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Hunter T Wolfe wrote: Also, can Scott be said to be making 'rock' music anymore? Do the territorial boundaries between rock, jazz, avant-garde, classical even mean anything these days, when talking about the kind of challenging, often dissonant music that many come to this site to discuss?
I think the likes of Robert Fripp or Peter Hammill get an easier ride because they've always made "difficult" music.
I think that's a really interesting point. I come back to the Jason Pierce thing. When he makes hazy, pseudo psych gospel records I think it is genuine. In essence I believe him even if I don't like some of the records very much. When he strays into improv territory (and I have seen him do it live and heard it on record) I cease to believe. It feels like he is trying too hard to be something else from a world that he has not fully inhabited. So when he plays in that style I have two things to think about
1) Do I think the music is any good in the context of the genre that he is dabbling in?
2) Does it get me out of my seat me on any level?
That's what I ended up having to ask myself with Scott Walker. By the time he got to "Drift" I felt that the music he is making owes too much to too many other artists (of whom most rock listeners would be unaware) and is relying on the fact that the listener isn't going to be switched-on to those sources by critics. That's all really.
The classical and avant garde folks are, as ever, for the most part pathetically grateful when a Damon Albarn or Scott Walker or Tori Amos sprinkles some rock star magic on their commercially arid soil so no one on that side goes "actually that's all a bit mediocre, listen to this instead" and hardly anyone on the rock side knows both sides of the fence in the first place so a critical conspiracy of silence ensues.
And what you say about Prog Symphonies or whatever is equally true. When the likes of say ELP started using ever larger classical musical structures as a vehicle for bombast then it became an exercise in hubristic oneupmanship not music making. It is strange that people like that never wrote bare simple stuff in a classical style - piano or guitar sonatas say. They always went for size and volume. Funnily enough there are few things as moving as hearing a massive orchestra in the flesh play really quietly.
I think Hammill is a pretty clear writer. VdGG got complex musically at times but it was more a viseral than an intellectual exercise. I don't know his 80s stuff as well as the 70s and 90s / 00s but Hammill's post 80s solo albums are challenging but also clear without being facile. Songs like say "Curtains", "His Best Girl" or "Like Veronica" are 5/6 minute novellas that deal with brutality of various kinds and have genuine weight. It is not easy listening but it is not deliberately inaccessible either.
As for Fripp I think there is a lot wrong with Fripp's shtick as the-great-man-who-was-wronged-by-capitalism but the the instrumental guitar records are built out of sound palette that, if he didn't invent single handedly, is a sound of which he was one of the foremost originators. He belongs there and so it always rings true to me.
Coming back to Scott Walker - I really like dissonant music. I also think that it is important that there is some songwriting in the world that tries to deal with the experience of being alive in this century and in this culture without being all ironic, arch and callous about it. So bravo for the major effort in going a bit further than anyone else though what it comes down to is that I just don't think he is as good with the avant garde material (sonic and lyrical). When it comes to expressing alienation, "Farmer in the City" aside (which could be on "Nite Flights" or even "Climate"), I think Scott Walker is a better artist when he sings "I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore" than when making "Drift". He certainly has a wonderful way with a lyric that the likes of Richard Hawley could only dream about but when he is singing words that make "The Wasteland" sound like "Beat On The Brat" while all kinds of oddness is going on in the music I think we lose more than he gains and vice versa. I really don't see how "Drift" or "Tilt" are any more important or well realised or profound than say "1.Outside" but an army of crtics will tell you otherwise. That's all really.
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