Cranky with the Culture
I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve been so cranky about contemporary pop culture, lately. Obviously my posts on music and film, have elicited a good deal of helpful feedback. But I don’t think it’s just an “in my day” rant. What our culture is giving us now is fast food when in the 60’s and 70’s, it was a meal. The action movies and the video games and the hip hop records may provide us a jolt of energy–Cultural Red Bull–but there is neither brain nor body sustenance in much of the music and film. Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society
It is characteristic of all culture that it builds a man made, artificial world, superimposed on the natural world in which man lives. But man can fulfill himself only if he remains in touch with the fundamental facts of his existence, if he can experience the exaltation of love and solidarity, as well as the tragic fact of his aloneness and the fragmentary character of his existence. If he is completely enmeshed in the routine and in the artifacts of life, if he can’t see anything but the man-made, common-sense appearance of the world, he loses his touch with and the grasp of himself and the world. We find in every culture the conflict between routine and the attempt to get back to the fundamental realities of existence. To help in this attempt has been one of the functions of art and of religion.
Ever since I started posting The Cost of Empire, I have been wrestling with the thought that perhaps the grand transformation I am hoping for is as much cultural as it is political. The thrill of being in this blog community is that I think a lot of you share that feeling–and that the cultural sometimes proceeds the political. The Beat Poets were happening in 1958 and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd
In gulag he was able to concentrate on (through writing and study) and participate in (through clandestine prayer and worship and witness) what became a bona fide underground reclamation from the Soviets of Russian Orthodoxy.He perservered; he overcame; he transcended. What came of it was art, and his freedom, and an intimidating rejection of the Nietzschean, the totalitarian, claim that the individual human spirit can be extinguished.
So I’m not saying we don’t have to deal with politics, but I am saying that the artist has a role in society that goes beyond just entertaining us. Part of the role of the artist in the 60’s and 70’s was to hold a mirror up to low road commercial culture, not be part of it. Marcuse
“In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of the artist.”
I don’t know, Jon. I think that we just have a longer tail on our mass media than before. There’s more vacuous crap, sure, but there’s more mainstream, more highbrow, more political, more lowbrow, more everything. Every niche is not only occupied–it’s overflowing. And if you’re looking for art as substance, resistance and political commentary, I put the current incarnation of Battlestar Galactica up against anything the Beat Poets turned out. That show bites the hand, bites itself and then makes you wonder if biting is right or wrong. I haven’t seen anything since Chayefsky or Serling take on the culture and the climate like this. Non-viewers will snicker and assume this is sci fi pap. Viewers will understand.
Dmitri Williams
August 7, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Cynicism…
Josh C
August 7, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Where do you see Cynicism, Josh C? I see it in almost every serious modern artist, but where do you find it here?
Hugo
August 7, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Some may roll their eyes at this, but I think you should head to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada at the end of this month.
For many, many years now my annual trip to the Burning Man Arts Festival has been a much needed restorative in the face of a similar disappointment with mainstream culture. Despite its flaws (most of which have been greatly exaggerated), Burning Man fully embodies and celebrates Marcuse’s quote:
“In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of the artist.”
You’ll find a wealth of information about the festival online, but as a 14-year participant I’d be happy to answer any questions about it via email.
Doublejack
August 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm
You can’t beat the Beats.
Hugo
August 7, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Most modern cultural artifacts, however profound they may appear at the time of their creation, are ephemeral. Only time will reveal the real quality and durability and value of contemporary arts. I have found that classical literature and music have covered the ground quite thoroughly. I majored in English lit as an undergrad, and only dimly appreciated the depth and scope of the universal truths revealed and examined by the masters of a century or more ago. Today, I am drawn back to their work and find in their writing almost perfect analogies for the problems we face today. There is little difference, in human terms, between a crisis of faith in the traditional and familiar, for example, brought about by the cultural explosion wrought by Darwin and the information firehosed to us daily by the internet and other information delivery systems describing a world gone seriously awry. Similarly, music and drama from earlier times are reliable sources of comfort and inspiration. This is not to deny the value of contemporary artists, for their essential work in examining our world and our lives, but I just cannot see Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsburg, or Rod Serling in the company of the masters of the Elizabethan era, the Baroque, or the Age of Enlightenment. Modern “Arts” seem to be valued most for their shock value (true also of some artists in the more classical periods, but still) or by those who have no grounding in the artistic traditions. So they don’t know how what they see today compares with what has gone before.
As for television, I see nothing of lasting value on tv today. It’s all just a variation of “24″ or “I Love Lucy.”
Patrick
August 7, 2008 at 9:02 pm
The top single on the Billboard charts in 1966 was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and “Cherish” came in second. The top album was “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” followed by the soundtrack for the “The Sound of Music.” The bestselling book of the year was “The Valley of the Dolls.”
I have long had this enduring fear that something like “Blonde on Blonde” would happen again and I would miss it. Maybe pop culture is not the place to search for what we’re seeking and never was. Maybe it is out there now, tonight, in the shadows.
Roberto Suro
August 7, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hard to beat the Beatles…
the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, the Kinks, the Band, Led Zeppelin. And nothing in hip hop comes close to the most average of Duke Ellington tunes…or the lyrical content of Langston Hughes.
Rick Turner
August 7, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Out of town and alone, I went for cheap laughs at the movies. Pineapple Express was supposed to make me laugh, take my away to somewhere for 2 hours. Prior to this Judd Apatow piece of crap, there were trailers for another half dozen imitators at your local theaters in the Fall. Truely we’re running on empty. While art and entertainment don’t always have to run enmeshed, when art gets into the picture we are usually more touched and stimulated and left with something to take away. There’s nothing to take away from pop culture because it really doesn’t have a lot to give. It is sad, but it’s just reflective of the rest of our sorry situation. It’s just not the right time. George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in the White House.
jeff
August 7, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Could it not be that (some of) the people posting here can’t see the forest for the trees? As in, can’t see the good stuff for the marketing of the bad stuff.
Marketers haven’t been sitting still these last thirty years. And as Dimitri mentioned above, they’ve got a lot more product to work with. And the cycles are shorter…
I’m in Kyoto at the moment, and on the Shinkansen to get here today I was listening to a bunch of stuff that’s all been made in the last five years, and which I absolutely *love*.
There’s a mass of smart movies, smart music, and some truly awe inspiring novels, all from the past five years. It mightn’t get press these days in the way the Beatles got press in the 60’s, but it’s definitely out there. My tastes might be a little old fashioned (I’m currently loving The Long Winters, Josh Ritter, Patty Griffin, none whom could be said to be cutting edge) but I still find something to love on the iPod every time I turn it on.
To “hold a mirror up to low road commercial culture” isn’t a terribly original thing to do these days. If you are an interesting artist, you probably have a lot better things to do than parody things that are practically self-parodying, and being better than low road commercial culture isn’t a hard goal to attain. I’m not sure what you expect artists to do about that, Jon. There’s no role, really, for a mirror to perform, when even the meaning of the word “ironic” died a death at the hands of a pop song back in 1995,
One thing I will grant you: Classical music, of the kind written for concert halls, died about 40 years ago, disappearing up its own fundament with along with opera. The only great orchestral music written these days is for film soundtracks, and the good ones are thin on the ground.
Rachel
August 8, 2008 at 12:23 am
Ooops… I meant what changed is cynicism. I got home a little late last night…
Not that I was around back when almost all of my favorite music was written and recorded. It just seems to me that our culture simply became more cynical. We learned about all the things our country was capable of, good and bad and I think people started giving up after this period. Just look at how Barack’s message of Hope is ridiculed.
Josh C
August 8, 2008 at 4:51 am
The audience for “real” art as you describe it is not so large, plus it is largely fragmented. Hence, mainstream media will not cover it, pretty much by definition. If you want to find something meaningful, you will have to search for it, and trust me, it is out there. You just won’t find good music on the radio, or good paintings covered in major newspapers, etc.
I am pretty much involved in music and there’s a thriving world wide community of music that is trying new things, setting new boundaries, etc. Over the past ten years that I’ve been involved in it, it hasn’t grown larger, neither did it become smaller. There is only a small audience for new and interesting things, and that’s because there’s only a small portion of the people interested in putting effort in discovering new things. It will take a couple of years for any trend before alternative media will cover it, and then a couple of years to find its way to the mainstream. I think it’s always been like that.
I’m reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the moment, and the quotes you give are exactly about what that book is about. The book is from 1974. I believe in 1888, Nietzsche said “Only sick music makes money today”. So I think nothing has changed that much; you probably just lost touch with where interesting stuff is happening today.
One thing I think is different these days: because of the internet and globalisation, the mainstream crap stuff seems to be everywhere. At the same token, the new and interesting stuff can also come from and be enjoyed everywhere. So I think it’s even better today than it ever used to be!
arvind
August 8, 2008 at 4:58 am
Rachel, there is good pop and folk music around these days, but much of it is under the radar of popular culture. The folk, roots, and Americana scene, for instance, is really wonderful, but there are no massively popular artists out there delivering the consistent quality and making the impact that my list of musicians above did. Selling product? Yes. Pass the test of time? I doubt it. Hence you find a lot of young kids reaching back and listening to the Beatles. You should have seen the look on my youngest kid’s face when I played the whole Beatles boxed set of Mobile Fidelity LPs for him when he was 10. He got it, and now that he’s 13, that’s still a peak musical experience for him. Why? Because as a body of work, what the Beatles did has no competition.
A lot of what you see these days is either flash in the pan…slightly extended one hit wonders…or artists who were pushed up the charts before they really had a chance to grow into their talent, and therefore get stuck repeating themselves trying to lock in a formula that gets tired too quickly.
This came up before, but I’ll repeat it. There are too few venues in which young musicians can really hone their live performance chops. The Beatles played night after night in clubs…hundreds and hundreds of stage hours. All the great bands of that era did, and it was really good for them. Go back to the swing era…same thing. Fast forward to now…not much.
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 5:03 am
I agree with Dmitri and Rachel and want to recommend a book: Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter” (sorry I don’t know how to italicize in the comments)
Neal deGrasse Tyson was just on a couple of the science podcasts recently agreeing that there really is more and better science shows out there today then there have been, but there are also more shows about everything else causing everything to get lost.
On top of that point there is one area of cultural entertainment that you haven’t touched upon that wasn’t around with the Beetles: video games.
There are a lot of really profound and moving ones out there. There are also a lot of lame ones, but it is still a young field. How many classic movies were made 40 years after the film projector first existed?
Part of what makes music, film and books so great is their ability to take us into their worlds and connect with who we are. Video games are capable of doing that much better than these other mediums. If you doubt me, try to find someone with a PS2 and Shadow of the Colossus. Or an Xbox and Bioshock. There are deep things happening in these games and because of the nature of the medium, you have no choice but to be immersed in them.
The great stuff is out there and in different mediums than before. So, relax. “The kids are fine.”
Nath
August 8, 2008 at 6:52 am
Adorno and Horkheimer said almost exactly the same things in 1944 in their famous analysis of “The Culture Industry”. Except, at the time, their targets were all motion pictures and all jazz. I hear the same stuff coming out of commenters (and Jon’s mouth) today, except with “hip-hop” replacing Jazz and “video games” replacing motion pictures. Sorry folks, but it’s all been said before… It’s not about ageism, but only to say that as long as monopolistic capital is the major source of artistry and culture (as it was in 1944, and is even moreso today), there will always be these kinds of critiques.
And, incidentally, anyone who decries “hip-hop” as being a dead or worthless genre knows nothing about its origins, or about its complexity. Hip-hop grew out of the defunding of public-school music programs in New York in the 1970s, and became a creative outlet for poor black folks, who couldn’t afford private lessons. There have always been fantastic hip-hop artists (and continue to be), but by and large, they just don’t get signed into the major labels. In 50 years, people will be holding up Public Enemy, KRS-ONE, Madvillain, and Tupac Shakur alongside Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, and James Brown as the best of African-American Musical tradition.
whenelvisdied
August 8, 2008 at 7:41 am
This is a wonderful conversation that I’d like to keep going for a while. It seems to me there are two strains of thought here. One is the “Gresham’s Law” theory I expressed last week, which is there is now a huge output of crap which overwhelms the gems of the true artist working today. The second theme, as propounded by Roberto Suro, is that the popular always outsold the good and that nothing has changed.
I have made the case before that there are just too many movies and too many TV channels, and that at some point the laws of supply and demand would force a correction. But it may be a long wait, because the lure of Hollywood always seems to attract dumb money.
As to the “nothing has changed” argument, perhaps that’s true, but I must say that in 1967, “Sargent Pepper” was a huge hit and in 1976, “The Godfather” was the number 1 movie.
When I look down this chart of tthe top selling albums of last year, I’m not sure there is one that will be remebered in 10 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number-one_albums_of_2007_(U.S.)
I feel pretty much the same way about the top box office films of last year.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2007
So what changed?
Jon Taplin
August 8, 2008 at 8:00 am
There’s plenty I could say here Jon. You know I’ve proposed to revive government subsidies for the arts both at the national and state levels. Its not a system I entirely agree with (seeing the institutional effects of socialized culture in Europe), but it would at least offer another alternative to the “starving workaholic indie” vs “corporate -sell yer ass to the moon”, extremes that exist for artists today and possibly help restore the faith of creative types in the government.
But like many sense, there is something deeper going on, almost like our vacuous commercial pop machine implies a culturally bankrupt populace, much like the government and business sectors are facing ethical and financial bankruptcy. One might argue that even the religious sectors are seeing a form of spiritually bankruptcy (pawning our religious values for corrupt politics). Somewhere deep in there these things are all connected.
My reasoning here is that if every aspect of life becomes intrinsically built on consumption then there must be a natural resource with finite reserves that needs to be understood. Abuse of any resources leads to depletion. As for culture this resource is as immaterial as our own spirit yet as discreet as the time we have to live. Simply working 45 hours a week to translate your time and efforts into a humble paycheck does not constitute as “survival” as much as buying an ipod, some tunes and listening to them on your way to work does not constitute as “culture”. Somewhere down the line, someone has to produce something of this immaterial “value”, meaning they have to get more for it than a market commodity value in dollars.
Possibly what bothers you and many of us is that if the Solzhenitsyn’s and all the other cultural icons we know, who through various forms of suffering and sacrifice, have contributed to the universal truths we value with our hearts and minds were to be replaced by the bottom line dollars and sense cost value of today’s pop trash, we then would face the nutritional depravity equivalent to living off fast food burgers made from styrofoam, vacuous material and devoid of any nourishing value.
And yes, this is where cynicism takes its root, in justifying even slightly that we can rationally ignore what sustains us beyond our material values, religious subordination, routine paycheck and senseless consumption habits.
Azmanon
August 8, 2008 at 8:46 am
Azmanon- A brilliant analysis, as usual. But what I’m trying to get at is that both cultural and spiritual forces can (and did in the 60’s and 70’s) help man to live within his means and within what is sustainable. The work of Stewart Brand and Bucky Fuller and Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful” were in concert with the revival of Bluegrass music and the popularity of the New Wave films from France. It was all of a piece and pretty much all directed against the overblown culture (Roberto’s “Sound of Music” example) and overwhelming militarization connected with Vietnam.
I am missing this contribution now from the cultural and spiritual community.
Jon Taplin
August 8, 2008 at 9:01 am
Oh, and I don’t want to come across cynical myself. Like others are aware of, there is an incredible amount of good music, films, art etc being produced today in every corner of the globe. It just doesn’t have the same effect on “mainstream” culture as it did, lets say, in the last century (where much of mainstream culture still exists). My hope is that this decentralized global culture starts to reverse the trend of the one way centralized broadcast culture we are used to.
Azmanon
August 8, 2008 at 9:05 am
Ah, were possible in tune here
Azmanon
August 8, 2008 at 9:08 am
I think the big media industries just need some good old fashion cross fertilization of culture, to be open to change and adpt to the world around them much like it happened in the flourishing periods of the 20th century and before.
I might complain if my garden produced a surplus of low quality food, but I wouldn’t starve. But if the plants in my garden would not be serviced by the bees and other beneficial microbes from the surroundings, then it would wither and not produce anything at all.
Azmanon
August 8, 2008 at 9:34 am
I think what this all comes down to is the loss of meaning in the English language itself. We’re in a world of text and instant messages where people dont mean what they say nor say what they mean. If you ever listen to how people spoke in television and movies from pre-1980 and compare it to how they speak now its amazing. You can tell that there use to be actual thought and meaning in the way people constructed thier sentences. Now we have completely reduced English to one liners and pop culture phrases. Basically there are no more poets to teach us how to feel and express those feelings, just expressions of consumerism.
Hassan
August 8, 2008 at 9:52 am
Warning: long counter Rant.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve been so cranky about contemporary pop culture, lately.” – Jon
As to your personal reaction I would look for context, Jon. What have you seen, read, heard, or more likely, had discussions about with someone that left you upset or disturbed? Something pushed a nerve, and it’s festering again; though, in all fairness, this is a trope that you do revisit often.
Considering that you live and work in a contextual setting where crass commercialism is a dominant part of the culture periods of downers are inevitable. Hollywood money (Big producers, investors) expect to make rock star money with each major investment. And they infect a significant part of the culture with that expectation. Excessive exposure to these folks can be toxic, so look at who has been rubbing on you.
It’s the Morgianian principle of Market Forces will out, with the usual reaction of the majority of folks who post to this blog, “But with what awful consequences if it’s allowed to go unchecked.” Pop culture has that name to distinguish it from efforts that aspire to be significant art. It wants to make money, and damn the consequences and the devil take longevity.
Pop culture is not about art, except incidentally. It talks it, but it’s about getting people to put up their money for a way to kill their time away from work and sleep. Increased discretionary leisure time, increases the demand for painless entertainment, increasing the incentive to create the next killer pop fashion (like a software “killer app”).
The number of artistic genius, (folks who incorporate the factors of innovation, technical skill, expressive skill, and have sustained output) is a fixed ratio of the population. Except in times of major crisis (war, depression, repressive political regimes, and the Bush administration) genius will attempt to express itself.
Great art, to be sustained, demands patronage, or it has to live in a system where it can fly under the radar while feeding a need for volume production (Kurosawa) or overlap with a feeding a new pop fashion (Beatles), or tap into a sufficient niche audience to make a living (Murikami).
But culture isn’t totally difined by either it’s great art or it’s pop expressions.
The level of near artistic genius (folks who can get part of it oh so right, but not the full package, (think Salieri v. Mozart, or Poe, or Godard). is also a fixed ratio of the population. These folks will put out good, but not great (i.e. canonized) work; though some have niche (cult) appeal that lasts. Most will become good craftsmen producing work that exists somewhere between GREAT ART and Pop’s Pap De jure.
Near genius produces more successful Pop Fashion innovations (determined by $$$$$) than genius. Genuine genius is usually too innovative for mass tastes and the times when it overlaps is special (Shakespeare, Beatles, Renior, Dickens). At no time in history has the majority of creative effort ever gone into art. It’s always been aimed at good craft or pop, because you can make a living doing that easier than art. But, then a lot of great art is produced by aspiring artists who never get recognized except by a limited following. This is especially true of performing arts which are ephemeral by nature. Come to Portland, you’ll see a music scene that is live, well, and producing work as wonderful as the majority of artists from the decades you lament. Fernando Viciconte, Dandy Warhols, The Shins, Curtis Salgado all make great music, but not necessarily to your current taste, and not really Pop.
Different forms of expression can have also have major dry periods, since so few true genius can get paid. Current major ones are John Lassiter at Pixar, and Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli, who are both doing something in film that is rare indeed, that is creating classic catalogs, not just one offs. (I got a big chuckle out of you and Hugo hand wringing about the state of current pop at the same time you were both ecstatic about “Wall-E”. Little dissonance there.)
Finally there is that sad fact that growing old(er) often has periods where tastes for the new sounds and sights just aren’t as sharp as for the familiar. Usually you have to be a practicing artist, like Patrick, or make a living keeping up to stay immersed in the evolution of your particular form to appreciate the current genius and near genius. Condemning a culture for it’s pop machine failures, is somewhat sad, since so much really good and great art exists to counter it and is really stimulating.
Dr’s Rx: subscribe to Bob Boilen’s “All Songs Considered” podcast. Give it a month and see if you don’t find your iPod filling with sounds as good and often great as the 50s and 60s.
Ken Ballweg
August 8, 2008 at 9:58 am
Left unaddressed is my personal sense that the strong joining of politics and popular art forms (not necessarily pop culture, which was more Laurence Welk and Liberacie than Grace Slick) was a result of a unique confluence of events in the 70s. The current crop of artists and craftsfolk that I know of are politically quite liberal, but not radically demonstrating, which seems to be the element you are lamenting.
Whether that’s good or bad is another issue, since my kids are happy to tell me that they regard the boomers as a failed experiment, responsible for the current state of affairs, and not something they want to emulate.
Chew on that concept for a bit and you see it’s hard to argue with.
Ken Ballweg
August 8, 2008 at 10:21 am
Jon,
Any chance that this blog (and thousands like it) are the cultural precursors to the revival you’re looking for?
I mean, I get the way that commodified culture can become very alienating, on so many levels. But if there’s truly an impulse that seeks connection to, as you say, the fundamental facts of existence, aren’t conversations like the ones here a place where that work begins?
You may already be a part of the solution.
Alex Bowles
August 8, 2008 at 10:32 am
Hugo – You can’t beat the Beats because they
were already beat … beautifully beat.
Can I dig this blog, Man? You know it. Jon,
thanks for this place and the thinking folks that
populate it.
JeffW
August 8, 2008 at 11:05 am
Movies and music run different risks.
Music is easy and inexpensive to produce these days, thanks to digital technology. There is a HUGE catalog of material that doesn’t hit the top 10; it exists on small labels, distributed cds, cdrs and mp3s. In recorded form, it’s never been cheaper or easier to distribute.
The problems come with marketing. The music video supplanted radio as the “first exposure” vehicle some 20 plus years ago and radio, of course, went all ClearChannel soon after. When you’re a music station buying your programming from JACK, as Little Steven said at his keynote address to the 2005 Radio and Records Convention:
“Replacing 33 year old New York oldies institution CBS-FM with JACK is like replacing the Statue of Liberty with a blow-up doll.”
So, you have to really DIG music, pony up for SIRIUS or pray to the gods that you can find “The Underground Garage” somewhere locally, or work the internet via music forums and blogs and (god forbid) MySpace Musicians sections.
Live music? There are clubs out there, less than before, but they’re there. Get into larger venues and you have another problem – sheer unmitigated greed. Why do you suppose dinosaur acts are the only ones that are touring large venues these days? Only well off boomers can cough up $75 and up for a ticket.
So, yeah, if you judge music by the big labels and the big venues, it’s tedium defined.
Movies, of course COST a crap load more to make and distribute. Price the cost of a release print these days – let alone production costs. Aside from a few true rebels such as John Sayles, American indy film is a joke – the few distributors that handle this stuff are constantly looking for a cheap hit so they have their criteria, “Is it like Sideways? Or Little Miss Sunshine?” Even asking that sort of question, you can feel any and all creativity draining into the ether.
The majors, they pony up bigger prices at the outset and of course, depend on pre-release screenings, audience response cards, market research and more to insure they don’t get stuck with some white elephant that won’t even sail through on direct to DVD sales.
Character driven movies are cheaper to make than CGI-riddled, special effect dynamos, but they also carry a bigger risk. Culturally, as a whole, we don’t really CARE that much about character and growth when we pop our rumps down in the dark to escape for 2 hours. The Cloverfield monster might have been more complex if it actually LEARNED something while destroying the planet, but face it, that would require exposition that will put an audience to sleep.
