If Music Was A Person
... would you get to know her?
Hello! Welcome back to our little listening club. Today in Melbourne the sun is pushing through rain, but it’s still a snuggly Sunday where couch and a blanket sounds pretty bloody perfect.
This weekend I’ve been obsessing over Raye’s new album, This Music May Contain Hope. I’ve listened four times through today and have lost myself in all the ways I could talk about it, but my headline is that this album is the ultimate sizzle-reel of music across time. If you have time today, pop it on and let’s listen together.
This album, and the commentary we’re already seeing about it, has got me thinking about how we constantly silo music and label it one thing or another. “It’s pop. No it’s jazz. No, it’s soul”. Why are we so obsessed with separating musical styles and cultures from one another?!
This analogy might be weird but it’s what’s on my mind on a Sunday morning, pre-coffee okay ;)
If I was Music - a person - and I was on my deathbed, this album would be my life flashing before my eyes; the important moments, a flash of those who have inspired me, taught me, nurtured me, loved me. It’s the life of Music neatly packaged by Raye and delivered by a community who know Music - the person - as the complex and beautiful result of evolution, biology, cultural and social influence and life experience that she is.
As people we can’t separate the You today from the You of yesterday, you have just added life experience and evolution but you remain the same person; the same person at work and at home. You’re the same person with your parter as you are with a stranger. Sure, you show different qualities and behave in different ways. But you are still You.
Music is that one person. Music is Pop at the cafe ordering a coffee. It’s Soul in those post-sex hours. It’s Gregorian Chant journalling. It’s a street song from Rio with your best friend. There can be differences in those moments, but they are still one and the same thing; Music.
What I found so powerful about Raye’s latest release is that she reveals Music as A Complete Person. She’s the kind of person you want to hang out with, right?! She’s gives us the kaleidoscope Herself, not just a vacuum sealed slice, acknowledging the ways she has grown, the life lessons and experiences that have led her to the version of herself we meet now.
While there might be some direct quotes in this album (hello Vivaldi’s Winter), this album celebrates musical lineages.
First track, ‘Intro: Girl Under The Grey Cloud’ I was like OH THAT IS BRAHMS! It’s his harmonies probably best heard in the opening chords of his Symphony Number 3: Movement III; one of the most heartbreaking openings ever written. It’s not a direct reference, but we have this track because of what Brahms did. And before him, Beethoven. And before him, Bach. It’s a musical photo album of Grandpa, Great Grandpa and Great Great Grandpa.
‘Beware.. The South London Lover Boy’ is jazzy yes, but that big band instrumentation is an evolution of military music culture; marching bands with snare drums to help soldiers keep in time. The Napoleonic Wars saw the development of the wind band (woodwind and brass) and this combo of instruments began to be used beyond military contexts before we started to associate the Big Band with jazz.
‘Click Clack Symphony’ was to me an INSTANT Pussycat Dolls / A.R. Rahman / Nicole Scherzinger’s Jai Ho! reference. Those great semi-tone ascending vocal lines. What a technique! She combines this with Hans Zimmer’s signature forward churn, a technique that features in pretty much any new Netflix drama opening credits these days.
Raye serves us monologues in the middle of tracks. This approach began in 16th-17th century opera with composers writing recitatives, such as Monteverdi, gave their main characters space to express their inner thoughts, often over a bed of music. Gilbert and Sullivan were later to revive this for a 20th century stage, and we move from Monteverdi to Pirates of Penzance to Raye.
It’s a walking bass blues structure in ‘I Hate The Way I Look Today’ paired with that male barbershop quartet sound that takes us to speakeasies. That sound morphs and all of a sudden we’re in a radio studio in the 1920s… y’know the sound, that kinda sickly sweet melody that’s irritatingly happy. Performers gathered around a single drop down mic, pushing the latest brand of cigarettes. I think of this scene from Annie (1982)!
For ‘Joy (feat. Amma & Absolutely)’ we can look to Black Gospel music. Music that is centred on praise and faith. And then, BAM out of nowhere a VIENNESE WALTZE, GUYS! My head is spinning, I LOVE THIS. In ‘Fin.’ Raye thanks literally EVERY contributor on this album by name, and it’s all on top of a huge orchestral waltz. This is a direct line to the Strauss family. It’s that unmistakable lush ballroom sound that took shape in the 1780s in Europe and evolved to take Europe by storm. But this 3/4 style is actually rooted in Bohemian and Moravian Ländler music traditions that included yodelling practice.
There are so many layers on this album. We haven’t talked structure, or Raye herself and her vocal technique or touched at all on the actual production of this record. We will keep unpacking this as we listen.
There is just one more point I want to make. My pet peeve is that ‘classical music’ is often othered in the broad music industry. It’s become the vacuum-sealed slice that collectively we are always SO SURPRISED to experience outside the concert hall. I remember reading that one commentator said ‘Rosalia’s Berghain is the best thing that’s happened to classical music’ and I almost cried reading that. It pisses me off that classical music is so ‘othered’ that the broader music world only recognises it when a famous vocalist sings with traditional Flamenco and operatic techniques and uses an orchestra rather than a laptop.
The thing is, classical music is always there because it’s part of Music The Complete Person. Bach is in 2020s pop just as 1920s jazz is in Hans Zimmer. We wouldn't have these chord progressions without first developing sacred polyphony, like composers such as Léonin did, a man who wrote music to sound within Notre Dame. And without Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Edith Piaf - artists who revolutionised the way women sang of grief and heartbreak - we wouldn’t be crying our eyes out to Nightingale Lane. These artists are with us all the way through this album.
Artists like Raye and Rosalia remind us that Music as a Complete Person is the most rewarding way we can be with music. She - Music - is kaleidoscopic. She’s evolutionary. She’s you aged 3. She’s you at 27. She’ll be you at 99. A collection of everything that has been and a promise of what will be.
Now, I have the last 30 mins of Dirty Harry to finish, and vacuuming to do, but I am here if you would like to write to me.
m.