Inside Inni

As a birthday present, my family allowed me to sneak out last Wednesday night to attend a screening of Inni, the new Sigur Ros concert film.

There are two ways of going about judging important music, and the critics seem to have been up to their neck in judging important music for a while now, or ever since Rolling Stone decided that "important" was an actual adjective to describe something like music. The first way of judging is to say something like, "The Beatles forever changed the landscape of pop music, not only spurring imitators but setting the standard of how a pop song should be written bla bla bla Beatles so great, important." Radiohead gets this treatment a lot, and so now everything they put out has to be important or it will be a disappointment, hence the lukewarm reception of their recent album "The King of Limbs," a technically great album that is been already deemed forgettable for its failure to influence rather than be influenced by. 

The lesser way of judging important music is the way I am going to do it now. It was not influential, did not set a standard, did not alter the landscape of any genre. It was simply so singular that anytime I want to listen to its genre, I can't think of a single group, band, or individual that might satisfy that craving. This particular band would have to be a genre in and of itself--can't be imitated and there is really no way to extend influence from something so strange, otherworldly. This is what Sigur Ros is like.

The concert film, Inni, was, in due fashion, a singular experience. It is a bit hard to describe, and I am not going to. I assume there are people out there who don't know of Sigur Ros's music, and I envy them precisely because they will, at some point, be introduced to Sigur Ros and get to discover an album that is so different from anything else, and will be so different for years to come. Which means the band is not important in the way that its impact on the world is felt; instead, it is much more interesting, and appealing for someone who loves music--totally distinct, still incredibly beautiful, and wholly its own, a bit like Milton's Paradise Lost. Unduplicatable in any other genre, with any other author.