End of the day, there are many cultures within our defined culture, always have been. The difference now is how much consumption any given subculture is willing to indulge in before the major labels and studios consider it a safe risk to court them.
Tom Wilmot
August 8, 2008 at 11:15 am
I’m not so sure. I do feel like there’s a bit of ‘back in my day’ going on in this post, as well as in the responses. If I had more time I’d leave a lengthy response and links to a large number of top-selling artists with quite radical lyrics. For the moment, let’s go with Nas’ “Sly Fox.” If you haven’t seen / heard this one yet, you really need to watch it now (let’s see if embeds are enabled here):
In case embeds aren’t enabled here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Uqk3fxFEs&feature=related
schock
August 8, 2008 at 11:19 am
I don’t buy the Gresham’s Law approach anymore. Distribution changes have made much of this argument moot.
The ground rules are simply different now. With an audience and a product this fragmented, it’s no longer an issue of bad driving out the good. There are too many outlets and choices. We all know the difference between the ratings points of a show in 1983 vs. today. It’s a different world entirely.
So, there was always a bell curve of culture and taste, but it’d been held back by an oligopolistic distribution system; with only three network channels, TV had to go broad and lame to maximize shareholder value. But with 200 channels, somehow we all want to sing along to Bruce saying there’s nothing on. Uh-uh, I don’t think so. If you think there’s nothing good on, you aren’t looking very hard.
Distribution’s getting whittled down something fierce, and what you’re seeing is that bell curve of taste hold its basic curved shape, but getting flattened and spread out (kurtosis for the stats geeks). In this world, it’s not so much bad driving out the good as the everything reaching the everyone and the choices and the filters all in a pretty amazing coming-of-age period.
As people find more and more ways to customize, filter, order and time-shift, that bell curve gets flatter and flatter. To be perfectly honest, if someone’s in the mood for pessimism or “kids these days” or what-have-you, the critique that’s more realistic is the “we don’t share anything together” anymore. With just the Super Bowl and Award shows and some sporting events as common touchstones, we have less shared culture in general. But oh my God is the landscape rich with both quality and crap. For every Dancing With the Stars, there’s a Rome or Battlestar. For every Britney, there’s a Nas. And on and on in every medium.
If you’re looking for where the mainstream pop hits that have substance are, I think you’re missing the bigger picture about the nature of the change we’re in the middle of.
Dmitri Williams
August 8, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Dimitri- If the Bell curve is flattening, does that mean that every piece of product will have a smaller audience and thus need to be made for less money?
As Tom Wilmot points out, it’s easy enough for the music industry to adapt to these economics, but both Hollywood and the Video Game business have relied on the “gusher mentality” of the 80-20 rule as their budgets continue to rise.
Jon Taplin
August 8, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Yes, costs per user have to drop, and along with distribution, that’s been part of the change. They are down in most industries as a response to the distribution shock.
And I suspect industries that are stuck in 80/20 mode are relatively unhealthy and uncompetitive. Games are arguably less healthy than film on this score, mostly because the bulk of budgets are going into wireframes and pixels rather than game design. As a result, a lot of mainstream games are unusually weak. But even here, we find thousands of niche games and mods springing up and finding their audience thanks to digital distribution. Almost all of this comes from small teams and individuals, often player/fans.
Dmitri Williams
August 8, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Jaws vs. Dark Knight
Hands down winner – Dark Knight. No question. Period the end.
Don’t mean this is a bad way, but Jaws worked because people were virgins. The exact same movie today, would be shit. Same with the Beatles. With less competition playing with the art forms (or the distribution), new guys on the block have an easier time of making it. Only old people don’t get this.
Nowadays, with lower barriers to entry truly standing out requires MORE, and thus our best is BETTER than the best of ages old.
Jon, you can continue to dance around this simple direct assault on your value system, but the kids today ARE SMARTER, BETTER, FASTER than the kids of your generation – that you can’t SEE IT – speaks to your own limitations and nothing more.
As a corollary, the same thing happened with Internet companies, after a wild birth of the market, the methods and costs of creation, have been refined and reduced… and the quality of whats being created now is higher, MUCH higher.
Morgan Warstler
August 8, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Jon,
Best selling album in 1967, despite Sgt. Pepper, was “More of the Monkees”
And in 1976 “Rocky” was the highest grossing film, though that still probably works with your argument. However, 79′ – “Moonraker”
I rest my case.
Heck, look at “The Dark Knight” compared to “Jaws” (top grossing in 75) and tell me that things can’t be fun and visually impressive and still have heavy themes working with them. Now, I’m not saying Batman = Godfather. I chose my comparison on purpose.
Nath
August 8, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I think a reasonable measure of the true impact of an artist, singer, song writer might be looking at how many other artists cover their songs. When you consider that angle, the impact of Dylan and the Beatles stands so far ahead of any contemporary artists it just isn’t funny. And hip hop…sorry, but how many covers are Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog, and NWA going to get in the coming years? I’d bet it will be fewer than the covers of one Richard Thompson song, Vincent Black Lightning. Jon’s not talking just hit records here; he’s talking cultural impact, longevity, and importance to other artists. So think for a while about how many people have recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and then compare that to what’s likely with any contemporary artist in any genre of music. No contest.
A friend of mine is an ASCAP cop…he gets clubs and restaurants to pay up their licensing fees. He dropped by yesterday for a visit, and I asked him, “Do you think that Bob Dylan goes to sleep at night and wakes up $10,000.00 richer on the royalties you guys collect for him?” Mike said, “It’s way more than that…” That’ s impact. I don’t think you’ll get that with Mariah Carey, Shakira, or MC Hammer, not even with Sheryl Crow who is kind of long in the tooth for this conversation, anyway. Who is a 20 something songwriter who will have the impact of a Dylan or Lennon and McCartney. They made their marks just out of their teen years, and kept and keep going. I don’t see it out there.
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I am a firm believer in changing the culture we live in before changing the political. Making political change is important, but politicians pander to their constituents to some degree and if they’re constituents are ignorant and enmeshed in this meaningless drivel we’ve been getting, that’s what’s going to be produced.
In wrestling with environmental problems I think this is especially apparent. No true change will be made until people begin to move away from certain cultural assumptions about what is required to fuel our society.
dragonmage06
August 8, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Morgan, name one band and set of songwriters working today who will be as good, be as prolific, and have as far reaching an influence as the Beatles.
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 2:53 pm
dragonmage06-Until people develop some sense of critical skill in deciphering the media bullshit, they are helpless in a political sense.
In terms of the environment, think of the cultural meaning involved in publishing the first Whole Earth Catalog. We can getpeople to think smarter, even if guys like Morgan think they already know everything.
Jon Taplin
August 8, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Whether U2 or Coldplay or anyone is as prolific or as good as the Beatles is a tail-chaser. The point is, with more channels and outlets out there now, people are less likely to all listen to any one artist, independent of how good/bad/challenging/whatever they may be. So, no one is going to have the same kind of impact that the Beatles or Zeppelin or whoever had because a smaller % of people will hear them now. That’s a very different point than one about quality. The long tail changes everything.
Dmitri Williams
August 8, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Well, one problem is that we’ve gone from broadcasting to narrowcasting. The idea is that the public doesn’t want to hear anything they haven’t already heard. Yes, I know that’s an oxymoron, but the policy is omnimoronic.
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Moby (can that guy make a soong that doesnt become the soundtrack for a movie?)
Fatboy Slim – and his body of work EASILY trumps The Beatles… jesus if I ever went to a dance club and had to listen to the friggin Beatles all night, I’d SHOOT myself. The crowd – the MUCH SMARTER CROWD than your generation – would shoot itself.
See, the goofy trick of your argument Rick, is that you want to use the fact that artists today OF COURSE are technically “influenced” by the Beatles, to give them extra weight – I don’t give them such weight. Infact, my thinking says more likely, if the Beatles came out today, they’d be about as big a band as Oasis – because they sound just like Oasis.
Who’d want to dance to the Beatles? Gah!
Besides, the best old band is Zeppelin and that’s all the credit we can give your generation – who was the best of the old guys? Zeppelin.
Morgan Warstler
August 8, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Nice turn, Turner. In salute I give you http://www.KHUM.com .
Hugo
August 8, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Morgan- Some day you are really going to regret saying something this stupid–”Fatboy Slim – and his body of work EASILY trumps The Beatles”
Jon Taplin
August 8, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Rick, what is your evidence for saying that people don’t want to hear anything new?
An endless stream of channels could mean perfect narrowcasting and isolation from anything new, or it could mean perfect variety among all people. I don’t know of data on this, but would love to see it.
My intuition is that if you took the variance on a metric of choice, it’d be a bell curve also, i.e. most people with moderate variety, with a tail of total insularity and a tail of perfect eclecticism. I’d further expect that variance to go up with the diversity of the person’s social networks, and down with homogeneity.
Dmitri Williams
August 8, 2008 at 3:44 pm
There’s something the Beatles had that no artist today will ever quite have… don’t forget that multi-track recording was developed along with other means of production during their time. That is, they had to invent their own means of production along with writing and performing songs. When they made ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ there was no other precedent in history for things like 4-track tape machines, FM and stereo records so the impact of what they did went much further and deeper into other sectors of society (and peoples minds) than what is possible today.
On the other hand, the possibilities of today, with the ease and flexibility of digital production, offers musicians and soon film makers, production and distribution methods unlike anything before… this has all been said in some form or another with respect to the optimism of the “digital age”, but still I can’t help but to think something is missing from the digital picture (as many things networked and digital also emerged from the same period).
I’m still left wondering, what is today’s equivalent of “Sgt. Pepper’s” and the ARPANET if we are to assume that technology still plays a defining role in cultural production (seems obvious, but who knows). Is all this an extension of that novel time (a la Stuart Brand) or will something else emerge, a new space for creating, allowing us to broaden the frame of our image of the world as in the 60s, just when we least expect it?
maaheli
August 8, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Fatboy Slim vs. the Beatles? Now that it just totally whacked… I see no influence of Fatboy Slim on any other artists…
BTW, I built a bass for John Paul Jones…and several for John Entwistle, Phil Lesh, Jack Casady, etc…
Re. the tech side of the Beatles, as a former 16 track recording studio owner, I do know a bit about the golden days of multi-track tape. They were far from the first to use four track machines, and Les Paul had been using a Sel-Sync (overdub capable) eight track Ampex 350-8 for years before Sgt. Pepper. That album was done on two four track machines. They’d record to one, mix tracks and overdub to the other, and then bounce back again, finally having a four track master with multiple overdubs on each track. It took a hell of a lot of pre-production to figure out just what to do in what order, and that was the genius of George Martin. You lost some fidelity each time you bounced from one track to another, and so you had to record the instrument or voice tracks you could most easily afford to lose fidelity early on, and record the tracks that needed the most fidelity last.
Many of us actually thought that going from 16 tracks to 24 tracks and beyond to 48 tracks had a negative impact on the music because you could be very sloppy, record everything, do multiple takes, and then “fix it in the mix”, which became a very negative phrase. Having to do such exquisite planning as Martin did with Sgt. Pepper really made for a great recording.
Funny, this subject, because I’m currently chasing down a project that involves a treasure trove of live recordings from the mid 1960s, most done mono on a top quality Ampex 601 portable tape machine. There are literally hundreds of hours of music that hasn’t been listened to in decades. These are recordings of most of the touring folk musicians who did the coffee house circuit…James Taylor, Kweskin Jug Band, Judy Collins, Kentucky Colonels, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Anderson, Carolyn Hester, Richard and Mimi Farina, Ian and Sylvia, Don MacLean, etc. So my brain is very analog tape oriented right now… The tapes may have gotten wet at some point, and I haven’t had my hands on them yet. I’m researching everything I can about archiving old tape, damaged or not, and there’s some pretty fascinating stuff. You have to bake a lot of mid ’70s to ’80s tape at 130 F before you can play it. Then you have only a limited time for transferring the music to a digital format before you either have to re-treat the tape or it just sheds all the oxide. Some of the earlier formulas need to be washed in distilled de-ionized water and dried slowly before you play them. You have to know exactly which tape formula is which, because while the earlier stuff may need to be washed, that’s exactly the wrong approach for the tape that needs baking.
One of the exiting things is that the original tape recorder(s) are with the tapes, so we want to have the machines restored for the playback and archival recording process. I think the original mics are there, too…
As far as modern studio wizards go, check out Kate Bush…she’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but she’s brilliant. That goes for Bjork as well.
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Popular culture has always been primarily vacuous commerce. But the long tail has gotten so much longer, more interesting, and far far more accessible for both the artists and their niche audiences. The current situation is radically better. Sure, the sellouts who cling to the RIAA/MPAA way no longer represent a cross-section, rather are approaching a lowest-common-denominator, but so what. That’s not where Art lives anyway.
Advice:
- turn off the TV [though there are some real gems in the last decade, including The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, etc.]
- never ever turn on commercial radio
- ignore the summer blockbuster billboards
… and instead
+ read Paste magazine
+ peruseindie music on emusic.com
+ go see Club d’Elf or Sigur Ros or MMW or Benevento Russo Duo or Radiohead
+ download live shows on archive.org
+ watch the film “Once”
+ read J.R.R.Martin’s “A Game of Thrones”
+ go to a local art gallery or theater
+ go to Burning Man or the Edinburgh Festival
Everyone reading this will have a different list like that, YMMV, but my point is there’s genuine vibrant artistic brilliance all around us, it’s just that it now requires breaking from the passive mono-cultural, monolithic channels which formerly monopolized the scene, and becoming part of (or at least observant of) the community that creates and supports it.
There’s more burden on the listener/watcher/aesthete, but the payoff is exponentially higher.
Chris Weekly
August 8, 2008 at 6:10 pm
I hope this helps, because if it doesn’t do, it’s going to piss off a lot of you.
Jon opened with his beef against immediately current “pop culture”. Throughout this discussion we’ve been doing a bit of “mission creep”, swinging over into elite culture in Patrick’s critique (in which I join, in part), and thence into “mass culture”, with smattering references, c/o mostly Rick, that throw “folk culture” into the gumbo. This is all great stuff, but it messes with my (forgive me) “intellectual framework”, as I’m a cultural historian (different specialization from this topic), and at least when I was taught American cultural studies — back in the proto-pleisticine — we were taught Yale’s way: to “read” artifacts as anthropogenic “texts” susceptible of our “reading” in the context of a cultural “grid”.
Now, I know by your blogging that some of you had the same training, and perhaps even have taught this construct, as I have done. But I’m trying to draw attention to that axis of The Grid that characterized texts (at least in my day), as either Folk or Pop or Elite.
Americanists since the Pleisticine have chucked a lot of that, and have cut much finer distinctions. Fine enough that we don’t compare cultural artifacts apples-to-artichokes.
It seems to me that this is a structured way of lending coherence to this charming discussion: to continue to question and inform the silly distinctions between cultures “Folk” or “Pop” or “Elite”. And sure, the techno-revolutions are highly relevant here; there’s no denying.
Let me leave you with where I happen to have left off with the Americanists — many of whom are not of American extraction — who study these things. Last I heard, the middle category, “Pop Culture”, was like any of a number of sweeping Victorian diagnoses of yesteryear: each so facile as not to catch a whiff that it someday would come to describe dozens of modern specializations, some of them ultimately disproved and discarded.
The middle-culture, the Popular Culture, that which pleases the most, is a huge problem for the old model. And you can see the problem here, on this string. Aren’t we really talking about Mass Culture, the product of massive manufacturing for the middle-class masses, the force that renders your nearest neighborhood’s nearest strip mall indistinguishable, via telescopes on Pluto, from mine?
The real argument, it seems to me, is not over whether Ginsburg can stand up to Whitman, or Patchen to Manley Hopkins or Manly Hopkins to Donne and Wordsworth. Rather, the better border-in-contention is that between “Pop” or “Mass” or “Consumer” culture and what Rick calls Folk Culture.
I’d ask, or even plea, for you cultural contemplatives to think about how hard or porous our distinctions SHOULD be between Popular Culture and cultural creations, preeminently artistic expressions, that derive from and dwell with the People. Arts not made for sale, but which may be horridly exploited toward that end. The vernacular arts that people make for sheer self-expression, and share amongst their immediate family, their extended family, their neighbors with no expectation of recompense. (I encourage an etymological look at the term.)
Hugo
August 8, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Jon, I haven’t intentionally put on a Beatles song since 1997, and I lived on them growing up. Infact, Zepplin, the Clash and Pistols, DK, Black Flag, Public Enemy, Run DMC, the Femmes… they are all worth listening to still – the Beatles- YAWN. No violent energy. No makes-your-pulse race driving beat. Yesterday? Coo coo kachoo? Gah.
What song by the Beatles makes you feel like you just drank 3 Red Bulls?
Let’s get down to brass tacks, are you just an old guy, who doesn’t like the noise?
Morgan Warstler
August 8, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Most of my friends are musicians; many are “folk musicians” in the sense that they play music AND have day jobs, and they play music whether they get paid or not. Then there are those who are professional musicians, song writers, etc., and who support themselves and families on the strength of their playing, singing, and composing. The ones I hang out with are no less artists for making a living at it. And then there are those who kind of drift from one side of the coin to the other, and that would include me, though I’ve not supported myself solely on music in decades.
I once had a great conversation with champion Irish fiddler Eileen Ivers at a party after a gig, and we talked about this whole definition of “folk musician”. She had just turned full time professional, and there was something nagging at her about it. She was nervous about losing that connection to an authentic life. Most of her heroes in the Irish fiddle world were people who worked “real lives”…they were farmers, fisherfolk, shop keepers who played fiddle for ceilidhs…traditional Irish dance parties. Eileen made the transition and very successfully http://www.eileenivers.com/ but her concern was interesting and touching.
On the other hand, a very successful full time professional like Jackson Browne can also be very authentic and deserving of making a living at his art. Get him off stage, and he’s just as passionate about making good music and getting better at his craft as anyone you’ll ever meet in any profession. That’s very different from allowing oneself to become a packaged commodity, a puppet on strings like a Milli Vanilli manipulated by some behind the scenes suits who are putting together then next Posh Girls or some new boy band.
And I’m still going to come back to the issue of long term influence. That’s what many of the bands and musicians from the ’60s had and continue to have. To think that Fatboy Slim can hold a candle to the Beatles in terms of long term influence on the music world is to be seriously deluded.
Hey, I’m of a certain age…65 to be exact. I find that many folks in their 40s and even early 50s are kind of pissed off that they missed “something” of the cultural sea change. It’s de rigeur to put down the 1960s now. Well, too damned bad you missed it, because we did have more fun than you did!
As for my comment on the narrowing taste of listeners…just listen to most FM radio these days. In the mid and late ’60s there was a revolution in radio that started in San Francisco. No play lists, no payola, and you’d hear a DJ go from Bach to Jimi Hendrix to CSNY in one smooth long run. You’d go to gigs where you’d see Albert King on the same bill as Country Joe or the Youngbloods with Lee Michaels. The shows were wild in their variety. And the funny thing is that even the TV variety shows were wide ranging; just go back and watch some Ed Sullivan or Morey Amsterdam shows. Amazing, and beats the hell out of American Idol where all the singers are trying to out chop Mariah Carey (who should get a ticket for abuse of chops) in what I call the Whitney Houston disease…black gospel singing gone wild to the point where it’s all ornament and no melody. So there was this blip of time when you’d really hear a wide variety of music on the radio, and the play list from hell mentality hadn’t kicked in.
We’re lucky here in Santa Cruz in having the best (opinion mine) commercial FM station in the country in KPIG, and then we have three great public radio stations at the other end of the dial. I still hear a lot of variety, but when I travel out of the area it’s dreadful.
Now for something completely different: you want to see and hear perfect simplicity? Check this out…and it’s way pre ’60s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUNRhHz3XRk
The quality that is in this song and performance has the quality of authenticity missing in too much of today’s pop music, and though this is really jazz, it has that essence I find in the “folk” music culture of which the definition now includes contemporary songs.
Many of you would be amazed if you went to an Americana music festival like MerleFest in North Carolina or Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco. No coverage in People magazine or anything else on the tabloid news stands. Barely a blip in Billboard, but then along comes a movie like “Brother Where Art Thou”, and a chord is struck, and Allison Krauss becomes a star. That musical world is just right there, and it’s strong. And the women singers aren’t running out for boob jobs, and the men are not likely to be busted for drunk driving on PCH in Malibu.
I know what Jon is getting at with this thread, and I do agree. Find me a contemporary band that is writing songs like Tax Man, Eleanor Rigby, Day in the Life, or Yesterday. Show me a band that’s having as much fun as the boys in Hard Day’s Night. Where’s the next Jumpin’ Jack Flash? Or Wind Cries Mary? Or, yes, anything by Led Zep or the Who Live at Leeds…
I’d love to be blown away by a contemporary pop/rock band, and I do hear musicians I love, but they tend to be closer to my age than the Beatles or Stones were when they hit. I just saw Sonny Landreth, and he’s just amazing on guitar. He’s got gray hair. The only really young one I hear now who is fantastic is Derek Trucks. But he’s no Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards. Maybe all the hooks are taken…
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Jon,
Great catalyst for a wonderful conversation and great to hear from Sasha and Dmitri. I think their comments and the overall discussion should move beyond your original post — ie where do we look for “inspiration” or the artist’s “role in society that goes beyond just entertaining us.”
Sasha’s example demonstrates that artists have a strong role; but Dmitri raised a more fundamental issue: with the massive de-centralization, dissemination and breakdown of the traditional architecture that distributed media content, which did help create a shared, cultural grammar and vocabulary, what ties will bind us in a global, digital commons yet also a simultaneously fragmenting, fissuring and exploding and imploding global world (hello Georgia!)?
Clay Shirky, and I guess you, in your “open-source embrace” hope to use the Wikipedia, collaborative model as a way out.
But first, we should look at the present with less rose-colored eyes. Perhaps, a starting point might be acknowledging the power of the oligarchic, corporate entities and policies that have brought us to the present. As Larry’s recent contribution acknowledged, the very creative, technological power that Dmitri and Sasha’s example seem to endorse, holds within it an inherently destructive, violent capacity.
Thus, it is fine for academics and activists to promote anarchic destruction of the old and unleashing of the new, but for those of us outside the Ivory Tower and looking to promote change from within, the core question still remains: as the information architecture that powers and fuels our information, knowledge, global economy will only strengthen, exploited by the corporate, oligarchic forces that now realize there’s no going back, how will a civic polity emerge either above all the chatter and one that doesn’t just tear down, but also build up beyond the fringe?
There’s something exciting about the prospect of “DIY” media control being re-claimed by the people, unleashing the creative force you seem to recall with 60s nostaglia. But given the devastation that we all see in Los Angeles outside the dear USC gates, which itself is a consequence of the “rebuilt” information, knowledge economy, the resulting stratification and de-industrialization, fueled by the never-more powerful, wonderful flows of capital that corporate players will always be ready to exploit (as they should), well, I’m at least not looking for any great artist to lead us to the promised land.
Lewis Haidt
August 8, 2008 at 10:47 pm
It seems that those whose living is quite assured are all in favor of information being free. Information=entertainment, by the way…
Rick Turner
August 8, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I’d like to go way back up to Ken’s Challenge–”Was the 60’s a failed experiment?” If art (Beatles)+ culture (Whole Earth Catalog) were both putting out an anti-materialism message, where it became hip to drive a VW bug instead of a Buick, was that necessarily a bad message for a time (now) of limits and Hugo’s “austerity”?
