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spilledreality · 4 years

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Sporting vs Herding

I wanna talk about two blogposts, Seph's "War Over Being Nice” and Alastair's "Of Triggering & the Triggered." Each lays out the same erisological idea: that there are two distinct modes or cultures of running discourse these days, and understanding the difference is crucial to understanding the content of conversation as much as its form. Let's go.

One style, Alastair writes, is indebted to the Greco-Roman rhetorical and 19th C British sporting traditions. A debate takes place in a "heterotopic" arena which is governed by an ethos of adversarial collaboration and sportsmanship. It is waged in a detached and impersonal manner, e.g. in American debate club, which inherits from these older traditions, you are assigned a side to argue; your position is not some "authentic" expression of self. Alastair:

This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.

All in all, it is a mark against one in these debates to take an argument personally, to allow arguments that happen "in the arena" to leave the arena. This mode of discourse I see exemplified in LessWrong culture, and is, I think, one of the primary attractors to the site.In the second mode of discourse, inoffensiveness, agreement, and inclusivity are emphasized, and positions are seen as closely associated with their proponents. Alastair speculates it originates in an educational setting which values cooperation, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, affirmation, and subordination; this may be true, but I feel less confident in it than I am the larger claim about discursive modes. Provocatively, the two modes are dubbed "sporting" and "herding," with all the implications of, on the one hand, individual agents engaged in ritualized, healthy simulations of combat, and on the other, of quasi-non-agents shepherded in a coordinated, bounded, highly constrained and circumscribed epistemic landscape. Recall, if you are tempted to blame this all on the postmodernists, that this is exactly the opposite of their emphasis toward the "adult" realities of relativism, nebulosity, flux. Queer Theory has long advocated for the dissolution of gendered and racial identity, not the reification of identitarian handles we see now, which is QT's bastardization. We might believe these positions were taken too far, but they are ultimately about complicating the world and removing the structuralist comforts of certainty and dichotomy. (Structureless worlds are inherently hostile to rear children in, and also for most human life; see also the Kegan stages for a similar idea.)

In the erisological vein, Alastair provides a portrait of the collision between the sporting and herding modes. Arguments that fly in one discursive style (taking offence, emotional injury, legitimation-by-feeling) absolutely do not fly in the other:

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge.

ii.

Seph stumbles upon a similar division, though it is less about discursive and argumentative modes, and more about social norms for emotional regulation and responsibility. He calls them Culture A and Culture B, mirroring sporting and herding styles, respectively.

In culture A, everyone is responsible for their own feelings. People say mean stuff all the time—teasing and jostling each other for fun and to get a rise. Occasionally someone gets upset. When that happens, there's usually no repercussions for the perpetrator. If someone gets consistently upset when the same topic is brought up, they will either eventually stop getting upset or the people around them will learn to avoid that topic. Verbally expressing anger at someone is tolerated. It is better to be honest than polite.

In such a culture, respect and status typically comes from performance; Seph quotes the maxim "If you can't sell shit, you are shit." We can see a commonality with sporting in that there is some shared goal which is attained specifically through adversarial play, such that some degree of interpersonal hostility is tolerated or even sought. Conflict is settled openly and explicitly.

In culture B, everyone is responsible for the feelings of others. At social gatherings everyone should feel safe and comfortable. After all, part of the point of having a community is to collectively care for the emotional wellbeing of the community's members. For this reason its seen as an act of violence against the community for your actions or speech to result in someone becoming upset, or if you make people feel uncomfortable or anxious. This comes with strong repercussions—the perpetrator is expected to make things right. An apology isn't necessarily good enough here—to heal the wound, the perpetrator needs to make group participants once again feel nurtured and safe in the group. If they don't do that, they are a toxic element to the group's cohesion and may no longer be welcome in the group. It is better to be polite than honest. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, it is better to say nothing at all.

In such a culture, status and respect come from your contribution to group cohesion and safety; Seph cites the maxim "Be someone your coworkers enjoy working with." But Seph's argument pushes back, fruitfully, on descriptions of Culture B as collaborative (which involve high self-assertion); rather, he writes, they are accommodating in the Thomas-Kilmann modes of conflict sense:

iii.

