The 2000’s song Josh Homme used to stop fans from falling asleep: “It is abusively long”
When people think of the songs they like, they think of something which is enjoyable to listen to, but that’s not always the case, as Queens of the Stone Age proved.
In order to highlight the effectiveness of the band’s musicianship on their album Rated R, we need to go a little bit further back, all the way to the beginning of the 1900s. Here, a man named Luigi Russolo was writing a manifesto called The Art of Noise, in which he said that because of the new mechanical sounds which were becoming common due to the industrial revolution, people’s listening habits were going to change.
“Music originally sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound,” he wrote, “Musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines…the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.”
This ideology eventually gave rise to noise music; however, it wasn’t initially viewed as something that was merely a reflection of this new machine-based industry. Instead, people would go to noise music as a means of protest. It was free jazz-esque. Those who made it weren’t trying to create a sound that was pleasant; rather, the unpleasant nature of the sound was supposed to be a reflection of their disdain towards the world around them.
This initial ideology goes back decades, and since then, noise music has changed. Originally, it was supposed to be completely inaccessible, but then, it started to grow in popularity, as those listening were able to draw a variety of emotions from what they heard, and then started to create other pieces of noise music with said emotions in mind. Jonathan Snipes of the rap group Clipping, who incorporated noise into their sound a great deal, spoke about how much the genre had changed since its inception.
“The noise music scene is like a non-academic version of something that was academic,” he said, “You get the feeling that with a lot of early noise music there wasn’t a language to judge whether it was good or not: it was about the process and the act of doing this unlistenable thing and any result was acceptable. Then the next generation heard those recordings, developed taste in them and said, ‘Oh, let’s cut these together and make them beautiful’.”
This means that now, a lot of people will go ahead and make music which is unlistenable, but with the intention of trying to get a reaction out of their fans rather than shutting them out. It doesn’t necessarily have to be noise, but the effect is the same even if the stimulus alters. Out of tune notes, awkward sounding rhythm, tracks that seem to completely deviate from structure, they can all convey emotion and are used by different artists in a bid to get a rise out of their listeners.
This brings us back to Queens of the Stone Age. When they were making their record Rated R, while good rock music was at the forefront of their decision-making, they also decided to channel a more awkward style of music. When you listen to their track ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’, while it sounds as though the song may be your run-of-the-mill rock track, the band opt to make a few changes towards the end, which completely throws the listener off balance. With strange trumpets, lingering noise, a drawn-out section of randomness and essentially an outro that makes no sense, it sounds as though you’re listening to a soundcheck which has accidentally been added to the recording.
While this may come across as a mistake, it was all absolutely intentional, and Josh Homme explained the reason why. He simply wanted to keep the listener on their toes: “At that time, a lot of my friends and I would fall asleep to records,” he said, “I always wanted the end of the record to jar you loose, repeatedly tap you on the shoulder and tell you, like, ‘Ah!’ Because it is abusively long.”
