Why Write About Music (If We're Doomed to Fail)?

In which I write about the old 'dancing about architecture' chestnut. Kind of.

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about failure. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

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Recently, I’ve been writing about various types of failure embedded into the fabric of Portuguese fado songs. There’s the failure to say what fado is, as expressed in the song ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’: ‘all that I say, and all that I don’t know how to say’. There’s the failure to account for the genre’s origins in songs like ‘Fado Português’. And there’s the failure to escape one’s destiny, as hymned in uncountable fados (I used the example of ‘Fado de Cada Um’).

Here, I want to think about the failure to describe musical experience more broadly.

Most people who have spent a decent amount of time time reading texts on music are likely to have come across a well known simile presented as an aphorism: that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. They’re just as likely to have seen the line misattributed, representing a failure to identify the source of this pithy observation about failure.¹

Just to be clear, I’m on the side of those who respond by pointing out that dancing about architecture is a great idea, a noble pursuit, something to be praised rather than condemned or laughed at. Prior to this post, I don’t believe I’ve ever included the ‘dancing about architecture’ line in anything I’ve written about music, though I may have failed to remember.

I’m always grateful when a text I’m reading looks to be heading towards the ‘writing about music’ haha line, only to neatly sidestep it or show me that the writer was never going in that direction anyway. I had that pleasant experience recently when reading the start of Joe Boyd’s massive The Roots of Rhythm Remain. Boyd writes:

Writing this book has expanded my listening—and my record collection—beyond measure. I now hear habanera syncopation, pentatonic scales and notes between the notes everywhere. It may be rash to suggest that reading about music can be as enjoyable as listening to it, but my aspiration for this book is that it will open readers’ minds and ears, as mine have been, to a wider, richer musical world.

The benefits for the writer are clear. I imagine many of us who research and write about music have had similar moments of discovery while diving into our chosen topics. I’d hope that most of us have similar aspirations for our readers, too.

For many years I’ve written about music as an academic. In academic writing, it tends to be the case that you need to be accurate and that you should do what you can to avoid being misunderstood. That can be true of music journalism too, and fact checking is as vital there as in academia, though there is more licence in that field for grand claims, dramatic narratives and the raising up of certain artists, genres or works by the lowering of others, the kind of things that much academic writing hedges away from.

This is something I explored early in my academic career by comparing two texts about the early years of rock and roll. One was Nik Cohn’s 1969 book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning. Cohn makes no claim for accuracy, and is transparently honest about this in his preface to the 2004 edition:

My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever written a serious book on the subject, so I had no exemplars to inhibit me. Nor did I have any reference books or research to hand. I simply wrote off the top of my head, whatever and however the spirit moved me. Accuracy didn't seem of prime importance (and the book, as a result, is rife with factual errors). What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed. Those were the things I'd treasured in the rock I'd loved.

Writing in 2008, with Walter Benjamin among the many authors on my bookshelf, Cohn’s ‘flash’ reminded me of Benjamin's account of history as a ‘seiz[ing] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. The flash is the attempt to fix, the photographic snap, the moment where something freezes long enough for us to glimpse some kind of truth, the epiphany. Benjamin’s ‘moment of danger’, meanwhile, seemed to fit with Cohn’s subject matter, a reminder of the subversive potential of rock ’n’ roll.

For Cohn, the event of the pop revolution called for act rather than accuracy. As a contrast, I chose sociologist Richard Peterson’s article ‘Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music’, published in 1990. Peterson’s ‘production of culture’ perspective emphasises important factors leading to rock’s advent: law, technology, industry structures, organisational structures, occupational careers, markets. Although Peterson is keen not to lose the significance of Elvis and his contemporaries, he downplays biography to present his argument:

It is easy to characterise eras in terms of the leaders of the time. The ‘Napoleonic’ era is an obvious case in point. It is no less tempting to identify an aesthetic revolution with its most celebrated exponents—Vivaldi, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso. In this vein, it is possible to point to specific individuals like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis and say that rock emerged in the late 1950s because [...] they began their creative efforts at this specific moment. In bringing into question this ‘supply side’ explanation, I do not, for a moment, belittle their accomplishments. Rather, I suggest that in any era there is a much larger number of creative individuals than ever reach notoriety, and if some specific periods of time see the emergence of more notables, it is because these are times when the usual routinising inhibitions to innovation do not operate as systematically, allowing opportunities for innovators to emerge.