Seph and Alastair both gesture toward the way these modes feel gendered, with Culture A more "masculinized" and Culture B more "feminized."[1] While this seems important to note, given that a massive, historically unprecedented labor shift toward coed co-working has recently occured in the Western world, I don't see much point in hashing out a nature vs. nurture, gender essentialism debate here, so you can pick your side and project it. This is also perhaps interesting from the frame of American feminist history: early waves of feminism were very much about escaping the domestic sphere and entering the public sphere; there is an argument to be made that contemporary feminisms, now that they have successfully entered it, are dedicated to domesticating the public sphere into a more comfortable zone. Culture B, for instance, might well be wholly appropriate to the social setting of a living room, among acquaintances who don't know each other well; indeed, it feels much like the kind of aristocratic parlor culture of the same 19th C Britain that the sporting mode also thrived in, side-by-side. And to some extent, Culture A is often what gets called toxic masculinity; see Mad Men for a depiction.

(On the topic of domestication of the workplace: We've seen an increased blurring of the work-life separation; the mantra "lean-in" has been outcompeted by "decrease office hostility"; business attire has slid into informality, etiquette has been subsumed into ethics, dogs are allowed in the workplace. Obviously these changes are not driven by women's entrance into the workplace alone; the tech sector has had an enormous role in killing both business attire and the home-office divide, despite being almost entirely male in composition. And equally obvious, there is an enormous amount of inter- and intra-business competition in tech, which is both consistently cited by exiting employees as a hostile work environment, and has also managed to drive an outsized portion of global innovation the past few decades—thus cultural domestication is not at all perfectly correlated with a switch from Culture A to B. Draw from these speculations what you will.)

There are other origins for the kind of distinctions Seph and Alastair draw; one worthwhile comparison might be Nietzsche's master and slave moralities. The former mode emphasizes power and achievement, the other empathy, cooperation, and compassion. (Capitalism and communitarianism fall under some of the same, higher-level ideological patterns.) There are differences of course: the master moralist is "beyond" good and evil, or suffering and flourishing, whereas Culture A and B might both see themselves as dealing with questions of suffering but in very different ways. But the "slave revolt in morality" overwrote an aristocratic detachment or "aboveness" that we today might see as deeply immoral or inhuman; it is neither surprising nor damning that a revolting proletariat—the class which suffered most of the evils of the world—would speak from a place of one-to-one, attached self-advocacy. One can switch "sides" or "baskets" of the arena each half or quarter because they are impersonal targets in a public commons; one cannot so easily hold the same attitude toward defending one's home. This alone may indicate we should be more sympathetic to the communitarian mode than we might be inclined to be; certainly, those who advocate and embody this mode make plausible claims to being a similar, embattled and embittered class. A friend who I discussed these texts with argued that one failure mode of the rationalist community is an "unmooring" from the real concerns of human beings, slipping into an idealized, logical world modeled on self-similarity (i.e. highly Culture A, thinking over feeling in the Big 5 vocabulary), in a way that is blind to the realities of the larger population.

But there are also grave problems for such a discursive mode, especially when it becomes dominant. Because while on the surface, discursive battles in the sporting mode can appear to be battles between people, they are in reality battles between ideas.

iv.

As Mill argued in On Liberty, free discourse is crucial because it acts as a social steering mechanism: should we make a mistake in our course, freedom of discourse is the instrument for correcting it. But the mistake of losing free discourse is very hard to come back from; it must be fought for again, before other ideals can be pursued.

Moreover, freedom of discourse is the means of rigorizing ideas before they are implemented, such as to avoid catastrophe. Anyone familiar with James Scott's Seeing Like A State, or Hayek's arguments for decentralized market intelligence, or a million other arguments against overhaulism, knows how difficult it is to engineer a social intervention that works as intended: the unforeseen, second-order effects; our inability to model complex systems and human psychology. Good intent is not remotely enough, and the herding approach cannot help but lower the standard of thinking and discourse emerging from such communities, which become more demographically powerful even as their ideas become worse (the two are tied up inextricably).

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.

