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| “Oh! How ordinawy.” |
A little bit of an business/economics side track here:
In the USA the word ordinary is rarely a compliment. It’s usually taken to mean unexceptional, uninteresting, not that good. It’s not a word you apply to a product you want to sell in a crowded marketplace. We want everything to be extraordinary, extreme, incredibly good— incredibly something, incredibly anything.
There’s a British usage that is interesting: ordinary bitter is a popular style of beer, for example. In the movie Gosford Park there was a line: “We don’t have bourbon sir, we have Scotch and ordinary whiskey.”
The meaning in that case is not boring crap. It’s more about what is suitable and economical for daily consumption. Meaning, it needs to be accessible, pleasing, inexpensive. It’s worth thinking about the idea, to understand what we’re doing commercially as musicians and creative artists— clarity about what we’re making, what it’s for.
I don’t know if the word is only used in the alcoholic beverages industry, but that’s a convenient field for talking about it. Compare how Americans regard good beer, vs. Germany, the UK, or Czech Republic. American “craft brewers” are trying to figure out how to get more hops into the product; in the other countries people are drinking incredibly good, balanced, satisfying ordinary beer— the equivalent of Budweiser, except much better. Which is how it should be; it’s a people’s beverage with an important social component.
That carries over into European food generally; what’s good is usually simple, and made with fresh ingredients. Often it’s accessible to everyone. When things are taken to a high level, as in gourmet French cooking, it’s built around a deep culture and craft, and social culture of appreciation. Meanwhile Americans are dreaming of Chernobyl-Style Ghost Pepper Mule-Attack Fajitas.
A little bit of that is fun and OK, but over the last ~10 years that impulse became first the brainless pursuit of eternally more of whatever ingredient drew us to the thing in the first place (see IPAs); and more recently into just doing the wrongest thing possible— getting attention by making the worst combination of ingredients we can think of. See: the Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper ice cream offered by Salt & Straw, the current hip place. Then you go to Italy and discover you could happily live the rest of your life eating just the chocolate chip (stracciatella) offered at any gelateria in the country. People who live there already know that because they’ve been eating it since they were children, and it has always been great.
The extreme products thing relies on a consumer mentality of always seeking out the next extreme thing, at the expense of core life experience— which many Americans are lacking, because the ordinary available products are historically pretty crummy.
We could talk about music that is intended for regular repeated listening, vs. music that is meant to be a very intense or challenging listening experience. Some jazz acts you hear at festivals use overwhelming energy and complexity to stand out in immediate comparison with a lot of other good music. That’s how that music functions, the players are just doing what they do. It’s not really meant to be listened to day to day— you couldn’t, and don’t— it’s meant to be experienced live as a high performance act.
Pursuing that kind of thing without having any concept of normal great music, and of normal ways of playing— most people don’t play like that, they don’t want to play with people trying to play like that, they don’t want to listen to people trying to play like that… most of the time. The extreme high performance thing is a niche.
It raises some questions: what is playing great? Beyond just overwhelming abilities with difficult music. Why can I listen to some overwhelming music every day— McCoy Tyner, Live Evil— and I never want to listen to other overwhelming music. Segment from Dave Holland’s Triplicate, for example. There’s some kind of spiritual depth to the former, that’s missing from the latter, even with some of the same players. Why do I want to listen every day to some players who are never overwhelming? What do they have that the modern festival headliners don’t? What’s the difference between dense and exciting music that is listenable, vs. the other thing?
As a line of product, what I’m doing with my visual art could be called ordinary— I make paintings that are meant to be hung in people’s homes, and experienced daily, and enrich their lives over time. It’s abstract modern art that still offends some people, but I’m using the same basic visual language of the past 100 years of art— not unlike what we do in music. Contrasted with industrial scale art that is meant to hang in museums, or corporate environments, or in public spaces, or that is meant to rewrite art history, or be collected by billionaires, or challenge people’s idea of what art even is, or get over with people giving away grant money— that’s something else.