvas overflowing with the already done, with cliché. The artist's job is not to create something from nothing; it's to create something new from the old. It's to slice away, take away, tear away as much as it is to add.  

I see the sign on the music store wall in "Wayne's World": No Stairway to Heaven. Because picking up a guitar, our instinct — or my instinct, at least — is to become Jimmy Page, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Marr. It's to be the rock star, the punk rocker, the folk hero. It's to be someone else, to be what's already been — and to sound just like him or, you know, more soulful. This is one of the great lessons of playing an instrument, something you learn in your very fiber as you play: cliché looms, cliché abounds, waiting for us all at every turn. (Not that this is all bad. There is something beautiful, even educational, about feeling like Jimmy Page, if only for a fleeting moment.)

So I try to put aside all those pre-packaged licks, those readymade riffs. I take to the fret like a pioneer and begin plucking here, bending there, strumming odd chords. I shift rhythms, change strum patterns, alter volume and speed. I try to break the cliché (without becoming one — after all, breaking form takes many forms that, at this point, are all too tired).  

And where do I end up? In the chaos of noise. I keep noodling, changing, shifting, alternating until whatever coherence there was has long dissipated. This is what drives children and girlfriends away, and quickly. 

It's an incredible experience that puts me face to face with the cosmos. I'm reaching, licking, for sense, for song, and can't find it. It — that elusive musical sense, a song, a score, a piece of music — refuses to come into existence. It's not that I am trying to make form from the formless. It's that I'm trying to steer all these possibilities — these notes and riffs, these songs, these histories from Beethoven to Beck — into some kind of something that won't come. 

And just when I think I have something, just when I feel there might be a there there, I realize I'm playing "Sweet Jane" only syncopated. Damn. 

I can write an ok moment now and again. But I never know what to do with that moment, where to go next, what to do next. I see nothing and I see everything and it's all just a big old jumbled mess.  



And so I try simply to lay it down. To grab onto a riff and repeat it, over and over. I want that delirium of repetition. I want to slip inside the secret beat of life, the cosmic rhythm, and be carried along its currents, grooving for eternity. 

But I can't. I try to repeat the riff. I really do. I tell myself, Just play that same stupid thing over and over. I go two, four, seven measures. And then I come in early or late; I add a beat, an upstroke, an accidental flourish that doesn’t fit. I get flustered, confused. I have no idea where I am anymore. Am I behind? Ahead? I don't know. It's humiliating. 

So I try to take lead. Maybe if I sit on top of the groove, I can ride its wave, pushing and pulling with my mad minor blues scales. And for a moment there, I’m rocking! I’m at the very crest of cosmic becoming! I am the lizard king!  And just as soon as I find it, it’s gone. I flub a note, screw the rhythm, get smothered by the wave.  Once again, humiliation.

But trying to find it, to feel it, to ride it is an education. O, to find that groove of grooves, to slide on in, to be taken in by the pull of the universe itself! To ride that wave! If only I knew how to swim.

To play an instrument is to reckon the cosmos. As you try to make sense, to get in the groove, you come up against the terrible tyranny of cliché on one hand and the terrifying abyss of chaos on the other. It is a humbling education that places your entire body and mind — your very being — in the thick and thin of it.  

Of course, some people move well with music. My friend Eugene crafts crafty songs readily and has been doing so since he was five. No joke. He speaks music; he thinks in music. Me, I think in words. I can parry clichés or embrace them and feel comfortable. This is not to say that I write well; it's only to say that I'm comfortable in the medium, with its way of operating, its set of demands. I can split infinitives, shift voice, make references and feel just fine.

But with music? Oy vey. How do I make my way amidst that torrential team of possibility, that storm of what is, what has been, what can be — all those songs, notes, moods, progressions? Can I catch a groove, if only for a spell? Can I spin the world fantastic, even if only once? How? What do I do? How do I position myself? What is my posture to be?

Even Eugene, that musical whiz, must turn and face the frenzy. Such is the task of life. We live inundated with cliché while chaos looms, relentless and merciless. Such is our fate. This is what we do as we dress, talk, kiss, write. Playing music amplifies the challenge, bringing the lesson to the fore — all the more because I suck.  


A recent track from Eugene's band, Here Are the Facts You Requested. 
Their take on cliché is to incorporate it, play with it, dj it. 

8 comments:

dustygravel said...

Hay Coffeen, I'm curious if you've given it any thought, what's the difference between concepts and ideas in Deleuze's work? I suspect ideas have a Platonic like potentiality, only having a temporal life span instead of being eternal, a multiplicity of divergent actualizations instead of being perfect, and preceding from the earth instead of from heaven.

A Concept on the other hand,(as you pointed out on your podcast), is a problem solution unit which lays out a plain of immanence, or a relation of figures, which seems to me not entirely unlike a narrative.

