Dancehall Beauty
Lubbock, Texas. The desert-bound Hub City doesn’t seem like a major hub of music, but acts ranging from Buddy Holly to Waylon Jennings to the [Dixie] Chicks all found their starts in Lubbock. Every decade seems to yield another star, rising from regional to national fame. Almost ten years ago, the music journalist Thomas Mooney took a notebook, planted himself at the Blue Light—a cavernous, dancehall proving ground for songwriters in the scene—and began chronicling the musicians who passed through; some on their way to stardom, others back into obscurity. Wondering why some subpar songwriters were able to find a large audience, while some excellent artists played to empty rooms, Mooney wrote:
We often talk about when a songwriter understands the lay of the land and the people who live there, it enhances his writing. But how much does it benefit the listener [to have the same understanding]?
Meaning, the quality of a song lies largely in the listener’s capacity to grasp, to perceive the song’s craft and purpose. Mooney’s comment focused on the songwriter’s subject matter; the images and language. In regional, Texas-country music parlance, that usually includes:
romantic relationships,
drinking for fun,
drinking for sadness,
the traveling troubadour’s lifestyle,
references to the musical tradition,
and as the songwriter’s audience gets older, family and nostalgia.
These are essentially the same tropes one can find in all of contemporary popular music, no matter the genre.
The form of the song is important too, but it’s implicit for the average listener in Mooney’s comment. Even if you don’t know musical terms, you do know the form. In popular music, the palette of forms is virtually limited to the usual Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge- Chorus. The songs are driven by a 4/4 time signature, hanging on a chord structure of 1-4-5, and span three minutes. Listeners have been trained on this form since the advent of radio, and only the rare songwriter ventures outside of it with any success. Closer to my point, every songwriter who has stood on the stage at the Blue Light pays heed to that form and the subject matter. This form has been proven to get the crowd dancing and the drinks flowing.
Then there’s Mooney’s account of a Ryan Culwell performance in 2015:
“The house music winds down and [he] begins singing an a cappella version of ‘Darkness.’ Strangers line the front of the room in small pockets of gossip. They start to quiet for a brief flash before, in unison, they realize they’re all too uncomfortable with the moment and go back to their pick-up lines and Spring Break plans—albeit, in a lower tone.”1
Culwell’s “Darkness” opens with the line
“The sun clings onto the edge of the world
like a big red drop of blood
and it pools til it’s heavy enough
to roll off beneath the cut”
which cribs its central image verbatim from The Grapes of Wrath. The love in the song is not between a man and woman, but between a people and their uninhabitable land. The song has no chorus. Not exactly dancehall material.
But I will venture to say that the moment was beautiful.
Beauty is the end though. Somewhere closer to the beginning is the familiar title exchanged between songwriters about their trade: Glorified Beer Salesmen.
So what is the difference between the average beer-slingin’ singer and an artist if they’re both working in essentially the same subject matter, the same form, and the same potential audiences? The French philosopher Etienne Gilson’s The Arts of the Beautiful provides some helpful terms. I’ve already said the word artist, so let’s begin there.
An artist is one who makes. Gilson goes further—all the way back to caves—and says man “is first a making being” and “Prehistory is sure of the presence of man only when it can establish the existence of objects which cannot be considered works of nature.” If you find an arrowhead, you can bet that it was made by a man, not the wind or a bear or a bird. The Blue Light is a long way from the cave, but the earliest humans made songs, too. Utilitarian songs for instruction, songs to pass the time, songs for record keeping and history. They had a rhythm and likely a rhyme or alliteration because those elements are useful for memorization.
Aptitude and Apprehension
Our sensitivity to beauty is hardwired deep in us. Man is a being who makes, but we are also beings who perceive beauty. How do we know that we’ve perceived beauty? We’ll stick with Gilson’s definition:
The beautiful is known to us by this, that it is an object of admiration. The word ‘to admire’ means ‘to marvel at’; admiration is the spontaneous reaction of man, of his sensitivity and intelligence, to the perception of any object whose apprehension is pleasant in itself.
When I was teaching poetry to high school students, poetic technique and figurative language was my favorite unit of study. On the day we studied alliteration—the repeated use of consonant sounds—I would play Culwell’s ‘WAR.’ Students catch the concept of alliteration quickly because it’s in childhood tongue twisters like Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. The song opens, “Our wheat wilted, waned, and withered…” and students understand—in a lesson about alliteration—that he’s repeating the W. In their minds, it is the same animal as a School House Rock tune.
