The Bad Art of Phil Spector, Part I

To the faithful: sorry for the meager level of posting, but my employer, a small liberal arts college, has rather, um, liberal notions of the amount of labor it feels entitled to squeeze from its faculty. Don't think I'm not thinking about you!

Anyway, I just saw today that Phil Spector’s murder trial (he is being tried for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson four years ago) is going to be televised; the judge’s reasoning is that it’s time to, as the AP puts it, “get beyond the O. J. Simpson trial.” And it’s true, I guess: if Americans have proven so capable of getting beyond Vietnam, they might well be able to get beyond O. J. as well.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Spector’s work for the past few months. He is certainly a lionized figure, if not the most lionized figure, in the history of rock and pop production. But like a lot of such lions, he’s generally understood through shorthand—largely the phrase “wall of sound” (which is certainly accurate) and a host of stories about his extraordinary misogyny (incidentally, Ronnie Spector’s autobiography, which documents much of this, is one of the better celebrity bios I’ve read), or his penchant for guns (which may have been part of his studio toolbox: he is said to have forced the Ramones to record parts of End of the Century at gunpoint).

The Spector sound is a really fascinating fine art of sounding, well, bad--at least bad in terms of the notion of (high) fidelity, which became predominant with the advent of stereo around the time Spector was making his classic recordings with The Crystals, The Ronettes, Bobb B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, etc. Indeed, Spector was famous for wearing a lapel pin reading “Back to Mono,” a replica of which is included in the box set of his work bearing that title (now available fairly cheaply from a lot of online sources). I’ve been thinking of ways of describing and understanding this aesthetic; it’s an ongoing project of mine, and at the risk of boring some of you, I thought I would share some of the basics of these thoughts.

They go back to the 19th century. At least that’s where I understand the history of modern listening to begin, and Spector’s work, in flouting the notion of “fidelity,” has to be understood in terms of listening, because it bucks the idea that everyone wants to listen to perfectly mimetic sound—the is it live or is it memorex ideal. My understanding of this history is not particularly deep by scholarly standards. It’s based, though, on a recent scholarly book by Jonathan Sterne, called The Audible Past. Sterne traces the development of what he calls “audile technique,” a mode of listening that involves separating out some sound from the larger environment, and fixing aural attention upon it. This is how we listen today. Since I can read the minds of cats, I’ll illustrate it this way. When I put Spoon’s Girls Can Tell (incidentally a title swiped from the Spector-produced Crystals) on a little while ago, my cat heard the music, but he didn’t see any particular reason to separate it from the sound of the cars going by outside, or of the heat blowing through the vents, or of my typing on this keyboard. He did not wiggle his butt, bob his head, or tap his paw--and not because he doesn't like Spoon (an essentially impossible state for all animate beings). Spoon was just another element in the ambient sound of the environment. But we humanimals, through a relatively brief history of cultural acclimation, immediately separate out the sound produced by sound reproduction technology and bring Spoon into the foreground, relegating the heat and cars to the background. The fascinating historical dimension of Sterne’s argument is that he traces this back to the development of the stethoscope and the sound telegraph in the early to mid 19th century. These technological developments suggested that sound was manipulable, and an object of isolable attention, in a way that we are all now used to.

Scenes from the next major to minor post:
Brian Eno!
Andy Warhol!