Songs in the Key of Inept

This weekend, I visited a church with a ham-fisted drummer. He played busily when the song required a skeletal beat. He ignored song structure and any notion of dynamics with a toothy grin. And just as the chorus of a beautiful hymn prepared to soar, he played an entire bar of gut-wrenching hi-hat fills.

Despite the obvious fact that he was new to the instrument, a stranger thought irked me. Something about the clumsy beats was disarming, even appealing. The drummer’s mistakes lent the entire affair a very natural, very human quality (much to the annoyance of the eight other musicians on stage) that illuminated one of the purposes of religious music: to blur the division between musician and spectator, creating a larger group of participants.

“American Idol” ratings are near their highest at the beginning of each season, when one poor sucker after another sings a wretched rendition of some pop standard and then gets verbally berated. Why do people love to watch this? Well, we’re a sadistic bunch, for starters, but also because an inept musician is just another schmuck. We savor the commonality.

More importantly, the inept musician is an icon, a frozen point in the lifetime of all musicians, who constantly struggle to reinvent themselves by mastering their instrument.

In 1962, John Lennon begged the postman for a letter from his sweetheart to the tune of four chords and the most tired drumbeat of the era. The Beatles’ “Please Mister Postman” wasn’t even written by the band. Four years later, he sung lines about ego death adapted from the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” over backwards guitars and one of the most important drumbeats of all time.

Of course, Lennon and his Liverpool pals were no hacks in the mop-top years, but their relatively derivative songs certainly weren’t pushing technical boundaries. Yet the early, rudimentary songs are the ones fans remember with fondness, the ones that granted the Beatles the funds and popularity to experiment. Ironic how the archetypal experimental rock band are so branded by their inexperienced beginnings.

Unsurprisingly, the artists that top today’s charts are largely inept. The only new aspect of Auto-Tune is that its use is more blatant than before, and popular singers were lip-synching long before Ashlee Simpson. These technologies have abolished the former standard and blurred yet another line: the one between a musician and a pretty face.

You can wince when the guitarist who fumbles around on the fret board or the singer who searches, without success, for the right pitch. But you shouldn’t laugh because, hey, at least those schmucks are trying.

3 Song Thursday – Wordless Codas

A coda is a musical means to an end. It’s the final transition into a song’s finish. This concluding passage is often what the listener remembers after the glow of the music has faded, and it determines whether a song sprints or stumbles over the finish line. These are a few of my favorite songs with instrumental codas, in which the singer is either too exhausted or too overwhelmed to continue.

1. “PDA” – Interpol

Interpol’s albums have grown exponentially worse with each new release, but this song is from their moody masterpiece of a debut, Turn On The Bright Lights. The song chugs along mechanically, led by throbbing bass drum hits and stabbing, dissonant guitars, returning to a confounding chorus about sleeping on “200 couches.” But then the song pauses, brightens. The chugging returns more excited than before, carrying a fragile organ coo on its shoulders, and the sounds zigzag and crash into silence.

2. “I Know There’s An Answer” – The Beach Boys

This wonderful Pet Sounds track is buried awkwardly in the third quarter of the album, which is perhaps why it is so criminally ignored. All the components of the song’s final 37 seconds are singularly present throughout the entire song: the bizarre circus piano, the merry banjo, and that tambourine. But it’s not until the song’s wordless coda that the threads are played together, and it is the blending of these elements that create true magic. It’s Christmas morning, it’s your first kiss, it’s absolutely perfect.

3. “Stop Breathin’” – Pavement

The song seems to begin in the middle of a phrase, without introduction. Stephen Malkmus croaks, “Dad, they broke me,” over drunken arpeggios and repeats the line twice at the finish of the first chorus. But he sings it only once for the second chorus, so we know a change is coming. Suddenly all falls silent, save for the sluggish 6/8 heartbeats of the drums. A brooding finger picked guitar line enters and is soon joined by another, each of them rising, falling and intersecting. The noise builds to a fever pitch, narrows to one single note of feedback, and then erupts again, roaring into a second coda.