"There's a fine line between clever and stupid" - who would you argue is clever?

Cafe Society
1

Or so says Nigel Tufnel. Or was it David St. Hubbins?

In this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=800528
Folks are arguing whether Sonic Youth played “microtonal, non-dodecaphonic music with non-Western intent” or just had some cheap guitars that sounded cool out of tune in a noisy way and which they based their sound on.

Similar to The Ramones: people dismissed them as loud punks, but when you read about them, and actually listen, they loved Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound pop songs, couldn’t afford or know what to do with a roomful of studio musicians, so they consciously tried to get that filled-in sound with guitar distortion.

That’s pretty clever. And the Sonic Youth thread is ultimately about the same thing. What can you think of that’s similar - and what side are you on? I would prefer arguments for clever vs easy dismissals as stupid.

2

A movie example: The jump cuts in Godard’s Breathless.

Here’s an article listing five proposed explanations for Godard’s use of jump cuts:

1 (stupid): Godard had shot too much footage, and a producer insisted that movie should be shortened. In order to piss the producer off and deliberately ruin the movie, Godard cut out parts at random.

2 (stupid): Godard had made a movie that he knew was nothing special, but he wanted to fool the pretentious French movie critics into thinking it was brilliant. He cut out parts at random hoping it would astound the stupid critics.

3 (supporting stupid or clever, depending on point of view): According to Godard’s own account, he agreed that the film needed shortening. He had made a movie two and a half hours long, but had been contracted to not exceed 90 minutes. He had made it too long at first because he was inexperienced and wanted to put “everything” into his first film. He invented the jump cut style to reduce the running time, sometimes cutting parts at random, but it was (at least presumably) to improve the film, as opposed to ruining it.

4 (clever): The jump cuts are meaningful in a storytelling sense, in that they reflect the disjointedness in the personality of the main character.

5 (clever): The jump cuts are meaningful on the level of the medium itself. They are part of a new cinematic aesthetic, introducing into cinema elements from other arts such as cubism or jazz.

Which side am I on? Well, I think the movie is gorgeous, and it certainly seems appropriate to me to say that it has a “jazzy” aesthetic. Maybe I don’t have a clue, though. But, FWIW, a friend of mine with proven great taste is on record as loving it, so I think I’ll trust her judgement.

3

Nice. Just the type of example I was looking for.

I suppose another example would be MTV videos - 95% were crap, but the jump-cutty, fast moving style was adopted into the language of mainstream movies and TV soon after. So: often used for stupid videos, but the technique ended up being clever, in things like the Bourne movies, found-footage tropes, etc.

4

Hey, I’m arguing over there that Sonic Youth played “microtonal, non-dodecaphonic music with non-Western intent”* and that the specific varieties they arrived at were governed by their cheap guitars that sounded cool out of tune in a noisy way and which they based their sound on. My [del]conspiracy[/del] theory accommodates both sides of the argument. Apparently I can back it up with walls of text, too.
But here, I’m gonna argue for the masters of knowing where that line is, blowing right past it, wrapping around a couple of times, and still ending up somewhere near that line. Probably by dumb luck, but they do it. Ladies and gentlemen: The Butthole Surfers!

Paul Leary said “Rock and roll isn’t about being smart.”, after he and his band had already been testing the theory for almost a decade. When you’ve got a name like that, scatological, uncomfortable content is to be assumed. If you show up at show where the name of the band is The Butthole Surfers, and you are offended by the content, I don’t know what I can do for you. Still, through judicious application of Gibbytronics and an unconventional approach to almost everything in the studio; they produced clever, irreverent, and sometimes pretty smart songs. It’s not as clear cut of a stroke of genius as the Ramones, because they were partly extending their path content-wise. Sonic-ally, there aren’t really any predecessors, they were more warped than just about anyone. It’s hard finding anyone who’s as extreme as the Surfers, but were somehow able to pull it all into a rock song.

Examples:

22 Going on 23 - 1987. Warning: This song uses a recording from a call-in show from a woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted. Whether that is true or not, it appears that she is an unreliable narrator through parts of the call. Combined with the editing, it makes for a disorienting nightmare. That is enhanced by the rest of the band’s performance. Pinkus’ bass is nearly chromatic (the only scale I can see it fitting in is double harmonic), and Leary’s guitar work is chilling.