It has been the trope of the right, that 60’s “decadence” is responsible for everything wrong with the culture. Ronald Reagan essentially ran 4 campaigns (2 governor and 2 President) on that message and Newt Gingrich still repeats it to this day. But in a deeper sense, the 60’s were not all sex drugs and rock and roll. They were about learning to live a simpler life.
Jon Taplin
August 9, 2008 at 8:30 am
To clarify: my gen X son and his friends are the ones who regard the boomers as a failed experiment, not to be emulated. What they see is a group that pushed for significant changes, superficially got what they wanted with the ending of the Viet Nam war, a higher tolerance for a little hedonism, and the civil rights movement. I’m paraphrasing but the essence of his view is that boomers then went on an unsustainable shopping trip that distracted them from their supposed agendas and has left the “kids” with a bill they can’t pay. Not so much a failed “experiment” but a failure to be responsible for basics.
And look at the reality. How many radicals of the 60s converted to communes, v. gated communities? I don’t think the majority of boomers are in gated communities, I just think more are living in them than are in communes.
I think the Dot Com bubble corrupted more liberals with quick wealth than were ever converted to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth philosophy.
I think the politics of 60s radicals was initially generated more by an agenda of avoiding the draft and that an all volunteer military caused us to become indifferent to wars if we or our kids didn’t have to go fight them.
I think liberals are guilty of shying away from the accusations of “treason” in the post 9/11 ascendance of the tough daddy Republicans, and fail to see anything learned from calling out the Tonkin Gulf lies, or the bombing of Cambodia.
I have to agree with the kids on this basic point: boomers of all political stripes are in charge, and the country is a mess. That’s the failure. The political “revolution” of the 60s and 70s was shallow rhetoric and pretty non-productive if it allowed the current state of the US to happen. It wasn’t just a neo-conservative coupe, as we like to claim (though they didn’t hesitate to jump on the opportunity we gave them) It was a lack of substance to that “anti-materialism” message and a whole generation turning off it’s common sense, and turning it’s collective back on that message.
You speak of the “message” of anti-materialism as if it every really had traction, but according to my son’s view and increasingly mine, we (the boomers) are the materialists, the ones obsessed with a good life based on electronics, big cars, McMansions, and arugula. That’s why we let corporations and conservatives take control; they feed our fantasies.
Walt Kelly said it all: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Ken Ballweg
August 9, 2008 at 9:59 am
Watch Wall-E. It will restore your faith in humanity. Maybe even in robotity.
thegiantsnail
August 9, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Ken -I agree the movement got coopted very soon by Doyle Dane Bernbach and other purveyors of New Age advertising. From a societal point of view the real “shopping trip” our generation paid for was the Military Industrial Complex.
Yes there are McMansions and Whole Earth Food stores, but there will be adjustments made in “lifestyle” and my generation is already adjusting.
Just how the “death of the mall” will affect the younger generation is a more serious question.
Jon Taplin
August 9, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Just to be a pedantic jerk, the Baby Boom is generally defined as including those born from 1946 through some time in the ’60s. Thus some of us, of a certain age (63, in my case) , do not qualify as Boomers. I also am not fond of arugula.
Patrick
August 9, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Morgan, how many children do you think have been conceived while listening to Fatboy Slim versus The Beatles?
Greg
August 9, 2008 at 1:43 pm
And I was born in 1942 so very much a “war baby”, but I was also young enough to have my butt on the line for getting drafted to serve in Nam, which I think is the more germane determinant of to who is likely to be grouped with and expected to carry the freak flag of Keasy, Wavy, Owllsy, Lennon, Newton, ad nauseam.
Birth year isn’t really as important as whether your name was (or should have been except for exemptions) on your local Board’s lottery list.
Ken Ballweg
August 9, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Perhaps the fact that good art topped the charts in the sixties was a fluke?
Perhaps media was temporarily out of balance then as opposed to thinking of the MSM now as out of balance. One notion that I hold about the sixties is that the early 60’s are the beginning of the modern era; all of the major technologies that we have now are finally in place: instant cameras, packaged food, television, fast cars, telephone — the exact same as today minus the internet.
This technologically rich landscape was a new frontier then. We collectively went through a period of glee and unfettered experimentation with our toys without the hindrance of precedent — it simply hadn’t been done yet, how liberating is that?
In the 60’s, the modern music industry didn’t even exist yet.
Frank Zappa said that the massive success of Sergent Pepper changed the music industry. When you start generating that much wealth the bankers and bean counters show up, you know, the people who don’t understand art, and don’t necessarily care. It becomes a different ballgame: talent takes a backseat to numbers.
Ironically, it’s often the success of a medium’s greatest wunderkind that plants the seeds of their medium’s demise. What they do is so good, so powerful, so fully realized (I can think of dozens of examples of this) that it comes to define the genre and the genre stops growing. Inevitably, a sea of imitators emerges. People intrinsically sense that it’s next to impossible to top or even do as good as the master, but they can at least imitate which allows them to participate and even cut out a hunk of the success for themselves.
People have a strong desire to be part of the process, even if their talent relegates them to the cover band, or worse.
(Rick, what a great post about the old tapes. I really enjoyed that)
Greg
August 9, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I’m a pre-boomer…1943, and I lived at Owsley’s house in the Oakland hills in 1970. It was a fabulous place in the Mission Revival style and had been originally built for heavyweight champion Max Baer. I had the maid’s quarters down under the kitchen. We had an Olympic sized pool, and Owsley had a pet owl. We had next door neighbors who had a pet cougar. Then the place got busted…
Rick Turner
August 9, 2008 at 2:52 pm
This discussion is all over the place so in that spirit here goes….
The Living theater/ Julian Beck, Civil rights/ Goodman Shwerner and Chaney, New Wave Film/ Trufault, Goddard, Pollack, deKooning, Birth Control, Vietnam, The Kennedy assassination, Lenny Bruce, the rural music collision with Rock n Roll….. “Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is” …well Bob Dylan did… better than anyone: “Your Sons and Your Daughters are beyond your command”. No kidding! Of the hundreds who tried, Bob was simply the brightest and the best. His work will be studied 100 years from now just like The Gershwins. I’m not so sure about Fat Boy Slim, Lil Wayne or Dre. Just, try singing one of their songs.
Hegel said “World historical men – the Heroes (allow me to substitute Artists) of an epoch – must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others” Bob Dylan is such a man.
I sure wish there was a talent like the late John Hammond to help us cut through the clutter or for that matter a George Martin to nurture the great talent of today… there is plenty and they are on-line. The Beatles of broadband might just be Bloggers or Gamers and not guitar players.
It’s a loosing battle to argue “now vs. then” but I would respectfully suggest that if the Sixties had not happened we would still be living in a world of “ Mad Men” (no pun intended) and not electing Barrack Obama the next POTUS.
Bob Kaminsky
August 9, 2008 at 3:39 pm
The groundwork for todays commercialized disposable, market driven culture was put in place in the mid fifties. Starting with the Payola radio scandal, and carried through to the then new medium of TV in the business practices of American Bandstand (Dick Clark and show staff had ownership and/or interest in several companies providing records that were in heavy rotation on the program see Demographics and Dollar Signs – How pursuing the baby boomers brought music to television. for some background).
The growth in technology and increase in speed,ease and breadth of disbursement makes for short product cycles. Be it shoes, cereal, film, or album, consumer products are designed for a “hit it and quit it” (my apologies to James Brown) life cycle that gets shorter and shorter. We have become conditioned to react rather than respond, and build an identity and sense of self around icons rather than ideas. This is precisely because icons can easily be replaced on a seasonal/monthly/weekly basis.
rovert
August 10, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Jon,
I think that your warm-fuzzy feelings about the 60s and 70s are enabled by right-wingers giving the hippies more credit than they deserve.
America lost the Vietnam war the old fashioned way – by being beaten at war-making. Lifting your people off the embassy roof after the deaths of nearly 60,000 soldiers and committing millions of men to the war is just plain old losing. You all can do the math on who prefers the blame for America’s disastrous war be placed on the locks of a 100K or so rich kids in their brand new imported mini-vans. “Militaristic intervention would have worked if it wasn’t for you meddlesome kids and your pesky dog.”
I feel like all the boomers really contributed to history was the death of the shame of debt and a total unwillingness to pass on any cultural knowledge from their parents to their children. (I’m talking ‘couple dancing’ for one.)
The way the mainstream ‘boomer culture is acting now has me and my friends joking that their plan is to try and die before anyone realizes the cheque won’t clear. The Iraq war and the economy are just the finale from they that broke the generational contract and are willingly, eagerly even, handing their children a shorter, harder and darker future.
Kenneth
August 10, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Ever read Robert MacNamara’s life account of how he and his cronies knew all along that they weren’t going to commit enough resources to win the Vietnam war, and they didn’t have the balls to get out? These were not baby boomers sending boys to die for no reason. What we were protesting against in the ’60s was real and it was evil. Don’t blame us for fucking things up.
Rick Turner
August 10, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Gah!
Rick & Jon, how about if I lie and stipulate that the 60’s weren’t a silly child-like (20 pts. lower IQ avg.) era in America compared to now?
If for a moment, I pretend that everybody wasn’t so dumb they lived with a cig, a high ball, and 10 years less than kids do now.
If for a moment, I forgive your generation for still countenancing racism, sexism, and destroying the environment.
If for a moment, I pretend you weren’t just dirty hippies, and you actually were a generally positive generation.
If I do all that, will you maybe, for just a second, for even a glimmer of a moment accept – that simply YOU DON’T ACTUALLY GET TO DETERMINE HOW YOU ARE REMEMBERED.
I do. Seriously. My generation gets to write your history. You’ll be gone. Worm food. And if you aren’t NICER to the next generation, and by that I MEAN, if you don’t stop consuming resources you don’t deserve, if you don’t shut up, and stop running TV ads that say, “Viva Viagra!,” we, I swear to god, on the day you all die, will get out our permanent makers and write on your GIANT headstone, “Here lies some selfish evil dead guys…”
Seriously, you’ll pass, and we’ll have your blogs erased, your art destroyed, your memories faded. OR, you can grow some humility right now, and start noticing that ALL your arguments, are really self-preservation arguments, and therefore, not to be trusted.
I keep saying this, but why delude yourselves, that your generation isn’t 200% more guilty than those poor souls born unto you? Why pretend, you have anything now to add?
Eat your green god-damn jello (with mandarin oranges) and shut up. PLEASE.
(ok Jon, hit delete – because lord knows we can’t offend the elderly).
Morgan Warstler
August 10, 2008 at 10:41 pm
FWIW, I’m with Ken’s kid. Of course, I’m Gen X and am looking at a devastated ecosystem and a giant bill coming up to pay for the Boomer’s retirement. Plus, my kids get to pay off the national debt. I like the Beatles and all, but it doesn’t seem like a great trade . . .
Dmitri Williams
August 10, 2008 at 10:46 pm
You all would be in a lot better shape if the counterculture really had taken over. Don’t blame us for Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2.
Rick Turner
August 11, 2008 at 6:06 am
I think the point, Rick, is that once the counterculture got what we thought was a victory, we stopped being passionate, and, involved. And, by that lack of organization and direction, allowed R, B1 and B2, and the well oiled machine behind them to get the power to deregulate, run up deficits, and generally dismantle the Constitution.
Where were the counter culture kids when the “war on terror” moved to Iraq? We were being afraid of planes, claims, and (anthrax) bugs; Oh My. Right in there with the neo-cons. No memories of Gulf of Tonkin, no memory of Nam being a lesson about not getting overextended, or under committed (whichever).
But we (and by we I would love to exclude me and thee, since we are war babies, but…) we spent a fair number of dollars on stuff, and not on politics, cus many of “we” weren’t so sure our interests weren’t with “them” and their tax cuts and their coming in and checking for ter’rists under our beds.
Putting it that way makes me realize how silly it is to talk of the 60s and 70s counterculture as if it was a cohesive, and clearly delineated group. It’s nearest current manifestation is any Democratic Party caucus with the thousand of non-cohesive agendas that make the results such easy pickin’s for the Neo-cons.
Kenneth said it all: “I feel like all the boomers real contribution to history was the death of the shame of debt and a total unwillingness to pass on any cultural knowledge from their parents to their children.” We became me, and nostalgia for the brief period we were an “us” isn’t going to bring about change.
At this point if you want to “honor” the supposed principles of the counterculture, don’t spend another dollar for stuff beyond what you need for basics, and spend what you save on national and local campaigns. Focus on punishing the Republican party for allowing radicals to take over. But don’t stop there, spend a matching amount on efforts to educate the folks around you about the folly of the neo-conservative years so there is no ambiguity. Take out personal ads explaining the cost of the military industrial complex. Get as passionate in the off line world as in this blog.
Excuse me, I have to go write some checks.
Ken Ballweg
August 11, 2008 at 7:41 am
I think both Ken and Morgan are right. We got too self-involved, and completely abandoned the “less is more” principles of our philosophy. But Morgan, you are wrong about one thing. You won’t be able to wipe out our art or our culture. In fact you are living in Andy Warhol and John Lennon’s world and until you make something important instead of derivative you will continue to be part of one of those eras of cultural consolidation rather than cultural rennaisance.
Sorry. You can write what you want on my grave, but Mean Streets, The Band and The Last Waltz will still be around when you are in your wheel chair.
Jon Taplin
August 11, 2008 at 9:15 am
They’ll be around long after I’M gone, Jon, but nobody will bother to scribble on my stone. Aside from the film, The Band, and the pioneering rockumentary being great, would you place them in the category of Pop Culture, Mass Culture, Vernacular Culture, Folk Culture, Elite Culture, Subculture?
It’s weird, isn’t it. But I have this special fear of coming back postmortem as a wraith, and of finding the Smithsonians putting all this stuff in the wrong cold storage, or on the wrong display, mis-labeled. So you broccolis have to name yourself for yourself, before it’s left to half-lettered fools taught by half-baked minds in a mindless culture.
Your call.
Hugo
August 12, 2008 at 7:21 pm
1) Rick Turner is daMan. Thanks! (from a guitar player).
2) Kate Bush is daMan. Thanks! (from a rabid fan of Bush).
The spirit of a time moves to different art forms. Pop music mined the zeitgeist of the Sixties dry. You are looking in the wrong place. The spirit of this time, the revolution, moved to the stand-up commedians.
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2008/08/culture-and-politics-and-who-is-worth.html
The people I find clutching their Dylan albums are too often the same people the heroes of the Sixties abhorred. If you want the experience, pick up a guitar and write a song. If you have nothing to say, you aren’t looking at your own life or you’ve never lived.
It’s a fire inside. Dorothy was right. Pick up the beat and click those shoes.
len bullard
August 13, 2008 at 6:30 am
Also len bullard,
Any guesses as to why Bush and Gabriel never married?
Too alike? I mean, wot?
Hugo
August 13, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Just a guess: I don’t know these people.
Gabriel is obsessed with his music and fairly guilty about his family. He can’t escape his own broken promises.
Kate is obsessed with her feelings and only guilty if she fails to love completely which she often does because she loves too well.
If married, they would only be happy at each other’s funerals.
But I love her voice and she has values I can only wish I had. And his genius of composition is something I can only envy at a distance. Think of a set of mutually influencing spheres. Kate watched the Floyd. Floyd watched the Airplane. The Airplane watched The Dead.
The Dead were staring into the void and making sense of that by staying close to each other.
Spock was right. Meaning is in the touch of another human being. The rest is just art. We grow it like plants breathing.
len
August 13, 2008 at 7:42 pm
There is still a kind of underground culture of those making music for the love of it. On the delightfully goofy end, there’s the ukulele culture of which I’m a part. Nobody gives a shit whether you’re any good or not; you’re expected to play at club meetings as much or as little as you like; everyone is welcome; it’s all ages and ageless. Yet, there are some amazing virtuosos whose work is loved.
Then there is the singer/songwriter community, and the whole house concert circuit. Yes, daughters and sons of Woody and Dylan and such. Some is too precious; some is raw; some is fabulous.
And, too, there are the music camps specializing in guitar, fiddle, bluegrass, multi-ethnic stuff. Camps where you go for a week or so, and all you do is live, eat, and breathe music, and then there’s the getting laid part, too. Yes, the great unwashed musician campers wind up hooking up and having a lot of fun. There’s nothing like playing music with people and then playing with them. Musicians really do have a lot of fun… Playing music with someone you like is incredible foreplay. The last couple of times I went to Lark in the Morning camp…well, this is a family blog, isn’t it?
But the point is that there is a very vital music scene that doesn’t make it onto the charts, doesn’t make it into Billboard, isn’t written about in People or the National Enquirer, has nothing to do with Britney or Michael Jackson or Shakira or P-Daddy or bling or wardrobe malfunctions. It has come back to being very real folk music because it’s what folks do outside of their vocation. It’s what we choose to spend our money on rather than Hummers or home theaters or whatever. It’s where we find community and understanding. Yeah, most of us are a bunch of pretty nice lefties, but we are perfectly willing to hang out with some red necked Bluegrassers, too…well, a little bit anyway. We are very open to music and art from other cultures be it Nubian, Mexican, Malagasy, Norwegian, or good old WASP Child ballads. But it’s not having the effect on the general culture that a Dylan or Baez had in the early 1960s.
Rick Turner
August 13, 2008 at 10:54 pm
That’s the spirit, Rick, alive and well and inside your fingers. Good to know.
I was on the commercial path until Lennon was shot. That’s when I stepped back and asked myself if the destination had value. All I really wanted to do was write and record. It’s a jones. Fortunately, costs made it affordable. All I had to do was work for a living. But the good part is it left it completely up to me and my mates and not the chord police.
You are right about the neo-folk circuit, bluegrass and even those who’ve learned to program their way to big sounds. The bad news is by building the digital infrastructure, we kicked the struts out of the part of the business that paid the royalties to guys like Levon Helm. If the money hadn’t been invested and they were living off those BMI or ASCAP checks, we created a business with a very small top a very big bottom and not much in between if the road trek was over, and for rockers, that trek is a killer. As Grace Slick said (paraphrasing) geezers playing rock don’t look right. I had to explain that to my last playing mate before he died. “We play well but we look like their Dads.”
The new folk circuit, yeah it’s come around again. Funny, but this is where it started last time with the Hootenannies and the little folk clubs. I found myself wanting to hear the Seekers again, the sound of harmony, a twelve string, six string and stand up bass. Then trawling You Tube, I discovered that Judy Durham never quit. She got out of her ‘pretty cage’ and stuck to her music. There are some beautiful vids with her at the piano singing.
The nice thing about music is not only can you do it for free, you can get old doing it as long as you don’t need the big ego rush of adoring or have to get paid. I leave my songs at Imeem now or let the kids building virtual worlds use them. The Ozzies paid for my copy of Sibelius V in exchange for using “Epiphany” and “Cecile”. “Sam (for Liz)” gets ripped off from the Bewitched site and reposted regularly and they send me mail. “The Tongue” is still a big hit in the closed virtual worlds but I can’t leave that one out for the kids to get although I got great mail from women saying “thanks for a head song for US”. Cool.
The nub is if we stick to what we love, it tends to all work out. Panglossian but true. And heck, if it still gets you laid, it can’t be wrong.
But I still think the Next Dylan is a standup commedian or virtual world artist or game maker.
It’s the spirit not the form. IMO, our important job is to kick open doors and hold them open until the kids get through them. That’s worthy.
And to have fun doing it.
len bullard
August 14, 2008 at 5:43 am
Anyone remember Bernstein’s series on the Beatles?
Personally Beethoven, Bach, Beatles, listening . Stones, dancing. Danzig— adjust the gain.
Art is like gold, it’s where you find it or more like Baseball maybe.
I find myself agreeing with Jon/RT for the most part.
“I feel strangely light headed”.
P. Cross
August 14, 2008 at 6:24 am
I remember his series on music where he said Muzak was killing our will to listen. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones projected two-dimensionally onto the black music they were hearing, but they never understood the culture. They took their celebrity status as a sign of their talent and wisdom not realizing it was the reverberant effect of American culture looking back at itself through exotic eyes. Woodstock succeeded because it was organic. They were of the culture and knew who to hire and who to avoid. Altamont was mounted by the Stones who had that two dimensional view of American culture and didn’t realize the Angels really were dangerous. Though they liked the drugs and really liked the sex, they weren’t that sold on peace.
Did you see the Burns’ series on Jazz? He made what I considered an illuminating observation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the musicologists were searching for the next big thing in composition. Of course, they were searching through the universities and were disappointed to find more of the same. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong was warming up in the bars and brothels.
Change comes from the edges most of the time. I think it may be difficult for the USC crowd to find the edges these days. Again, perhaps they should be looking in the game worlds, the comedy clubs, wherever, and be prepared to discover that what is being said may not be what they want to hear because it is not what they heard before.
“I have seen the men like Wooden Ships, back broken on the reefs of contentment.” – Len Bullard/Ground Level Sound
len bullard
August 14, 2008 at 6:58 am
I’ve been thinking and thinking about this, and it’s been sort of stuck in my subconscious, cycling around, wanting me to figure it out, and I believe that I finally have.
Morgan made a pretty valid assertion that: “what is better Fat Boy Slim or the Beatles?” and his evidence was that dancing to the Beatles, or “clubbing” to the Beatles would just be terrible. You wouldn’t be energized, where as decent techno sort of instills energy and alertness in you. In a very real sense, it functions like a drug, coaxing your heart rate to be a certain way and what not, and in general the effects are desirable, especially if the cultural moray of a club is to dance for hours and hours, you require this sort of energy boost. Put the Beatles in there and everyone would fall over. No fun. Ok. I’ve made his case as clear as it can be. Now let me make mine.
Notice, I said that it was a valid assertion, but the assertion in no way becomes an axiom. It’s useful, but I think debunkable. My desire here isn’t to just debunk an assertion that someone has made because I don’t agree with it, but to try and distill what it was that was important about the 1960’s version of music that has completely gone missing from the musical experience of today.
Perhaps some historical accounting would help. This morning I remembered a quote from a documentary with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir (of the Grateful Dead), where Phil is telling a story of how those two, Phil & Bobby, and Jerry Garcia head off to go to a Cream concert in 1970.
As they walk in the door and the music starts, Lesh gets really excited and exclaims, “This is the best band in the whole world!”
A brief pause passes and then Jerry turns and says, “No, tonight, ” he pauses briefly and his eyes get really wide like he knows he’s saying something incredibly intelligent, in the way that only a stoned person ever does, “No, tonight, they are the best band in the world.”
With emphasis on the tonight. He had it, nailed it in one stroke, I mean how could you argue. The Dead certainly weren’t playing that night, and probably they knew of half a dozen other great bands that were also at the show. It just makes sense.
Anyway, to put this in perspective, that music was ideological, chordally colorful, lyrically brilliant, oh and their instruments were ALL ANALOG. Anyone, if asked which show that they’d rather see, would be crazy not to pick Cream, because it was just a special and rare thing, that requires the confluences of the entire universe to make possible, even FatBoySlim, I guarantee, would choose Cream, or 1973 Zeppelin, or any 60’s Beatles. I mean, that stuff is priceless, plain and simple.
This doesn’t answer Jon’s initial question. But if you ask me, I would try to answer it, and probably could get pretty close, being an old hat musician myself, especially active in the 80’s and 90’s, but not so much these days.
