Music: In praise of Slop - getting lost in the moment.

Cafe Society
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I’ve been on the road too damn long, and am trying to relax. As I got ready to make some pancakes for the kids this fine Saturday morning, I put on Glenn Gould’s early Goldberg Variations. He is such an Art Tatum (aka “20th Century Piano Genius” of jazz) of classical - super fast, articulate, but you can really hear him asserting his interpretation of this work.

And you can hear his voice, too. Gould would famously hum during his particularly immersed moments. A ghostly, leaden, monotonal hum, like an idiot in front of a TV, drooling.

I love it. It’s slop, the mistakes that show it’s alive. In Jimmy Page’s and Jimi Hendrix’ playing, in the best jazz solos, in primitive Blues recordings where there was only one take, and of course, all live recordings, there’s the immediacy of slop - and if there is no slop, we feel a bit ripped off.

As listeners, we all understand what good slop means - the player is up at the edge of their abilities, pushing in an attempt to say something. It feels more personal.

As musicians, we understand the importance of selling it - finding a voice that works for you, so, in a practical way, you become more authentic, and thereby more entertaining. Slop puts butts in seats. And it feels really, really good, too. We’re trying to slip into the moment, a form of musical meditation, of being in the zone, walking the wire.

Probably my favorite music quote is Eddie Van Halen, which is something like “I want to sound like I am falling down the stairs, but land on my feet.”

Yes.

2

In Behind The Ritual by Van Morrison, he just sings ‘blah blah blah’ for a while…I think he might have been messing with us, of course, he sounds pretty drunk at the beginning too, so that’s a possibility.

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No, this is rubbish. You’re using “we” when you mean “me”. You come across as yet another chap who wants to impose his own golden age on future generations, as if your golden age was the objective pinnacle of culture. I don’t have a problem with you celebrating your favourite music, but you’re pooh-poohing mine. In the long run we will win, because your generation will simply die off.

Now go back and rip out the “we” and replace it with “I”. Change “as listeners, we all understand what good slop means” to “I like slop”, and change “as musicians, we understand the importance of selling it” into “from what I have read, some musicians are less precise than others, but it’s silly to pretend that there is one objective true way”. You might still be within the edit window.

I mean, it’s all just bleepy-bleepy noises, isn’t it? That’s not music! And this is without going into the impossibility of differentiating slop from intentional complexity. I mean, part of the appeal of something like this or this is that there’s no slop at all, it’s precise like a clockwork machine. But it’s not music, is it? Hmm? It’s just bleepy-bleepy noises. Because my culture is just a hollow imitation that can only dream to aspire to the greatness of the Dave Clark Five and the Vanilla Fudge. That was real music.

Yeah, I hear you. I’m selectively picking examples that make your side of the argument look bad. Well isn’t that something.

4

Who the hell peed in your cornflakes?

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That sure was a lot of words to completely miss the point.

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Slop murdered my parents.

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“I must not slop. Slop is the mind-killer. Slop is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my slop. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the slop has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

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WordMan, I think slop is one of those things that (can) add tension to a piece, in the same sense that a dissonant note or a groove with swing can do so so: the player has wandered off the reservation for a moment, and everything is out of kilter in that moment. Will they pull it off, or will they fuck up (or have they already)? Then they indeed get back where they should be: in the groove, in key, whatever, and the tension is released.

Here’s what I wrote in a thread about great, short guitar solos, regarding Jimmy Page’s solo in Whole Lotta Love:

Slop works sometimes (and it did brilliantly in that solo), and sometimes it doesn’t and it’s just slop.

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I hope slop is good because that would mean I’m a much better guitar player than I thought I was.

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Heck, I eschewed all the non-slop parts of my playing years ago. Play to your strengths, I always say. :smiley:

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:smack:

I can’t believe I forgot to attach my signature to that last post. It would have looked perfect!

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By the way, fachverwirrt, you obviously understand my point. As a classical guy, how do you view slop? Twisty McKnickers above seems to want to portray slop as a “fashionable” thing that twits like me find cool because blues and rock are played by musicians who lack technique.

But I started off my examples with Glenn Gould, a classical pianist. Chopin and Liszt were famous for their improvisations - wouldn’t there have to be some slop in those, occasionally?

