I’ve decided not to hate Jack Johnson anymore. Not because I’ve discovered some brilliant bongo work embedded in the background of “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing”, that perfect piece of elevator music that played in Kmarts and Dunkin’ Donuts across the nation last summer, and not because I think there’s a deeper, postpunk side to Johnson that the radio stations don’t want you to hear. Rather I’m sick of being the kind of person who cringes instinctively at proficient-if-formulaic songs on the radio but will sit attentively through a 90-minute symphony for triangle and kazoo for fear that I’m missing something. Plus, I’m interested in the humility of a musician who can, as Johnson has, undergo the ego-inflating unreality of hit singles, Grammy nominations and a movie soundtrack and continue to say that the stuff he makes is background music (even if it is). That’s a concession I can’t imagine the musicians I usually give the time of day to — the kind that insist, in broken whispers and screaming feedback, that you must change your life right now — ever making. Imagine, music that is not an announcement of the imagination or intensity or suffering or sexiness or whatever of the musician. There’s got to be something to that, on a human if not an aesthetic level.
So in light of my newfound toleration, I’d like to explain why I won’t make fun of you if you buy Matthew Barber’s recent CD, Sweet Nothings. Warner Music classifies album as alt pop, but I’m guessing we’re not supposed to put much stock in that “alt,” since Sweet Nothings, as Barber would probably be the first to acknowledge, is firmly and unapologetically ensconced in the context of mainstream music.
“I admit I use some clichés,” he says. “My music’s not for people who expect anything obscure or ironic.” He does try to soften the category a little by claiming to be part of a tradition of “singer-songwriters who rock” — citing Dylan, Petty, Springsteen and Costello as predecessors. And while it’s true that on some of the songs on Sweet Nothings (the rockers “Awful Dream” and “Make It Right”), Barber’s voice is awkwardly reminiscent of sometimes one, sometimes another of the above — the ballads, where he seems most in his element, owe more to contemporary R&B artists like Johnson than any of the classics. And like the top-40 whizzes (and unlike broodingly introspective singer-songwriters), Barber tends to downplay lyrical content, focusing on rhyme-and-rhythm-dominated confections (“free as a bee can be”; “you might be messin’ round with other girls / I love your tilt-a-whirls”) that can hardly be intended as objects of intense scrutiny.
In the process, Barber manages to flawlessly conceal the fact that he was, in his previous life, an intellectual of sorts, earning an M.A. in philosophy from McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, with a thesis on the Wittgenstein-McDowell model of therapeutic philosophy, which holds that the point of philosophy is to get you to stop thinking about the stupid intractable problems that no one ever solves. Sort of. Barber says doesn’t really see any link between his philosophical interests and his music. “I guess I spend a lot of time in my head,” he says. “That makes me suited to both music and philosophy. In terms of the process, they’re both very different.”
The one real concession that Sweet Nothings makes to any sort of introspection is the ballad “Easy to Fall”. The song addresses some pretty standard stuff about the pointlessness and repetitiveness of experience; an angst vaguely concentrated around a question asked in the opening verse, “How do you write a love song in 2003?” What’s interesting about “Easy to Fall” is not the question so much as the answer. That is, the fact that there really isn’t one, at least not in the lyrics — we get the familiar postmodern “it’s all been done, I don’t care”. But the real resolution is a simple, pretty hook that takes over close to the end, rocking the questions to sleep: “You make it easy to fall. You make it easy to fall.”
See, I have a theory about this whole philosopher-turned-pop-musician thing. Despite whatever Barber says about the lack of connection between his past and present lines of work, I suspect that Sweet Nothings is nothing less than the practical extension of his academic thesis. Sure, he could have written us yet another thoughtful, depressing album that would only serve to reiterate all the circular questions and ironies that get us all mired again in our lives, forcing repeated listenings that will never quite exhume the nugget of pure clarity and meaningfulness you can almost hear at its core. But who says that what really matters in life are the things that get stuck in your head?
The brilliant thing about Sweet Nothings is that you can listen to it once and, like only the most unannoyingly indistinctive members of its genre, like the perfect one-night stand, and like any question along the lines of “Is that pen on the desk?”– where the issue is not one of “is there really such thing as some material object roughly coextensive with my sense perception of this set of implements?” and where the words ‘pen’ and ‘desk’ do not imply an instantiation of some consistent form that subsists in all other instances of pen-ness and desk-ness — it will never bother you again. Really, I recommend this CD for anyone who’s sick of all this talk about meaning and would like to receive some post-philosophical question-lulling therapy from a thoughtful, humble musician who has looked over into the mire of thinking-about-stuff and opted for pop.
We can even extend the Barber-Wittgenstein school of pop beyond merely inoffensive, undistinguished sounds into regions of what a less enlightened listener might be inclined to call “bad music”. Here we are guided by a sort of by a sort of homeopathic intuition that when it comes to the stickier, more pervasive human emotions: “like cures like”. Just as the best way to cure sceptical worries is by incessant exposure to the most rigorously, sincerely pedantic of sceptics, so nothing quiets excess feeling quite like its loud, whole-hearted treatment at the hands of an 18-year-old millionaire.
I mean, who hasn’t been embarrassed out of a stupor of self-pity via a Counting Crows-style I-hate-myself-and-I-want-to-die blurt? Or felt the waning of pent-up sexual desire at an exhaustive description of the act by Boo-yaa-something-or-other. I’m not talking here about catharsis (that’s a separate argument I reserve for justifying my bad music, not yours) but about a saturation that encourages one to give up on certain ways of feeling that once seemed crucial, and which turn out to be selfish and silly, or at best just tired and useless.
Just as 20th century philosophy represented, for Wittgenstein, the refutation of what pure thought can accomplish independent of practical application, so a lot of the music on the pop charts works as a ‘critique of pure feeling’, a clear picture of what insular adolescent passions and certainties look like from the outside. Maybe that’s the real reason I avoid the radio — it’s just too unsettling to be reminded that I’m actually, one of these days, going to have to grow up. When Justin Timberlake sings, “Rock Your Body”, I find myself sympathizing with my mother’s counsel against kissing in public; when yet another emo-core kid whines “You don’t know how it feels” (and come to that, even when Tom Petty sings it), I’m embarrassed by my own latent assumption that my emotions are somehow different and special; and when Conor Oberst shrills “I give myself three days to feel better”, it occurs to me that I’d better reconcile myself to living in the world as it is for a while yet.