But about halfway through the second verse, students’ heads begin to pop up. They look to me to make sure they understand, then exchange glances with each other in their secret confederacy of apprehension. The moment they realize the trick he’s playing with the form of the song is a spontaneous pleasure. It’s a simple trick. It doesn’t take a high degree of sensitivity to apprehend it. Maybe those fourteen year-olds did not possess the intelligence to catch the tragic layers of the pioneers’ foolhardiness, or the populist conscription of religious language to make war, or the nods toward eschatology, but the song rewards multiple listens in multiple stages of life. New layers of apprehension await, new pleasures spur the listeners’ attention to the song and the world around them. They work to deepen their own intelligence in order to apprehend more. Surely the beautiful is known to us by that admiration.
Gift or Grift
Meanwhile, back to Mooney’s account of the Blue Light show in 2015. I was there, too, the night that Ryan Culwell opened to a crowd of disinterested fraternity brothers. I rode down with him. Rolling Stone had just featured his album Flatlands and this was the first show he was playing back in Texas. We wondered out loud about the reception he’d get. It had been five years since he’d played the Blue Light, when he was still performing with his band The Young Senators. A bachelorette party had stormed the stage, making obscene gestures with sex toys while he sang. That show, at the end of a years-long hustle, had caused him to walk away from playing live music indefinitely.
But the itch to write and perform wouldn’t quit. He’d moved to Nashville, got a record deal, and now was trying to find his footing on stage again. We arrived and set up the merch table and talked to Mooney. I posted at the bar. Ryan took the stage in a denim shirt, jeans, and workboots. He played the opening slot at ten pm before the real party crowd appeared. From the stage, he made friends with an older couple who were winding down their evening.
About halfway through the set, the headliner stepped into the room. He looked the part. A Stetson, creased professionally. Short-sleeve pearl snap, sleeves rolled up even higher to accentuate the biceps. Tight Wranglers. His band consisted of Lubbock hired guns, musicians from nearby South Plains College who arrived from another gig across town. The crowd swelled around the bar and pushed me out. The band played loud, fast songs with a train beat for two-stepping. The fella danced and stroked his guitar, inaudible in the mix, the crowd yelled their conversations and screamed to the bartender for another round, and the fella was dancing and singing and over the din no one knew when one song ended and the next began. Empty beer bottles crashed in the trash cans.
I don’t remember his songs. There wasn’t much to admire. They weren’t bad per se. They held to the form. He sang them with enthusiasm. The man was an artist. At least by Gilson’s definition. He was a making being.
Two artists on the same stage, singing within the same hour, even to the same people (granted, they had entered late-stage inebriation). A distinction needs to be made between the songwriters, and then a comment about the crowd.
The two artists had drastically different objectives when they committed their songs to a form. Gilson makes a distinction between Industrial Arts and Fine Arts.
A large part of man’s making activity aims at producing objects answering practical purposes. The useful is what serves a need. There is no opposition between beauty and usefulness, for beauty may serve useful purposes (in a sense it always does), yet beauty is not made in view of its possible utility—it is desirable for its own sake…If we take the word ‘art’ in its broader sense, as in the expression ‘arts and crafts,’ we may say that it includes industrial products…Such things have their beauty, but it is not the kind of beauty characteristic of the works produced by the fine arts…Industrial beauty is true beauty and industrial arts are true arts—only they are not fine arts. The proper function of the so-called fine arts is to produce objects expressly willed and conceived in view of their beauty alone. Arts of this kind are called fine arts because they are the arts of the beautiful, and the objects they produce have no other proximate and primary reason to be than to be beautiful.
A Maserati is a beautiful car, but its primary reason for existence is transportation. Likewise, a steel sculpture—though sometimes not as beautiful in form as a Maserati—is primarily made to be beautiful. One song in the key of G is created to be beautiful; another song in the key of G is made to sell beer or to give a tongue-tied fraternity brother a chance to dance with a girl. Get a rare vocal talent like Chris Stapleton to sing the beer-selling song, and it may sound more beautiful in realized form than anything Culwell (or George Jones) has performed, but it will have accomplished its purpose the second a fraternity brother opens a tab.
The beautiful song, the fine art, however, is a gift.
The Crowd of Single Listeners
Remember Mooney’s original comment about the listener, the crowd: How much does it benefit the listener to have this understanding? It’s more than the subject matter and the form of the song. It might also be the listener’s own understanding of the pleasure she feels. She won’t listen if there is no pleasure provoked. But which pleasure and what source?
The word pleasure, always vague, becomes even more so when applied to the experience of the beautiful…There are all kinds of pleasures…ranging from touch and taste…to the pleasures of learning, understanding, and discovering truth…The pleasure of art is of this kind…This pleasurableness of the beautiful either engenders desire or crowns it.
Beauty engenders desire, just ask the fraternity brother buying the girl drinks. I’m afraid though that the beer-selling song might teach the end of desire is merely to consume, in excess even, until the object of beauty is destroyed or the consumer is poisoned by her own appetite and vomits, tainting her senses. A proper response to this desire is not one of consumption, but rather to drive us further into the beautiful; apprehension leading on to apprehension, never possession. Something akin to love.
