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Where the
Spoken Play: Self-Titled
Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher and student of Martin Heidegger and of Karl Jaspers believed that the evil of Nazism lay not in its radical evil, but rather in the banality of that evil. In her coverage of the Eichmanns trial in Jerusalem, she noticed that the notorious Nazi killer was not motivated in the same way that many wide-eyed true believers were; that is, he did not believe what he was doing was right and good, rather he did out of bureaucratic necessity. Eichmann and other Nazis crimes were not in their sadism and anti-Semitism, but rather in their willingness to not think through their orders and use their own sense to parse the obviously evil orders emanating from their Fuehrer. Arendt may or may not have been correct in her appraisal of the Nazi war criminals, but the important point is her expression of the often banal character of evil. Some things or people may not be awesomely evil; rather they may make an accumulation of oversights and bad judgments that down the line will lead to manifestly evil acts. The London-based band Where the Spoken Play is not evil however, not even in the banal sense of the word. Music, necessarily lacking the ethical character of much behavior can only be judged on the merits of its relationship to standards of art, not morality. Art can be good or bad, but not in the same sense as a person can be good or bad. While the goodness or badness of a person may be related to his or her deviation from an ideal standard of right conduct, music is and should be judged by its deviation from the standard of ideal music. No one can probably articulate what exactly this standard is, but this does not stop us from judging music anyway. Where the Spoken Play is probably as banally a bad band as there could be. In fact, one might say that this band is awesome in its banality. It should be held up to the world as an example of banal music; and for this, I suppose they should also be admired in a perverse sense. They are not awesomely bad as some bands are, they do not make the grand mistakes that can only come from a willfulness to eschew quality. Rather, in trying to create art, and while probably starting from the right place, they make a misstep here and a misstep there that, at the end of the day, leaves their music with a lack of quality that is as strong as it is puzzling. It is puzzling, because this band has many of the features that a good band would want: often strong songwriting skill and a dynamic musical interplay. What they lack, however, is good judgment and the willingness to take the risks that are necessary in the creation of good art. Their songs, often beginning strongly and with promise will continuously devolve into ponderous and pointless repetitions of themes that were uninteresting at the start and become downright annoying towards the end. Unwilling to tell the big lie that art often demands, this band is stuck in a musical limbo of mediocrity without the virtues that could take it into the upper regions and without the mortal sins that would send it below. In short, this band is interesting as an exercise in pointlessness. Its musical value, however, is questionable.
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