Hay It’s “22 Going on 23” in reverse at high speed, and re-worked. The cows at the end of “22 Going on 23” are what sounds like “Hey”.

One’s a complete nightmare reflecting what I think is a good abstraction of the world that person might inhabit, and the other is a crazy joke song. They both appear on Locust Abortion Technician. There’s absolutely no indication of what speed you’re supposed to play that record at, on the label or the sleeve. About half of the songs actually work at either 45 or 33 rpm, depending on whether you’re interested in the vocals or some other random instrument sounding near it’s correct pitch. Many of them aren’t at concert pitch at either speed. Clever or stupid?: IBM presents “You Make the Call!”

Their “Day in the Life” equivalent is probably Jimi**. It’s the audio version of a Francis Bacon painting for about seven and a half minutes, then a church bell rings, Lurch answers “You rang?”, and it drifts off into one of the most creative soundscapes I’ve ever heard, with bowling for percussion.

So, I’d call them on cutting edge of stupid/clever, even at this late date.

I can probably also make a case for Capitan Beefheart, but that will have to be for another morning.

*But I think I might have settled on xenharmonic.

**Not named that originally, the original record has pictographs for song titles.

5

I kind of agree: Sonic Youth walk that line between clever and stupid, consciously playing with tunings, sometimes to great effect and sometime just making noise.

I have a book which I reference regularly here, Our Band Could be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. ISTR that he had a good chapter on the Butthole Surfers, pointing out their anarchic, chaotic approach that often produced worthy stuff.

6

Stupid.

Clever.

This is arguable of course and both “pieces” are completely anecdotal in my opinion but at least Schulhoff had to work a bit. It makes me smile whereas the Cage… not so much.

7

LEDS - sorry, I am not familiar with Schulhoff. Or sheet music ;). Can you 'splain what I am looking at?

8

Are you at least familiar enough to see that there are no actual notes there, just rests?

9

From here.

In short, both pieces are completely silent.

But the difference is that Schulhoff actually went to some absurd lengths to fill the sheet music with rests of various durations only (no notes), in complex time signatures and with some indications like clefs and fermatas (i.e. pauses), all of which are completely useless of course. Amusing and clever.

Cage picked a sheet of paper, wrote “I, II, III” , each followed by “Tacet” (silent) and said: “Job done!”. Stupid and lazy.

None of these two works are masterpieces, mind you, but as I said earlier, the Schulhoff makes me smile. The Cage doesn’t even deserve a “roll eyes” (and yet some hipsters will tell you that it’s “like, so deep.”).

10

I’m going to say Mark Rothko.

To people who get it, his works are gorgeous.

To people who don’t get it, they’re a con, and the people who (pretend to) like them are dupes. Or something.

I’m not saying anyone has to like anything, but the conspiracy theory version of modern art history deserves the same level of respect as any other conspiracy theory.

ETA: See also; Jackson Pollock.

11

Clever = Jackson Pollock.
Stupid = Mark Rothko.

I definitely have a preference :D.

12

This is what you meant, right?

Clever = Mark Rothko.
Stupid = Jackson Pollock.

:wink:

13

…and thus new tribes arise and wars are declared :p.

14

I can explain why people think something is stupid. If you like something, it doesn’t matter how stupid it is – you like it. And if you dislike something, it doesn’t matter how clever it is, because it’s wasted on something you consider to be crap.

And that’s basically it.

You are never going to convince someone of anything regarding music that they don’t like by claiming that it’s clever.

I’ll give you my own example of clever, and you tell me. When Bob Dylan first started, he sounded like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWz88VY-FkA

The problem was, he wasn’t selling records. So he changed his voice to sound more like a blues singer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHMBs5yZDEc
And sure enough, he started selling records.

Now if you don’t like Dylans voice, I’ll never convince you that what he did was clever, and if you do like Dylan, it doesn’t matter how clever it was.

