Pilgrims Progress No Journeys End

I was listening to Peter Gabriel's Up, and I remembered again my first reactions to the album. On the one hand, I was impressed with the sonic detail, some of the textures, the overall quality of the sound...I liked it better than I thought I would. (I bought it only because I found a used copy for cheap.) On the other, my advance reservations were confirmed: "why does he have to take everything so damned seriously?" Even those aspects of the record I admired spoke to that overweening seriousness, along with the fact that it had taken Gabriel however many jillion years to record the damned thing.

But contrarian that I can be, I found myself questioning why that seriousness bugged me. It wasn't that it was in service of trivia, or particularly egocentric: Gabriel seemed to genuinely want to engage with the fairly heavy-duty questions he typically considers. Still, I found myself wondering, where was the Gabriel who wrote "Harold the Barrel," or "Moribund the Burgermeister"? Then I remembered that those songs feature a suicide and the plague, respectively...

Certainly, excessive seriousness can weigh down music, resulting in leaden, plodding numbers that threaten to induce sleep more than enlightenment. At the same time, there's something a little too easy about always refusing seriousness, always selling oneself short. It's safer: you can put up something simple and straightforward, and rely upon the listener to supply the feeling, the intensity, whatever depth the song might have for that listener, rather than doing so yourself. And it eliminates the need for a safety net for failure: if you're going to fall from only a foot or so off the ground, you're less likely to get hurt (or even have anyone notice).

But I think I begin to value ambition, particularly since it's rarer than it once was in popular music, if only because in the current climate all by itself it indicates a refusal to play it safe. In another context, Matthew at Fluxblog regrets the way some musicians seem to limit themselves to the same sorts of arrangements, and he wished more would allow themselves the freedom to explore arrangement styles that they perhaps can't execute in their sleep. I probably could go on at great length expostulating on the market conditions, cultural environment, and political realities that encourage musicians, like everyone else, to play it safe...but I'm trying to keep these entries a bit shorter, and to talk about music more often! So I'll save those thoughts for another day, and end by wishing that more musicians would intentionally not do what they're comfortable doing, even if the result is a failure. This is one reason I've always admired Elvis Costello and Julian Cope, both of whom probably could have made huge economic successes by writing the same songs and putting on the same images in perpetuity, but who instead chose to follow their own, rather thorny, and sometimes hopeless paths. And the title for this post honors another group of artists that practice the art of risk-taking, Wire - although I've rejiggered the punctuation to allow for alternate readings (you might place a comma after "progress," which is a verb here).