Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?
No one can.If mortals die, will they live again?
All the days of my service I would wait
until my release should come.– Job 14:4,14
Corey Greenberg is a journalist and reviewer of stereo equipment. In this day and age of mobile technology and digital streaming, it might seem quaint that there are people out there not only using playback systems that require furniture to function properly but actually taking the time to do a book report on those systems. But someone out there has to continue to advocate for ways of listening that don’t simply approximate music based on the probability of what music might be, generated from a set of digits transmitted wirelessly.
If anyone understands that listening to music is not an approximation of an experience but the experience itself, that person is Corey Greenberg. For a long time, his specialty was less expensive, more accessible equipment. The kind that I can afford. His source material for testing was also, by some criteria, more pedestrian that of his colleagues. While one might use a recording of Yo-Yo Ma performing of J.S. Bach’s Suite for Cello No. 1 as source material for a review, Greenberg was as likely to use Mark Knopfler’s guitar solo from Telegraph Road.
Not that either Corey Greenberg or I would argue against listening to Yo-Yo Ma. Indeed, I (and I am willing to bet he) have been moved to my core by a cello performance, but it was not the mere fact that the music was performed on a particular instrument that moved me. Of course it was not, and there are pieces of music and pieces of equipment that I recognize are technical marvels but which I have no interest in listening to. (See, for instance, much of the work of King Crimson.)
So why do we get so wrapped up in technological perfection? not just in stereo equipment but in so many areas of life. We are constantly suckered in by the idea that a piece of technology is going to empower us to achieve some arbitrary ideal when such an ideal ignores the very real differences that make individual humans beloved. The diet book industry must be pissed as hell that Fit Bit, Oura Ring, and Whoop exist, and someone is going to need to explain to me how increasing my anxiety over a “sleep score” is going to help me rest.
We are trapped in psychosocial finger cuffs, and the more we pull, the harder it is to get free. We are not going to get out of this on our own. We need a liberator, someone who does not denigrate the things that make us human but frees us from the hell of a self-refential self-help culture that is ultimately self-sabotaging. The harrowing of hell is as eternal as everlasting life; it is a process that is always liberating us from within, at this very moment.
So what does that look like? What is the Body Mass Index of a liberated person? In the words of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, the question is moot. The question is not the size of the ass, it is whether or not the ass is shaking. In a discussion about equipment and source material, Corey Greenberg introduced a concept that I have applied to more and more areas of my life. He argued that the 1976 album, “Bogalusa Boogie” by Clifton Chenier is such a life-giving record that it should be impossible to stay seated when it is played. Technology cannot improve the experience of listening to “Bogalusa Boogie”. It can only impede the experience. In other words, “If you can’t shake your ass to Clifton Chenier, your system sucks.”