Occupied Territories

It’s a cliché but accurate to say that country & western is split emotionally between a desire for home and family on the one hand and the urge to range wild and free on the other. This can either be a profound paradox or a lazy inconsistency depending on the artistry involved. […]

In general I like music that overspills its container, though for this to work well there has to be a good container in the first place. So that’s my version of the split (Nietzsche’s melding of Dionysius and Apollo, I suppose, though I haven’t read Birth of Tragedy in thirty years, so don’t really know). Anyway, alt-country—alt anything, actually, including the Nashville Scene and New Times and the Village Voice—has its own version of this paradox/inconsistency: it claims to ride free—to be alternative, to overspill its container—and at the same time it turns “we overspill our container” into a container itself, a niche for the likeminded, and without a lof of motion in the niche.

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Frank Kogan, “Frank Kogan’s Country Music Critics’ Ballot 2005 (excerpt),” in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006

I’ve been catching up on the music criticism of Frank Kogan after discovering his 2011 Pazz & Jop ballot, in which he lists a number of K-pop records (albums and singles). I’ve also found that he has written extensively on K-pop, more than just about every other music critic I’ve encountered.

I like the ideas he sketches out in the quote above, and I think it’s a pretty good articulation of what I look for in music and film, though it’s something I’ve struggled to describe myself. I probably saw it in myself when I noticed how much of a greater tolerance I have for “flawed” works of art than most people. In a sense, you could see the quality of being “flawed” as itself a sign of this overspilling. A perfectly crafted container (“perfectly,” considered in the most pejorative sense of the word) would, after all, hold its contents in place without fail. Of course, there are a number of films that really do seem perfect (e.g. Dreyer’s Ordet or Tati’s Playtime, my two favorite films), but what makes them great is the extent to which they do, in fact, overspill their contents.

To continue with these two films as an example, you don’t just watch them and then pack everything away, back in the container, when the movie is done; there’s an excess, in terms of both profound feeling and (eternally) unresolvable intellectual tensions, that feels as if it emerges from the container itself in order to take on a new life, organically unfolding outside the work of art and in relationship to us as audience and participants. I suppose that’s what I privilege in art: a sense of aliveness. It’s as if a work of art perfectly capable of resolving all of its tensions is, in some sense, rendered dead by that process. It is for this reason that I don’t tend to value art that seem primarily designed to find answers to questions. It may seem strange to forever delay the “answering” function of art, but it may also be true that art’s value is in allowing the unresolvable and unanswerable to take on a firmer, more substantial existence without collapsing under the weight of our desire for complete resolution, whatever the costs (see: “negative capability”).

The most shallow thing you can say about a work of art is that it’s well-constructed (“well-written,” “well-directed,” “well-performed,” etc.), because that only succeeds in shedding light on the container itself, which is an aesthetic red herring. However, as Kogan notes, the container does indeed matter, but it’s just a medium for an active, organic process (the “overspilling”), which is what really matters. It’s more difficult to discuss a process, something ephemeral and invisible, than it is to discuss the equipment (the “container”) used in enacting that process, but this is why, as Kogan notes, we tend to return again and again to praising a world of containers (particularly, if we think of ourselves as sophisticated or “edgy,” the “we overspill our container” kind of containers, the “alt-” containers). But the beautiful, generous, and even democratic thing about art, and the reason why criticism can be so valuable, is that there’s not a simple, deterministic relationship between the container and the process of overspilling. A pop song is not necessarily shallow, and an art film is not necessarily profound. We lose sight of what matters most when we praise the container itself, especially as a kind of shorthand way of flattering ourselves for recognizing its sophisticated and superficially perfect construction. That’s the problem of “taste”: it’s too caught up in the solidity of containers (the objects of our praise), because looking at everything that happens afterwards is much less capable of being put inside a regimented hierarchy.