A Defense of Skratch Music (Round 2)
Let’s workshop this lyrical essay that aims to defend skratch music from some rather harsh assessments as to its beauty and impact on musical appreciation and society
A Defense of Skratch Music
. . . the planetary center the notes /
orbit. Scratch it easy, scratch it . . .
—“Slim’s Sonnet” by Jon Tribble
1. Introductory Remarks
A defiant orbit of notes among the countless planetary rhythms, skratch music follows a practice—marginal, but dating back to the 1940s—of reimagining the turntable as a musical instrument. Its characteristic sound is frictional (yes, scratchy), a brick-cracking testament to its unfiltered and untamed origins in the bombed-out wastelands of the 1970’s Bronx: truant-of-the-hill trash heaps rotting each dystopic intersection, the gang buildings behind them often either abandoned by the middle-class exodus or torched to rubble—and quite easily, with fire stations derelict over a decimated tax base—by landlords hoping to extract insurance payouts on the ever-plummeting property value.
Unlike what we have seen with other avantgarde forms of music such jazz (whose challenges to the conventional soundscape, to our aural norms and preconceptions, drew much scholarly ridicule), no sustained criticism of skratch music has appeared in academic journals (or even in personal blogs, as far as I am aware). There is, I feel, a rather brutal reason for the sidestepping: skratch music is deemed so pathetic—both in musical sophistication and mass appeal—that cornering it with criticism seems no more worth our time than punching down at the javelin-throwing styles of special Olympians. But however undeveloped it might be, many people do harbor disdain. Disdain, revealing itself again and again in casual dismissals, is what once provoked a pianist friend of mine to scoff, “You must be joking,” as I nodded with a squinted brow—“Damn this shit’s ill, right?”—to the phrasings of D-Styles and Qbert. Disdain is what provokes everyday people in parking lots to say, “Turn that noise down”—yes, even when I bump what I regard as a masterpiece: Toadstyle’s “Switchblade Sermons.”
My aim in what follows is twofold. First, I hope to bring out of latency the reasons for the disdain of skratch music, giving solid voice to the silent reservations many hold against this beloved genre of mine. Second, I hope to highlight the redeemable qualities of skratch music that, when approached with an open mind, stand out in spite of its limitations.
2. The Critique
What is the problem with skratch music? Let us start with the basics. Predominantly improvisational (a rebellion against the intricate tidiness of heady premeditation), here rhythm takes center stage—harmony among pitches largely neglected. Chords unlikely to grace the soundscape, only one pitch tends to resound at any one slice of time. Its range of pitch, and so range of melodies (rhythmic strings of pitch), are highly circumscribed. It is also “destructive” by its very nature, one might say: stylus needles, often weighed down with coins and batteries to prevent skips, are dragged back and forth over record grooves children are taught never to grease with bare fingers.
Considered radical for such reasons, skratch music—banal, beneath the surface—merely passes itself off as radical. One becomes a virtuoso by mastering syncopation, executing phrases in broken cadence and queer accent, coming in strong on a weak beat, weak on a strong—and then surprising us by doing precisely the opposite. But for all its quasi-jazz phrasings of child’s play, its basic pulse seldom strays from the signature of the four-four cliché. The beat loops with the mechanized precision of the assembly line, almost never progressing (through emotions, through narrative) along the way. The phrasings overtop the on and on, rudimentary and rehashed, resemble the tricks—the ollies and kickflips—of a skateboarder. More about the hacks of showmanship than the practiced artistry of music, there are, in fact, encyclopedias of skratch techniques that each “skratcher” trains to learn: flares and orbits and chirps and prisms and tazers and transformers. So-called “freestyles” amount merely to pluckings from this standardized bag of tricks, in which case the improvisations are largely regurgitative shams.
Skratch enthusiasts might mock the new devices today, which allow one to execute these tricks with a press of a button. The mockery, however, really amounts to violence at the mirror these button-pressers hold up to their faces, the mirror that forces them to confront the disconcerting realization that they themselves are doing little more talent-worthy than the button-pressers—a difference in degree, not kind. Such defensive derision is as transparent and pathetic as the mind-scientist or psychic or ghost hunter who ridicules other mind-scientists or psychics or ghost hunters for being charlatans: too unskeptical, too unscientific. It is just a way to make themselves seem to have the legitimacy they rightfully fear they lack. It is just a defense mechanism to mask from themselves the truth in their hearts: that they are charlatans too.