And on the strength of sporting approaches in rigorizing discourse:

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue

Thus those who wish us to accept their conceptual carvings or political advocacies without question or challenge are avoiding short-term emotional discomfort at the price of their own long-term flourishing, at the cost of finding working and stable social solutions to problems. Standpoint epistemology correctly holds that individuals possess privileged knowledge as to what it's like (in the Nagel sense) to hold their social identities. But it is often wrongly extended, in the popular game of informational corruption called "Telephone" or "Chinese Whispers," as arguing that such individuals also possess unassailable and unchallengeable insight into the proper societal solutions to their grievances. We can imagine a patient walking into the doctor's office; the doctor cannot plausibly tell him there is no pain in his leg, if he claims there is, but the same doctor can recommend treatment, or provide evidence as to whether the pain is physical or psychosomatic.A lack of discursive rigour would not be a problem, Alastair writes, "were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing."

As for myself, it was not too long ago I graduated from a university in which a conflict between these modes is ongoing. We had a required course called

Contemporary Civilization

, founded in the wake of World War I, which focused on the last 2,000 years of philosophy, seminar-style: a little bit of introductory lecture, but most of the 2 x 2-hour sessions each week were filled by students arguing with one other. In other words, its founding ethos was of sporting and adversarial collaboration.We also had a number of breakdowns where several students simply could not handle this mode: they would begin crying, or say they couldn't deal with the [insert atmosphere adjective] in the room, and would either transfer out or speak to the professor. While they were not largely representative, they required catering to, and no one wished to upset these students. I have heard we were a fortunate class insofar as we had a small handful of students willing to engage sporting-style, or skeptical a priori of the dominant political ideology at the school. When, in one session, a socialist son of a Saudi billionaire, wearing a $10,000 watch and a camel-hair cashmere sweater, pontificated about "burning the money, reverting to a barter system, and killing the bosses," folks in class would mention that true barter systems were virtually unprecedented in post-agricultural societies, and basically unworkable at scale. In other classes, though, when arguments like these were made—which, taken literally, are logically irrational, but instead justify themselves through sentiment, a legitimation of driving emotion rather than explicit content, in the Culture B sense—other students apparently nodded sagely from the back of the room, "yes, and-ing" one another til their noses ran. Well, I wanted to lay out the styles with some neutrality, but I suppose it's clear now where my sympathies stand.

[1] It should go without saying, but to cover my bases, these modes feeling "feminized" or "masculinized" does not imply that all women, or women inherently, engage in one mode while all men inherently engage in another. Seph cites Camille Paglia as an archetypal example of a Culture A woman, and while she may fall to the extreme side of the Culture A mode, I'd argue most female intellectuals of the 20th C (at least those operated outside the sphere of feminist discourse) were strongly sporting-types: Sontag, for instance, was vociferous and unrelenting.

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doomedandstoned · 6 years

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Portland’s Eight Bells Ready for Psycho Las Vegas

~Interview by Jamie LaRose~

If you haven’t caught Oregon’s EIGHT BELLS yet, your chance is coming up at the Psycho Las Vegas, where they play on Sunday, August 19th. Some of the bands playing Psycho this year are Dimmu Borgir, Danzig, Red Fang and Wolves in the Throne Room. Eight Bells has long been held together by the very talented Melynda Jackson, who has given life and beauty to this emotional masterpiece of sound. We had the chance to speak with Melynda Jackson as well as Melynda Amann, Brian Burke, and Alyssa Maucere and get some insight on how the band has progressed as well as their plans for the future. While they have been working on new material for you to get your emotional heavy groove on, they have made great strides as a group and have plans to record once they have completed their current writing process. Don’t miss them at Psycho '18, and look forward to the delicate doom that will enrapture your soul.

Landless by Eight Bells

You have a very unique and particular style about Eight Bells. What was the original inspiration for the project?

MELYNDA: I had started out playing in SubArachnoid Space for years, kind of a hard psych/noise what have you instrumental project. That project started as improvised noise, and over 15 years morphed into more of a songwriting collaboration. When I decided to let that project go, I knew I wanted to continue on into more distinct and concise songwriting but keep a little bit of the feel of SubArachnoid Space. Over the years the drummer was becoming more and more interested in some metal techniques like blast beats etc. We decided that we wanted to continue that trajectory after we dissolved SubArachnoid Space, so we named the new band Eight Bells, after the final SAS album. We never really wanted to fit anywhere perfectly, and I think we have accomplished that goal. I feel like turmoil and sadness are expressed frequently in this project. We would like to make something emotionally vivid and not have all the songs sound the same.