Greg
September 1, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Having seen Cream at the Cafe Au Go Go and having traveled with the Dead as front of house sound mixer on several tours, I can absolutely appreciate that story, Greg. Fatboy Slim? Never heard him/them, and if it’s techno/electronica dance music, I probably never will. I don’t take the right drugs for it…and I can appreciate Cream and the Dead quite well without the drugs I used to take…
Rick Turner
September 1, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Rick, it’s funny to hear your stories here. In the 80’s, when I was doing my due-diligence as a young musician upstart, I read about who made the Dead’s instruments, and remember that it was somehow connected to Owsley, I expect that must have been you. Cheers!
bahhh, but I feel like I didn’t even make my point. What I was trying to say that the feeling of going to such a show like that was palpable, more than palpable, something so real and momentous that the universe seemed to be standing still. That’s what I imagine going to 60’s & 70’s shows must have been like. The feeling of a momentous occasion. Not just the formality of putting in a CD, pressing play, and filling a room with people. Thats just going through the motions in comparison.
Re-reading Rick’s post about pickers, I do notice one other strong theme, that real musicians of today have little access to the Bully Pulpit. In the old days, when you made it through the vetting, you were in, had the record deal, all those “perks” spoke of in The Last Waltz, and the radio stations of the nation and tv programs carried this stuff, to some extent.
There is a pretty decent stable of talent out there now. On the whole, not on the same level as the sixties, but that is probably because of the lack of access to the bully pulpit. You could probably pull a young, promising folk singer out of a coffee shop in San Francisco, give them power, record deals, unlimited access to the “perks”, and they might blossom, and become someone very very important, musically on a global scale.
So yeah, my guess, restore the bully pulpit to the talented, and you would get your media that makes sense for the right reasons back. The people who are meant to play would be getting the highest reward; the universe would be in accord with itself. coda.
Greg
September 1, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Nice post, Jon.
My irritation with popular culture is that the idea of art has been conflated with marketable entertainment, and that much of what is being produced is intended to appeal to the broadest number of people. But when some people write or paint or compose, they are creating something they know only a handful of people will comprehend. Those are the people I want to write and paint and compose.
I like Koestler’s thoughts about what constitutes creativity and I think he’s onto something, though he doesn’t pursue it far enough. There is an embedded reconciliation of seemingly disparate or incompatible things that’s integral to art, and you are certainly correct that there is an aspect of the vehicle that’s unavoidably culture bound.
But there’s also keats. Some artists are phenomenal weavers – they can make something beautiful out of almost anything. But the integrity or quality of the components also matters. This why, in the final analysis, Fatboy Slim will never compare to the Beatles, and Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash (both of whom I love) will never compare with Keats.
There is nothing inherently corrupting about money, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that the commercialization of art has corrupted it.
Unless, of course, the money becomes the more compelling priority, as seems to be the case in virtually every identifiable instance, in this place and time.
fieldingbandolier
September 1, 2008 at 4:10 pm
You’d need to see the system in place now. The Beatles didn’t come out of that system. They are in some ways, the cause of it, but they didn’t invent it. It is weird and warped in ways no other business except possibly the drug business is. Also, technology changed to make it possible to make literally ANYONE sound acceptable given a style to which THEY are applied, not a style they apply. Oddly enough, from the point that Lennon endorsed the ability to double a voice mechanically, that march to the borgMusician was launched.
Not that good tools in creative hands don’t produce creative results; it’s just that most of what you hear in media are formulas applied by people well versed in those formulas. Let me give you an example. To record doubled or background harmonies, I have to work very hard to get these exactly right, or right to my standards. I do them the old fashioned way: track by track. For sweetening, I might use a vocalist (a harmonizer) for sounds I can’t physically make (sorry, God didn’t make me a better soprano). That is somewhat the challenge Martin had with the Beatles. After so many takes, the voice fries and so do the ears.
Enter Melodyne. It’s a fabulous piece of software that enables one to take a single vocal melody and create all of the other voices perfectly. No Mickey Mouse artifacts. Perfect intonation and timing.
In the hands of a good singer, it’s a way to avoid strain and less than good emotional delivery. In the hands of a producer, it delivers good results for little talent.
There’s no dark part of this. Musicians stood next to their harpsichords protesting piano fortes as works of the devil. Tools is tools.
BUT: the formula production enables the same semiotic demographic tricks we see everywhere in the media these days. Precise predictions of trends are applied, licensing is setup to favor the company so that by the time the artist has enough sales clout to renegotiate their deal (artists pay for EVERYTHING), they are pushed out of the label and replaced with the next new manufactured thing. So very few artists get the chance to establish the kind of market credibility that translates to political credibility.
The sad sad bit is the same tricks are now applied to political candidates. Truth is hard to come by. I’ll leave it there.
BTW: politics and music are usually a bad brew.
len
September 1, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Once again I have to say that one of the things that made so many of the bands of the 1960s and early ’70s so good was that they played and played and played in clubs and then on the road. Garcia could not stand not playing out in public at leas four nights a week. The Beatles played practically non-stop every night for months and months in the same clubs. People went out for music, and there were no home theaters except in Hollywood and the White House. Hell, I once did 19 gigs in 23 days, each gig in a different city including two in one day…Raleigh, NC in the early afternoon and Binghamton, NY in the evening. The bands lived on stage, and they got good.
Did any of you ever hear the Beatles live? They were awesome, when you could hear them over the crowd. The vocals were spot on, and they were tight.
Then there was Motown. If you haven’t seen “Standing in the Shadows…”, and you like music, you must see that.
Rick Turner
September 1, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Typo! Should be “Garcia could not stand playing out in public less than four nights a week.”
Rick Turner
September 1, 2008 at 6:53 pm
How fun that after a month, this string refuses to give up.
First off, Sergeant Pepper was recorded in Abbey Road on a 4 track Recorder. They would lay down four track, mix them down to two and then lay down two more, ad infinitum.
Rick I’m pretty sure the early Motown records were on a four track as well. Aretha’s “I never Loved A Man the way I loved You” also done in Muscle Shoals on a four track.
Greg and your assertion about heart rate and the “disco beat” is pretty much confirmed by research. The music was geared to raise your heart rate. Jimmy Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” was geared to do the opposite.
Jon Taplin
September 1, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Live gigs: absolutely. They build stamina and weld the groove. The Funk Brothers at Motown were night time club musicians who then played late night jams sessions, then went to the studio and often used riffs from the night before. Noodling is a big part of composing and when using session players, the ideas that come to the hand fast and readily are pure gold.
Don’t forget research though. One studies to get new styles and synthesizes if allowed. Note that this is a big problem with the industry today. A band produces an album but the label handler comes and tells them what is releasable. If the A&R person is good, they can be a big help. If not, best to lime pit them and claim ignorance.
The Beatles used a lot of different styles in their songwriting once they had control. They were perennial students who start out slowly then go supersonic.
The Dead use several, but overall, they always sound like a jam band that played bluegrass (and very well). The Dead’s lyricists excelled and that is the underated part of songwriting. McCartney said he would use “words that worked” meaning understanding the relationship of time, breath, vowels and consonants. Dead lyricists told stories even at the expense of the singer. There are some Garcia cuts such as “The Deal” that I still play…
“If I had a gun for every ace that I have drawn…”
Motown used a two track with a center channel, a four track, then an 8-track before the move to LA. Yes, the Beatles used a 4-track then an eight track. It’s easy to tell which is which if you have the original vinyl by playing with the panning controls.
It helps a lot if you have a producer who can also score arrangements. Without Martin, the Beatles would have been Cliff Richards. The Dead? I think they would have been the same no matter who manned the console. Very different approach as far as I can tell. I’d love to hear some inside stories about that.
Tape width == $$$. You can do a lot of overdubbing on 2-inch wide tape that will make 1-inch or half-inch sound very noisy but boy is the tape expensive. It takes a lot of planning to get this right. EQ matters A LOT if you are overdubbing. Less tracks will keep you honest and that is often what is missing from our bags and bags of software digital tricks. Too often for my comfort people write and tell me how much they like the one-mic-one-guitar-one-voice-one-pass recordings that I can just barely stand.
Pull out a copy of Dylan’s original Mr Tambourine Man. It’s mono.
On the other hand, considering the time, expense and resources required for analog, I’d never go back. I can get a lot done alone that was impossible in the analog days. It isn’t that I prefer it but the deal is this: in a band that performs successfully, I can get maybe two or three songs recorded every two years. As a songwriter, it isn’t enough. Stevie Nicks remarked on that too.
As I said, tools in creative hands get creative results. A Muscle Shoals producer once warned me that buying a 4-track (best we could get then) would turn me into a recording engineer when what he really wanted was a songwriter. There is truth in that. Sitting with the guitar until the song is written THEN starting the production is almost always the best approach although I do admire what can be done with the Sibelius idea pad and a bit of math. Both work, but the first is usually more honest.
As Harlan Howard said, “Three chords and the truth”. The three chords bit bothers me (check out the chord police) but the idea is right.
len bullard
September 2, 2008 at 7:11 am
Live gigs:
The most compelling musical artist I (and about a bajillion other people) discovered in the last couple of years was Nick Drake. The number two or three slot probably goes to Eva Cassady (and again with my bajillion companion fans).
Given that neither of them were particularly fond of live performance, I think it’s safe to conclude that there really are many roads to Rome, though some undoubtedly more visible, and better traveled, than others.
Just sayin’.
You can feel it when an artist is in pursuit of that ephemeral tiger, and sense the brushing of their fingers against the fleeing tail. It’s rare anyone manages to latch on, however, which is why we’re still compelled by treasures that are hundreds of years old, and so rarely find something contemporary that’s worthy of such rarefied company.
fieldingbandolier
September 2, 2008 at 7:30 am
I’m still on the trail of “the Lost Vineyard Tapes”…an incredible collection of probably hundreds of hours of live recordings done in coffee houses and concert venues on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s and ’70s. Everyone who was on the coffee house circuit on the East Coast in those days played on the Vineyard. We know where the tapes are; they’re safe; we’re talking to the family of the man who recorded it all. Stay tuned…
Rick Turner
September 2, 2008 at 7:35 am
Let me know when and how much. I’d gladly buy that, Rick. The folkies inspired as a songwriter far more than the rest. Lyrics. Lyrics. Lyrics.
I can’t stand Dylan’s voice or Hank Williams’ for that matter being something of a vocal nazi. But the lyrics? Who can touch them?
I’m also a b-side fan. There is a little played Joni Mitchell song that comes back to me as prophecy from time to time: Songs To Aging Children Come. It was used on the Alice’s Restaurant soundtrack but I didn’t find it anywhere else.
len bullard
September 2, 2008 at 7:43 am
Rick- I was at dinner with Geoff Muldaur last night and he was reminiscing about The Kweskin Jug Band playing the Vineyard in the mid 60’s. He said it was always the best gig.
Jon Taplin
September 2, 2008 at 7:48 am
@bandolier:
Live gigs aren’t necessarily what a songwriter needs (eg, Drake). In the studio though, they ensure the musicians have a steady stream of fresh chops. In combination, a brilliant song and brilliant chops are magical.
But you’d hate the tedium. As Ringo said, he mainly remembers Sgt Pepper as the album during which he learned to play chess. I call these sessions The Great Sit Around.
Songwriting is often more like acting or journalism: it requires an eye for details and relationships, a point of view. At a certain point of development of the craft, the eye and the heart should turn outward. One can only write Love Me Do once, then what? Live gigs are an excellent view on human affairs, so again, not necessary but not bad.
I caught hell from some quarters for The Tongue. From others, sincere thanks. I don’t leave it up for kids because my daughter is embarassed. But it did the job asked and it was great fun. All I can say to the sexually-repressed uptight crowd is, “well, it’s accurate” and let it go at that. I worked on it for all of three days.
Schtick that it is, everybody loved “Sam” because my heart was in it and I worked on it for three years until I was satisfied. Different strokes.
len bullard
September 2, 2008 at 7:54 am
I suspect live gigs work well for some groups, however. In a place like this we use the ideas voiced by other people as springboards for our own. Catch a bounce (and sometimes you can), and you’ll go higher than you ever could on your own.
I remember reading something about Led Zepp to this effect (I think the topic was actually why they couldn’t imagine replacing Bonham). One band I had hopes for was Soul Coughing (they seemed to come so close…), but as much as I like Doughty, he is missing his drummer and keyboardist. BRMC was onto something for a minute with “Howl”, but in retrospect, the critical ingredient may have been their producer. Hard to say, from so far away.
I have no idea who you are or what you’re referring to, btw. I just stumbled across this place on night and was impressed by the comments being made. As far as tedium goes, however, there was a time in my former life when I sat as part of an orchestra in the studio. I imagine I have a faint taste, though the repetition factor would probably increase by a factor of ten.
I’ll be away from the nets for a few days, but will check back when I’m around. Because you’ve piqued my curiosity and I hope you provide clarification: The Tongue? Sam?
Looking forward to discovering what you’re referring to.
fieldingbandolier
September 2, 2008 at 8:15 am
@bandolier: yes, and sometimes they bloody drop the blanket and someone falls in the mud.
You can find my songs at IMEEM by typing in Len Bullard in the search box. (Sorry, that isn’t meant to be a shameless plug). I don’t leave The Tongue up on the web. It was a commission for The Jewel of Indra web site (a VR adult site). The title conveys the content. I was happy to write and record it but I don’t do that sort of thing often. Sam (for Liz) is at the Bewitched.net site and IMEEM. I loved Liz Montgomery and I miss her. So personal? Yes. Popular? So it seems. Songs to aging children come…
I use it here as a contrast and an example of treating songwriting as a craft and art instead of emphasizing it as a personal diary. Both are possible and different artists emphasize different aspects.
There isn’t a reliable formula for predicting who is going to be a good composer. I’m glad about that. Some songwriters I know are terrible musicians, and some incredible musicians I know are terrible songwriters. We can discuss the whys of that if you like, but otherwise, I’m telling you what it looks like inside these eyes only: a point of view is a place in time and space seen by eyes with an entire universe behind them. At the other side of that universe, is the back of my head, an infinity of points inside a locally bounded circle.
len bullard
September 2, 2008 at 8:36 am
@len, @everybody,
Steve Albini, the producer, is on the record saying, “recording your primary take to digital is like trying to paint a masterpiece on toilet paper. Your primary take HAS to be to analog tape.”
presumably then, it’s ok to dump it to digital and play with it afterwards. It’d sure be simpler to do all the bouncing on digital. Not to mention an arbitrary number of tracks, you wouldn’t have to worry about it so much, and no loss of fidelity, if you start with a high enough sample rate.
Although that quote is probably 10 years old, and I suspect a lot has changed. For instance, now there transistor guitar amps the size of a big pedal that can emulate the sounds of all the classic amps: Vox, Marshall, Fender, .. and do a pretty good job.
I’ve been a heavy critic of synthetic instruments, in the sense that they replace, copy or imitate their older counter parts. ie, I love synths, but I hate synths that try to sound like Grand Pianos. The keyboard with the Hammond sound, Rhodes program, or Moog sampler, things like that. I saw a fantastic band last week in San Francisco (Stanton Moore) with a young, up’n'coming jazz keyboardist, who used a real Hammond B3 & Fender Rhodes. In Hammond player circles, there’s simply no substitution. You absolutely have to lug that 200lb hunk of Oak around, even in these very digital days.
Len’s talk about subtleties of composition is interesting. Me, personally, I tend to be very interested in the technology still. I think of it as a snake-dance, there are right and wrong ways to use all the new technologies with each other. Samplers can be interesting, but relying on them a crutch, pedals, oh infinite pedals. But the part about starting with the guitar and getting it all worked out first is pretty much dead on. For me, I’m actually usually a step or so regressed from that. I’ve been playing guitar for so long, that I’ll just hear melodies when I’m out and about in my head, and try to play them on a virtual guitar in my minds-eye to see , and hopefully remember the note-progression. After years of practice , I can do a pretty good job of this.
Not really a plug either, but here are a few acoustic songs that I wanted to show a friend in France, http://www.myspace.com/gregnaughtonexperience
Just to prove I’m not a total hack.
Composing is the easy part for me. It’s finding the money, time, and simply staying organized that I find hard. Well, and I like to have a good drummer handy, which isn’t always the case.
This thread is awesome.
Greg
September 2, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Google up “Nagra” and look at what the pros have to say. Using the Nagra version of noise reduction, the specs come in very close or as good as digital, though the newer one bit stuff is getting really fine. There is a safety zone using tape where it overloads in a much more civilized manner than digital, which when you overload it goes straight into the crapper. Most drummers would prefer to record to tape, and 16 track 2″ at that…not 24 track. There’s nothing quite like track width.
My pal Kavi Alexander recorded most of his incredible Water Lily Acoustics albums on a custom rebuilt Studer 1″ two track machine running at 15 ips. No outboard EQ, no noise reduction, no limiting, no compression, no fake reverb or delay. Just two custom made mics into two custom made mic preamps into the machine. Listen to Meeting by the River with Ry Cooder and VM Bhatt for how good analog recording can be. Then listen to just about anything else Kavi has recorded to hear live music captured as well as anyone ever has done so.
Ry’s wife, Susie and I were the only two in the audience for Meeting…
Rick Turner
September 2, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Thanks for the nagra pointer. Greg, I’ll check out your site. I AM a total hack but it’s all still fun. Experimentally, I’ve been looking into the 3D world engines for the fun of writing self-mixing music (what happens when wav files are combined based on spatial proximity triggers).
Very true about the ceiling. With tape, you can punch it and similar to tubes, it behaves and will even get this lustre that won’t happen if you don’t let it go red here and there. With digital, the ceiling is the ceiling and there is no forgiveness. What goes away is warmth. Even in 16 track half inch, the tunes are warmer.
For me it comes down to cost and feedback in the information sense. What I compose on the guitar and then what I can do scripting in midi by writing the score are two different inputs so two different outputs. Being a reasonably trained musician, I can write in the notation and listen, then copy, paste and keep improving my idea. I can print that out, give it to players that read, let them add their magic, and things are good. When improvising a piece, I turn on the machine with a decent mic (can’t afford better than decent), my fingers do what they can, and then I clean up a bit in the software. So at least digital gives more musicians more access and capability for cheaper. It isn’t better sound. Just more accessible and without the long learning curve. The downside is the canned repetitiveness of using other engineer’s ideas of good eq or effects settings. The upside is it is pretty good eq and effects setting.
Productivity for song writing and producing is better digitally for me working alone. With a band, it’s a trade-off but given a choice and having the budget, I’d go analog for the ceiling forgiveness and the warmth. Even if I have to use filters, it’s still a better sound. I just can’t be a studio engineer, a composer, the singer, the lyricist and the player of multiple instruments without compromising something.
I also notice the older musicians who came up through the evolution of recording and actually had to play it right with a money meter running are better at it at all levels when it comes to real sound. There is no comparison of the sound of The Last Waltz and even a Beatles studio album. Live makes us better. TLW is a masterpiece and for my money, appropriately titled. It seems that all of the good chops of that era are on that album/movie.
Music has this pattern where the popular music hits a height of taste and complexity, then collapses back to rudiments and starts over. Except for the music archaeologist bands (thinking bluegrass for example, or the trad blues players), it never quite repeats because the songwriters and players will fuse something new into it. My son plays in what they call a ska band, but it is metal/jazz/funk/punk and sort of terrible to my ears, but to them, it’s alive and they are very proud of themselves. Just as it should be, I think.
len bullard
September 2, 2008 at 3:16 pm
@Rick, wow, I’m running out to get that album right away. Yeah, drums do exacerbate digital recording’s weakness. Symbols especially, sit right in the frequency range somewhere around the Nyquist frequency; digital seems to reduce them to piles of hiss; pity. Reading 16-track 2″ gives me warm fuzzy feelings, and just makes me want to play. something about the warm cocoon of an analog environment. Perhaps I’ve over-idealized it, perhaps not.
@len, I’m a terrible producer, and hear you about digital for personal use. I’ve spent a lot of time on Cubase and Rosegarden (a linux variety), but to be honest, none of my efforts at isolated digital recording have ever turned out real well. I think I was much better playing with other people. It’s a really cool thing to be an enabler in the sense of helping a good time to happen for a lot of people beyond yourself, by just showing up. Even if the PA gives you a headache and you have to pack all your gear in at 3:30 in the morning. The comradery it fosters amongst folks is pretty unique too.
As far as cycles of taste goes, I tend to think of it in more of the sense of the romantic period of classical, Beethoven & Rachmaninoff, something nice and melodic at the beginning, and this period is good and lasts for a long time, then gives way to Stravinsky, and then the 12-tone guys. They just sort of blow the whole thing to pieces with over-analysis, the same way that Jazz Fusion did to Jazz in the 70s. or Nirvana did to the guitar solo in the 90s. Then a short period of nothingness follows, where it’s any mans game. and it all starts over, simple at first and builds; commodious vicus of recirculation.
Greg
September 2, 2008 at 4:04 pm
@greg: I couldn’t get your MySpace page to load. Access denied. Rats!
You said you didn’t know me and that’s ok. I’m not known. I started as a soloist and only then did I play in bands. I started out playing with two-track ping pong, then deck to deck ping pong, finally bought a 4-track reel to reel, then and eight track, then a sixteen with the band then graduated to digital once I got out of the band. So I’ve always written and recorded, but at the point at which I should have moved to Nashville (with Chet Atkins encouraging me, Glenn Frey encouraging me, no end of that), I decided I didn’t like the lifestyle and kept my amateur status. So I’m a nobody and proud of it.
It’s a simpler life. I go up to the Bluebird in Nashville every few years, play the Songwriter’s Night, and then I’m done with it. The BB has turned into a museum of sorts so I don’t think I want to do that again. My last bandmate died a year ago and I haven’t wanted to go back to the clubs. Hermit recording and writing for the church are enough for now.
Don’t put it down. It gets better with age even as the muscles don’t. It gets deeper too, and in some ways easier to do. If you view all the toys as gateways, they help with the adventure. If you rely on them absolutely, they are Chinese finger puzzles.
Some people I know write a song a day. I only write if the song seizes me, or if someone asks but I always have a project in progress. Some take days, some take years. It doesn’t matter as long as I like it.
I have friends who can’t write because they are still too obsessed with being accepted or cool or dominant. It turns out stilted. The better writers I know are keen observers. Some keep notes and they do get passionate about topics while retaining a detachment in the process. The best songs are the true songs not the artsy crafty blue songs. If you laugh or cry while writing it, so will the listener. Music is a language of emotions and it is the only universal human language. If you can speak it, it’s a gift and a privilege.
When you play, make the audience the star. You are a fire in the corner and the more you empty yourself out and fill up the space with the big spirit, the more the real music is heard and remembered.
Not to go on because you are tired is understandable. Not to go on because you partied too hard or took too much stuff, that’s a betrayal. When Garcia died, one of the band said in an interview that the hardest thing to take was that in the end he loved the junk more than the music. Having buried friends, I get that.
Dang. Jerry Reed died last night. Bummer! Amos was a hot picker. Gotta go blog him.
len bullard
September 3, 2008 at 5:59 am
Like Jon, I keep following this thread, which has taken on the qualities of great jam session, which makes it awkward to intrude, for fear of interrupting the flow. I like to let it go a couple weeks, then check in, so I can appreciate the three leads riffing off each other, with fielding providing a some damn good counterpoint.
I did, however, react to Len’s “Some songwriters I know are terrible musicians, and some incredible musicians I know are terrible songwriters. We can discuss the whys of that if you like…” with a sense of being able to add to the liner notes if you will. Hoping it will enhance rather than mar the performance.