And speaking of tricks, it is not uncommon—although this is more true in the early days—for skratch performers to incorporate visual gimmicks known as “body tricks” into their routines: full-body spins, one arm behind the back, crossfader manipulation with the mouth, wiggling the record with their nose, and so forth. Neglected for decades in private and public (and this is coming after centuries of slavery in the case of the main drivers of skratch culture), is it any wonder that these marginalized—and, on several measures, underdeveloped—people would feel the need to impress, driven by the validation-seeking air of “Look what I can do?” But whatever empathetic reasons we can give to explain why these have-nots would want to showboat like this (and I believe it is connected with why they would want to sport gold chains and drive expensive cars even though they live in project housing), the unfortunate point still stands: these “musicians”—“Watch how I can do this skratch with no hands!”—are putting themselves above the music.
Although prized in skratch culture (as in the larger hip-hop and US cultures in which it is rooted), individuality is liquidated—mass-produced—as everyone learns the same tricks. Skratch music perpetuates the mass-produced individuality rampant under capitalism, where one’s specialness becomes reduced to mere outward signs available for purchase: “My hipster features (beard, flannel) make me unique.” “My urban features (Jordans, FUBU) make me unique.” Skratchers work, to boot, almost exclusively with Roger Trilling’s “aahh” and “fresh” vocoder samples. The whole enterprise is formulaic, never providing a true challenge to our sensibilities—a mere sip of cough syrup compared to the heroic dose of shrooms we get from the heights of, say, classical music or even just progressive rock.
The predictable “aahh” and “fresh,” combined with the predictable tricks repeated in predictable patterns over mechanical beats, leave little room for surprise. Skratch music, in effect, carries us to a place—home—freed from the demands of active listening, freed since we know what lies ahead. It is not tough work and can never edify the highest aspects of ourselves like, say, Bach can: challenging our attention, expanding our intellect, tugging at our heartstrings. Skratching may not have wide appeal, but it caters to the formula required for wide appeal in a society exhausted from work, averse to change, and unwilling to take risks (or even to dream of any). One-dimensional, leveled, and lacking in transformative power that can elevate our souls, skratching is digestible for those of us who eat at drive-thrus (and get the same meals), those of us who only like to renew old encounters, those of us who are trained to want only what we have grown accustomed to. It speaks to the collective consciousness that prefers repetition over experimentation, mirroring the all-too-common fan of a certain group who demands the very same hit—“Light My Fire”—over and over and becomes enraged if the group, through changing direction, acts like an uncooperative piece of property: a piece impermanent and out of the owner’s control.
Skratch music dilutes musical artistry to the point that listeners are at risk of no longer caring about actual talent. As we see with the more typical forms of pop music, listeners of scratch music—and even the performers themselves—succumb to passivity, lulled away from even rudimentary contemplative engagement by the baby food digestibility: precisely what a fatigued and fearful society craves. Skratching ends up mirroring the routinized rhythm most of us keep: rise, eat, drive, work, eat, drive, sleep. It fails to challenge a life of novelty-fearing repressive rigidity. Conformist music in nonconformist masquerade, skratching feeds that life.
When evaluating any artform, a constellation of questions come on the table. What does it say about the culture from which it springs? Does it signal regression of our musical understanding and appreciation, a dumbing of our mental powers? Does it resist the commodity nature of other art? Does it ignite emancipatory urges? Does it alter, or express any need to alter, our situation? Does it expose our ailments? Does it contest them or leave them in place? Might it even hide them, inhibiting critical discourse? Does it imperil individuality? The answers to these questions in the case of skratch music does not bolster its appeal. The genre cannot help but reflect the mode of life characteristic of metropolises like NYC, where each person—absorbed in routines of superficial interactions—blends with every other person into a conformist mass of mediocre homogeneity, a go-go-go mass incapable of deep self-reflection: Heidegger’s “das Man” (“the They" or “the One"). It cannot help but reflect, more specifically, the unfortunately stunted nature of the lower classes who created it.
Skratch music, at best, might be said to stand as a testament to human creativity, resilience, and the indomitable spirit of a broken community that refused to be beaten down. “The gritty sounds,” one might continue, “represent the spirit of a community that, even in the face of adversity, found a way to make its voice heard.” But just as playing a cello with ones feet (or doing “body tricks” while “beat juggling”) might be an impressive feat, that in itself has no bearing on whether the music itself is any good. It is sad, yes, that the Bronx of the 1970s seemed forsaken by the outside world. And it is touching that its broken people could repurpose a device meant for passive consumption into an active instrument of expression. But one should be cautious about equating the context or the backstory with the quality of the output: just because the little girl on stage has Down syndrome does not make her any good at singing. Emotion, technical skill, innovation, and cultural impact—these are the more relevant metrics of evaluation. Does the music itself stand up to scrutiny when separated from underdog roots? It seems not.