What is the driving force that carries you on over the last few years?

MELYNDA: It has been a tough couple of years for sure, with many points where I considered giving up. Playing music teaches me lots of things. I would say those things go beyond learning to play the music itself, but interpersonal stuff, connectedness, commitment, self-examination, and emotional expression. I have a lot to learn so I keep trying because it is interesting. Getting older reminds me that I have a finite amount of time to create, so I really have no choice-it is an itch that can’t be scratched. Also, I am stubborn as fuck so when signs all seem to be pointing to giving up, I try harder.

Can you talk about the lineup changes and how that has affected the sound this year?

MELYNDA: Oh, we have about 20 minutes of new music that has been difficult in its creation because of how many people Lindy and I have gone through in the rhythm section. (laughs) She has been with me for a couple of years now, but we are on our 3rd drummer (Brian), as well as our 3rd Bassist, (Alyssa). It felt like a struggle to really practice with regularity and treat it as a discipline until Brian and Alyssa joined. The songs Lindy and I were working on as a duo sort of finished themselves with their input and the ideas were made better for sure. I am not sure yet how the sound has changed to an outside listener, but I can say for me, the music is more defined. We have three-part harmonies now and we had a great time at our last two shows, so we can have fun together and connect onstage and that means everything to me -- and I do mean everything.

Do you have any upcoming plans for a new release with the new lineup?

MELYNDA: We totally want to record when we have another couple of songs. We will be focused on writing and making demos when get back from Psycho Las Vegas.

Describe your favorite way to enter the writing process.

ALYSSA: When someone comes in with a riff and we play it over and over, and it grabs us, that's when it's the best. We can see where else it could be taken, or it can push us in a completely different direction as our minds/ears begin to churn. It's important for me to carry the foundation for the harmonic layering to give space and clarity to my bandmates. It's a lot of refinement and experimentation, and that gives birth to truly abstract and complex song structures that give that feel really satisfying once they're played to our standards. Witnessing my bandmates get lost and found within a composition is how I know we all found something that works for us.

LINDY: Before I even present anything to my bandmates I am often inspired in random and unexpected ways. My voice recorder on my phone usually gets a lot of action for spur of moment inspirations out of nowhere. If I hear a riff in my head I often sing it into my recorder, so I don’t forget it. Sometimes this spontaneous idea could translate into a vocal melody or a keyboard riff. This riff usually doesn’t make it to the band practice room for others to listen to until the pot smoke has dissipated, and some serious rumination has occurred. If my riffing inspires others. I get excited and a possible jam may elicit more awesomeness that I didn’t hear the first go around in my head.

MELYNDA: I kind of feel like I don’t really have a choice in the matter in terms of how I process, meaning I don’t consciously choose to sit down and write a song. I hear riffs in my head and enjoy working with the group in real time to flesh out songs and arrangement. Recording riff ideas, like lindy says, helps. Sometimes I will work off a keyboard part of Melynda’s, or whatever. I like jamming a riff until it leads to the next part. We don’t really have a formula that we follow and we are still developing a language that we all can understand. Seems like learning to play the parts together is the first pass like a rough draft, then more arranging and tweaking.

What do you most look forward to while participating in the upcoming Psycho Las Vegas 2018?

ALYSSA: It's a family reunion for many of us. We have friends from all over the country convening all in one place, seeing bands that we all look up to, together, or never have seen, confined to a ridiculously fun environment that encourages all forms of debauchery. I'm honored that we get to play the Vinyl Stage with of such an amazing line up, I mean, c'mon we play after Necrot and Mutoid Man, two of my favorite bands out right now! It will be great to have this moment to give people the ability to see the reincarnation of Eight Bells. Plus, there's that killer pool and legal marijuana.

LINDY: I look forward to the camaraderie and friendships with my contemporaries and fans and also the bangovers and ringing ears caused from my own band’s crushing performance and from the performances of my friends and heroes on all of the stages.

MELYNDA: Playing the set honestly. I am not a fan of the desert in August. I look forward though, to air conditioning and seeing folks I don’t get to see very often.

Where did you start on the path of playing music?