In the 70’s, when I started shifting from teaching to psychology, I happened on a book by a couple, Claire and William Russell, called “Human Behavior” published in 1961. Don’t recommend tracking it down, as it’s a strange brew of the then new “Behaviorist” slant, Humanism (lots of classic lit references), layered onto a (soon to be shelved by most) Classical Freudian framework.
Buried in it is one chapter where they fleshed out the late 40s work of statistician named Halsted who used factor analysis to try to suss out the qualities that distinguish varying degrees of intelligence. It’s a fairly simple perspective that has served me for 40+ years, whenever I’m trying to sort out or explain why this artist, or that craftsman is better than others. And yes I know there are a ton of other models but this is the one that consistently serves me the best so lets not go down the rat hole of “But you left out….”
The Russell’s translated Halsted’s dry statistical work into four simple factors: Abstraction, Integration, Specific Expression, and Exploratory Drive.
Abstraction is the ability to see patterns in raw data. People who are good at it can pull patterns out of the chaos of life better than most. Most of us have to do the reverse which means we filter chaos down to a very restricted stream just to get on with the day. We actively don’t pay much attention when a new pattern presents itself, in fact we are usually quick to discount it or forget it. Abstraction is best seen as that flash of inspiration, and is necessary for great and meaningful variety to be introduced into human experience. The great are able to crate patterns where others can’t, the good pick these up from the great quicker than most, and the rest of us only accept them after a long gradual process of exposure which regurgitates them into new pop memes. In evolutionary terms its the primate of the tribe who forms the idea that there may be other food sources than bugs and roots by observing other primates eating.
Integration is the ability to compare new data with old, and use it for organized, flexible growth of the individual’s experience. Flexibility, or the ability unlearn old ways of thinking if you will. It’s the ability to evolutionarily integrate newly abstracted patterns into old to come up with a synthesis that is in itself, new. The great create new patterns for us to learn, the good absorb those new patterns well before the rest of us, and the rest of us absorb them after a slower process of exposure. Again, it’s the primate who sees that other orders of chimps don’t die when they eat berries in addition to r&bs. Forming the idea that “I bet that means we can eat berries too.”
Specific expression is easier. It’s the skill to be able to turn the more general internal activities of abstraction and integration into meaningful external experience. It’s the ability to pass those internal ideas to others in a form that they can absorb. It’s skill, and executive ability. The great seem to fall into ways to express things clearer and more efficiently than others, the good can do it far better than average, but hearing or seeing them compared to geniuses (which is what we are really talking about when we talk about the greats), they just aren’t at that level of skill. Salieri v. Mozart, Drake v. Dylan, Shakespeare v. Molière (you get the drift). And for the rest of us it’s the full range from the good local bar pianist singer doing Tom Waits covers, to me playing chopsticks. Abstraction and Integration by themselves can be thought of as that genuine key to a unified field theory of physics, scribbled sleepily onto a notebook in the middle of the night which is pure gibberish the next morning. The three working together result in that poem or song that wrote itself whole one day, that you and others think is pretty incredible. Expressing is the development of the ability to go from picking up a rock to pound a root, to flint knapping. There is a true genius in a finely done Clovis point.
Exploratory Drive is really simple to explain, harder to quantify. It’s the physiological ability to tolerate newness in our lives. In the great, there is not just a high tolerance, but a genuine physiological NEED for new stimulus: new skills (the better to express with), new ideas (the better to build even greater patterns from), new environments and new chaos (the more raw material to build from). To explore is to tolerate uncertainty. Think Coltrane, T. E. Lawrence, Margaret Mead, and run the list out from there in your own head. The great don’t just go to new physical and intellectual places, they have to go there to thrive. The good can tolerate the new, but just don’t have that intense drive being, and are more often getting their NEW while staying at home (literally and figuratively) processing the discoveries of the great.
The rest of us? Well, this is the genuine deal breaker between Great, Good, Pop, and the Rest Of Us. Other than carefully prepared consumer goods, we’re a pretty stodgy bunch about more than canned change fed to us at a rate we can digest. For example, we flip out when someone the idea that we might actually have to pay for our current lifestyle, ‘cus that’s very unAmerican. Treasonous in fact. Even in politics, the other than great or good are not just new stimulus adverse, they’re outright anti-change because it physically upsets them. We just don’t want to explore there, so we kill the messenger and carry on to The Collapse.
Part of Jon’s whole argument of then vs. now is based on his belief that there just aren’t as many people willing to explore the musical extremes now as there were in the 60’s and 70. Several of us have countered with “Yes, actually there are, but you aren’t willing to explore them.” A hardening of the categories if you will. So maybe Jon’s real argument is that there is a certain lack of musical genius that is accessible to him.
But then, as Len said “Music has this pattern where the popular music hits a height of taste and complexity, then collapses back to rudiments and starts over. …, it never quite repeats because the songwriters and players will fuse something new into it.” and we may actually be in a musical interregnum.
Clearly, the greatest geniuses are gifted and proficient in all four areas. The good are either not as proficient or are clearly lacking in one or some combination of the factors as you move down the scale of great to good, to good but not as good. It’s one of the reasons why teams like Lennon and Mcartney did better together than apart. Together they brought all four factors at genius level. Apart, not so much. In fact class, play around with this assignment: Resolved, John was the genius explorer, and abstractor, Paul the integrator and expresser (with George being a hell of lot better on guitar skills, and Ringo on rhythm skills than either).
Is Glass a well rounded musical genius, or someone who has genius levels of abstraction, but expresses the ideas this gives him in ways that few of us really want to listen to. “Dudes far our, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend all that much time on the journey with him.” “Well Rounded” becomes the operative concept for good, while true genius presents as an integrated package that is seemless.
And sometimes the real genius comes from outside the actual act; i.e. a really genius producer or packager can allow a group to appear better than they are.
Anyway, without being negatively critical, look at the folks you admire and draw from, and those you play with. It’s hard to assign a pure scale number, from one to one hundred, to all of them for each factor, but it’s ever so much easier to assign people by using the “better than” subjective rating (comparing a to b which is better? which is what we all do all the time), and figure out how much of it is really coming from which factor.
Quick: Steven Stills v. Jimmy Hendrix.
See?
Ken Ballweg
September 3, 2008 at 10:50 am
Hendrix
Rick Turner
September 3, 2008 at 11:13 am
No contest…
Rick Turner
September 3, 2008 at 11:17 am
Like I said: See.
Gets harder when you apply it to folks who are a little closer together.
Lets try another with the requirement for voting being clarification of who is better in which factors.
Dylan vs. Simon
Cobain vs. Yorke
PJ Harvey vs. Cheryl Crow
Go.
PS: this needs to end after these examples, so the liner notes don’t take over the real session. I know: Damn A&R men, who invited them?
Ken Ballweg
September 3, 2008 at 11:39 am
Good research, Ken. Pretty much it from where I sit. It takes all four and by experience, it shifts around for different pieces of composite work. I got better recordings with the band because each hand has an extra unreproducible skill and each voice has a sound and quality of breathing. The beauty was the aggregate. The unrecorded pain was the dogfight it took to do that. In case you wonder why bands don’t last…
As to your choices I can only do the first two:
1. Hendrix. No contest. Stills has more work because he has more staying power. Enuff said.
2. Simon if I have to listen to him. Dylan if I have to read him. I played a fair amount of both. Simon is much more challenging to play his music. Dylan is much more challenging to learn his lyrics.
Otherwise, I loved the directness and simplicity of Lightfoot.
They all held a bar high enough that I could never quite grasp it but not for lack of trying and continuing to try.
I really wish Croce had had another two or three decades. He had so much coming out of the gate. On the other hand, I’ve heard nothing from Arlo in a long time and his gifts on stage for making me laugh were prodigious. I saw him live in Santa Barbara. Truth be told, if I were to be invited just to sit an pick, it would be Arlo. Why? Copacetic spirit.
Otherwise: Kate Bush or Joni Mitchell?
len bullard
September 3, 2008 at 11:52 am
Ken, by all means, jam out. I could spend a whole bunch of space agreeing with what you said and extol it’s brilliance, or for that matter, Len’s post before it, but try this out for size:
“Do what thou wilt so mete it be”, the old Aleister Crowley phrase that Pagey is said to have inscribed on the inner runner of Zeppelin III albums. I verified this once in a vinyl shop with several copies. In fact, so many of them had the inscription, and many of the inscriptions varied from one-another, I don’t know how that would have been accomplished, given that they pressed millions of those.
A phrase, that I think for Page meant that when you press on past the ropes of accepted and understood discourse, you are all on your own. There are no rules out there, no guidelines. You have what you bring with you. (Hey, sort of like that famous scene in Empire Strikes Back!) But more importantly, it teaches you not to judge or second guess yourself. You can’t compare yourself with what has been done. “Do what thou wilt”, in a sense, is a magick incantation which tells you that no matter what you do, that it hasn’t been done, which means that you are free of all comparison. You’re free.
Others are going to judge anyway, and that there are a whole army of critics lined up, just waiting for their chance to pass judgment, but who cares what they say? That’s what they do. It’s cool, it’s their job.
Hendrix: “I’ve got my own world to live through. Ain’t gonna copy you.”
Isn’t it funny how nearly every one of us can do a better than passable impression of Dylan’s early period, sandpaper throaty singing? Does that mean we’re all as good as he was? That’s slippery, really. Maybe we are. Every last one of us could just stand up and pick a social issue, we have the voice to sing it, Bobby taught us. But not one of us would dare. It’s sacrosanct, and besides, he did it first, and we all know he did it best.
That happens a lot of the time. The first does it best. Many of the subsequent are faced with the difficult decision: well, should I use some of his chops, or completely ignore him? and because the pioneer was so all encompassing over a genre, if you choose to avoid using the new vocabulary that they created, you realize that you are willfully choosing to be lousy, but you have no choice, because imitating them isn’t just as bad, it’s worse. You have to go in search of your own voice.
I think for all of us, before we even get to the part of trying to wrangle our abstraction/integration machinery, we first, earlier in life, assess our natural gifts. Of which there are many that are going to make a difference of what you can get away with. For instance, my motor control is for s**t. But that didn’t stop me from playing guitar for 20+ years, several hours a day. and I did get fair at playing, but my motor-control malady never went away and still challenges me. I wanted to be Django Reinhardt, Jaco Pastorius, John Scofield, all these guys with uncanny motor control. and no way I could do it, not even close. Hendrix, that guy played his guitar as much with his electrolytes as he did with his fingers. Just amazing to see him throw up an arm and conjure the damndest feedback that no one’s ears have heard anything like before or since.
One other comes to mind, Greg Brown, who I’ve seen many times because I used to live near him, has this deep, mahogany silky voice like an old tree that’s seen a hundred seasons, that can do no wrong. Only a few of us are born with those physical traits as to give an immense leg up on the rest right out of the gate.
Greg
September 3, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Dylan vs. Simon: Dylan if I get to pick an era: ‘63, in the D.A. Pennebaker film. He was a hell of a picker in that period, and to use Len’s phrase, filled the room to the point of blinding.
Cobain vs. Yorke: that’s a wayy hard one. Cobain, maybe, only if because Yorke is fairly reserved, bordering on neurotic. but Radiohead continue to pump out brilliant records and show no signs of flagging. They are the only band at their maturity level, I mean, even including the old classics who pull that off. Just shows that their priorities are in the right place.
P.J. Harvey vs. Cheryl Crow: P.J. Harvey, hands down. I didn’t have any friends who affected tattoos, piercings and drastic lifestyle changes over Crow.
Greg
September 3, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I’m with Greg…
Dylan’s breadth is much wider and he’s far more daring.
Cobain, well not quite so easy, but I’ll give a slight nod.
Harvey…yeah, once again it’s the daring
Mitchell vs. Bush? That is hard, they’re both really brilliant, and Bush’s latest “Aerial” is a work of major daring. The thing about Kate is that she has the guts to sound ugly when the song requires that. Few artists have the self confidence to do that.
Some of this might get down to desert island choices, and we don’t have to put one artist down to raise another one up. So far, with the exception of Fatboy Slim, I’d listen to any of the artists mentioned, and I do eagerly.
Rick Turner
September 3, 2008 at 2:46 pm
With Kate I always have to get used to it and let it seep in. Hounds of Love was the exception. It was immediately accessible. Aerial is like a painting on a wall behind me, or really clear water. I can listen to it endlessly and somehow what goes by never sticks. That’s not bad. It has a seamlessness like a Beethoven string concerto. I have an undying devotion to that woman’s work. It moved me way beyond where I was, challenged me, made me write bad checks. Love her. Always will. I put up my first VRML web site for her and left it up there although it was really weak.
Bravery or bored with the same old same old? Hard to tell sometimes. The music seems to lead where it wants to. Dylan was certainly braver in lyrical content, but musically he was usually pretty pedestrian even with The Band. Simon did a lot more exploring and of course a lot of that is studio musician chops, but like the Beatles and the Stones, he went culture strip mining and then turned that into pop. I have a certain respect for that urge that I don’t have for the white guitarists who spend a lifetime trying to sound black without exploring their own insides, or at least taking that to new places. Ry Cooder is an exception. He got a unique feel out of it that was copied most notably by Mark Knopfler and then takes it in a new direction.
Process is the unexplored thread. I know the ways I do it but I’d like to hear from those who have watched others or do it themselves.
len
September 3, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Greg,
Agree totally that “Do what thou wilt…” is the correct guideline for a playing musician, or any artist, for that matter. The actual making of music, of all the performing arts for that matter, needs to be without any conscious regard for what the critical reception is going to be. If that’s the driver, then your probably some where down the comparative scale, and very self consciously aspiring to be more. The means that it is much more likely the “art” will be derivative with an eye to being successful and therefore fall down in the exploratory area, as well as have that overtone of trying too hard that separates it from the easy “So have you heard this?” of Rick’s casual and carnal music camps (oh I’m so jealous). One is going to flow better because it isn’t fighting artificial standards. And you know, it’s really going to sound better as a result.
It’s like listening to mid and late period Casals solo cello work, the hook is in the soul of it. I can’t listen without getting very emotionally effected. That electric thing that goes up your spine, that’s a g-meeter. Usually only happens when a true moment of genius is occurring. But you have to be careful, because it can throw some false positives like the time my daughter and three of her friends played some incredibly respectable covers of the Bolin/ Rampal jazz discs for their senior concert. Certain drugs can also effect the trigger threshold as well, which may actually account for some of 60s music nostalgia. Paired and state bound learning can be a bitch to sort out.
I think that another tell for genius moments is does it make you laugh with joy, or just plain feel happy? I got that way the first time I listened to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, and subsequently have gone through roughly four copies of tapes, before I got it on digital. Great music is somebody making a very personal and emotional statement accessible. Which means it isn’t limited to geniuses per se, but the genius of genius is the consistency and ease with which they can do it.
Another tell is does it bury itself in you, becoming a bit of permanent part of you. Can you catch a snatch of even a bad Muszac version in the grocery store, and have it trigger aural memory (like one of Proust’s madeleine) where the real experience relives in your for a moment.
Remember, the point of my liner note’s intrusion, was to offer up a personal theory of the mechanisms working when we sort great performances, and great catalogs, from the good, and the not so good. It was triggered by the pedant in me wanting to help Len with his question of why are some folks strike him as great songwriters but terrible musicians (usually because they don’t have mastery in their expressive factor), and why some great musicians are terrible song writers. (likely more a result of not being that gifted in the abstraction/ integration factors. They can play it well, but they can’t explore poetry or lyric lines that come from a different level than a couple thousand other singer songwriters.)
My thinking says we all get cheesed when someone sets themselves up as a professional critic, yet we’re doing a similar process on a personal level all the time. It’s done in what you seek out, what you buy, and what you listen too. The collective of all these processes, especially that of people who “know” as opposed to those who only “consume” (lookin’ at you Morgan and your Fat Boy Slim indeed) is largely how the greats get filtered to the top. Any time you want to know who the practicing geniuses are, poll the really good as to who they are learning from. It’s not just the “influences” which are often stacked with “Folks I also like to listen to.”, but try to isolate “Who makes you play better as a result of directly trying to dissect and spin off from their music?”
Even though the process is largely happening at a pre conscious level, it can still be articulated, and can help with understanding, but not controlling, the process of aesthetic judgements. But, again, to be valid it needs to come from inside the community, rather than from music spammers.
Ken Ballweg
September 4, 2008 at 7:53 am
“The actual making of music, of all the performing arts for that matter, needs to be without any conscious regard for what the critical reception is going to be.”
Ummm… see the scene in Blues Brothers at Bob’s Country Bunker. Chicken wire is real. Been there.
No two gigs are the same. Not paying attention to the audience is deadly. The studio and the club are distinct applications.
That said, if the musician is bored, the music is boring. Sometimes the audience couldn’t care less.
I was playing with a flower-power band in an after hours club (where people go who can’t get drunk enough by 2AM). We were failing badly. Fast Eddie Grantland jumped on stage with his drummer, took the mic from me and said under his breath, “Len, this isn’t a concert. All these people care about is getting drunk, getting high and getting laid.”
Then he set the house on fire with Johnny B Goode. It was the silver bullet right into my third eye.
Context matters.
len bullard
September 4, 2008 at 8:10 am
Didn’t say not regarding your audience. You have to have that, or what’s the sense of performing. Often they are there because they have already made a critical judgement. And that electric moment when the total energy of the audience loops back into the playing and pushes it just that much higher are really magic moments. It’s why Rick says you really don’t learn the full art and craft if you don’t play live.
What I was slicing out was playing with an eye to making the charts, getting good press, and being concerned with being packaged and sold well: impact over substance. Hitting to the cheap seats as it were. If that’s the performer’s focus, to my way of thinking, it will come through in the performance and take something away from it.
Ken Ballweg
September 4, 2008 at 8:39 am
it’s why Spinal Tap’s “Big Fat Bottom” will never be anything more than a cult giggle.
Ken Ballweg
September 4, 2008 at 8:44 am
“It was a silver bullet right into my third eye”
omg, you guys are priceless. Thanks for letting me engage in this discussion with you. We all win an internet.
minutes to attend to: Fat Boy Slim, just because his name keeps coming up, I wanted to clarify one thing. This guy is a bedroom DJ, and one of the better ones. That means that he uses “gear”, computers and keyboards and makes finished songs. I recently watched a BBC documentary about House music that started from the beginning where, in Chicago it was, “hey, what’s going on that the Warehouse?”, because that was literally the only dance club of its type in the world at that point. Then it got shortened to ‘House, rest is history, yadda.
My purpose for watching this docu was to see what the big deal was with the whole genre. They pretty much covered all of the significant history, from beginning to present moment, and I still hated %90 of it. The music just wasn’t that good, which astounded me because there is a lot of very ok electronic music. House/electronica is a low cost of entry music, which is why it became hugely popular. People with vastly less musical talent were able to participate in music for the first time as creators, rather than be passive observers, and they went bananas with it. Personally, because I have ears, I judge them by the same criteria that I would hold the Goldberg Variations or Bitches Brew to, and it dies. go figure. FatBoySlim isn’t bad though. If we need a whipping boy, I suggest we pick something more contemporary that is easily reducible to it’s core fallacy. Creed perhaps? Naa, too old. I don’t even know what’s contempo-cool now.
A couple of the other electronic musicians, most notably Aphex Twin and DJ Shadow are sublime, and easily equals to some of my highly esteemed instrumental heroes, for sure.
Kate Bush: sorry, I am barely familiar with her work, so I sat that one out. Her melodies are so completely unconventional that it seems she occupies a plane completely orthogonal to my conventional diatonic understanding of chordal makeup. Amazing really.
“Which means it isn’t limited to geniuses per se, but the genius of genius is the consistency and ease with which they can do it.”
I can’t agree enough with this phrase. Consistency should be added to the set of necessary basic traits. Showing up for gigs on time and sober, and able to be “ON” at a moments notice — all admirable.
Rick, I picked up A meeting by the River, listened to it twice and went and bought an acoustic guitar. Thanks. They sure make it sound easy.
Greg
September 4, 2008 at 9:20 am
Kate’s fortune is her voice and luminescent eyes.
Her heart is in every note. That’s real magic.
Electronica IS fab. I indulge.
It is the easiest way to go a raiding. I go through phases with indian music that I can’t really do well but the color pallette is extraordinary and it frees me up from the tyranny of harmony over melody. George Harrison pointed the way. Kate is one who took that journey at times as well as Delius, Floyd, Celtic and the rest of the sounds of magickal creatures. She has one of the finest synthetic heads going in the sense of talking bits of this and that and layering them perfectly for the emotional responses she is after. To me, she was the last real juju of the 60s style of awe in the face of the universe, the childlike but weary wonder of the immensity and the impossibility of understanding it all yet somehow sure that there is a simpler understanding that makes it alright. And that is the Deal with God.
I’d hate to be her A&R guy. It would be like being the Maytag Repair Man.
len
September 4, 2008 at 6:39 pm
“Hitting to the cheap seats as it were. If that’s the performer’s focus, to my way of thinking, it will come through in the performance and take something away from it.”
Welcome to the Tragedy of Nashville’s Record Row. Many chops. Much soul lost.
len
September 4, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I think Kate is her own A&R guy…kind of like Joni Mitchell was. When Joni got signed, David Crosby signed on as her producer so the record company types would leave her alone. Joni produced herself. Kate, too had some big time fans in her early years…Peter Gabriel, David Gilmour…who went to bat for her inside the industry. She is a genius.
Rick Turner
September 4, 2008 at 7:01 pm
BTW, look into all the other Water Lily recordings. Exceptional music recorded superbly.
Rick Turner
September 4, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Joni Mitchell is my great unrequited love.
Beautiful in all respects, dangerous, always on the edge of something really new but always personal. I give her very high, very well rounded genius points in all the factors.
But I’m biased cus I’m a love struck puppy.
Ken Ballweg
September 4, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Ken- Me too. When she did “The Last Waltz” with me, I was kind of dizzy all day.
Jon Taplin
September 4, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Rick- Geoff Muldaur sends his best.
Jon Taplin
September 4, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Guys- This stuff is so interesting. That this string lives alife of it’s own. Where can we take this? I keep coming back to the original purpose of the post–why doesn’t pop culture matter as much anymore?
Any thoughts?
Jon Taplin
September 4, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Jon, I’d love to talk to Geoffrey about the Lost Vineyard Tapes project. I’m pretty sure he’s well represented in Jug Band recordings done there. I’ve been in touch with Carolyn Hester, Sylvia Tyson, Tom Rush, and Peter Coyote who were all there playing the club and hanging out, too, in those years. I think there are several hundred hours of well done live recordings.
Geoff was always brilliant, but he’s done some of the best work of his life in the past five years. I love it when people just get better and better. For anyone who doesn’t know his work, start with some recent stuff, “Secret Handshake” and “Private Astronomy.” Then work your way forward and back.
Rick Turner
September 4, 2008 at 9:26 pm
“why doesn’t pop culture matter as much anymore?”
Answer: Because you are old. Deal with it. Seriously, Jon – please listen to me! Read.
There are two requirements for any warrior:
1. Go fight in new battles and win.
2. Ride in parades.
The key requirement is #2 parades. The warrior must ADMIT they THEY WON.
This is a crucial thing because old guys too often, like Sharpton or YOU, don’t want to admit that the battles they fought CHANGED the system. Like your forefathers, and their forefathers. That the past is not prologue, that the arguments of yesteryear ARE NOT APPLICABLE today.
Look, I know shit about music, but I know math, and based on that I’ve studied digital microphones and worked on turntables that used high speed cameras to control scratching.
And frankly from a weapons approach, saying the Beatles is better than Fat Boy Slim, is like saying the bow and arrow is better than nuclear bomb.