15

Ah - I am an idiot. I hadn’t looked closely enough. Once I saw sheet music, I had a guitarist’s instinctive reaction: to panic and shut down that webpage :wink:

I love both Rothko and Pollock, so, yeah - not going to go there. Now, someone like Jeff Koons, who is famous for making big sculptures that are meant to look like giant balloon animals, he walks a fine line. The balloon animals seem really stupid to me, even in person. But he has another large sculpture, Puppy, that really works IMHO in person. It’s big and monumental, but it’s a puppy, so you get that weird cognitive dissonance, kinda like Warhol depicting a soup can with all of the trappings of Great Art: koons puppy - Search He is attempting the same with his balloon animal sculptures, but one works for me and the other doesn’t.

I can’t listen to clips right now, but will go back and check out the links to Dylan. Not sure if that qualifies as clever vs. stupid.

16

Whether someone likes or dislikes X is a different matter. Although I suspect that it’s just a matter of time before the thread devolves into the usual “X is so cool!” vs “No, you’re so dumb, X is stupid!” slapfest.

We’re not there yet, though, so maybe we can get some more examples in. I think the more interesting cases is where you like something, and you’ll like it either way, but you still can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or dumb. It’s funny you should mention Dylan, since he’s like that for me at times.

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D.A. look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don’t try “No Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose

OK, that is either great poetry that was sweated over and revised endlessly, or just some weird stuff that Bob wrote down while drunk, on a napkin, in the back of a taxi, and then found the next day and decided to keep. It’s really hard to tell sometimes. I’m pretty sure that he employed both methods.

17

Seriously? I always thought it was “better stay away from those Carolina bayoes.”

Not that that makes any more sense.

Personally, I think Dylan has been fooling everyone for 50 years about how clever a songwriter he is (including himself). But that’s just my opinion. Even so, he straddles that line sometimes. And I like SHB!

18

I think these days we would say that Dylan had a good “flow” - like a rapper. If the flow is working, a lot of nuttiness is more than acceptable.

Martian - I used words like “I like” and “I dislike” - but what do you think of my Jeff Koons examples? In both cases, he is trying to jar our thinking by taking childish things and making them monumental - again, depicting them using the language of Great Art™. And both are dogs (he had done other balloon animal sculptures, but his most well-known is a dog) - koons balloon dog - Search

The Balloon Dog doesn’t work as well as the Puppy - IMHO, the former is “stupid” and the latter “clever.” As with Rothkos and Pollocks, it really is better if you see them in person, to take in their size, the level of craft that went into them, etc. But the Balloon Dog looks like some company could have manufactured it - like you could order a dozen of them, even that big, and have them delivered by Friday*. The Puppy looks like a shit-ton of work. For some reason all of that apparent effort, and the “hey, wouldja look at that - a big puppy!” reaction create that interesting dissonance.

*apparently the Balloon Animals are super-hard to make, require teams of metal craftsmen and plenty of rejects where Koons’s team has to start over. Again, that seems so ridiculous to me for the effect it delivers.

19

I resist the dichotomy. Or, rather, I think we (modern?) humans have a tendency to need to qualify the things we like or admire as being “smart” or “brilliant” . . . we justify and legitimize our opinions by insisting that the creators of art we like are visionary or somehow really smart.

I think that most of the time, good art is just an expression of something that felt right, cool, or satisfying to the artist, and is a synthesis of that artist’s experience up to that point, filtered through their chosen medium.

Sometimes that synthesis is interesting to the rest of us, and other times it isn’t, but very rarely is anything truly brilliant, or does a thing’s ‘cleverness’ rise to a level that is notable.

I don’t really know the music of Sonic Youth, but my guess is that their sound is something they fell into, and is not ‘clever’ in the sense that they put their mind to figuring something out. Bob Dylan writes the way he writes.

Very few of us can help but to be ourselves; is an artist who creates work in their own unique way clever, or just the same as the rest of us?

(Sorry to inject wishy-washy philosophy here, but to me, once a person decides to express themselves authentically, all analysis after that is in the eye of the beholder).

20

I found the Jackson Pollock simulator on the web and played around with it for a while (left-click to change the color). When I compared my “creations” with the real thing I was struck how lifeless mine were in comparison. Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t handling a physical medium but I think it’s more Pollock had something I lack.

Rothko I have no opinion.