ALYSSA: It started when I was a little kid. I used to play this game with my family where they would turn on a song for one second on the radio/CD player, and I'd have to identify what band it was, and most of the time I was dead-on. I was obsessed with tone and recording quality, all the unique sounds individual to a specific band, and it fascinated me how different everyone was. That's how I was able to remember who was who by their tone! Before I was even 10, I was hooked to MTV, especially 120 min and Beavis and Butthead (which I used to sneak at night and watch). It was there I heard PJ Harvey, Bjork, Soundgarden, Helmet, Unsane, Hum, The Beastie Boys, etc. I really liked playing on one of those children's pianos and would do it all the time for hours. Eventually my family broke down and found me a cheap upright piano when I turn 8 and it changed my life. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, and I’ve played one almost every day for 20 years now. It was when I was 23 that I got asked to play bass in a band, and I never looked back.

LINDY: It started from the days of infancy when my mom would place my playpen by the record player, plug my headphones and spin an LP for me to keep me occupied. Later, that path continued on long car rides from Massachusetts to Maine when my Dad would blast Pat Benatar, Black Sabbath, Tina Turner and the Motels all the way to his place. It started with singing in church every Sunday, and friends picking me up in the morning for school blasting Iron Maiden and Metallica. Music has always been a central part of my life.

MELYNDA: I played clarinet and bass clarinet in band, but was kicked out for being unruly even though I could play well. I suppose that was my first lesson – you are never so good or talented that you get to be an asshole to everyone and keep playing. I failed at guitar lessons soon after. As a kid I liked to listen to music and count the beats- oh here are 4s, but halved they are 2, oh this is 6… that sort of thing.

What are some of the most influential artists to you?

ALYSSA: Al Cisneros is a wizard. He creates a sonic vortex by meditating on very few potent riffs for lengths at a time. There's a mathematics going on there, a pattern that undulates in and out of consciousness. I know how to play most of those riffs, but if you ever see the man live, you're blown away by his delivery. Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell were probably the first musicians to show me what "heavy" meant, between the depth of the content in the lyrics and the eclectic richness of their influences. Soundgarden was a perfect storm of catchiness and brutality. It was also because of Kim Thayil that I ended up loving bands like Master Musicians of Bukakke and Sunn O))). Last but not least, metal bands like Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega have a profound influence over my writing. It's chaotic and unsettling, and somehow, it's incredibly emotive and beautiful.

LINDY: In terms of vocalist heroes, I would say: Pat Benatar, Bruce Dickinson, Joni Mitchell and Aretha Franklin. Musicians that I am influenced by would be Nick Cave, Prince and Diamanda Galas.

MELYNDA: Old and new: Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, hildur guðnadóttir, Death, Enslaved, Popol Vuh, Butthole Surfers, Oranssi Pazuzu, Vaura, Earth Wind and Fire, Bauhaus, Faust, Amon Düül II -- so many. Basically, everything music influences me in some way, even if I don’t like it. I try not to wear my influences on my sleeve, but I also try not to overthink things.

Do any shows stand out above the rest, so far, as your favorite experience with the band and why?

ALYSSA: I'm so new to this band that every show so far stands out. Psycho Las Vegas will be the largest crowd I've played to in 5 years, and I'm really looking forward to performing.

BRIAN: The first two and the last two stand out most in my mind.

LINDY: Considering that I have been a member of Eight Bells for 2 years, I have only played 6 live shows with them. One that stands out for me is playing in Canada, opening for SubRosa. The energy and our playing were great and the excitement of the show was palatable.

MELYNDA: Brian we have only played two shows together. (laughs) Honestly, I would say our first show with this lineup eclipses any other that I have played with Eight Bells so far.

Is there a central message that you would like to convey?

ALYSSA: Eight Bells will crush your soul.

LINDY: Our time is finite. Our time is up. Crush my enemies, see them driven before me and hear the lamentations of everyone.

MELYNDA: For the love of Satan, please when driving on the highway, use the left lane for passing only.

Catch Portland, Oregon’s Eight Bells on the Vinyl Stage of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on Sunday night, August 19th, at Psycho Las Vegas. Get tickets here

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie: Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie

A good chorus can put a whole lot of questions to bed—about a song, about a band, about a reason to get up in the morning, you name it. Fleetwood Mac, whose catalog is so festooned with world-bestriding hits that they can do a best-of reunion tour and leave “Sara” and “Hold Me” off the setlist, know this better than just about any other band. Their colossal pop collaborations kept them together through years of intense interpersonal turmoil and full decades of cordial détente. Like, in the grand scheme of things, is it really that big a deal if you left your bass-player husband for the light guy if the result is “You Make Loving Fun”?

