YouTube Musicology (new)
Street smarts, not book smarts
NOTE: I screwed up the settings on the previous version of this post, here’s the exact same one, but better.
I read a lot of academic musicology because it’s my thing as a musician and a critic. Musicology is the study of music in both technical (how it works) and historical (how it came to be and what that means) contexts, and that’s of interest to anyone with more than a consumerist interest in music of any kind. It’s also practiced by anyone seriously studying composition, theory, any instrument, or music history, amateur or professional. So the separate academic discipline of musicology is something always teetering on the verge or redundancy and decadence, and a few decades of increasingly shitty, hermetic, and onanistic musicology has brought me to the conclusion that music is far, far too important and just plain beautiful to be afflicted by the practice’s current state.
Musicology, and new music composed by people from places like Yale, Princeton, etc., are my exposure to academia, so I don’t know what happens inside the walls, just what comes out. Most of that has so little to do with the world and history, and music itself, that it’s been increasingly infuriating. Some musicological books I’ve read work so hard to cite and refer to previous musicological work that they have nothing valuable to say. It’s often so anodyne, obvious, derivative, and covers topics that have been done before, better, and in greater depth, that it feels like the idea of the PhD has become nothing but a credential to enter a decadent guild system. A lot of the music has the same quality, it shows the composer has researched what has come before and can refer to it in their music, and that they have no connection to the world around. All this stuff is polished like a Brancusi and empty inside, jejune. I’m convinced that the foundation of the greatness or Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, et al is that they were working and living in the real world, they had to make music that mattered to them because they had no other choice. They were in public.
Musicology in Public
Musicology can be public too, and it should be. An example of its value is the program notes that Michael Steinberg used to write for the San Francisco Symphony, which were the best I’ve ever read and a model of their kind—every time I dip into the notes at Carnegie Hall or for the New York Philharmonic, I always think, “Is that all there is?” Steinberg gave the reader historical circumstances and context, technical details for those who understood them, and suggested key things to listen for, think about, and even possible meanings. Brother, that’s how you do it.
People are still doing this kind of musicology, mostly for popular music (an area the academics have been cringe-tingly, to use their favorite verb, “problematizing”) and the place to find that is YouTube, in the genre of the “reaction videos.” If you’ve never seen one, a reaction video is where you watch someone’s reaction to something, the camera/image focussed on the person(s) doing the reacting, usually with a picture-within-picture box so you can follow along with what they’re responding to. If that strikes you as dumb and boring, you’re not wrong, most of them are! But there’s also a handful of people who are doing actual, insightful musicology through these videos.
I first discovered these during the pandemic. I can’t remember what, if anything, I might have been looking for, but I found the page for Jamel_AKA_Jamal. He does a lot more pop culture gossipy commenting now, but he started by posting music reaction videos. What drew me in beyond just his great personality was that he was doing something interesting as a Black listener exploring the canonic catalogue of more generally white popular music, like Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Dire Straits, ‘60s rock classics, etc. This is how he rolls:
There’s a lot of people who do exactly this, just telling you how they feel about the music, and they really depend on personality. Most are just boring, if not with some clear sociopathy of wanting to be the center of attention. The ones that I enjoy, like Jamel, remind me of earlier times in my life, when I’d sit around with some friends, just listening to records. That’s a pleasure that gets harder to experience as life goes on through the structures of the day and time, and one that I wonder might not really exist anymore for people in their teens through mid-twenties, so few of whom have anything like a music collection where they can rifle through and pull something out, put it on, pass it around. The personal practice of headphone listening is socially isolating, you can’t pass around a stream.
The Stank Face
Success breeds imitation, and you can easily find a dozen or more videos for individual songs like “Sultans of Swing,” “Sledgehammer,” “Kashmir,” and others. Aggregate all these and you can pick out distinctive subgenres not just because of the music but the consistent reaction to a first listen. There’s this thing that Yes’ “Close to the Edge” does to people, often ending with the declaration that it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever heard—this young guy crosses himself and is absolutely speechless after the track ends:
And there is the hearing/seeing-Stevie-Ray-Vaughn-for-the-first-time, which breaks apart brains and produces the condition known as “stank face,” and believe me when I say that stank face is the greatest compliment music can get:
Nothing like seeing one of the greatest guitar performances of all time!
One Step Beyond
Detailed, descriptive, meaningful musicology comes via a related subcategory of people with classical training and/or professional musicians, often teachers, listening to pop music and exploring the structure, form, and technique, and also expressing their tastes about it. The specific classical people include Doug Helvering, Virgin Rock, and The Charismatic Voice. I’ve listed then in descending order of favorites; Helvering listens with minimal interruptions and picks out harmony and form as things go along, the other two have a kind of classical musician’s naïveté about pop music and bring out fascinating points but also can comment too often, almost lecturing, and The Charismatic Voice can be irritatingly performative.
My own favorites are two guitarists who are working, non-classical musicians, for whom musicology is part of their basic toolkit: Michael Palmisano and Pat Finnerty. Palmisano is a musician and guitar teacher. The videos he does come out of that focus and the common practice for how working musicians learn styles and specific songs by listening and playing the stuff back. Like improvisation, this is one of the most widely practiced means of making music around the globe, but seems of little interest to musicology probably because it comes from the bottom up, human source of music, rather than the academic top-down hierarchy of citations —> documents —> recordings. That means musicology is missing out on bands, and how they work. That is a fuck-ton of music being ignored.
Bands, and how they work, are what I love Palmisano. He loves bands and the subtle and important details inside them. He knows how music is made and appreciates the heights of the craft, and since he’s a teacher he’s a learner. It’s fascinating to watch him get what Radiohead is doing, break down “How Soon is Now,” appreciate the talent of a former student and show the sophistication of his playing.
You can watch his videos and see how he breaks down rock and blues harmony, how to use that with guitar technique in improvising. But I’m going to show you one where he’s showing you what a great, great band does that an ordinary band doesn’t, things that a musician can see and hear from the inside, even as he points out that he practices very different genres:
Finnerty has a series called “What Makes This Song Stink,” and it is real, insightful, and deep musicology. What makes a song stink for him is not just how it works but the musical and social context around it, how it’s made and why it was made. The title probably tells you that he has a sense of humor, which he does, but it doesn’t prepare you for how carefully and brilliantly made these videos are. They are great examples of what visual podcasts can do, as long as you have the 8-12 months it seems to take for him to make them. That’s not a labor of love, but a labor of passion.
Finnerty cherishes what he calls “the fucking songs.” As he says, “have you ever been to a wedding? Have you ever been to a bar? You ever been anywhere … have you ever seen a chicken quesadilla and heard live music at the same time? Then you know the fucking songs,” like “Piano Man,” “Wonderwall,” “Country Roads,” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” It’s funny because it’s true, they are songs that are part of the audio and social fabric of contemporary life. Even just identifying them and pointing out what they are is more valuable musicology than most of what comes out of the academies these days. How valuable? I recommend you watch this entire musical, social, and political takedown of the reeking mediocrity known as Jason Aldean:
“I mean, this is what Don Henley would sound like if he took less chances.” Give this man a fucking PhD and a tenured position at Princeton already come the fuck on.
Good listening to all.