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.

I've come to realize that one way of dealing with the serendipity of Juju is to have a long term art project that allows for the juju spectrum to unfold and sequence itself into key elements of the design process.

To illustrate, on a recent art project I followed the basic timeline:

1. idea arose, started as narrative prose.
2. went over and edited.
3. thought about layout - roughly 30 drawings with narrative - and began breaking pages out of the text.
4. Made 30 panels - sketched out each
5. Began work on final panel - first pencil, then ink
6. scanned to computer
7. cleaned up each scan
8. Formatted to narrative pages
9. submitted to online publisher and ordered proof
10. reviewed proof, adjusted and submitted final project.

** I've highlight text according to relative wave frequencies on the EM spectrum, with Red being deepest Juju and Violet being weakest.

Depending on the level of art required at each level, Juju can be stored/spent accordingly.  Of course, it doesn't always work out so neatly.  But with overlapping tasks, juju can be pushed or pulled with greater flexibility.  For instance, measuring panels or cleaning up scans require minimal Juju, while writing narrative prose or sketching out each panel required very high levels.  These elements of the project thus circle one's juju as if in orbit.


***I came across notion of Juju as artistic energy from Kevin O'dell who tragically died of a stroke in 2022, leaving behind Sarah, the mother of his child.  Their term originally refers to the Western African spiritual traditions. But I'm not clear on exactly they were used. (I got sidetracked perusing Wikipedia as I came across highly biased and outdated sourcing.  One reference was from 1898 and used racist language "Uncivilized".)  However, I believe Kevin, Asian American and worked in environmental social justice, would have been aware of his own appropriation of the term.  When I met him he lived in a grand house with many roommates (one of them iirc was the son of Peter from Peter, Paul and Mary) and it was the kind of place you could just show up and hang out.  The living room was messy with paint supplies and Kevin would often show up to work (we were care providers at a clinic for the Traumatically Brain Injured), his shirt covered in paint.  He was a big man, dressed in boots and sometimes almost militarily baggy clothing hanging about him.  He was deeply spiritual, in the sense that he seemed always to be peering behind the veil.  He had a wicked sense of humor combined with compassion and enthusiasm.  He liked to make big meals in which he spoke of learning recipe's from his Korean mother.  His father was white and met her during the war.  He grew up on military bases and moved to Portland after graduating from Chapel Hill.

Kevin referred to his artistic ambitions as juju.  It meant the powerful force that comes into you and makes you want to create transcendent things.  I'm not sure I felt like he ever applied himself enough to make anything that interesting.  But he did often speak of the juju as fleeting force in his life.

I've come to use the term as I like the mystical/spiritual associations that give some sort of verbal language to the experience of making transcendent art.

IN the Beatles documentary, Get Back, Paul is asked how song writing is going.  The context is John and Yoko's relationship's effect on the band.

He describes a lull, owing to them not all living together,  He says when they were in the same house they were always around and the writing would just happen.

I've been going through old voice memos.  My process, ever since I picked up the banjo in SF at 18, has been to make music that sounded good.

It was 1994, and I had been living in Santa Cruz, only maybe $5 to my name, along with whatever food stamps I had.  I was living on a couch with my older brother in a house occupied by UCSC students, across the street from the Santa Cruz High pool.  We were out one evening and popped into a music shop.  I picked up an old banjo from a bargain bin.  The clerk asked me if I was interested in it.  I told him I didn't have much money.  The tag on it aid $250.  He smiled and told me he'd sell it to me for $10.  I thought he was joking.  But he wasn't.  I borrowed cash from my brother and that was that.

I moved in with my girlfriend in San Francisco a week later.  She had been a friend of one of the UCSC students and had also been staying in the house over the summer before moving into a flat in the city to attend SFSU.  I would hitchhike up Highway 1 to visit whenever I could.  Once, the car that picked me up broke down around Half Moon Bay and had to hitch again the rest of the way.  But it was usually pretty easy to get up there.  Getting back was always more difficult - getting out of the city via 19th until it really turned into the 1 again.

I began by trying to figure out how to tune it, and then working out little top string.melodies and turning them in to songs.  I would make simple multi-track recordings by recording the banjo, then playing it one one cassette while recording lyrics into another, then playing the second recording while recording something else - maybe pie tin drums into a third recording. One serendipitous track came out great when the N Judah passed and rang its bell just as the song faded out.

"People in my life
These people
They say so much while looking away
From me 
They care about their cares
Our cares, blank stares
Foggy lenses
Hidden cameras walking 'round on 
Tripods setting traps for angles
on the beasts that we see"
 - Ding Ding - 

I used to practice for hours in her apartment..  Sometimes I'd go up on the rooftop, or sit on the back stairs.  The neighbors yelled at me once because I was out there late at night making a god awful racket.

My dad then gave me his old acoustic and I began learning chords.  This was before the internet, but somehow I got ahold of the tabs to Greensleeves.  Maybe one of the only "covers" I know to this day.

As my playing grew more advanced, I imagined being in a band.  My good friends John, Jeff, Kenseth and Mitch formed Rumah Sakit.  I moved to Portland in 1998.  John sent me their demo tape and I played it at the group home where I worked.  It was set up for people with brain injuries, and they would come up to the main office to get their meds, staying to play solitaire on the old windows computers and chat for a bit.  The tape blew me away. 

I always wanted to make music with other people.  Their compositions and mine together building something greater.  In Palm Desert, I've made multiple attempts - even playing a house show once.  It was exhilarating.  But it didn't work out.  The people were either weird (the house show band was all the songs of a young guy who spent too much time on the internet and was some kind of neo-fascist.  He was where I first learned about Jordan Peterson.  The songs also sucked), or just didn't play the kind of music that inspired me.  I'd find them on Craigslist and then invite them to play in my music room.  

For my last two rock albums albums, Polyvision Offering and Discovery of Zero, I had thought about having people play with me.  I was even teaching some of my stuff to a pretty good drummer and bass player.  But it felt lagging and we went our separate ways.  For DOZ I pretty much resigned myself to doing solo projects.  

​Maybe one day.