3. My Response
The above criticisms seem to presuppose that skratch music harbors imperialist ambitions, as if it dreams of being the only form of music. If skratching, a narrow form with specific idiosyncrasies, aimed to be the only form, then yes—it would threaten our power to understand music (and perhaps everything else that was said). But musicians do not generally believe that their genre should be the only genre. Propagating the presupposition that skratch music has hegemonic aims to be the singular representation of music—that is the true problem.
Rather than threatening to breed exclusionary conformism (a monochrome audioscape of skratch), skratch music simply offers a distinct perspective—one not to be dismissed on grounds that it fails to meet the standards of other perspectives. Perhaps more than blues before it, skratch music is limited in vocabulary. Fine. But thin dimensionality is no reason to condemn it. One might argue that minimalism in visual arts or haikus in literature lack depth due to their simplicity and structure. However, it is within these constraints that creators find a unique space to express, innovate, and push boundaries. Similarly, skratch music, with its rhythmic focus and improvisational nature, offers a distinct experience adding to the multifaceted universe of music.
The relatively thin dimensionality of skratch music is more a reason for appreciating how, on the one hand, other forms go beyond its confines and how, on the other hand, it manages to do so much with such a poverty of resources—a power reflective of the dynamic spirit of the rejected communities (black, brown, and white too) from which it sprang. Think of black-and-white photography. We do not ridicule it for its lack of color any more than we ridicule impressionist paintings for its failure to capture in the manner of a camera. In addition to opening us up to appreciate the distinct power of color photography, black-and-white photography opens us up to appreciate the unique ways of capturing light, contrast, and nuance.
Skratch music explores countless possibilities within its narrow range. One thinks of the virtuosity of blues musicians working with just one guitar string. It takes courage to try to create so much with so little—a barometer of true mastery. It takes creativity to delve deep where constraints, spurs to exploration and innovation, prevent going wide. As Goethe wisely said, “In limitations, the master shows himself."
Skratch music opens up novelty in the way that a microscope opens up a hidden world: the whole hand disappears, yes—but look what pops out in the individual cell! More constrained forms make concrete what for more open forms is virtual. They make more tangible, more actual, the richness doomed to remain relatively latent in less constrained forms. Look at it this way. The key elements of painting (line, shape, color, stroke), although present in classical painting, pop out with new intensity in abstract painting, where they stand more alone and amplified, unsubsumed in, say, the representational tree or lake of Biva’s “Water’s Edge.” Likewise, the key elements of music (cadence, repetition, accent), although present in classical music, pop out with new intensity in skratch music, where they stand more alone and amplified, unsubsumed in, say, the storyline or many voices of Strauss’s “Don Juan.”
At a remove, skratch music is—as with blues—predictable, cliché. From a distance each mountain tree looks alike—each lion face, each language, each white person, even each piece of classical music! But zoom in and individual elements, peculiar proclamations, bloom into vibrant texture: the peculiar pattern of the dipped Wallabees, say. The peculiar twirl of a specific hipster’s mustache would not pop as well were it not for the constraint: the hipster boilerplate of males wearing facial hair. Those not hip to hipsterism will slur over that tweak. The same holds true for poetry, where established forms provide the canvas upon which individuality pops. Between two things, what would stand out as unique were nothing in common between them?
As humans born virtually identical at the gene level, we all fulfill a stereotype; we are all formulaic—as uniform as a vast desert under a noon sun. The same argument as to how mediocre and repetitive and bland skratch music is can be made for all of humanity given the right distance. To a space alien, humans—like their diverse languages—likely all appear the same, as ants do to us or as all beings (stars, cars) can for the metaphysician. Belonging to a type, skratch music—like every human (from Goethe to a low-functioning autistic)—is formulaic. And yet each piece is a distinct token.
So no, skratch music does not dilute our appreciation for musical talent. Raw and gritty, it opens our hearts and minds to a more constrained aspect of musical talent. In the grand concert of diverse musical forms, skratching enrichens us. Only from a removed perspective, coupled with the false notion that the skratch genre aims to be hegemonic, does it make sense to conclude that skratch music breeds conformity, reconciling the listener to the existing social order and retarding their musical and critical capacities. Skratch music, instead, is one of many vibrant hues in the vast spectrum of musical expression.
This lyrical essay is unpublished