Pitchforkmedia, bastion of flowery independent music reviews, has posted a feature by comedian David Cross (of Mr. Show with Bob and David fame) entitled Albums to Listen to While Reading Overwrought Pitchfork Reviews. It’s funny, and besides picking on Pitchfork for their sometimes elaborate-to-the-point-of-nonsensical reviews, it diagnoses a symptom that has seemingly become endemic to the serious independent music scene, a kind of impossible completist syndrome that has given way to the oft-heard accusation of “music snobbery.”

May I suggest listening to Until it Happens/You Let it Happen, by Maximum Minimum. The fourth album (not counting the re-release of the first three 7-inches on HugTown Records) reaffirms the band’s status as the godfathers of the Taos, N.M. “crying scene.” Like a gilded phoenix rising from the toxic ashes of the death of mercurial lead guitarist, Peter Chernin, Maximum Minimum snarls back like a taunted tiger on steroids (also on acid).

There is something definitively psychological about this kind of completist syndrome in music. In this article, it is suggested that completism stems (perhaps originally) from a “part of the nature of improvisation that breeds the completist in us,” vis à vis jazz. Sumera seems to think that it stops there, though: “There are not too many pop completists out there. The ephemerality of the music cannot sustain the interest of the completist syndrome.” As it were, the Pitchfork scene and your friends deftly testify to the mistakenness of this.

The completist urge is doubtless a radicalization of the simple collector’s urge. It’s not enough (though it is great) to keep listening to Dusk at Cubist Castle when Mississippi Luau exists too. And thousands more. Doubtless, one tries to hold together the indefinite and constantly surging history of a genre, a style, an artist - one thinks these things historiologically. A touching example of this completist phenomenon is the fabulous John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame. But why? Why is enough never enough?

Humor and philosophy are all tied up. Things that we know are true and scare us make us laugh. Sometimes it’s the only reaction that can save us.

It’s no mistake that Heidegger makes his most substantial mention of Nietzsche in Sein und Zeit under the heading of historicality (See: Mcquarrie translation, Part II Section 5, ¶76, 448-49/396-97.)

The beginning of his [Nietzsche’s] ’study’ [On the Use and Abuse of History] allows us to suppose that he understood more than he has made known to us.
…
But the ground on which authentic historiology is founded is temporality as the existential meaning of the Being of care.

That is, our discourse on history is grounded in our existential temporality, being futural, being-toward-death. And indeed, according to Heidegger, on the anxiety that would paralyze us in the face of a death which is each time ours alone. In the face of this anxiety, the state of what Heidegger calls “inauthentic” Dasein is something akin to the frantic forgetting of its futural being, a plunge eyes closed into the quiet waters of Das Man: the world of measure - clocks, calendars, investment, record collecting. And with David Cross, we laugh at the extensivity with which this plays itself out. As Camus once quipped, “When one has no character one has to apply a method.”

Meanwhile, 1892, Turin. Nietzsche, in the early throes of paralysis progressiva, (he was paralyzed for the last 11 years of his life - during the last seven he could not speak) only repeated phrases: “I am dead because I am stupid,” or else simply “in short, dead.” During those last seven years, eyes wide open, he perhaps lived death as few have - a model of courage for Heidegger’s “authentic” Dasein - registered a silent laugh at the very thing from which we distract ourselves until we are overtaken with it, eyes wide open.

In one of his last meaningful correspondences in 1889, a letter to Peter Gast (a composer who moved to Basel in 1875 to study under Nietzsche and Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche’s “editor” and proofreader in 1876) he wrote:

To my maëstro Pietro:
Sing me a new song: The world is transfigured and all
the heavens are full of joy.

The Crucified