Brat
I put gas in my car yesterday. A tin-can clip of a song from Charlie XCX’s Brat played on the small, advertising speakers (normally broadcasting commercials on a touch-screen) right next to the pump. I recognized the few seconds of the song. The pump clicked. Gas tank full. I put the pump back, twisted the gas cap on, and drove away.
Two Tuesdays ago, I played ambient music while working at church. The sanctuary filled with tone. I explained, while Ann walked in, that I was listening for the relationship (in a recording) between very acoustic instruments and an electronically-processed environment. How do they occupy the same space in a recording? I have a dobro, and wonder how it will play with synthesizers. And I put on examples, and Ann asked, “is this music?” and I said, “that’s a good question,” and Ann and Lynn (her husband) recommended (then later bought me a ticket for) a bluegrass concert, in the spirit of dobro.
When I heard the gas station clip of Brat, I heard, in spite of its garbled, tin-can noisiness, a song. A song labelled a song, then popularized, abstracted, commercialized, and placed on an advertisement screen. A song stripped of its qualities of glamour, surface, and the verneer of production that normally defines a “pop-art.” A song recogniziable, still, through its distortion, its sound-bite status (a song, which is a growing trend, as sound-bite, as fragment-of-song), assimilated into a gas-station experience. A song in five seconds on a gas station advertising screen, as a nod to the culture we belong to.
It is December 12th today, and I am thinking of New Years Resolutions. I completed 2 out of 9 last year, which is not very good (I bought a dobro; I am in the middle of planning an art exhibition, which are the two I completed). And one that I’ve discussed with friends is a commitment to long-form mediums. It’s more difficult to assimilate a 20 minute song from Longform Editions, for example, onto an advertising screen, than a song cut and produced in ways that allow it to be shared through a phone speaker on TikTok.
If I’m more and more convinced that art can be political (art can be public--art can mediate our common life, art can help situate us in the world), then, it’s silly to say this, but art (music, here) should help us pay attention. I read about Felix-Gonzales-Torrez, who, my professor described, engaged in identity politics without being didactic; how do we engage a “politic” without being literally confessional; how do we consider life when it is not so easily reduced to 5 second clips of something that has become ubiquitious? There’s no simple answer, except through a long process of attention.