SALIENT MINERALS

A couple of years ago, I was asked to contribute to a critical suite on Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence." I was supposed to write about the "aesthetic sphere," so I got the idea of tackling it in terms of my recent thoughts about pop song "hooks"—or more specifically, what the smallest, dumbest thing is that can still be considered a hook. I ended up not talking about Kierkegaard at all, and the whole thing turned into a mess. The mag has since folded, so I'm reprinting the piece here. Like I said, it's kind of all over the map, but I think there are some interesting moments.

The Tonic for a Weary Soul: The Aesthetic Sphere of the Hook
[from Matte no. 3, Fall/Winter 2002]

Dr. Seth L. Sanders, acoustic phallologist, posed an interesting question recently during one of his supercharged motivational seminars. The seminar was held on the face of a sheer rock precipice in South Dakota. We were all dangling from nylon cables and I fumbled my poor notebook and it tumbled down into the abyss. It was too windy to smoke. But I distinctly remember what was written on the dry-erase board (also swinging from rappelling rope). I can see Dr. Sanders’s exquisite copperplate on my mental screen as I type this.

We were talking about the One-Note Hook. A thin mountain wind was whipping through Dr. Sanders’s toga as he mused about the function of repetition in rock music. I remember thinking, “This is a stroll in the agora,” as my ivy wreath came loose. The Hook is a term that is as ill-defined in music as Intelligence is to cognitive science or as Truth is to philosophy. All we can do is point to good examples and make sure to capitalize the word itself in print. When most folks talk about hooks, they’re usually thinking about something like the carillon guitar intro to “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. A quintessential pop hook. The slightly more deconstructed take would be to posit the drum intro to “Be My Baby” as a Hook: Hal Blaine’s eternal “Boom; boom-boom: Slap!” Both figures have an elusive grammar; they seem to be simultaneously talking, singing, and gesturing, like shills in an Arabian market.

But even less articulate (or musical) sounds are also clearly Hooks, like the synthesized dowel-rod-strikes-PVC-pipe sound in Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” Can you imagine the song without it? Could that discrete little pulse have been the first thing you ended up humming later, after the very first time you heard it on the radio back in 1982? Or the salient mineral that jogged your memory the next time you heard it, and caused you to recognize it as familiar? Probably yes, on both counts. But that electronic clank-sound is also the least likely thing you would have chosen to pantomime if you wanted to jog someone else’s memory of the tune. Kurious. So musical Hooks are neither aesthetic nor mnemonic, but some kind of complex synthesis of both.

If a Hook can be as arbitrary as a momentary fart from a twenty-year-old, off-the-shelf keyboard, then a Hook can probably be comprised of just about anything else in the material universe. Which leads us back to the One-Note Hook Dr. Sanders was expounding on (he insists on being addressed as Dr. Sanders, by the way, which no one else seems to have a problem with).

The marrow-freezing harmony in “September Gurls” by Big Star is as aesthetically beautiful as a Hook can get, and as elegantly mnemonic. Even people who can’t sing for dollars or donuts will give it a shot when this song comes on a jukebox in some humid hapless bar. But you could make the argument that the atavistic Hook in “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath, a plodding guitar-vocal unison, is at least as palpable a Hook as “September Gurls.” This would be a stillborn argument: Black Sabbath elicits teary sing-alongs for a population that vastly outnumbers the razorcut Big Star fans of the world.

The thing is, “Iron Man” isn’t trying to be beautiful; it’s barely trying to do anything. In terms of the nuts-and-bolts of it, it’s a riff that isn’t so much a riff as it is power-chord ornamentation around a single tone, the tonic note. Even Beavis and Butthead can feel it.

“Ornamentation” is just one of the many jaundiced musical terms that describe the same basic condition: the obligation to play more than one note, but the desire and necessity to play only one. “Pivot tone” and “trill” are a couple others. The One-Note Hook wasn’t invented by Suicide or Stereolab, it’s been around since Josquin, covertly tiptoeing through time and culture like a meme in a bandit mask. In fact, Baroque was originally a pejorative term (like Impressionist), poking fun at composers who sought to polish a preclassical turd to a blinding luster.

Inclusive of the excesses of baroque music, resolution to the tonic is the basic act that knits together all harmonic drama in Western music. Random example: the tidy restatement of the major tonic that coalesces at the end of every Vivaldi stanza. So keeping in mind this basic fact, maybe the threat of leaving the tonic chord at all is what makes heavy metal “powerful.” Metal is an idiom characterized by a steadfast staking-out of the One-Note Hook. (By heavy metal, I’m referring to the Urinals as well as “Ultimate Beats ‘n’ Breaks” DJ records).

It isn’t always lunkheaded, either. The One-Note Hook can be taken to transcendent aesthetic heights: compare to Bailter Space’s “X,” in which the chord progression finds its drama by forging successively “out” noise-clouds that still contain the same sitar-like tonic drone. This drone makes its presence known in the first pathogenic moments of the Marshall stack intro, and then tension is mediated for the next four minutes by how much of the drone is revealed and unleashed, along the moving-sidewalk crush of slamming rhythmic abandon. That boiling drone is a latent wish; the wish is deferred, then manifested, then camouflaged. Our desire to hear it again is the drama of the Hook.

Our drama. The drone, be it rhythmic or melodic, is a wild cognitive parlor trick. It links James Brown with Zeni Geva with Philip Glass. The trick is that the riff remains the same, forcing you to watch how you progress throughout the course of the song. That’s a heavy cosmology: Listen to your own chord changes, schmuck. Or maybe the world is a chord change, and you’re the drone note. But you have a nice beat and you can dance to yourself.

Aesthetics is often confused with Romanticism. More often than not (and certainly in rock or metal), it’s anything but escapist. In the One-Note Hook, aesthetics and mnemonics are negated, and the listener him or herself becomes the dependent variable. Inarticulate lyrics pose a Zen koan that is beside the point, like all rock lyrics, and all Zen koans. Memory is nothing, and the jukebox becomes the least aesthetic object in the galactic tavern. We nod our heads to the windmill chord of the spheres, and wonder what we might be rocking about.

posted at 2:02 PM