Bosons and BRATs

Charli xcx’ BRAT is currently sitting at the top of the 2024 chart on Rate Your Music
 
What is the rubric for rating music?  Structure, tone, lyricism, innovation, pleasure...
 
I often think about the classic division between Beatles versus Rolling Stones fans.  The former is clearly more complex, inventive, technical and dynamic.  However, the latter possesses a sort of raw pathos.  It’s too reductive, but there is an element of intellect versus soul.  The Beatles created gorgeous aural worlds.  The Rolling Stones tapped into something deeper and darker in the soul.  Both of these bands came out of an explosion on popular music as a worldwide commercial phenomenon.  Both had access to amazing studio production, the former leaning into this much further, yet still relied on their own core band member's songwriting - what each brought to their instrument and how it folded into the others' sound.
 
Commercial music had already long-established songwriting factory production - Fordism in art.  Tin Pan Alley being maybe the most famous and successful since the late 19th century.  Songwriters would create and sell their product to artists to use.  Skilled session musicians were then hired to provide backgrounds.  This was the ultimate commodification of music, and many genres basically existed because of it.
 
"Indie" music of the day would have been early country, bluegrass, folk and blues.  This was an opposite set-up, with single musicians or small groups forming together to play everything from porch stoops to bars, to parties, to small and medium venues.  In its purest sense, it was the opposite of Tin Pan commodification.  This "roots" music allowed for the purest expression of what we might call the soul of an individual or local community and tradition; the “ars gratia artis” (famously printed beneath the Lion of the MGM logo) – “Art for art’s sake”.
 
This tension between commerce and soul has always been a tension in all art.  Literature, theater, film and music have all, to greater or lesser extent, had to deal with the realities of the economic and social structures of their day.  From the simple bar songs inscribed on stone tablets in ancient Greece, to the patronage systems of medieval Europe.
 
Does knowing the production-providence of a work factor in to its appreciation?  Can one not simply listen to a song and be swept away by it, no thought to who made it, where it came from, or how it was made? I’m reminded of the dilemma one faces when a beloved artist is discovered to be an awful person, having done awful things.  Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Louis C. K.  Can we listen to the music, laugh at the stand-up routine, or watch a film made by a rapist?  What if Hitler made slammin’ beats?
 
OK, let’s reel it back in a bit.  Corporate music isn’t raping anyone (mostly).  But what do we do when a track list flits from a group of unassuming musicians creating their own sound on a shoestring versus a mega-corporation selecting and creating every element of a piece of art based on maximum commercial viability.  The top of the billboard charts is consistently dominated by music that has been crafted by enormous teams of people, costing upwards of a million dollars for a hit track.  From A&R department sales presentations with PowerPoint charts, focus groups, bids on beat packages, vocal coaches, multiple producers, mixers, engineers, songwriters, session musicians, classically trained orchestration, famous guest artists, then a shiny, well-quaffed cover artist with stylists and personnel including managers, lawyers, road crew and tour bus drivers.
 
Charli xcx is clearly a product of the latter.  What do we make of this?  On a purely non-intellectual, almost acontextual level, BRAT is danceable, innovative, sprinkled with hooks, interesting chord structures and progressions, technically adept and dynamic instrumentation.  But can our rubric dismiss the context from which the music was created?
 
What is the purpose of a rubric?  What is the point of rating music?  There need not be any Platonic ideal here.  One might choose from among a vast array of artistic elements in their score.  One might weight elements differently.   One might leave out completely – if only out of human cognitive limitations – entire categories of appreciation.  The artistic canon is nothing if not a story of time, something that by definition cannot be scored until many years or even decades have passed.  “Cultural impact” is commonly only judged at a much later date – often after the original creator is long since buried in the ground.  And by its very nature, the trajectory of culture is almost impossible to predict.  Who could say what future listeners might find interesting in a work 100 years from now (assuming, that is, world wars won’t have burnt the physical record to a crisp).  The carved stone tablet of a simple Greek citizen’s bar song was created more than two thousand years ago. 
 
So, subjectivity established, this reviewer argues from a point of personal privilege, for a rubric that includes as much context as possible, with weights given according to that which objectively exists in the work, the work’s subjective expression in the listener, as well as what values ought to be venerated in its creation.  In one sense, to include artistic values in a rubric might seem superfluous, in that it feels removed from the actual experience of the work – the ineffable effect sound has on a human is something no one really understands.  Various animals have been studied and while some species seem to respond to certain elements – pitch, rhythm, etc. – none respond to as wide a variety of musical elements as humans. 
 
The brain is the most complex known object in the universe; the sheer number of interconnecting neurons responsible for these responses is only beginning to be understood.  Synesthetic waves wash over us as we process sound leaving speaker boxes, vibrating across gas molecules, striking the bones of our ears and disappearing into the ocean of our subconscious and conscious experience.  An article in 2012 describes the phenomena of a comatose patient literally being awakened by an Adele song.
After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn’t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila began singing along.
 
 
 
Then something remarkable happened: Charlotte smiled. Within two days, she could speak and get out of bed. Why does music seem to help "awaken" some people from their comas? (Meghan Holohan, NBC News, June 2012).
 
Is there room in our rubric for a song’s ability to wake someone from a coma?
 