There is a SCIENCE to all things. And the longer the science is studied, the EASIER it is for less insightful people to make greater use of reality. This isn’t a judgement on the quality of the artist, this is a quantifiable aspect of their output – who cares what they had to work with??? 4-track analog. Jesus. what matters is the output. death to the past, it was full of genius cavemen. genius then yes! cavemen still.
You can scream like any old guy, that George Burns is funniest man ever – you’d probably say Pryor, but you are just OLD.
This is a tremendous discussion that I have stayed out of, but HOW can you try and shoe horn it after 120 posts, into the daydreams of yesteryear, of a 61 year old man???
OUR pop culture KICKS your pop cultures ass – DEAL WITH IT. Admit it. NOW!
Just because you want to stop learning, doesn’t mean that new knowledge doesn’t leap past yesterday. You grow old and feeble, you no longer speak for pop culture. Ride in your friggin parade already!
This is the DANGER: if you don’t ride in the parade, admit you changed the world, and accept that the next generation already has, you look dumb and greedy (like Sharpton) – worse than that – the TACIT underlying idea of your comments is that – NOTHING ACTUALLY changes – you aren’t riding in the parades. You teach the next generation, that they should NOT EVEN TRY.
Because the parade isn’t really for you – it is for us. The parade is the promise that we honor those of yesteryear, to encourage and validate the tomorrow. The parade is our way of being sure, that NOW your opinions are wrong. Because if you could do it, becuase you did win, we already have!
Put on your fez hat and get in your silly car and STFU.
Morgan Warstler
September 4, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Jon, maybe that’s what’s so fascinating about asking the question about why pop culture doesn’t mean as much; is because there is no answer. Or that there are so many independent variables as to take it out of the realm of calculability of the human mind. We have the technology aspect, which we’ve explored: analog vs. digital and how so many of the capture technologies have changed. We have the media at large with its multitudinous distribution channels that we have now, and things like Clear Channel, which is a cynical sort of homogenization of what used to be lots of small, independent, free thinking units of radio stations across the country. We also have the quite formidable Longtail, which I believe existed in spite of the internet, but that our computers gave us the power to tame the wild beast. I used to order bootlegs from mail order catalogs from some place in Florida before I had a computer to track things down with.
I believe there is a passage in a book of John Lennon’s where he predicted that all possible chord progressions would be used up. That, his experience as a song-writer was looking for novel, as yet untried combinations of chords, because I guess the idea is that a new chord progression will be shocking to listen to, and will just grab the listener because it’ll excite neural passageways that haven’t been used before. And though the notion seemed interesting to me back then, I think time has disproved it, although, probably more because we tend to forget, than because of the math of the thing.
I remember reading an essay once where the author went to great pains to describe just how barren the world of television was in the 1980s. We were so starved for anything new and hip that we thought Harvey Corman and Bee Arthur were good. (Not meant as a slur towards them) The author’s point was that we were liable to like things then that we wouldn’t like now, simply because there wasn’t much there.
We’ve gone from Pop intellectually under-nourishing us, to intellectual obesity.
Greg
September 4, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Please don’t take this as snark Jon, but I read this whole string from the beginning a couple of days ago, which pulled me back into it big time. As a result, I think that there are several answers buried in the 120+ responses.
A partial answer is that the moment you are focusing on, was a break through moment in music. A sea change if you will, and there were a significant number of greats, and a some significant geniuses some who are still producing. At that moment, pop and really great music collided, and colluded. The two became synonymous. That’s over and I don’t think it’s coming back.
There’s also the fact that we all are growing older and for some that means nostalgia, and probably fuzzy memories of just how significant it really was. According to many, the main accomplishment of the period was creating a generation of hedonists who started the consumerism that has probably broken the country in a way that will be very difficult to repair, and it wasn’t all done by the conservatives.
It’s not really from a lack of good and great music happening now (check with Rick, Len and Greg). It’s more from too much change in the industry; the delivery system was way more focused, and narrower then and required more time doing live gigs.
Are the interweaving of politics and artistic expression of the 60/70s replicable? The consensus seems to be to doubt i; way too too toooo much change in the nature of the culture wars (hint, us radical liberals lost because we became the enemy) and it’s possible the kids blame us more than see what was going on then as a path to follow.
Then the biggy that Len pointed out “Context matters.” and you can’t cross the same river twice. Something as significant is happening now in the form of the major political changes, but there isn’t a sound track this time. But there is a very significant part of pop culture shaping and perhaps responsible for it, and that the internet. It may be a misleading to assume that music and film are pop culture. It’s broader than that now, and has a funny life that is in a way dynamic.
Anyway, that’s my presumptuous take from rereading the whole thread in a sitting.
That and the fact that Rick, Len and Greg have very rich musical lives that furnish them with very compelling stories and insights into their community. Sufficient so to have long ago hijacked the thread and moved it into an extended jam that just keeps going. You could shut it off, or try to push the river; or you could just let it run, and probably get a book out of it in the end. Your call.
Ken Ballweg
September 4, 2008 at 10:36 pm
if theres a book, can we all be on the dust jacket?
Greg
September 4, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Regarding my last post, i dont mean to be rude Jon, but I’m frustrated that you’d read through this thread and think it naturally points your wrong first assertion…
its ok when everyone proves you wrong.
Morgan Warstler
September 5, 2008 at 4:21 am
Morgan, In your attempts to pull your head out, stop spraying feces on everyone. You are by your vary nature rude, shrill, and have nothing constructive to contribute. Your feeble scrap of an apology indicates that you know damn good and well the you’ve just blatantly violated the ground rule that you were welcome back but not if your main contribution involved attacking our host.
If we truly were at a dinner party, since Jon struggles with how best to respond to your rude, I would be rallying everyone but Jon to get up out of their chairs and collectively throw you out on your ass, saving him the responsibility. You mistake liberals for pussy pacifists, trust me, at this point the majority wouldn’t have any qualms.
Jon, there is no hope for this guy, and no reason for you to put up with his abuse. Hit the kill filter and be done. Morgan can go off and feel like he won, and the rest of us can breath a sigh of relief.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 7:29 am
No. Let Morgan have his say. Close the door to the dissenter and you close the door on evolution. That’s Death.
Mechanical engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets. That’s Death too.
The pop culture is alive and well. It builds machinima. It makes games. It creates mashup videos then the industry sues it. It gets hijacked for political purposes then fights back with humor. It takes ska and punk and jazz and metal and makes something weird to my ears but makes the kids get up and dance.
We are not irrelevant, Morgan. Our jobs have changed. Where once we were students, now we are teachers. Where once we innovated, now we kick doors open for innovators. We have one last big moment ahead of us: we will die, but we will live on in the songs, in the posters, in the movies, in all the incredible art of our generation, because the kids I know are in awe of it and determined to better it.
And that is LIFE.
I spent a year and 50k developing The River of Life virtual reality album with help from over 50 3D artists and programmers on an open list doing it for the fun of it and the love of just hanging and out and showing off. In 1996, I led fifteen artists world wide who used email and a listserver and beta software to create the world’s first virtual reality epic, Irishspace, and gave it the village of Trallee, Ireland.
We can work together now in ways that were never possible before. If you don’t believe that, go down to the software gulch in San Francisco and look at the art. Where I could write music for them, they took it graciously. In return, they taught me 3D and there are incredible unexplored possibilities in the 3D sound engines. The combinations of poetry and music and animation to create a real-time moving painting that acts like it is alive, this is thrilling stuff.
In effect, there is an enormous change going on and just like Dylan sang so many years ago
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 7:52 am
Ken, Ken, Ken… I’m sorry you are upset and feel like you are covered in shit.
I made a real point in answer to Jon’s – this is common theme of mine, sometimes the answer to Jon’s question, is to explain the faulty POV used when he asked it. Look, as simply a fan, someone who followed the dead and fish a bit… culturally nothing makes me angier than watching the Boomers turn 60 and start screaming that things aren’t like they used to be – it is a SAVAGE renunciation of their youthful glory that they sound now, not like their parents, but like their grandparents. It ruins their memory. It betrays the old films. Moreover, I find it all indicative of the ME Generation, that they became in 80s-90s – further proof that what was good in the died a long time ago. Camille Paglia is on my side.
I’m going to shut up now, and enjoy the conversation I hope continues. Though I do still smile at the image of Jon in a fez.
Morgan Warstler
September 5, 2008 at 7:52 am
That’s not dissent. That is maligning our host. Please don’t be so liberal with you language, Len.
If this were a dinner party, and he had the impudence to attempt this sort of behavior, he would only do it for the briefest of moments.
VeryBadMan
September 5, 2008 at 8:24 am
Morgan, In the last couple comments you’ve made, in different threads, I see a common theme; that you really want to prove Jon wrong for some reason. Now, I can only speculate as to what that reason is…
It’s no one’s mission to be right or wrong here; the important part is enjoying the journey; not TYPING IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Stop it, you’re going to get high blood pressure.
I would agree with you Len, and encourage Morgan be allowed to have his say, except that he’s complete off topic. He’s not discussing the issue, but just looking for ways to be abrasive. An inner demon is steering his boat. Dylan didn’t tolerate the opposition when they were in the wrong either; he trounced them wickedly.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 8:32 am
Free speech in Hyde Park is one thing, it does not, and should not be used to excuse personal attacks in one’s own home as it were. It is a fault in the liberal impulse to tolerate without setting boundaries because it enables the process. Morgan is the spawn of the Conservative Attack Industry; it’s where he gets his content, his tone and his techniques.
Greg, look at what you wrote and give me a clue why the conclusion of it is to “encourage him”???
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 8:59 am
Ken, I didn’t really arrive at my own personal conclusion, so I left it out of the post as well. Some of what Morgan writes can be interesting. It is just a shame that he crosses the line of good taste so often. It would be a welcome thing to have a constructive dissenter here, I think. Just not an abrasive attack-ish one.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 9:16 am
His style is his style. I’ve been on the Internet for over two decades and there is always someone like this. The fellow who coined the term ‘blog’ is a sociopath at the extremes. They even ran him off the Kate Bush list.
Don’t mistake models for reality. An open list with a moderator is not a dinner party even if the fiction is there to set the tone. I agree one should be respectful of the host, but in a Tit for Tat game, unless the host is totally neutral, he becomes a player. Note threads elsewhere asking if having the anchors for networks in the tank for candidates is a good thing. Jon is not neutral. So he is fair game. I don’t mean to be vicious but he is a communications expert and he knows that there is no point without counterpoint.
We can keep it civil. Indeed.
That said, my point is not to defend Morgan but to assert the principal that evolution requires irritants in real systems. If the popular culture is not asserting itself, then something is suppressing that.
Is it? Or are we doing that? That’s the question Morgan is asking us rudely, but folks, was Abbie Hoffman a polite guy? Bobby Seals? C’mon…
I don’t accept that the culture isn’t alive and well because I’ve been a part of too many projects that were crucial parts of the evolution of the new media. Some things have changed in the environment:
1. Low-cost tech for low-cost art. To get the most participation, the cost barriers had to come down. There is more schlock but there are more opportunities if you can play for the door. Heck, on the west coast it’s often pay to play. At least on the web, put up a site and go for it.
2. There are so many ways to cooperate and find one’s tribe we’ve almost quit going outside our own neighborhoods of thought because we have enough members to self-reinforce ourselves into extinction.
That’s bad.
The kids I talk to love our music and are in awe of the times we lived through, but we don’t tell them as much as we should that those were times of dieing, the cities were on fire, the body bags were stacked up like firewood, that we were poisoning the planet, the failures, the foibles and the outright hypocrisies. Point them to that mass of garbage miles wide and hundreds of feet deep floating off Hawaii and say, there is the 60s.
So they don’t trust us.
But they will gather on lists and social networks. They code, they make virtual worlds, they seek each other out to escape the mediocrity of TV and movies. They do not want to slide into the Idiocracy (see that movie).
And everywhere I’ve been on lists listening to them and giving my art to them, showing them tricks and learning tricks from them, it’s been grand. Everything I wanted from the Internet from the days I began to work on it, it has given back but not because it is important, but because when I was in my 30s, an email from Moscow would have stripped my security clearance. Today it is where I get some of the best help available for 3D.
We can converse with the world. Free.
When we began, we carried the shared fear of our generation that the world would blow itself to hell and we responded by creating the means to have a worldwide conversation in the hopes that those who can talk to each discover what they have in common. We forgot that commonality is often the cause of strife. So now we try to celebrate our differences in the certainty that the frictions are the source of our evolution. Without them, we dumb down. We become gray goo.
We don’t quit being racist because we ignore our differences. We quit being racist when we love our differences. I won’t move to Santa Barbara from Alabama because there are no blacks there. They are so much a part of my world, their music so much a part of mine, their speech so much a part of mine it would be like switching from salsa to ketchup.
I’m 54 and I may not see 64 because the combination of diabetes and non-hodgkins lymphoma will take me out eventually. But if it comes tomorrow, the things I’ve seen the kids working with the not kids on the web, the joy of that, gives me all the hope I need. I don’t need leaders. I don’t need the styrofoam temple. We do for each other and we fight and we go on, and we make and we destroy and we go on.
Go write a song for a children’s play at your local church. Use the old licks from the 60s. Watch the four year olds jump up and down with glee.
It’s magick.
Without us, they will go on. Isn’t that a vision so much more sublime than when we thought we couldn’t trust anyone over 30?
So kids, ignore us or imitate us or just do us one better. But while you can, pick up your guitars, open up your graphics editors, look in the mirror and pour it all into this limitless living canvass we’ve made for you.
What do you have to say? What is bothering you? What makes you sweat? What makes you wet? Do you think we had a secret you don’t know?
Do you want to know the secret?
Love God and breathe. That’s the whole secret. All you need to know. The rest is loving your audience more than you love your image of yourself.
The only way you fail is not to try. The only thing you lose is your time.
“Taking my time, taking it away from me.”
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 9:53 am
If we are to believe Morgan’s implications, then pop culture is an upward spiral of quality; he would have us believe that Fatboy Slim is at least as good if not better than Dylan or the Beatles, and that what some of us see as the extraordinary phenomenon of “the ’60s” (yeah, into the ’70’s) has no meaning.
I see culture, however, as more of a roller coaster ride. There are periods of highs and periods of lows. This is born out historically as well. Greek, Roman, Minoan, Islamic, Renaissance Europe, the Elizabethan era, Paris in the late 1800s and again in the 1920s, the Post WWII New York art scene, the Beats, and yes, then the ’60s. These were high points. In music these days, we’re not in a high point. Many of us, though, are getting a different kind of culture here on the Internet. I wonder if we might not be in a high point for this medium. If so, I hope it doesn’t go into decline.
This, by the way, is not to say that there isn’t a lot of good music around, and we have better access to music than ever, though the content providers are scrambling to figure out how to get paid for their work. But there is no music presence that matches up to the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, the Who, Led Zep, Hendrix, Cream, the Band, Joni Mitchell, etc. Who you going to go with, Toby Keith?
Rick Turner
September 5, 2008 at 9:53 am
Morgan made the point that “the Boomers turn 60 and start screaming that things aren’t like they used to be”, but I think if you re-read Jon’s initial post, that this thread isn’t about that. As Jon so presciently stated, ‘media is fast food, where it once was a meal’, exactly! I don’t think that there is media now that is a meal in the way that it was. But I’m not 18 years old anymore, when it really matters. I can’t imagine the new Batman movie, or a $60 Xbox game, or the best album released this year being a meal for anyone either. But I’m not them, I could be wrong.
What we lost (or what we had briefly in the 60’s and 70’s) is palpable and important and we should be talking about it, because we are in danger of historical amnesia kicking in and forgetting. I’m gonna throw in The Worst of Jefferson Airplane, just to remind myself again but after that it’s liable to be Bon Iver, which just came out and makes me tear up a little.
One thing about popular music that I think brings it into focus for people, is that the good artists create something that resonates with what the they are taking in about culture around him/her. So in a sense, the newest art is still the most important, even if it’s level of quality doesn’t measure up to previous heights. It should again someday, we just don’t know when that will be.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 10:26 am
Sad but so, some of the best choral writing is church music, Rick. They pay for the printed sheets and that sustains it. Sustainability and affordability are tightly coupled.
Are we helping them or forcing them through our own music? The web puts up midi, midi goes straight to tab, and as a result, cover bands can cover easier younger. Good for the chops but then what? It does to them what the jazz players tried to do the rock players by telling them The Beatles sucked next to Gershwin. They did. So what? They took up the banner of the crafty hook and married it to the superior tight vocal stack. Results? 50 years later we are still listening.
Why? We were having fun then. It wasn’t all social responsibility. It was Kicks. Then kicks just kept getting harder to find. That’s life.
I confess I can’t comment much on the new material. I’m not listening. I moved over to 3D with the kids and work experiments with them. Why? We are having fun.
Upward spiral? yeaacch. No one starts at the top of the hill.
Maybe we turned our studios into factories and museums and made it too hard. Dylan was a terrible guitar player but anyone could learn his songs. Garcia was a great guitar player but it takes a lot of work to learn Sugar Magnolia note for note. Friend of the Devil? Not so much.
Why do we keep insisting on the old forms? Study yes, but replicate like a machine? The blues is a ball and chain like bluegrass these days: too much emphasis on form over expression.
I go to a local coffee bar and the kids are singing songs I sang at 18. It makes me angry and I yell at them, “GETCHER OWN MUSIC!” and that makes them angry. Then they come ask me how to play Time In A Bottle and I only show them half the lick because trying to figure out the other half, they get bored and breed it to something else they’ve learned and write a song.
Same way we did it. Steal This Book.
Ummm…. if you work your way down my blog, you’ll find I’m not a TK fan. Nashville is a factory for pressboard guitars and paper hats. I don’t need them and they don’t need me. It’s a virtuous relationship.
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 10:33 am
Okay, I my pet peeve down cus he was obviously a little rabid, and buried the body out in the back yard. On with it…
What if the essential difference from the 60/70s is that media has become pop culture, and pop culture has become a medium? The container and the contained.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Mainstream news became a pop medium sometime back.
Rent a copy of Idiocracy if you haven’t seen it. The first ten minutes are pure gold. The premise is flawed but don’t let that disturb the laughs.
Assert: As the number of channels of information increases, and the time online goes to maximum (All the News All The Time), the perception of quality logarithmically drops and the ability to attend any single item drops proportionally.
Notice now that ALL news has a blinking light that says “Breaking News”, to the actual information value is dropping toward zero. In other words, in Shannon terms, given a list of choices all choices are equally probable, so entropy is at maximum.
I think this recovers ground covered earlier, but it is the effect of a steady rate of bifurcation. You can be Bob Dylan but only to a very small group of like-minded Dylans or so the theory goes.
Now the question is, why are Dylan and the Beatles and the Floyd so big with kids again? They are searching and this is what they feel an affinity for. I suspect that yes, it is genuine, and yes, they get tired of the games, and they are reaching out to each other.
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Agree with Len and Rick that if the focus is just music, it isn’t happening at the same level, but I’m really confident Greg, that the films of Pixar and Studio Ghibli will be relished in 50 years with the same gusto they are received with now.
They are our age’s Chaplin and Keaton for the future and will be every bit as significant as any of the artists Rick cited in his brief pantheon.
Another thought re: that pantheon: the ones that are still alive are still producing and taking chunks of the space new acts could be filling. Granted it’s largly subsidized by what boomers are willing to pay for concert tickets, but on the whole, if they were/are as good as we say, it wouldn’t look like good odds to compete directly.
The kids may be waiting for the Seniors to graduate.
Can’t remember if I’ve told this story, but it’s worth retelling even if. My dearest friend in high school, Jim Collins, started out in marching band on drums. One of our mutual friend’s father owned the local record shop and we would hang out there. Buz’s father played in a local dance quartet, but really dreamed of being a jazz bassist, and gently fed us jazz iin a way that gave us a permanent appetite. My first record purchase ever was a 45 of Shorty Rogers’ “Maritans go Home” which made me a real geek for the day. Time passed and Jim moved to virbraharp, and I played stand up bass. Our 8th grade science teacher had a drum kit, and pulled us into playing with him at several dances, and Jim quickly found out he had the soul for music among us, but was discouraged by the sheer logistics of schlepping vibes around, and started dinking with a four string guitar.
By the time we got to high school and struggled with doing Kingston Trio covers in a desperate, and unsuccessful bid to get laid, I moved my nearly four octave voice over to choir, and Jim was learning the rudiments of classical guitar. We spent a few of our post high school years together in SF, with a group of other guys who were very music oriented. It was actually at that awkward time when we were too late to be Beat and too early to be Hip that I formed a lasting love for Jazz and Folk. I had by then chain smoked my one musical asset down to a very limited range, but Jim stayed a participant, getting very serious about the guitar and studied classical at SF State. He had a luthier build a custom $1,000 box (in the early 70s mind and no I don’t know who Rick), and worked his ass off.
We drifted apart and came back together briefly when he and his stunningly gifted harpsichordist partner were deep into the classical scene in Portland. First thing I noticed was that Jim, even though he was sitting Za Zen and working at Artichoke Music, wasn’t playing anymore. He was content to schlepp her harpsichord to private gigs for the period music elite, and use his ability to discriminate finer differences than quarter tones, to tune it.
Eventually I had to ask and this was his story told with humor and only the slightest tinge of regret. After we left SF, I to Australia 9to avoid the draft), and he to the Coast Guard (to avoid the draft) we lost contact. When he was discharged he was determined to make it to the level of Breem and Segovia. He decided to become a guitar monk, and moved to the west coast of Mexico, lived in a small village in a small room and spent every minute practicing. He said he would work until his hands cramped. In addition to learning the classical guitar cannon he studied the masters. He had his own voice, but would work at it until he could emulate really difficult technical passages.
All was moving along well until one day he was coming from the beach and heard someone playing classical at an incredibly skilled level. He sought the person out, and discovered it was a young, self taught Mexican boy of roughly Jr. Hi age.
He said it slammed him in the gut so hard, he said without really thinking about it he walked back down to the beach and threw his custom made guitar, tre expensive ax into the ocean. He went back to his monk’s room, packed and returned to the states. It would be several years before he would play for others again. He didn’t lose his love for music, but he jjust stopped playing.
When I worked up the nerve to ask why, he described a visceral level epiphany, which was that no matter how hard he worked he would always know that the world had too much competition that was better and he needed to take his life in a different direction.
Jim is a computer programer in San Diego now, and if he chances on this and my remote recall has really fuzzed the details, I apologize to him. I’m fairly sure the essence is accurate, because it had such a burning impact. And I think what I saw at the time as loss, he saw as insight.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Wyle E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Ken. The savant vs the hard worker. No amount of scheming beats natural talent.
Again, self-image. He probably was very very good but insisted on comparing himself with the top rather than himself. I’m not a great player. I’m a decent writer. I knew better than to take on the savants but I love it too much to quit. Some will ask, why do you still bother? Well it’s like the joke about the lady who looking at her date’s lacklustre endowment asks him, “Who you gonna make happy with that?” and he replies, “Me.”
Maybe that’s why they call us the Me Generation.
All I know is when I saw those two and three year olds dancing to my music, or the first time they used one of my pieces for a communion service, I was quite satisfied.
I don’t need to be a star. I’m rather happy to be on the bandstand. Anyone who does it knows why.
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Well, right there is one of the big problems with the classical music world. The expectations are so narrow and so high, and that world is so all about competitions, that it can just destroy the joy. That world is exactly like the Olympic sports world. It takes a single-mindedness that is just beyond what I can be around very much.
