What’s more important, catering to a person’s mood or their genre of choice?

Some mornings I wake up and wonder what Elliott Smith thought of twee pop, or what members of The Boy Least Likely To think of Skip James. Would “Killing Me Softly” era Roberta Flack have dug cuddlecore? Did Van Halen slam to Woody Guthrie at galas? Are Jay-Z and Lily Allen sipping Cristal to the sounds of Espers or Brightblack Morning Light?

If these artists were music critics, would they have (had) the strength to maintain objectivity, despite the heartache and trauma or the happiness and triumph before and after them? I doubt it, and I know I’m broaching a heavily debated issue pertaining to art, one that I should not attempt in fewer than 500 words, but this is one of those mornings and the music is on my mind.

Coincidentally, it’s also on my computer. The good fellows over at Said The Gramophone turned me onto Stone Jack Jones late last year and I haven’t known how to write about him since. I find myself grinning as “Smile,” the first track from Jones’s latest album, Bluefolk, gently streams through my speakers. After listening to five seconds of this song anyone will tell you it is not by any stretch of the imagination instinctively grin-inducing. So why am I smiling? I’m not the kind of person who revels in another’s misery; I don’t have an “A Minor” chord tattooed on my neck; I don’t bathe in sheep’s blood.

In all my attempts to convey what the handful songs that cause me to burst into tears or hysterics accomplish, I have never mentioned what they don’t. These songs aren’t powerful, they are power.

I mentioned genre earlier, but I’m not trying to recreate genre theory. I’ll be the first to admit I’m no Rick Altman. But there’s more at work here, I think, than this inclusive/exclusive (genre/mood) approach to music analysis; there’s more than “audience and institution.” There is ubiquity. There is timelessness. There are the unspoken hauntings we experience in every experience, in every breath, independent of whether it’s our first or last. Some songs remind us there’s more than the subjectivity the post-modernists would have us believe in, and it’s not a contest, a race to find some alleged “answer,” because I don’t think one exists either. But at times there are songs, and they are music, and they are us, and we are them. Goo goo g’joob.

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