In Peterson's article we find the site of rock ’n’ roll’s event elaborated in all its detail but missing Cohn’s ‘pulse’ or ‘flash’: missing, in other words, the crucial magic of the event.

Back to my present reading. Joe Boyd makes it clear in the introduction to The Roots of Rhythm Remain that he is not writing as an academic. Yet, while there are a few errors and grand claims in the book, he has clearly done a lot of research. That reading and listening work, combined with his own experience in the music industry and a page-turning narrative style, make his book a brilliant addition to the canon of global music literature.

The kind of writing I do on Substack navigates its way between the Cohn and Peterson headlands. I’ve written before about what this space allows me that I couldn’t always find in the world of academic writing. I make grander claims these days than I used to, and I make connections that might stretch the credulity of a peer reviewer. I take more liberties and experiment with more styles of writing. And, while I still fact check nearly everything I write, that ‘nearly’ tells its own story of liberation.

As I also reflected in my November 2024 anniversary piece, I’ve been surprised what people have taken from some of the things I’ve written. Often it’s not the main things I was trying to convey. And, though I’ve always been a firm believer in the birth of the reader that comes with the death of the author, and feel that readers should be at liberty to take what they want or need from a text, I’ve still sometimes felt that I failed to communicate what it was I wanted to say.

I am not seeking advice here. There’s plenty of that out there in Substackland, plenty of people to tell me I should write shorter pieces, have a more consistent style, make it clear what ‘product’ or ‘service’ I’m ‘selling’, give readers what they want rather than following my tangential whims. They’re probably right, and that’s my failure, but that’s not what this is about.

No, I want to think about another kind of failure, the kind that gets me closer to the ‘dancing about architecture’ crowd. To pick up that fado line again, it’s about all that I say and all that I can’t say.

I can’t convey the feeling I have when, driving the A1 through Northumberland, the music playing in my car—Neil Young & Crazy Horse, ‘Over and Over’, from Way Down in the Rust Bucket—combines with a certain angle of sunlight and a certain bend in the road to make me feel both completely locked into that moment and unfettered, a speeding-through-place-bliss that gets entangled with a skein of memory, experience, imagination and awe, an awareness of individual elements—drums, bass, rhythm guitar, shrieking, buzzing lead guitar, solo and group vocals, repetition, repetition, repetition—meshing into an awareness of the whole, a driving-forward and pulling-back, the complexity of a single note held longer than I expect, of other notes crashing into each other in distortions and contortions that should blow the speakers but don’t, a feeling that sonic distraction should be driving me off the road or into the path of another vehicle but isn’t, that I feel a kind of control right now that has been missing from other parts of my life, another realisation that this is a momentary distraction, a desire for this distraction to keep coming over and over again.

I can’t convey the feeling I have when the same thing happens during ‘Mansion on the Hill’ later in my journey, when the conditions are different, when the light has changed, the rain has started, the road is a straight line heading to the horizon. I can’t convey what’s the same and what’s different when the same musicians are soundtracking my journey through Cornwall instead of Northumberland, why I’ll always associate the sight of a certain tree I pass near the Cornwall-Devon border with ‘Like a Hurricane’.

I can’t convey how I can listen to a song and experience an unthought known, an epiphany, a yup moment, how I can just grok what that song is telling me about my life, about someone else’s life, about the invisible threads connecting us, about other equally unseeable lines that divide me from others, that make me feel distinct, that make me feel that it is only there and then in that moment at that time with those sounds in that mood in that willingness in that openness with that receptivity to that prism of connections that only reveal themselves at that point, that I could possibly feel this way even though it’s happened over and over again.

I can’t convey how I’ve felt when some of my favourite singers have stepped onto a stage and started singing, how the frisson of the live performance has hit home, has made it feel so much more special than those thousands of special moments spent listening to recordings. I can convey how bored I’ve sometimes been at gigs, shifting from foot to foot and wondering when it will all be over, why I don’t just walk out. I can’t always convey why it was that I felt that way when so many others were clearly entranced.

I can’t convey all of this, so I do. Over and over again.