One of the great things about real “folk” music is that it’s about community, and many of the real deal folks in that scene use music as a way of connecting socially with people, not as a way to make a living.
Rick Turner
September 5, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Amen, Rick. Amen.
The vampire casts no image because it has no soul, only memory and hunger. How did that go? Constant craving versus a satisfied mind.
One of these days I’d love to play one of your nylon string guitars. I think that would be deeply pleasurable.
At least for me anyway.
len bullard
September 5, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I am beginning to think that this string could be a book-”Meditations on Culture”, and we could include Morgan’s rants with all the CAPITAL LETTERS.
I am drawn back to Len’s observations about the mid 60’s –”We were having fun then. It wasn’t all social responsibility. It was Kicks. Then kicks just kept getting harder to find. That’s life.”
When young bucks like Morgan get so angry about our search for a culture of meaning, I have to remind myself that there is an element of jealousy in their rants. I see it all the time in my students who wish they were born 35 years years earlier.
Ultimately, Rick is right. Culture just goes through periods of genius and periods of consolidation. The rennaisance didn’t actually last that long. And the nexus moves around from place to place and art to other art. It could be that we are in the golden age of animation, but in music we are in an age of retro-consolidation.
That’s ok. French films were great in 1961 and are pretty lame now. But Chinese films are much better today than even 15 years ago.
Jon Taplin
September 5, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Rick, That’s pretty much what Jim was telling me.
The question is whether there is anything similar operating in the field of contemporary music. I’m just not in direct contact with musicians that much since moving to a small coastal town, and really have no idea if it could be some part of the reason we are not seeing the same intense level of creativity.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 5:19 pm
It’s there, Ken. It’s not being marketed.
When the folk movement burst, it was at a time of social activism when we were trying to right a wrong, heal a wound, and go to the Moon. We needed each other so much we were willing to be kind to each other, so Woodstock but so filled with rage, we couldn’t police our own, so Altamont.
Culture is a brew. The ingredients matter. We are not just stewards of our culture. We are cooks.
len
September 5, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I only have time to scan this massive thread, but I’m sort of in awe of the lack of new bands even mentioned.
As some folks have noted, the industry have changed. Pop charts are all payola. There is very, very rarely a Billboard hit that is even worth listening to seriously.
On the other hand, independent music is thriving with the internet and file sharing. If you put in some time and listen around, feel out the current music scene, there’s some great things under the surface. Perhaps, they aren’t Jimi and Bob and the Dead, because, as the industry has changed, those (potential) bands have a hard time surviving.
However, check out pitchforkmedia.com some time. They review just about everything that comes out, and they do it well. And you can search by genre and/or rating.
Since there’s been pretty much no new music to challenge the assumption that it all bites, here are a few new, different, and impressive bands y’all might want to check out:
Beirut
Joanna Newsom
Panda Bear.
Y’all can check out a taste on youtubes if you’re into it. Or just grab a torrent. Or pick it up on wax if that’s your thing.
Mark Maglio
September 5, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Mark’s right. I’ve been thinking this for a bit, but not acting. Here’s a rough try:
Beirut
Joanna Newsom
Panda Bear
Devendra Banhardt
Calexico
Iron & Wine
Ladytron
Wilco
Radiohead
Neutral Milk Hotel
Fleet Foxes
The Thermals
Andrew Bird
Portishead
Ethiopiques Volume 4.
Garage’a'Trois
Charlie Hunter
Low
Peter, Bjorn and John
Vetiver
Sigur Rós
Of Montreal
Ryan Adams
Interpol
The Black Keys
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 6:36 pm
forgot:
Deathcab for Cutie
M.I.A.
Nick Cave
Caribou
Flaming Lips
Grizzly Bear
Menomena
Nine Inch Nails
Feist
!!!
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 6:44 pm
I’m guilty of doing the same thing as your friend, Ken. I emulated master musicians; practiced for hours every day; and beat myself up over not quite achieving my goals. Both Rick & Len described it well. There was an illusion of freedom that I held out in front of myself. Financial freedom, sexual freedom, being a star, all these things, what folly. That ‘if only I work hard enough’, that I can get these things. Jim might’ve had different motivations. Honestly, I think I wanted to play pretty bad and for mostly the right reasons, but I was always afraid of being unsuccessful & broke. Thank god that was a long time ago, hindsight = 20/20 and all.
On togetherness and competition:
I remember Marion McPartland lamenting how the whole jazz world wasn’t fun anymore. That in the 1950s the Be-Bop piano players would all go over to Bud Powell’s grandmother’s house in the afternoons and show each other new riffs. What an amazing environment that must have been; the kindred exchange of ideas. Sure, they had competition too, but it was friendly. They were all in it together. There wasn’t any reason not to mutually help each other grow into being the best that they could. Could the playing field be more crowded now, more players competing for the same number of prizes?
I used to think of the traveling big bands in a similar way. They were like traveling music schools where you got to woodshed with your pals during the day and gig at night, what a deal. This sort of tradition continued through the 70’s, with all the Earth, Wind and Fire type bands, also thinking of blues acts and Cropper, Duck Dunn style R&B.
My dad used to take me to the neighborhood music store when I was very young (the mid to late 70’s), and I remember it always being full of shaggy guys, just hanging out. I mean, music stores were full of people back then. They were congregation spots. With the 80’s came the hair bands, metal, etc., another sort of tribe, and by the 90’s the music stores had emptied out or become corporate.
Jon, your students still have 60’s envy? I know my friends and I did in the 80’s, but somehow I pictured this generation as different. I don’t know, something, the internet, hip hop and video games all seem so final, that I figured 60’s envy had become a thing of the past. Guess not.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 6:47 pm
This generation is different, Greg. They’re geeks.
Lovingly said by the way. Screen jockey here.
A musician I know runs the Pickers Exchange in Chattanooga. Last weekend at the reunion he remarked that when we were young and got together, we talked about chops. When he sees younger musicians now, they all talk gear.
Music is geekier.
You are right. People who don’t think something new is happening aren’t listening, and some who are can’t relate to what they hear.
That’s ok too. Ears age, but also, pop is the culture of a time. If you are not of that time, you are not of that culture even if a near neighbor.
Music is time. Time is space. All relative. All proximate.
len
September 5, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Thank you Mark!
What an awesome thread. As a 34 year old amateur musician I feel like I fall halfway between (or straddle?) the two most dominant “sides” here. My first albums were the Police, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd… but my live shows were Phish and the Dead, then d’Elf and MMW.
Listening to Beirut now for the first time (via emusic.com) and they’re fantastic. In some ways reminiscent of Tom Waits’ latest release Orphans in that it deceptively seems it could have been released anytime in the last 40-odd years.
I had a recent passionate “Beatles vs. Led Zeppelin” debate w/ a good friend (it’s Led Zep, natch) but sometimes we’re arguing about different things. Popular culture vs. accessible culture. Art vs. entertainment vs. commerce. It gets harder when artists deliberately mess w/ these apparent boundaries in self-conscious ways.
I feel there IS work being done now that compares with or even exceeds the canon from the 60’s. Rage Against the Machine make as eloquent an anti-war statement as any I’ve heard from the 60’s — check out this impromptu a capella performance (via megaphone) and conversation w/ the crowd in MN outside the DNC, can any of you greybeards who were there back in the day, tell me this doesn’t give you goosebumps?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYwzW2QFnwo
I’m guessing it is more powerful if you are familiar w/ the original songs (which are anthemic/iconic in my demographic) … but the passion is there. Check out Saul Williams’s “Not in Our Name” too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ_o660d0oc
Artistically authentic, counter-cultural resistance to mass-market ideas and ideals did not die in the 60’s. I think that period merely had a strange temporary juxtaposition or confluence where the counterculture first really emerged, and for a while the “culture” at large was still largely confused about what was mainstream and what was counter. Even during the Beatles’ careers they went from bubblegum “safe” pop to Within You Without You, that was a transformation within the band… so you had radical ideas and true art finding its way onto popular radio, before the suits got it “figured out” and returned things for a while to the canned / manufactured ways. I think the older generations’ easy dismissal of hip-hop is establishment anti-rock attitudes all over again. Is much (most) of it worthless chest-bumping? Of course. Just like most rock is worthless adrenaline/noise. But there is amazing Art happening there too at the edges, if you look. DJ Shadow (Endtroducing), Paul Miller/DJ Spooky (Optometry), Saul Williams, Haiku d’Etat, DJ Olive (Bodega) etc. etc. I digress, but hopefully have contributed in some small way… so many ideas here to digest…
Chris
September 5, 2008 at 7:05 pm
P.S. I have to push Paste Magazine (“Signs of Life in Music, Art and Culture”) again here, it’s intelligent and tasteful enough to be palatable to any generation’s cognoscenti, but manages to stay relevant and fresh at the same time. The signal:noise ratio is just amazing.
Chris
September 5, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I’ll go ahead and second Iron & Wine.
I’ll add some favourites:
Why? (alt hip hop, some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in a long time; just entirely honest and poetic. )
And I don’t like to challenge folks but I’d be surprised if you aren’t at least a little intrigued after watching Wolf Parade live, even on the youtubes.
Neutral Milk Hotel put out what is probably one of the best albums of the 90’s with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Then again, I won’t be too surprised if these fall on deaf (or 60’s era) ears. It’s a very different aesthetic.
And, oh, I don’t know, Sigur Ros?
Mark Maglio
September 5, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Just want to put in a good word for Bjork. She’s someone to listen to seriously who will be making interesting musical and cultural statements for decades to come.
I go back, though, to impact. Nothing in pop music has had the impact of the Beatles in terms of an overall breadth of work and excellence. No band or artist has been so impressively dissected and found, even under the microscope of released out-takes, alternative mixes, demos, early live recordings, etc. to be as inventive in so many ways, musical and technical. I feel damned lucky to have been just hitting 19 and 20 when they hit the airwaves in the US.
I gave my 13 year-old son the Mobile Fidelity half speed mastered Beatles box set of vinyl. It’s his most prized possession, though the boat he’s getting may beat it! (pun intended)
Rick Turner
September 5, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Mark and Greg,
Oddly, I’m probably the oldest person in the room, but my current iPod laod shares 19 artists with Greg’s list. There was a long period where I wasn’t buying anything new, partially because I was pissed about having to buy into a whole new format. After vinyl to four track, to cassettes, I rebelled against CDs. Didn’t start buying them until I could get used copies of the albums I wanted. In fact I got so contrarian, that i mostly palyed vinyl at home. I also got married to a very nice woman 14 years ago who loves John Denver with a passion, and we just didn’t play our respective music all that much in each other’s presence, cus one or the other would be in pain.
But oh my, once the iPod came along I went through a major catch up period. It was an explosion of new sounds, in the most flexible format ever. I was spending $200 a month, and throwing a lot more downloads against the wall to see what would stick.
I’ll be looking at those on your list I haven’t tried yet, and would add The National (especially “Boxer”), Eels, Patty Griffin, Kaki King, New Pornographers, Patty Larkin, Mary Guthier, Okervill River, Gogol Bordello,Gomez and PJ Harvey. And, seconding Rick. Bjork, definitely Bjork, who I think has some genius qualities. Mind this is balanced by a load of 60/70s jazz, Leo Kottke, Tom (frikin genius) Waits, Ry Cooder, Gillian Welch, and a bunch of Seattle indie mixes from the “On the Mountain” series. The only 60/70s other than jazz currently loaded is one Led Zepplin collection.
Not wanting to start a hipper than thou contest, just reinforcing Greg, and giving these new young devils their due, I honestly believe that a lot of these bands, if transported back to the “golden age” would not just survive, they could headline the Fillmore or Crystal Ballroom and thrive. Seriously, Gogol Bordello would have been Wavy Gravy’s new favorite band.
So, the music lives, it is different. It may not be as easily labeled as genius as a Dylan, or the Beatles (though that’s hard to determine this close up), and it is fairly remote from the pop driven media/ media driven pop. As someone once said, the kids are alright.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Chris, that Rage against the Machine link is priceless! Everyone should check that out. It’s especially relevant given Jon’s other posts about recent arrests in MN and the huge protests up there that have got more time in foreign press than they did here. ((btw, I know David from devhouse. Is that your brother?))
I think I distilled a decent list of relevant music from the last couple of years. It by no means aspires to catch all of the other stuff that has been around for longer than that (like Bjork). That would make it too large to be manageable. I also avoided more poppy bullshit like Vampire Weekend, Franz Ferdinand and a gazillion other niche things that people are crazy for right now. People like what they like. But I do see strong currents of art in certain areas that feel like they’re having a strong meaningful effect on those who are tuned in to it. Ipods and computers still seem to divide as much as they unite, because even if a band like the Decemberists has thousands of loyal, literate, like-minded fans scattered around the world, I doubt that they know who each other are.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Actually, Greg, come to Portland and I’ll introduce you to a couple hundred of them all in one room.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Ken, if w could put some of these acts in the golden age and the Fillmore, they would not only survive, they would be even better.
oh, and I second Benevento Russo Duo. (from way back up the page). I just saw Marco Benevento with Stanton Moore and he was a gas.
Jon, I think we need a wiki.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Decemberist fans that is. Though not right now, they’re touring the East Coast and wont be home until November. And Jon, they did play the Portland Obama rally back in May, for what it’s worth.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Ken, I love the Decemberists. Didn’t know you were in their neck of the woods.
Greg
September 5, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Seventy miles due west from Portland on the coast.
Ken Ballweg
September 5, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Colin Meloy (Decemberists) has one of my guitars in his quiver…
Rick Turner
September 5, 2008 at 10:36 pm
And here’s a guy for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceqN4IyIEgo
That’s another one of my guitars…
He’s also a pal of Geoff Muldaur’s…
Rick Turner
September 5, 2008 at 10:38 pm
We’ve discussed this before, but
Sublime
Cake
White Stripes
Surely add them to the above list.
Jon, again you daydream for your own delight (your own image of my fez hat) I want to have been born 35 years ago, and not 35 years in the future. What is it going to take? My anger is in your continued arrogance about something I judge quite plain and average – the 1960’s. It isn’t like I don’t have parents your age. It isn’t that I don’t love them or their bands. It isn’t that I didn’t grow up on Classic Rock, I’m from NE Ohio too – where they still only have classic rock stations, and you can listen to “Get The Led Out” 24 hours a day, if you bounce around the stations enough.
But, c’mon, music today is BETTER, just like Medicine, TV, Film, Cars, Food, Everything. Do you not see HOW MANY kinds and flavors of ice cream there are? Are you insane?
Our chicks are hotter. Our kids are smarter. Our soldiers are tougher. Our athletes are more amazing. Our politicians are smoother. Our architecture more compelling. Everything (for better or worse) is better. Today kicks yesterday’s ass. And tomorrow will trump today. And every imagined “future shock horror story” thats willfully portrayed in every movie and novel, eats at the same trough – it tells us all we are better than our children.
The same sick desire comes in forgiving history, so that we might be forgiven. Honor the past, in hopes we might be honored too. Woe is to the bastard to pisses on past, because it forces us today to suddenly worry about how we will be judged tomorrow. If we do not forgive the stupidity of our forefathers, then we will not be forgiven.
I say, let’s burn the boats. Admit the past was what it was – some lesser degrees of cavemen. And we are still cavemen thus, and need to be judged harshly by a future that is told in the history being written, we know gay rights is rightful. judge us. we know deficits are criminal. judge us. we know civilization is about respect, not laws. judge us. we know no one should get rich being a politician. judge us. do NOT forgive us if we fail. we know we only made the Beatles, LZ, and dylan. we wish we did it sooner. we wish we offered more. we know what you do tomorrow will be better BECAUSE what we did today is better than yesterday, and we’re dumber than you our children of the future.
We have reached the compression of history. On the x/y axis, for the first time, things move so fast on the timeline of history, they change so much, that being older, having old experiences, doesn’t equip one with automatic dominance over our kids. Things change so readily, organic destruction comes so quickly, that you can be outdated at 40 if you aren’t careful. You see the same effect in first generation immigrants, where the children are the map, the guides, for their parents on how to get along. It is happening now – we are socially immigrants in our own homes. Each new decade brings children better equipped socially, technologically, economically to survive in each new version of the world.
You better take care of your kids, because they are your best chance to figure out what the hell is going on tomorrow. Your best earning years might just be 25-45. Deal.
How in this overwhelming preponderance of evidence, can you say keep talking about Dylan and Beatles and not recognize how silly and arrogant and old it sounds. Look, this isn’t to say old people aren’t fun, and their old music is fun to listen to, but my GOD, Jon Fishman played the vacuum cleaner with his mouth, John Lennon endorsed Yoko Ono, and if there wasn’t a Vietnam War, what the hell would Dylan have sung about?
Look, we remember history only so we don’t repeat it. Why would you pretend that doesn’t extend to music?
Morgan Warstler
September 6, 2008 at 12:11 am
I’m a regular reader of this blog, but this thread passed me by until you re-linked to it Jon. I haven’t had time to read every comment, and I apologise if I’m reiterating a point that has been made previously, but I just wanted to bring to light a cultural phenemon that I’ve been noticing in the UK for the past couple of years.
In the UK we’re subject to a lot of scare tactics from the media, constantly being warned of impending terrorist attacks / global warming / recession / inflation. This is not a time of optimism.
Since we invaded Iraq I’ve been expecting to see a growing amount of protest from the British cultural world. Sure, artists have united on the world stage against climate change, but the mood had lasted barely longer than the concert itself. There’s no atmosphere of protest.
Here’s my point: what we’ve seen instead is the young, educated middle classes crawling back into their shells; taking refuge in their childhood, adolescence, or a fantasy world. These are the people who in 1968 were out on the streets protesting.
You can tell by listening to the music. Folk is on the rise, but it lack the fire of Dylan; instead it provides escapism. This is organic music for the organic generation; childhood instruments like recorders and glockenspiels abound; girls sing in cute girly voices, men in falsetto; chord sequences are basic. This type of “child folk” is everywhere on adverts, because those in marketing know that we’re a depressed, corrupted nation, we want to reclaim our lost innocence. Examples: Feist, Noah & The Whale. We want purity and simplicity (the rise of Apple Computers Inc. anyone?!).
Then there’s the retro music (Amy Wimehouse, Duffy), that harks back to a rose-tinted time when things were just swell.
Lastly there’s the purely fantastical escapism, case in point: Fleet Foxes. The songs are wrapped in a shimmering reverb like they’re echoing from the past or a parallel universe, and call on trad.English folk and baroque counterpoint. Times past. Better, purer times, and when you listen to the music you can go there too. This band would *not* have sold many records in England 10 years ago.
I don’t think we’ve reached the end of the road for music – I know innovation and protest is bubbling away underground. But I don’t know what’s going to make it brim over into the spotlight, and I worry that now we’ve got the Internet to give us refuge and pseudo-community, it never will. It’s like we’re hibernating, or smoking a giant, collective reefer. What’s going to make us snap out if it?
AndyF
September 6, 2008 at 3:39 am
In the US, one of the reasons for the apathy is that the Repubs were smart and cynical enough to out-source a lot of the war to contractors instead of instituting a draft that would have sent young men and women to Iraq against their will. And to top it off, the Repubs figured out how to make money on that scheme as well, what with Halliburton being one of the big recipients of that nice bit of war profiteering corporate welfare.
Rick Turner
September 6, 2008 at 7:27 am
“Look, we remember history only so we don’t repeat it. Why would you pretend that doesn’t extend to music?”
But you don’t actually remember historr, Morgan. You can’t. Your brain won’t let you do that in the sense that you can’t have a literally accurate chronology. What you have is just-in-time wired impressions. The mammal brain is a lump of plastic neural structures that use co-incident timing to wire up the structures by which it processes signals. It self-filters by relating signals it receives to the other signals received co-incidentally in time and space.
That is why the only way you can relate to the music of the 60s is through whatever was going on around you when you heard it/hear it. You can’t hear the actual music of the 60s. You can only hear the recordings. We heard them too but we heard them in the 60s.
Sometimes called Hebb effect or reverbratory effect, read Donald Hebb’s “The Organization of Behavior”. There is a “dual trace mechanism whereby interconnected and coactive circuits permanently modify the efficacy of activated pathways.”
The best we get is a negotiated consensus of what is happening around us and the more we are separated in time and space by age, thus by culture, the harder and longer that negotiation is unless some confluence of forces creates a Lagrange point where we can co-locate for a time with little or no expenditure of cultural energy. The 60s can be seen as a cultural Lagrange point where many ideas and influences were sitting in the same place in the evolutionary path of the pop culture.
len
September 6, 2008 at 9:11 am
AndyF, I’m guilty of liking a lot of that escapist folk. I think you’re right. We need to examine why it sounds good to us. I think that all the signs show that people are as bright and tuned in as they ever were, and waiting to pounce as it were, when the right thing presents itself. But if real community can never be had on the internet, should we stop trying? Just walk away from it? That would be nice, I think I would enjoy it, say cordon off the web for doing business and chores only, but leave culture for the outside world. Except that I wouldn’t be here now, would I? So it’s purgatory then. And there’s no escape. and music’s role has changed, providing an emotional escape. In some sense, there’s nothing new there.
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 9:27 am
I read Morgan’s top three bands a few comments back and,
I luld
Mark Maglio
September 6, 2008 at 9:28 am
@Greg “I know David from devhouse. Is that your brother?”
Yeah, he’s my younger brother. Small world. =)
Thanks for seconding the RATM post, glad you liked it too.
Chris Weekly
September 6, 2008 at 11:15 am
OK, I’m so square…what the hell does “luld” mean. I f…ing hate acronyms. They’re used too much in a hipper than thou context. Geek gobbledegook. PUMA, for instance. Put it Up My A..?
Rick Turner
September 6, 2008 at 11:25 am
Rick, luld is sort of transmogrified lol , as in, “I laughed out louded”. These things morph pretty quickly. for instance, OMG became zomg, which is just “Oh my god” with a z in front of it, but it looks cooler for some reason. who knows why it works.
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 11:47 am
“… if there wasn’t a Vietnam War, what the hell would Dylan have sung about?”
He would have sung about everything he actually did sing about as he never sang one song about the Viet Nam War. Not even one.
So life, death, sin, salvation, love, hate, art, and everything else. Except the Viet Nam War.
Charlie Wilson
September 6, 2008 at 11:50 am
On the subject of music being geekier, do you guys know Jonathan Coulton? You think kids who talk about gear instead of chops are nerdy, there are several full fledged genres of nerd music now. There’s chip tunes which are guys who take apart Nintendos and gameboys and use the audio chip to compose with. They have shows. There are acts where these guys compose lines of Perl in real time which spawns generative loops or something. There is nerdcore rap, which can be really funny. and probably the crown prince is Jonathan Coulton; who has lyrics about “code monkeys”, which like any of this stuff is internet famous.
Here’s a video from a show where they forego the playing of music entirely, instead he invites up some fellow nerds and performs his own song on Garage Band. oh the times, they are
changinmorphing.http://www.joystiq.com/2008/02/24/video-jonathan-coulton-performing-still-alive-rock-band-dlc/
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 11:57 am
err, Rock Band, mybad
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 12:05 pm
And will the great “we” be talking about him forty five years hence? We’re talkin’ Dylan…and he was forty five years thence. That’s cultural impact…when an artist’s contemporary cultural work is still a hot topic after a couple of generations.
Rick Turner
September 6, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Rick,
Yeah, luld is a past tense of lol. Which becomes lul do to pronunciation and use as a verb. People do things just for the lulz. Oh, fun times, teh memes.
