Anti-Climacus

LINK: Dead Flowers with some Soundcheck songs by the Smiths.

With a band like the Smiths, the final product as it appears on a record is often the sum of many parts. As a result, it's difficult to pull apart a track and get a sense of how the song is constructed. Demos and soundchecks are interesting because you can follow along with the musician and begin to get a sense of what he thinks he's doing as he plays. The track for "There is a Light That Never Goes Out" is a good example: deprived of the (really excellent) studio additions, there's only the movement of one guitar, and in that movement, somewhere, is the part of the song Johnny Marr thinks is essential.

This is part of the reason I find conference papers and articles (before they're turned into books) so interesting. The environment of book- or dissertation-writing allows you to do a good number of things not available to you otherwise--to move through a topic thoroughly, and at length; and to control the experience of your reader in ways that flatter your methodological and substantive predilictions. In a conference paper, by contrast, I think you can generally only make one point*, and the form requires you to make some judgments about what's essential and what can be put aside.



*If you're a graduate student, anyway, I think you're better off trying to say one thing well than many things (with any level of quality), but I grant this may change over time