The experience of love, engendered by beauty rendered for the senses through the fine arts, grows upon itself. It’s fertile.
One cannot exhaust the pleasure of reading a poem, of seeing a statue, of hearing a musical masterpiece. It is true that sensibility wears out, and the too frequent repetition of an esthetic experience results in taking the edge off the pleasure, but this does not mean that the esthetic experience in question has come to an end. Those interruptions rather prepare its revival. Sooner or later, the same thing of beauty will unexpectedly overpower us again, exactly as it did the first time and we shall experience again the same sweet surrendering to a joy that is not entirely of this world.
The narrator in Ryan’s song ‘Certain Light’ asks a lover to stand still for an impromptu photograph, taken in a mundane moment as light spills through a window. Not posed or prepared, but in a certain light. When the beloved asks to see the picture, the narrator responds,
“No, you can’t see it
You have a million
I took this one for me. It’s
a thorn, it’s a splinter, it’s the blister
on a sunburn that helps me to remember
you like this.”
There’s an agony in knowing that moments of beauty will end because we know—like Solomon knew—that God has made everything beautiful in its time, ripening and dying, engendering a desire for eternity in the hearts of men. The moment flees. The attempt to apprehend the beautiful in its time, in a form for the senses, whether in a photograph or a song is the engendered desire for the artist. She is taken with the urge to make—in Plato’s terms she is pregnant—but it does not begin with her. She has received the gift of beauty. Her senses were opened to it, and she picks up material so she can make the gift for others.
Ryan’s narrator continues in the bridge,
“Up in the stars above
That’s where I saw you, love
I tried to draw your face by a thousand thousand suns
I’d burn out both my eyes
to see you in those skies
and no more have my fill of you than when we first begun.”
If there’s a theme that recurs across Ryan’s albums, it’s a perpetual longing, to always be in the posture with your hands up and out to receive. From the man in ‘Red River’ who “needs a land where he can lay with a river that ain’t dry” and the warrior “a thousand years ago” who died searching for rest, or the thief in ‘Heaven Everywhere I Go’ that would give anything to see through his lover’s dress, the veil that hides her from being completely known by him. The characters in his songs who despair have closed their hands into fists. Some are coaxed to open them again by love, like the ruined old man in ‘All I Got.” Others keep them closed and disappear into violence, like the murderer in ‘Satisfied.’
One final note on the listener.
The listener can’t be beholden to every songwriter there is. There isn’t enough time. But I think Ryan’s posture is one to emulate. Maintain the posture to receive beauty, but then that requires a person to know beauty when he encounters it. I’m reminded of B.H. Fairchild’s poem “Beauty”
…it occurs to me again
that no male member of my family has ever used
the word [beauty] in my hearing or anyone else’s except
in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer.
Much like Fairchild himself, the speaker in the poem was raised working in a machine shop surrounded by the dry fields of Kansas with treeless horizons and slate skies. The men in the shop service the broken machinery of oil field roughnecks and scrabble farmers. This is not a place of abundant natural beauty, meaning, one needs a lunatic acuity to see the beauty that does exist.
That doesn’t mean beauty can’t be found in places like this, but further to Fairchild’s actual point, there is no language in this culture to talk about beauty. Even the word beauty is suspect. The speaker in the poem remembers hearing two men talking about beauty on the radio while the family waited on their weekly entertainment. The general reaction to the conversation from the men in his family is:
“They might be homosexuals.
That would be a natural conclusion, of course, since here were two grown men talking about ‘beauty’
instead of scratching their crotches and cursing the goddamned government trying to run everybody’s
business.”
Fairchild’s Kansas looks an awful lot like Lubbock or Culwell’s Perryton. One of the threads of Fairchild’s poem is a cautionary tale. He recounts the life of one of the machinists in the shop who had closed himself off from the gift of beauty. The man committed vile acts and ended his life in despair, and the poem implies that his refusal of beauty had made him less than human; bestial in pursuit of pleasures, spiteful before gifts, covetous of his own destruction.
It’s not a class issue, or an education issue, or a wealth issue. I’m certain there are more people who’ve lost the capacity for beauty haunting SoHo art galleries than there are in Kansas machine shops. It does not have to be discussed in high Latin terms or the phrases of French philosophers, but the word beauty does need to cross our lips with affection. And once apprehended, should lead to deeper and deeper discoveries of beauty, not possession or consumption, but gratitude. Don’t close yourself off from the gift, even if it’s at ten pm on a Monday night at the dancehall and you were there to get foggy-eyed and numb-tongued.
In the next issue, I’ll zoom in on one song from each of Culwell’s three records to see if there’s some thread that ties all the songs together.