Which brings us to the curious case of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, a Fleetwood Mac album in all but name—and the conspicuous absence of the third member of the band’s songwriting trinity. Ending what seemed like a permanent departure from the band, keyboardist and vocalist McVie returned to the fold in 2014 for a massive tour. After it wrapped, she and guitarist/vocalist/production whiz Buckingham headed back to the studio together for the first time in well over a decade, with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie joining them. As for Stevie Nicks, well: “What we do is go on the road, do a ton of shows and make lots of money. We have a lot of fun. Making a record isn’t all that much fun.”

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie feels like a retort to Nicks’ statement. For McVie, the return to the band has been creatively invigorating as well as financially lucrative (Nicks herself gets that, facetiously describing McVie’s only other alternative to heading back to the studio: “‘Now I’m just gonna go back to London and sit in my castle for two years?’ She wanted to keep working”); Buckingham’s a born striver who kills time between tours by adding guitar texture to Nine Inch Nails records. Going on the road and making money is “what we do”? The pair’s collaboration feels like a “speak for yourself” in album form. To paraphrase a Rumours classic, they’ll make recording fun!

Their self-titled album is front-loaded with jams, with the kind of choruses that dissolve doubt on first listen. “Sleeping Around the Corner,” the album’s opener, sees Buckingham all but race through the first verse, just a couple of lines sung in an affected rasp, before unleashing a big and bouncy bass-driven chorus that springs into being like an inflatable castle at a kid’s birthday party. “Lord, I don’t wanna bring you down/No, I never meant to give you a frown” he and his multi-tracked army croon. Does it matter that he could have just sang “make you frown,” which is something that people actually say, instead of “give you a frown,” which is awkward and goofy and almost childlike? Yes, but only in the sense that it’s better this way. Keep in mind, this is a dude who kicked off his band’s bestselling record with a song that invited its subject to “lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.” His line, “We made sweet love over and over,” is refined to the point of esotericism by comparison.

McVie takes point on the following song, “Feel About You.” No songwriter in rock does infatuation better than McVie—“Feel” may not join that august company of her immortally swoony “Everywhere,” but it’s love-struck smiley fun nonetheless. Its crunchy beat and marimba hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Haim album, and its almost doo-woppy chorus is just a “tell me more, tell me more” away from Grease-level crowd-pleasing territory.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. You hate to play armchair-psychiatrist with a group dynamic as complex as this, but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that the easy-going, Nicks-free composition and recording process left ideas unsharpened or undeveloped. McVie’s piano ballad “Game of Pretend” opens with a gorgeous melody that evokes Roxy Music’s “Sunset,” but its lush build-up leads to a verbose chorus that lacks the economic punch and power of her own “Songbird.” Buckingham’s “On With the Show,” an ostensible paean to “stand[ing] with my band,” closes with the phrase “let’s get it on” repeated approximately 36 times in a minute and a half, making you wonder why you wouldn’t just sit back down. And Mick’s big drums on “Too Far Gone” can’t disguise the pro forma nature of its boogie-woogie rock-by-numbers. “Goin’ underground,” McVie sings in the chorus—to what, the wine cellar?

Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album. As writers and performers, Buckingham and McVie are simply too talented, too engaging, too endearing for it to be any other way. To be a Fleetwood Mac fan is to feel like you’ve received teary text messages from its vocalists, like estranged friends turning to you in their hour of need. The ache in McVie’s voice when she opens the mid-tempo mid-album “Red Sun” with, “I wonder where you are as I fall upon my bed” is as tangible as a late-night mattress. Buckingham concludes “Love Is Here to Stay” with a melodic cascade that’ll have you skipping down the nearest mountainside at your earliest convenience. Just hearing their vocal tics—the way McVie pronounces “night” as “nigh-eeet,” or the catlike meow vowel twist Buckingham adds everytime he sings the word “down”—is enough to delight. Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie really does make listening fun—just not fundamental.

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