Real Life Instruments

Posted by: EJSL on: December 29, 2010

In: Articles
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Part of the reason you get the perspective you do from The Five Percent Rule is not only because Gina & I are both female musicians, but because we’re female instrumentalists. We have both studied instrumental music in college, which is how we met, and so defending the idea of girls playing instruments (in a clearly visible way) is really important to us. Really, the idea of band members playing instruments is really important to us.

It’s bad enough that auto-tune makes it so that you don’t have to actually sing now (and this is a terrific blog about said offenses), but the idea that a really cool synth could supposedly replace any instrument is old news. This only gets worse as the years go on.

Aside from electronic instruments, there’s sort of an idea in indie rock that it’s cool to play non-standard rock instruments really sloppily. Let’s throw in a French horn you can’t hear. Let’s have a trumpet player who can’t really hit his notes on the first shot, and record them like that (ahem, Sufjan Stevens). Let’s have some really sloppy string players to sound cool. Let’s show that we have lots of real instruments onstage so we’ll look important but not really use them. We’ll have the place decorated like the walls of a T.G.I. Friday’s.

I think I subconsciously I seek out artists who really know how to make the best use of real instruments. I’m not looking for a wankering show of virtuosity (ahem, hair metal), or even playing the instrument for the instrument’s sake, but using the instrument effectively to truly add to a song’s sonic landscape.

Let me provide a few examples. One surprising non-offender in the indie world is Camera Obscura. I really love these lovesick Scots, and but I understood why after I played one of their songs for a music class of mine. A young trumpet player heard a particular brass section lick and said, “One day I want to play trumpet like that.” I didn’t realize until then that I was actually giving my kids a legitimate instrumental example that didn’t come from an educational CD set. Even with all of the swirling, 60s sunshine pop-esque strings Camera Obscura uses, I didn’t fully appreciate their effective use of real instruments. I do now. (They get 5% Rule love too, for being a band full of girls who not only play instruments but also write the songs.)

Even after reading the millions of year-end album? lists out there on the interwebz, pretty much all of my favorites come from old standbys, two of whom are Ben Folds and the Magnetic Fields. We could go on for days about Ben Folds’ musical proficiency, and not just on piano but on every instrument he touches, but it makes a difference. I can listen to him forever, and everyone in the world wants him to produce their albums because he is such a tremendous musician and just makes everything sound so good. And I think he’s also married to a real life string player now, which would make sense as the string arrangements on this year’s Lonely Avenue (the one for which Nick Hornby wrote the lyrics) all contribute to the songs rather than watering them down.

The Magnetic Fields are also an example of an indie band that makes really good use of instruments. There are some critics out there who nail Stephen Merritt & co. for being too cutesy, too nerdy, but those are the things I love about this band. Take for example the song “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree” off of their 2010 album Realism (named such because for their third effort in a row, they aren’t using any of the synthesizers they were known for on their first records). The only instruments played on the song are ukelele, temple blocks, cello and vibraphone. Sure some of the lyrics are a little on the odd side for popular music, but I love hearing real instruments played in an environment outside of classical music.

And unlike another band who got way more attention for their latest effort in 2010, (ahem, Arcade Fire!) Stephen Merritt knows to hire people who are good at playing their instruments. Yeah I said it! I’m not afraid to listen to artists who use properly tuned violins!

This ideal applies for me even in hip-hop. I enjoy a lot of hip-hop, but The Roots absolutely top them all, not just because their music is intelligent and creative, but they are unbelievably good instrumentalists. And they borrow from the old Brass Band tradition and use a sousaphone player to enhance their bass. Awesome. I will say without hesitation that they are the best live band I’ve ever seen.

I also love artists like David Bowie (you should see little cool kids’ faces light up when you tell them he plays the saxophone!), Tom Waits (recently announced he would be inducted into the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame! we love him for his love for marimbas!), and The Decemberists (best example of this, and more gorgeous vibraphone use, is “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground”) for their love for and employment of well played instruments.

Punk is punk, and maybe a lot of the modern music we love owes some influential debt to people who weren’t fantastic instrumentalists but went out, guns blazing, and played with passion anyway. But in some ways, it seems as if a lot of music has tilted too far in the direction that no one needs to play well, making it so that often people don’t care whether you can play or not. Apathy toward practice not only irks me in my professional life but makes me mad when I hear it in popular music. Playing your instrument, and playing it well, does make a difference. At least it does here at the Five Percent Rule.