Yeah, that sounds right. So, I guess I talked my self into those definitions... didn't take much, I just had it write it and now its what I think. But I want to stay open... Do you have any thoughts, objections, on the matter?



Daniel Coffeen said...

Ha! What's better than someone writing themselves into their own enlightenment?

Anyway, it seems like you and I are on the same page; this is exactly — well not exactly — as I'd describe the difference, too. I used to explain it to people like this: there's the idea of love which includes lots of different possible concepts and events. Romantic love, meanwhile, is not an idea but a concept.

This is not to say that concepts are a species of the genus, ideas — although that can be the case, depending on your idea, your concept, and your perspective.

I like your suggestion that a concept is akin to narrative. I like that a lot. In my mind, I see moving shapes, trajectories. Which is, of course, what narrative is.

dustygravel said...

Do you know of Henry Cow? Thought you might like it because you like Jethro Toll. Its not really to similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaBptCea3yA

zero reference said...

This was a fun read - thank you for taking time to lay out and communicate your thoughts on this. The universal-exploration element of playing an instrument I feel you on.

I'm not much of a composer but would add that in my limited experience, letting go of the urge to create something new and to be content being a craftsman following a blueprint already laid out is the key to making work -- something I am working on doing more.

dustygravel said...

I remember when I joined my first band. I was stoked, playing your guitar is an experience with endless possibility, but with a band, even a shity high school punk band is like nothing else. I remember telling my friend, "I'm in a band", and his response was, "you have an album? You play shows? It means nothing unless you actally play shows." His words stuck with me, giving me motivation to make it happen, but also shifting my focus, (the seed of ideology!) ever so slittly, from making something, to making something happen for me. I started to think of being a musition as something I had to do, which is so obvious, right. You are what you do other wise you could say your any thing you want and it be true, even if you only did it once in your enter life, even if you never really did it at all. But gragually I started to think of it differently. Reading phenomenology I started to questen the things I do on a deeper level. What is my being in the world? What are my becomings? What is the lasting affect of what I do? What sense do I make? And that's it! Lissening to your podcast I realized that being a musition isn't making a new sound and twisting you friends fuck'n arms off tell they get the tune right. It's the way you hear the world when you are trying to make something of it. It's not just making a guitar do what no one thought it could, it's feeling in your whole BWO! (Sound like profanity!) the strife of trying to make a guitar do what it can't do! It's the same with painting. Most paintings don't look like there subjects, the best are still paintings. Not painterly! That's like playing a smells like teen spirit like it's written in a guitar world magzine. Which brings me to the problem of the philosophical concept of a world, as presented by Heidegger as a referential totality, which sounds communal and wholistic. But when I read Badiou enlisting the art world as a revolutionary force of change it becomes very apparent to me that referential totality means, a closed system controlled by planers. The curator is king and the museum is her realm. The museum, as it turns out is a reductionists space where affect can be isolated from affect and utility can rain subprime over mood and spirit. The museum is an asylum of fetishes to powerful for the "material" world. So it is with the music store, if I could play stair way to heaven, again, what a ridiculous world that would be!! Instead we will talk about equipment. The thing is that music takes practice but how can you practice something like music! Thank you for the inspiration Daniel Coffeen.

Daniel Coffeen said...

@ Zero: Excellent, excellent point. Makes me realize I was too abbreviated and distracted writing this. Because, oh, man, I'd be so happy to be a craftsman in music. Your point is spot on. The problem is, and I think now I didn't make it clear: I'm a terrible musician. Music eludes me, even as I listen to it intently and play it often. It's actually easier for me to write a song than to play another's song — and I can't write a song, either. Which is why I ended up writing about composing rather than playing — when playing is my real challenge.

But I do think that were I to try an imitate someone else's playing, if I tried to be a craftsman, even in my inevitable failure I would learn a tremendous amount. I used to make my writing students imitate different writers — Allen Ginsberg, Nietzsche, Borges — as it forced them to do things with words they wouldn't normally do. But I never followed this lesson myself in music. Silly me.

Daniel Coffeen said...

@ Dusty: First off, I don't now Henry Cow but holy shit, that's some perfectly strange music. Thanks.

And, I have to say, this one phrase: "It's the way you hear the world when you are trying to make something of it. It's not just making a guitar do what no one thought it could, it's feeling in your whole BWO!" is so freakin' awesome. And, well, wise. When I'm feeling good and chill and relaxed, I can be that kind of musician; I can hear and enjoy and live through the smallest moments — no need to be fancy, to challenge cliche, to do anything at all buy enjoy those notes, those chords, I'm playing. To go with the music, as it were, rather than playing music. No instrument, no musician, just music.

So, alas, the thanks are mine for the inspiration!

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