Man, I feel like....

While escaping the Arctic night air of the Oakland Coliseum in the faux-est of Irish pubs within the ballpark's bowels, Jim from Berkeley asked me curiously, "Is there any genre of music you're not interested in? And are you keeping tabs on all of them just to keep up?"

It's a very good question. I suppose there are some extreme fringe genres that never appealed to me -- grindcore, for example. I never embraced the world of metal, apart from, say, Zep and Sabbath (and it'd be a stretch to say I ever embraced Sabbath!), but I can't say I really have a proper boundary there. I've shopped from nearly every bin in the record store, save for the "black metal" section at Amoeba, if that's the question.

What Jim was really asking me, or at least what I wish he were asking me, is: Are there good ideas to be found in every idiom? And my answer is, most probably yes. Obviously I'm knee-deep in rock'n'roll, jazz, folksong, CBGB (the acronym) and, increasingly, classical music. My gut tells me that the great innovators in modern music are the ones who embrace technology, and that most music cognoscenti (me as well) give criminally short shrift to electronic composition. Yet I admit I have a hard time being truly touched by purely machine-made sound, and will quickly grow bored if I can't hear someone's hands and/or windpipe at work. Sue me.

I will always embrace some cultures more than others in this world, and we can debate all day long whether some are right and some are wrong (or "more right" and "more wrong"). But I do believe that they can all contribute something of value, in the end: an academic idea, an artistic notion, a form of tonality, an instrument. I don't exalt the oud for its otherness, but I'll bet there's an oud player who can show me something. I'm not one to take sides: "World music is for hippies," etc. The Clash didn't say that, and neither did Ellington.

Greil Marcus once wrote of Sleater-Kinney that he liked them because they knew things he didn't know. This person wishes new indie-rock bands would sing in French, lest he "have to listen to someone 20 years younger than me try to tell me something I don't already know about the human condition." Can an artist in an easily-reviled genre such as Contemporary Hit Nashville Country tell me something I don't already know? Of course she can, and I'm simply not willing to wave my hand and write it all off due to antiseptic production, retro-awful synth sounds, slickness or whatever, without admitting that it's possible that they can tell me something new.

To wit: Listen to the "killer chorus" of this song. Do your best to ignore the screwed-up Tron video (sorry, conflated with one of her others), and check out the timing of the words and the oh-ohs. Is it as original, as strange, as something off of the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, universally lauded as a major influence on modern rock song structure? I could make a very good case that it is. We applaud Spoon for doing the same thing, and in fact we applaud them for making such weirdness a little more palatable -- for their specific choices in being derivative!

But (and I can't believe I'm going to write this) Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" does not signify as influential music for early adopters who pride themselves on being ahead of the curve (or, for that matter, college kids who think violent head-splat fantasies are hilarious). Rather, "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" signifies as fun radio fare for Women Who Want To Have It All. How does it signify this? By not using appropriately vintage guitar equipment, by deploying synths reminiscent of the bold, primary-and-pastel-colored 1980s, by the silly video that remakes another silly video that's all about the costumes, by the snare drum that's loud and obvious and simple enough that even the line-dancers can find it after a few Bud Lights, and by (as Anthony notes in the comments section of another post below) the haircuts of the people involved. And although the Twain record seems to come from a different world, it's not like Mutt Lange's never heard of the Pixies.

All right, then: No, "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" doesn't really speak to me. (I'm not a Woman Who Wants To Have It All.) I'm just trying to say (back to my original point) that there are good and bad ideas everywhere, regardless of idiom. In a way it's amazing that Mutt and Shania made such a weird little bit of music acceptable to an audience of 40 million people. I could have rejected it out of hand, because of where it came from and what, at first blush, it seems to stand for. But it's really not a bad little musical idea, see? Or, at least, it's one comparable to things people trip over themselves to applaud (see hilarious love shown in Pixies 'Gouge' documentary). It's very easy to fall into the trap of accepting lesser ideas because they seem like familiar good ones. (Don't get me started on cumulative advantage; that's for another day.)

At any rate, there you have it: my rationale for how it came to pass that I can find myself spinning an Oliver Nelson record one minute and a Hüsker Dü speedfest the next, via Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman." In fact, I'm willing to wonder aloud whether the flat-out dismissal of a whole genre - say, reggae -- is really all that different from saying that there aren't any good ideas coming out of Jamaica, period. How, exactly, are those two ideas different? There's intense reggae, languid reggae, violent reggae, peaceful reggae. The easiest way for us to dismiss reggae, though, is to associate it with a particular kind of listener and suggest that we don't like that kind of person, which is the ultimate disservice to a work of art. And that last idea is one for which I have little patience.