What is the general view held by classical musicians - esp soloists - if they are “putting it out there” during a featured moment? As a singer, do you ever have a voice crack, like one of the most famous bits of slop ever heard, Merry Clayton’s break during Gimme Shelter, that is seen as a good thing?

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This is all good. Yes, bad slop is bad slop - that’s the point of this thread, to differentiate the two.

Listen: Merry Clayton blows that phrase - at its most basic, her voice cracks. But we hear it as good slop. What is universal about that ? To AP above, my premise is a nonstarter.

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Well, Ashley Pomeroy, when you come right down to it, music IS “all just bleepy-bleepy noises, isn’t it”?

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There’s a quote, I believe from Liszt to his student Von Bülow, that runs something along the lines of “always make sure to play wrong notes. That way they’ll know how hard it is.”

In live performance, there’s always some degree of imperfection, of course. I think in classical performance the possibility of slop is the compelling thing. You know that a passage is almost impossible to play, or the soprano has to sing that pianissimo high D at the end of her aria and you’ve been there (I’m not a soprano, but you know what I mean) and you know that there’s a chance it will all go to hell, and then she nails it. It has a completely different feel live than recorded, when you know that if she missed it, they’d just retake.

Generally a crack will not be seen as a good thing, but it is often an understandable thing. It happens to the best, and other than the denizens of the “loggione” at La Scala, is usually forgiven assuming the rest of the performance is well done.

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Cool. Great stuff.

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I’m sure that that’s what you’ll be saying in 40 years’ time. The music that you now think is so great will be mercilessly criticized, ridiculed or even forgotten by future generations.

With Chopin there’s the controversial question of rubato i.e. the art of playing some parts faster or slower than written. A lot of people expect it in Chopin but if you use it too much, the music falls apart. It’s not even sure that Chopin used rubato the way we understand it now. Some of his pupils only mentioned that he would occasionally delay the melody while keeping a steady bass line resulting in the former falling a little after the latter but chances are it wasn’t the crazy time-bending that you sometimes hear.

Hearing a soloist “on the edge” can be very exciting but a crack or an out-of-tune note are usually frowned upon. Forgivable but best avoided.

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I like slop when it’s the by-product of a great player playing at the edge, when “it sounds like he’s barely holding it together and will fuck up any second, and he never does”, as squeegee put it. That, to me, is a big part of the appeal of Jimmy Page. Some of his faster solos have passages where he’s behind the tempo briefly and then catches up, and that creates a delightful tension that gets released or resolved. He’s also great when he plays well within his abilities, like in Stairway To Heaven. When I was a teenager, I assumed that the Stairway solo was totally composed and took many takes. I then read that it was off the cuff and took two takes. Blew my mind.

There’s a part in the second solo in Crossroads on Wheels Of Fire where it sounds like Clapton has lost his way, gotten out of sync with Bruce and Baker, and then somehow at the turn-around he finds the beat again without stuttering. Great stuff.

Hendrix could be precise, the intro to Little Wing and all of All Along The Watchtower demonstrate that, but a lot of his best stuff was great because he was just feeling it, not thinking it, and just letting it rip.

I had a bit of an epiphany about this when I heard the band Dread Zeppelin do Heartbreaker. The guitarist in that band covered the a capella solo perfectly, eliminating the stutters and lags and other imperfections from the original. It is an amazing feat of guitar skill, but I like the tension of Page’s version better. To flirt with sacrilege, I feel the same way about SRV’s Voodoo Child(Slight Return) versus the original.

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Over on The Gear Page, there is a thread started which includes a link to Jimi Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower live in 1970. His guitar track is isolated.

Folks are getting all “sharp knees” about the track: “he should’ve worked on his tone”; “man, it is sloppy.”

:smack:

Link to TGP thread, so you get the link to the Hendrix isolation and the comments: Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower (Live 7/4/70) isolated guitar | The Gear Page

There’s a big difference between not having good technique, and playing the multiple parts Jimi did all at once, including singing, and really selling the energy of the song…

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There was nothing “sloppy” about Chopin’s use of rubato; in fact he documented it in great detail. He knew exactly how much to use to keep the music from falling apart. That, in part, was his genius.