Gritty oysters
When I was little my mum used to play a Bob Dylan record. I think it must have been a kind of ‘best of’ collection, with Hey Mister Tambourine Man, Just Like a Woman, Like a Rolling Stone etc. I thought the parts where he was singing were alright, though I didn’t like his voice much, but I absolutely couldn’t stand the harmonica parts. They just seemed inexcusably discordant and ugly and random. I remember wondering how it was possible that anyone would listen to that noise by choice.
But now I like it. I even like some country music (building on yesterday’s reference to Little House on the Praire) that would have made me cringe uncontrollably as a teen, hating sloppy slide guitar and whiny vocals and mystified by all that whinging about failed relationships and dead dogs and nostalgia for some old barn somewhere.
An anthropologist I know, Chris Eipper, says that it’s the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. For me that’s an idea that has resonance all over the place, and maybe in music too.
These days I find myself tuning into, not out of , slidiness and discordancy.
