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Thursday, November 13, 2008
VOICES
Cheap Trick
Dream Police
Epic : 1979
[Buy It]
YOUR SWEET VOICE
Matthew Sweet
Girlfriend
Volcano : 1991
[Buy It]
I HEARD THE VOICE OF A PORKCHOP
Jim Jackson
1928
Available on: Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937
Old Hat : 2005
[Buy It]
Recently I've been doing interviews for my new book, which is a collection of short stories about letter-writing and correspondence, and the way that the recent and advancing technologies are harming, which is not to say destroying, the intimacy that comes from that kind of communication. That's the party line I've been spouting, and I believe it, largely. The interviews have themselves become players in the case I'm building against technology: some of them have been conducted on email, which is at least a little bit ironic. Others have been on the telephone, which is at most a little bit ironic.
The phone interviews have been conversations, of a sort, but they've been conversations with strangers. When I talk to friends these days, it's not always (or even often) on the telephone. I am not alone in this. The thing that we call the telephone is in fact a nodal point for several other kinds of communication that have little or nothing to do with telephony: text, IM, email. This evolution has had several major effects, but the main one is this: there are days when I talk to friends but I don't hear their voices. In a literary sense, this isn't quite true: I read things that they write, so I learn their voices, but the physical fact of their voices is less real than ever: air, cords, tongue. This week, I was speaking to a friend I haven't talked to in a long time; we reconnected on email. She was talking (writing) about someone's voice in her office, which struck me as strange. I could imagine that person's voice, since she was describing it, but I had no information about her voice. Had it changed over time? Was it roughened up by whiskey? Deepened by age? Stealthy? Persuasive? Careful? Candied? I didn't ask, because that would have been embarrassing, but I wondered, and wondered if anyone ever asks. What does your voice sound like? It's an intimate question, and intimacy means different things than it used to.
Though the world has fewer voices in it, it also has more voices in it, and pop music is one of the sites of that paradox. You can't listen to it for more than a minute or two without thinking about voices: why this one is better than that one, why that one is more affecting than the other one, why a certain technical ability fails to convey a certain kind of honesty. Magazines are constantly running features about the best voices in the history of the genre. Is Dylan better than Sam Cooke? Is Christina Aguilera better than Grace Slick? Is Ian Hunter better than Malkmus? Is Bobbie Gentry better than Beyonce? Every answer to these questions is right, and every answer is wrong, but the questions themselves are the point: it is voices that are being considered. The fact that you could go on forever -- or, more to the point, that I could -- is one of the central aspects of the entire art form. And yet, even within a genre universally defined by voices, though, there are only a few songs that are specifically about voices. Cheap Trick's "Voices" is one, and one of the best, because the melody is sweet without being saccharine, and because Robin Zander has a better voice than most singers. It's not about a conversation, but about the memory of a conversation, and about how memory can polish a lover's voice:I remember every word you said
I remember voices in my head This song reveals one of the secret truths about voices, which is that they are mostly for other people. Singers probably know this instinctively, but it's nice when they write songs that sharpen and drive home the point. When other people give you their voice, even a few moments of it, you can use it to build upon: you can yoke it to emotions, retreat inside of it, feather your nest. This idea is handled even more explicitly, and even more self-referentially, in Matthew Sweet's "Your Sweet Voice": Speak to me with your sweet voice
And take me through another night
Speak to me with your sweet voice
And I will surely be alright Try to read this with the pun stripped away. Or rather, try to hear it with the pun silenced. I can't. It sounds like he's at once pleading with a woman and marketing his own work. I once spent the night with a woman whose voice I really liked. I like the voices of everyone I've ever been involved with (how can you not? it would be intolerable) but this one woman had a tremendous voice. I told her so, that night, all the time, until I realized that when I was telling her things, she wasn't talking.
Since I started writing this piece, my phone has buzzed twice. That's two more voice mails I'll be listening to, two more voices which will, as a result of technology, leave me slightly cold.
My younger son is four. He's just recently started reading, which means he's just recently started to learn the process by which language becomes immortal (or is it tragically attenuated?) in the printed word. Up until now, as a pre-literate but already verbal child, he has had only one option for expressing himself, talking, which he did (and does) constantly. He talks and talks, and if using your voice is a form of generosity, he is the most charitable being I know.
Sometimes, when words fill up his head, he offloads them, and pretends that inanimate things are speaking to him: fire hydrants, cars, stuffed animals. The other night, he was supposed to read my wife a book after she read him a book, but instead he picked up a stuffed dog and let it do the reading for him. The dog read well. It was funny, because he made no real attempt to differentiate the dog's voice from his own, and it was also something other than funny, because it illustrated how firmly he's located inside a world of voices. That will change, and that change will be welcome in some small ways, because it will diminish his unrelenting chatter, and it will be sad in broader ways. You can make the argument that one of the dividing lines between childhood and adulthood is the moment when we stop pretending that inanimate things are talking to us, but then you'd have to contend with the counterargument, brilliantly expressed in Jim Jackson's "I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop," from 1928:I heard the voice of a porkchop say, "Come unto me and rest"
Well you talk about your stewing meats: I ain't know what the best
You talk about your chicken, ham, and eggs and turkey stuffed in dress
But I heard the voice of a pork chop say, "Come unto me and rest" Here, the porkchop is talking in the voice of the Savior. Jackson is lampooning Matthew 11:28 (no relation to Matthew Sweet) and the popular hymn based on it, but he's transplanting the divine comfort to something much more earthy. Puzzle out the song on your own time, slowly, and give me a call when it's unpuzzled. I'll pick up. I have one friend who gets annoyed when I don't answer my phone, and instead of leaving straightforward messages, she does funny voices. Her British accent is terrible, but don't tell her. Her sassy Puerto Rican accent is excellent, and you can tell her I said so. Those messages are more like songs, because they're resigned to be one-way communications, and because they're performances. Sometimes she'll pretend to be her own secretary, telling me to call her back.
The other day, my younger son called me at the office. As he goes from pre-literate to literate, he's also going from pre-numerate to numerate, and one of his favorite things to do is to pick up the house phone and dial my wife's or my cell phone number, which he's memorized. Some days, he'll call me four or five times. I am assuming this phase will pass. The other day, he called twice. I picked up both times. The first time, he said "hi," and then I said "hi," and he said "hi" again. The second time, he told me that he was wearing a Superman sweater that had been mine when I was four. That part I understood. Then there was a garbled monologue about pants and fish and, I think, a firefighter who was wearing a hat but wasn't really standing on the side of the road so much as climbing a pole but then his shoes were not rubber but they were black rubber. I may have gotten the details wrong, but it doesn't really matter. It was nice to hear his voice.Labels: ben, blues, pop
posted by Ben
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