The human brain (along with other complex species, to various degrees) contains structures both old and new, evolutionarily speaking.  Two systems – the limbic and the cortical – are responsible for very different processing tasks, yet are inseparable.  The limbic system is responsible for our basic drives – fear, joy, anger, sadness, while the cortical system makes sense of the world – forming the vast set of connections that give rise to memory, language and abstract thought.  But our advanced ideas about the world are bound to our basic drives.  Memories contain fear and joy.  Arriving at logical consistency often requires both the joy of the new and a transcendence of the fear of losing the old.  The faulty logic we see in social phenomenon such as conspiracism is as much driven by an aversion to scary realities as it is clumsy epistemological scaffolding.
 
Art lives within these spaces.  At one’s most depressed, lonely and hopeless moments, the experience of a song or a film can transport one to a completely different place with stimulated thoughts and feelings that can serve to pull us into new realities of conscious and unconscious experience.
 
This is almost religious.  Historically, religious practice commonly involves a transcendence of cognition and emotion, with the goal of finding one’s way closer to God.  From the whirling dervishes, to Pentecostal glossolalia, to Jewish shuckling.  Note that this practice almost always involves a physical action that seems to in a way distract the participant, allowing them to transcend the physical and reach a new level of experiential consciousness.  Other practices rely on different techniques, but the goal is largely the same.  Native American ingestion of peyote or entrance into sweat lodges alter the body’s chemistry or physiological response directly.  Buddhist meditation, with almost brute force, asks the participant to sit immobile and organize their thoughts in such a way that the cortical and the limbic systems might be stripped bare and reduced from conscious experience.  A Hollandaise of the mind.
 
What is the point of religion?  It seems almost fundamental to the human experience.  It seems to be there at our oldest record of human activity.  As such, its function is clearly an enormously powerful element of what we – the most sophisticated beings in the known universe – do with our lives.  As incredible as our bodies are, we can only have begun to respond to the universe. 
 
4.5 billion years ago, when molecules somehow began to link up in self-replicating packages, forming RNA, then ribosomes, then multicellular organization, then organs, and spreading out over the planet in great kingdoms, what we call “life” was essentially a form of reality peering back at itself.
 
The fundamental forces and laws of the universe, as far as we know present 13.7 billion years ago when everything seemingly popped into existence.  The Bosons of the Higgs field pulled together fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks, giving them mass as they exploded into the unfolding expansion of the universe.  Atoms formed into ever-heavier elements as black holes and galaxies collided and stars imploded under their own gravities, launching them ever further into clouds of gas and dust. Accretions formed new solar systems and planets.   We are the first assemblages that we know in which water, amino acids and other basic building blocks formed into life.
 
And so here we are, with our brains and our communities, our religion and our art, still folding into ever more complex creatures capable of peering out at the rest of the universe.  We want to know.  We want to feel.  (As a behaviorist, I might proffer that we feel we want).
 
This reviewer views religion as a social phenomenon, created as a function both of human desire and fear.  Life is beauty but life is suffering.  I also want to know why.  But while religious practice and belief may have its unique epistemological advantages, as a logical proposition it is tautological and ultimately limiting as an avenue towards greater knowledge.  On this front, it fails at its own proposition: knowing God, precisely because it’s reliance on God as a manifestation of ultimate understanding.  As cognitively limited as humans are, we can at least experience truths about the universe far more profound than those found in texts written by particular humans with an historically quite limited appreciation for the vast number of stimuli available to life forms such as ourselves.
 
But the one thing religion can do really well, is act as a cortical-limbic bridge.  Given that these two systems are literally the stuff of which our living experience is formed, the leveraging of their interconnectedness will always be required if we are to truly grasp the outer reaches of our understanding and interaction with reality.  For this reason, religion has always been at the for front of this avenue of human exploration.  But like every early probe into the unknown, such as fire, boats, microscopes, telescopes and satellites, their function is limited, and earlier versions are inevitably supplanted by new technologies.  As a social construct with the epistemological limitations mentioned previously, it has always been off limits to those who see these deficiencies and find themselves unable to overcome them. 
 
Fortunately, religion is not the only road to cortical-limbic navigation.  As a technology for human awareness, music can be as effective (if not more effective) in this role.  It is no wonder that music itself has usually been an integral part of religious practices designed to transport one into otherwhile inaccessible realms.  A sufficiently expansive rubric for music appreciation would require consideration of its ability to provide this human platform of exploration.  To the degree that cortical-limbic exploration is valued, as such it will be weighted in the rubric.
 
And so, criteria argued for, I return to Charli xcx’’s BRAT.  While aforementioned elements of the music can score highly on their own terms (it’s danceable, innovative, sprinkled with hooks, interesting chord structures and progressions, technically adept and dynamic instrumentation) to the extent that it is a creation of Fordist commodification across a wide array of corporate policy manifestations, a rubric that values expression as a route to further exploration of the cortical-limbic pathway  – what might be called “soul” – would score it quite low in this area.  The social structures, with all their power hierarchies and pressures, reach in to the work like vapid tentacles.  This can be seen throughout.  A better reviewer than I – and one more inspired to break down what is and is not reductive, contrived, affected or derived – would catalogue these elements of BRAT.  A better reviewer than I would offer them as an argument for the very score that I say ought be diminished here. 
 
Alas, I’m less interested in that.  In this review, I merely offer an examination of why one might come to similar conclusions about any mass-produced popular work of art the production of which relies so heavily on the social structures I have described, and thus its inherent  limitations as a truly great art form.

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