I’m playing fast and loose with a few things here, part of that getting-away-from-academic-clarity-while-still-expecting-everyone-to-get-exactly-what-I-was-thinking-when-writing scenario I sketched earlier. For starters, ‘writing about music’ can be so many things: music history (whether of the Cohn, Peterson or Boyd varieties), sociology, analysis of sounds (the part that is doubtless at the core of the ‘dancing about architecture’ critique, though I’d like to see a lot more of it), musical experience, and what seems to be most people’s favourite: emotional back story, whether of the artist or their audience.

Some of these types of writing about music are more difficult than others. In my opinion, writing about the experience of music at the more difficult end of the spectrum. One of my favourite books about music is called The Experience of Song. It was written by Mark Booth, published in the early 1980s, and has been out of print for some time. It’s well worth tracking down.

The experience of song: that is what I want to convey and what I always feel I fail at.

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Here’s where it gets a bit academic again. Or rather, where it gets to my defence of being academic about music occasionally. I was already engaged in writing this piece a week or two ago when, browsing through Substack Notes, I came across a thread about music writing on this platform. One contributor made a passing reference to Substackers over-intellectualising music. I don’t know if it was meant as a serious criticism or as a self-deprecating ‘I do this too’ jape. I just saw the same old thing I’ve noticed for years, an assumption that engaging the brain when it comes to pop writing is inherently suspect.

This got me thinking about the ‘architecture’ quip again. One way to interpret it is to say it’s about the failure that awaits in writing, that whatever one writes will not be able to capture sonic experience. Another way to read it is via the notion of failing a person, cause or thing: applying thoughtful reflection via writing is somehow failing music, being unfaithful to it. Wasn’t that Nik Cohn’s point about forsaking accuracy for the flash: that being true to the music he loved meant putting objective facts aside in favour of subjective ones?

In the 2008 essay in which I enrolled Cohn and Peterson to represent extremes of writing music history, I also enlisted philosophers Alain Badiou and Louis Althusser to discuss music, ideology and truth. I don't want to rewrite that essay here, but I do find myself thinking about Badiou and his theory of fidelity to the event.

An event comes along that changes things and creates subjects who show fidelity to that event. I decided to apply this idea to the emergence of rock n roll in the 1950s, using Cohn, Peterson, Elvis, John Trudell and a cast of many more thinkers and musicians. I did foolish things like try to explain Althusser's theory of interpellation by using Bruce Dickinson's engagement with arena audiences during Iron Maiden concerts. I contemplated the failure of interpellation via Spinal Tap's Cleveland gig. I used ageing denim-clad rockers as examples of Badiou’s fidelity to the event and explored ideologies of music through Dewey Finn's speech about 'The Man' in School of Rock.

I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

No, that’s only partly true. Perhaps I did used to wear the things I’d gleaned from fancy theory books like a shiny new suit, whereas now they’re more like an old worn shirt that I use for the odd decorating job. But there was always a playful mischief back in my old-early years. Invoking ‘Air Raid Siren’ Dickinson in the same sentence as Louis Althusser was as likely to piss the philosophers off as the poptimists and rock authenticists. There was something that felt quietly subversive about that.

The point I was trying to make back then, though, and which I’d bring to the classroom whenever my students would let me, was that I recognised what Althusser was saying because I had been a teenage Maiden fan. I made sense of pretty much every bit of high theory I encountered via popular music references, just as we all make sense of new experiences through prior experience. There was no way I was going to leave out references to my favourite musicians in whatever I was discussing, no matter how cerebral the subject matter, That has been my fidelity to the rock event,

Fidelity means showing up over and over again. It is not failing music to bring it into conversation with any other discussion, no matter how ‘intellectual’. If you live and breathe music, you live and breathe your intellectual encounters musically, or that is how it has always seemed to me. To do otherwise, for me, would be the real failure, a failure to connect the various aspects and experiences of my life. If you can't be true to yourself, what can you be true to?

The open secret of fado, of the blues, of other artforms saturated with complaint, fatalism and failure, is that the making of the art itself is getting over, making it through, persisting in the face of adversity.

I’ve written this piece with all of that in mind. I hope I’ve been able to make that clear. If I haven’t, I’ll just chalk it up as another failure, nothing too hard to handle.

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1. The maxim has its own Wikipedia page, which gets us a bit closer to the origin, but also leads to some frustrating dead ends. For example, Elvis Costello is cited as using the phrase in an interview in Musician magazine (no. 60, October 1983), but I can’t see it anywhere in the published interview. If any readers can point me to where Costello actually said this, I’d be grateful, even if it is the case that he was quoting someone else.