And if I’m not mistaken, zomg came about when some goon missed the shift key by a stroke and hit z. Or both, in the case of ZOMG.
Although I’m pretty sure my favourite acronym is ‘titcr’, which is standardized test-nerd speak for ‘this is the credited response’, and used for what one perceives as the best post in a thread. As in, “@Greg, titcr”
… although, there’s always the classic OGC which looks like a dude taking care of himself if you tilt your head left.
Anyway, back to the subject of ‘chip tunes’, I’d suggest y’all go youtube Fort Worth duo Best Fwends doing Skate or Live… these are just two cats who make shitty songs, play them via ipod at their live shows and rock out intensely with their mics. It’s some wonderfully enjoyable performance art.
Mark Maglio
September 6, 2008 at 2:55 pm
It’s funny reading a middle aged man like Mr. Warstler championing old school music like Cake or Sublime while putting down other old school music like Bob Dylan and The Beatles.
Charlie Wilson
September 6, 2008 at 3:26 pm
@Charlie Wilson, titcr.
Cake and Sublime were a few of the last bands to get big via MTV before there were low-cost, easy-access alternatives to music on the internet.
Two bands that get played on the jukebox and baffle me as to why anyone would pay a dollar to hear them. Again.
Mark Maglio
September 6, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Empty V
Charlie Wilson
September 6, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Morgan- I took a lot of time this afternoon to listen to your faves–Cake, Sublime and Fat Boy Slim. Is that the best you can do? You have really bad taste in music and none of those bands will stand the test of time.
I’m sorry, but your latest long rant of how everything is better reminds me of a great passage fromNorman Mailer in the early 60’s when everyone was saying the same thing.
“. But the plague remains, that mysterious force which erects huge, ugly, and aesthetically emaciated buildings as the world ostensibly grows richer, and proliferates new diseases as medicine presumably grows wiser, nonspecific diseases, families of viruses, with new names and no particular location. And products deteriorate in workman¬ship as corporations improve their advertising, wars shift from carnage and patriotism to carnage and surrealism, sex shifts from whiskey to drugs. And all the food is poisoned. And the waters of the sea we are told. And there is always the sound of some electric motor in the ear.”
You are of course a salesman, we all know that. But I for one am not buying your pitch.
Jon Taplin
September 6, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Morgan- Also regarding your sense of history. Bob Dylan never sang about the Vietnam War. By the time Vietnam was in our collective consciousness (1966) he was long gone from protest songs.
The amusing thing is that you end by (kind of) quoting Santayana and yet you refuse to learn his lesson. You don’t know dick about history.
Jon Taplin
September 6, 2008 at 5:45 pm
It’s good to see the generation gap is alive and well.
But Rick is dead on: the test is time and how many covers were made if you are talking about culture.
If you are talking about enjoyment, count your own smiles and tears and guffaws. For commercial success, get the take from the till from the man after the gig.
Contexts.
len
September 6, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Mr. Taplin
Don’t worry about Mr. Wartsler. I have an uncle just like him. Learns a G chord and thinks he’s Beethoven. Comes to Thanksgiving dinner and tells everybody how smart he is, how much smarter he is than we are, until he is alone in the room. My dad tells me just to agree with him and go on about the day. Mr. Warstler just sounds like a frustrated middle aged old man stuck in the past.
Charlie Wilson
September 6, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I’d not noticed it, but I suppose it’s true. Kids (relative term) looking back at the Sixties tend to see it through the prism of the war, just like some look back at Von Braun and only associate him with Nordhausen making references to controversial history that wasn’t really controversial at the time. Sad really.
The spirit of the Sixties actually starts in the Fifties from what I remember, and then it goes on to about 1971-72. I tend to date it by songs starting with Tom Dooley and ending with Bridge Over Troubled Water. There are reverberations until 75 but after that, not much. Anyway, that’s my view of it.
But it wasn’t all protest and the war. It was something else, a need for community, a need to find out what was beyond the trap of the job, the home, the family, the church. It was as if with the explosion of media and the tube, we became hungrier than we could contain for new experience.
I suspect if we were to look at the history of media and communication, we’d find similar bursts. I wonder if this does have something to do with Hebb’s theory of co-incident wiring. When the availability of so much different information came, the human brains went into an overdrive trying to wire it up into memorable patterns. In some, it was like the gasoline of their genius was mixed with nitroglycerine and it exploded in every direction. For others, it became a hunger they couldn’t satiate so kicks just kept getting harder to find, as I said before.
Others stood and watched unable to grasp it, and as a result, they went in the other direction, became ultra-conservative, ultra jealous and eventually, manifested a jealousness that became violent and possessive.
And those domains have been dominant attractors in American culture since then, as if there were different classes of brain structure since then, not just cultural, but actually a part of the evolutionary chain. Hmmm. Something to puzzle over.
len
September 6, 2008 at 7:36 pm
hmm, when I hear “who will be listening to X in Y years?”, I somehow feel that it’s a mistaken notion, wrongly accusing a particular music of it’s shallowness. Sure, a song or artist’s ability to stand up over history, how many covers are made, sheet music sales, these things do give a good indication after the fact, but it isn’t what you shoot for when you’re doing it.
I don’t mean to criticize Rick’s judgment in anyway. As far as I’m concerned Rick’s posts about the tapes of the old folk acts (I love Richard & Mimi Farina with a devotion rarely equaled), and the people Rick has made instruments for, are the best parts of this entire thread, because they are real and tie directly in with music that I hold near and very dear to my heart. But saying that such and such of a contemporary performer isn’t going to stand up, seems somehow wrong.
And you know, these artists we’re criticizing probably aren’t going to stand up, but that’s not the point. The point is to let the living live. And the living right now just have some pretty funky, eclectic tastes. If we were the taste cops, we could have them all arrested, and promote our chosen agendas, (and I guarantee that I’d enforce a minimum amount of chords per pop song limit so that we don’t have to endure another rout of f***ing 3 chord songs, the same chords we’ve already heard a million times before) but that’s not how it works.
We have to let evolution decide, even if the uncertainty in that is more than a bit unsettling.
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 7:47 pm
wow len, very interesting notion about brain structures. Lemme think on that one for a bit.
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Len- I think you are on to something with the brain re-wiring. And if we go beyond music into the realm of animation and video games it’s almost like someone hit the evolutionary gas pedal.
Jon Taplin
September 6, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Len, your thoughts about the ultra-conservative reaction to the 60’s mind-expansion reminds me of a Tim Leary quote: “LSD is the chemical that makes those who haven’t taken it completely insane”, or something to that effect. You’re not suggesting that the current state of our liberal/conservative polarization has something to do with thought processes that emerged from the 60’s, are you? It seems like roles were slightly reversed then, because I often catch references to the liberal as the bad guy in the early 60’s. just a thought.
Greg
September 6, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Jon, how can you not like sublime and cake and fatboy slim?
Frankly, I am aghast. Nothing you have ever said as taken me aback quite so much. Well atleast you took the time to listen to them, tho it is WEIRD you hadn’t heard of them before.
My mouth hangs ajar.
Morgan Warstler
September 6, 2008 at 10:27 pm
The spirit of the Sixties started, I would say, in the mid Forties and lasted until the mid Seventies. One way to look at the last sixty years in the United States is this.
There was a Revolution starting say about 1945 that lasted until about 1975. It grew out of the Labor Movement of the Thirties and the World War. Its leaders eventually became known as the Beatniks (for a little Red Fear) who later turned into the Hippies and all that. Though there were excesses in the Revolution, many crucial gains were made in areas such as civil rights which scared the pants off a lot of our more conservative brothers and sisters.
In its wake came a classic Counter Revolution that started in the mid Seventies and lasted until a couple of years ago. It sought to unwind the progress of the Revolution. It traveled under the guise of the Culture War and fundamentalist christians were its public leading edge. Here is a link to the seminal document of the Counter Revolution, The Powell Memorandum, written by future Nixon Supreme Court appointee, Lewis F. Powell
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=22
At this point, the Counter Revolution has run its course. It has lost power and is in its death throes. The Counter Revolution is over, Lebowski. The bums lost.
VeryBadMan
September 7, 2008 at 6:14 am
“And those domains have been dominant attractors in American culture since then, as if there were different classes of brain structure since then, not just cultural, but actually a part of the evolutionary chain.”
Len that actually makes sense, do you think it played out internationally at all, or just in the US?
Ken Ballweg
September 7, 2008 at 7:08 am
“My mouth hangs ajar.”
That has been noticed.
Charlie Wilson
September 7, 2008 at 7:33 am
Ken: It played out all over the world because it happens at the emergence of global communications. The insularity of locale that acts as a control over fast reactions was breached. It was like a levee breaking and taking seeds from each culture to all of the others. Would you or I know as much as we know about the Hindu faith or Indian music if Harrison hadn’t studied with Pandit Ravi Shankar? Look at the looks on the faces of the then superstars at Monterey Pop as they watch him perform after some of their drug-laced but actually pretty poor performances.
There are geo-locales where it got focused because of the environment such as San Fran, and it took on the flavors of the local cultures. But the individual exposure and suseptibility varied and that is a key to what happens next. Everyone is wired up by individual experience but their location in a population determines if they are pushed to the neighboring domain. Think of viewpoints, again; Kate watched Gilmour, Gilmour watched The Beatles, the Airplane and the Dead; the Dead are watching each other looking into the void. There is a daisy chain of borrowing licks and thoughts. Everyone watche Dylan, Dylan watched Woody Guthrie and so on.
Some people were watching Perry Como. Everyone wires up differently and as a result, statistical domains emerge. The waves of counter and counter counter push individuals back and forth. A small minority comes alive, has that aha moment, the enlightening, and they begin to rewire their own brains. They become wild cards.
What ‘it’ is is the holy grail of culture. Some would say ‘desire’ and that’s good enough for some models. That is one reason I avoid the Spy vs Spy entreaties. In the next two years, if we want to achieve what we want it is not just a matter of defeating the Republicans. We have to find in them that which is us and they in us that which is them. Identity is not a single dimension; it is fractal. We’re intermixed in the wiring. We have to find each other and then we can do the necessary work.
Bush and Cheney are part of us, not admirable, but not separate just as Manson emerged from us, separate, evil, monstrous, but a demon from our own ids. With the web, we’ve become the Krell. If you want to know what scared the hell out of me when we were building the systems that would become the web, it was knowing that and knowing there was no way to predict how it would turn out.
Then I realized all justice is in the human heart. There is none in math or nature. Individuals would determine how it will come out. The teachers would become students, to use a cliche, and the cooks would have to eat their own meal.
It’s up to us. As Barack says, we are the people we’ve been waiting for. Not him; us.
Greg: we were the bad guys.
“We are forces of chaos and anarchy.
Everything they say we are we are.”
But you must understand the bad guy. You have to reach into their message, because there is a part of them in you and you have to find that prisoner and set it free. Otherwise it will torment you from the monkey cage. Then you miss the magick moment when the monkey mind becomes the human mind, that transition from impulse to self-directed evolution. By the way, I’m coming back to your three chord dilemma in a separate post today. That ties some important aspects of how we wire ourselves and others up by process.
Jon: Yes. Cu cu ca choo! I pulled out the Last Waltz to watch again. I haven’t said it before, but sincerely, Thanks! It makes a difference.
“We can be together. We can be together laughing. We can be together. We will be.”
len
September 7, 2008 at 7:45 am
such a wonderful thread, so many thoughtful posts and rich directions to pursue further. i’m stacking both my reading lists and my emusic saved-for-later as a result; thank you all for your contributions. what it reminds me of, and i don’t think i’ve seen pointed out quite this explicitly here, is that there was a period when even the music was not just about the music. yes, there is the world of composing and playing and writing and producing and i love what it creates. i’ve known some amazing artists and there are some present here. but i’m also recalling when, back around 8th grade for me, i discovered Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! and not only did the music break down walls/open doors/etc but the liner notes (of this, and We’re Only in it for the Money) also sent me and some of my friends off to the library to check out Edgar Varese and Kafka and try to find out who Lenny Bruce was, and look up the Dadaists, just like the Beatles’ quests sent so many Eastward at one point. it could be that part of Jon’s original question has something to do with the way that there was once a time when a larger quest was going on, music was central to it, and there were a lot of other directions spinning off of that. that is something i don’t see happening with my teenagers and their music; i’ve just taken it to mean that music doesn’t have all the same functions it used to.
mango
September 9, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Once upon a time, there was AM radio and a Top 40 play list, and four channels of TV. Families watched TV together because there was only one in the house. Radio was the refuge of the teen-agers and they listened in their cars. Stereos were novel and expensive.
Today there is an unlimited canvass but a space of infinite possibilities is the same as noise: no means to choose. Even the evil forces of the record industry, your chooser of choices is dieing.
So it’s up to you to find the music and up to me and others to make it. If we find each other in an infinite universe, it will be because we are trying.
Keep looking up.
I still owe Greg a rant on three chords and why that’s not such a bad thing.
len bullard
September 9, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Once upon a time, there was AM radio and a Top 40 play list, and four channels of TV. Families watched TV together because there was only one in the house. Radio was the refuge of the teen-agers and they listened in their cars. Stereos were novel and expensive.
Today there is an unlimited canvass but a space of infinite possibilities is the same as noise: no means to choose. Even the evil forces of the record industry, your chooser of choices are dieing.
So it’s up to you to find the music and up to me and others to make it. If we find each other in an infinite universe, it will be because we are trying.
Keep looking up.
I still owe Greg a rant on three chords and why that’s not such a bad thing.
len bullard
September 9, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Hi len,
I still rank the film “Avalon”, despite it’s muddy reception, among Levinson’s best, if only for three things: the first reel which includes the stunningly magical-realist rendering of a boy immigrant’s first experience of Fourth of July; R. Newman’s subtle, postgraduate “Ragtime” soundtrack; and Levinson’s earnest and formally designed attack upon television as The Harp Mourning the American Hearth. The movie may not add up, but several of its parts are artful films in themselves.
Hugo
September 9, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Hah, I was ready to let this thread rest for a while. We’d said a lot, and I started feeling tired out thinking about it. The thing is, Len, when you got me thinking about how music was tied into how our minds were wired; I started extrapolating that into the future. I revisited some singularity theory, and some other communication gurus like Stewart Brand & Kevin Kelly, particularly Kelly’s TED talk on technology, which I suggest everyone check out who hasn’t:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html
At about minute 12, Kelly proposes an idea that I am thrilled about: that old technologies don’t die. How about the Stanley steam car? Certainly no one drives those anymore. Nope, there is a site on the web that sells replacement parts for your steam car! And this appears to be true for just about every old (and presumed dead) technology there ever has been.
My thinking is that this is true about music as well. We conserve ideas, we conserve novelty. It is something we are wired to do. In a sense, when we discover a new idea, something that many people find useful, it was there all along, unacknowledged, in a mental space shared by all of us, just that the first person to find it and sell it to the rest of us gets the credit and the entry in the history books.
on 3 chords: My real peeve with the current batch of musical apprentices is that the genetic connection with musics of the past has been broken down. What I hear today coming out of young musicians is a much poorer harmonic palette than a person of similar talent 40 years ago. I don’t blame the people, I blame the media. Music in films has gotten MUCH POORER. It’s degraded so drastically. Even B-movies in the 1940’s and 50’s had orchestral soundtracks of calibers far exceeding anything in Hollywood now, and thats NOT an exaggeration, it’s the truth; there used to be a very strong orchestral tradition that has somewhat disappeared.
Often in larger budget flicks, the soundtrack is contrived the same way as the plot: they use the tried, proven tactics to manipulate viewer emotion on the script cues. “ooh, they’re going to kiss, resolve to the tonic. Ooh, we’re entering a dream sequence, play ascending Major-11 chords.”
We used to live in a world where most households had a (real) piano in them. Now nobody has. (and I’m very serious about this: ELECTRONIC KEYBOARDS DON’T COUNT) We used to live in a world where we were tied much closer to classical music, this connection has understandably faded somewhat. And what I am saying is that a direct consequence of this drift away from a harmonically rich diet is that the melodic & harmonic awareness of the average young person now is pathetic compared to previous generations of the 20th century.
It comes out in the songs. Overall, they’re not harmonically challenging. I always want them to change a chord, add a 6th or a 9th, give me some harmonic color, not just straight diatonic triads, and how bout a contrasting bridge? Many very popular bands have 3 & 4 chord songs, where the chords just repeat for the duration of the song. Obviously they are retarded.
But having said all that, I’m still going to agree with you Len. In the hands of someone who’s done their time (in Hendrix’s words: is Experienced), 3 chords are just fine. Something about the way they let their mind dwell over the notes and infuse them with understanding works. It’s the performer, not the chord count.
What this all adds up to is that the modern performer often isn’t utilizing the full vocabulary
available to them. History conserves novelty, we have shown that. The old ideas aren’t going to go away, they will be conserved. But now the burden falls on the young musician to really do his/her homework; to have to dig back through folkways, and victor classical recordings, and educate themselves.
All hail Frank Zappa in his infinite excellence.
Greg
September 9, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I have to look up “Avalon”, Hugo. I’m a movie watcher but not a buff. I like the way you break the themes down. Whoever you are, you’re a heckuva good writer because you have an eye for the thematic. I’m not that good at it.
Greg: It comes down to texturing. If you use richer chords, you have to adjust timings and voices to fit the extra sonorities. For example, in three chord rock, you bash away at the guitar because the sonorities don’t clash (mostly fifths, octaves, thirds). In jazz, at the other extreme, if you do that, it will sound cluttered and muddy.
If you use the extensions and put them in other instruments, you can get away with that better and that’s how a lot of rock/jazz/blues works. The rhythm player and the lead player go to different registers. Also the higher you go, the faster you can go. Frequency acts like mass. Other qualities such as the construction of the instrument affect the overtones produced. Rick knows more about that than anyone here.
All of these rules can be broken by someone who knows how or someone who noodles enough to stumble in.
As to chord progression exhaustion, there is something to that in that Lennon was competing with McCartney and that made for a really good go through the possibles, but just a change of melody and a different instrument gives the same old same old a new polished feel.
Where many of the new rock bands go wrong is turning on the distortion and never turning it off. Add that over the top of a lot of synth tracks, and it sounds like a thousand buzz saws in the hands of cannibals. Blood all over the tracks. That’s why I’m glad to see a neo-folk movement. It pushes back through the basics and puts melody out front. A one voice one guitar one take track is true grit.
Another issue is craft. Here is something I did last week for the contemporary group at church. It is midi tracks with my vocals and some vocalist harmonies. It is cheesier than a Wendy’s burger but a solid song. Give it to a good band, they’ll make it sound good. But it’s just craft. This is a very simple progression with some extensions in the gospel part in the middle to make it sadder.
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/TheGift.mp3
Terrible recording, but hey, dirty deeds done dirt cheap.
The minister gave me a theme and I gave him The Old Stories with relish and pickles. No apologies. It’s meant to be fun and I don’t have enough time to do a super production of it, just a demo. There are other tracks there like Harbor The Heart or Reefs of Contentment that we slaved over. Gesthemane is definitely a better composition.
Guess which one they will like better and play longer? The Gift. Is it better music? No. It just works.
Then I do something like Epiphany for the women’s choir and use a theme guaranteed to rip their hearts out when they sing it because that is exactly the emotion I want them to have. It’s about Mary at the 12th day when she realizes she is the mother of a child the world will kill and it is her sacred duty to get that child to that place. That is her Epiphany.
Very sad. People will cry. That will be a success.
So it’s a good idea not to compare yourself too much to others, it’s a really bad idea to be a slave to someone elses style (there is only ONE James Taylor per century; don’t be the Other One). It’s a really good idea to steal other licks, to study other styles, and to read as much as you can to feed to the lyricBrain.
But if you aren’t having fun, Quit. Do something else. You may come back to it to have fun, but if you aren’t, the audience isn’t either.
I had to stay at work tonight with nothing to do. Sorry for posting too much, Jon. It was keeping me awake.
Goodnight.
len bullard
September 9, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Ah Hugo, so good to see you back. And I mean that sincerely. Like Len, I love your writing, even when I’m totally outraged by what you are saying.
I’m thinking I need to take a rest too, as the eyestrain of obsessively following the other threads is getting bad, and the partisan bickering is getting way too shrill. Will continue to check here as there is real pleasure in listening to the trio riffing off each other.
Ken Ballweg
September 10, 2008 at 7:11 am
Greg,
Pianos.
There’s a cultural artifact that tells a lot about the evolution of the American household. In the forty’s and fifty’s owning a piano (or even an organ) in a working class neighborhood either meant that you grew up with it being the alternate source of family music or you had ambitions to give your kid some cultua’. Like that set of Britanica’s in the hall book shelf.
Or you got them the really poor man’s piano, an accordion.
In my world, as families got more mobile and uprooted, it became a bigger burden to move the damn things, and it cost way too much to tune them after you did, so the sound associated with them was less and less listenable. Add to that the gradual easier access to “hi-fi” with mass market players, and the general ownership of pianos, and the number of people able to play them moved steadily down. Piano’s went the way of home canning. Mind, still lots of people who do it and do it well, but just not at all ubiquitous as it once was.
I also suspect that the fact that schools have curtailed or eliminated music programs except in the better funded districts has also accelerated the shift to consuming rather than making music among the working class. Less pianos, less guitars (except self taught 3 chord rockers who don’t have any music fundamentals; “Dude? major 11… what???). Thankfully, there are still a lot of folks who do play,(or what would there be to consume?), but it is a very different world.
Ken Ballweg
September 10, 2008 at 7:38 am
Ken:
On the other hand, a program like Guitar Pro (a midi enabled notation and composition program) costs $50 and the web is loaded with pretty good free midi renditions. It has more piano theory online for free than I got in the three times I took theory (barely passed, passed, aced it).
The cost of composition is very low. The ability to write down a score and hear it as written without having to pay a fortune to an orchestra to play it only to find out it is full of mistakes is undeniably useful.
Greg and friends are right about this: if you poke around some of the newer bands, there are some fairly complex and newish sounds there. In fact, the long tail glut of these has made it necessary to do some pretty aberrant stuff to be a star these days.
There is an article on the web written by Jon’s friend, Emmett, describing the recording session that preceded The Last Waltz movie. It is a decent insight into the way we did this stuff when we had to have a band, an arranger and session players to augment. Folks on this thread should read that to understand better what I mean when I say costs came down, opportunities increased, but the overall percentage of good and bad hasn’t changed much because the rewards diminished (shredding the natch).
With the neo-folk movement emphasizing songwriting again, authenticity becoming a worthy if slightly misguided goal (tools is tools), and a proto-distribution system forming (Imeem and a Paypal button), and digital gathering spots emerging from the social network apps and virtual worlds (played the first one of those a decade ago), there is a new cultural engine coming. It is early. Keep in mind, the world of the Beatles and Dylan was intensely competitive. Lennon had to compete not just with the Stones and the Beach Boys, but also with McCartney.
I’ve faith in the kids. My daughter is showing me stuff that is ok if not of my time and rightly so. The kids who take music and video animation are coming along nicely as Jon showed us with his pick. Old heads like me can now do what I always wanted to do: score for the choirs AND the contemporary services, or even record a song for a booty site.
When I was first getting into this, the music scene was dieing because the suits had taken over. I missed the big ride in the Sixties, but I learned from them and am very grateful to all of them. I’ve had a good ride and am even proud of a few of the things I’ve written because they mattered to a few people.
It’s good. It’s getting better.
And somewhere out there, the next Louis Armstrong is playing bad ska with the next Eric Clapton.
Roll baby, roooolll!
len bullard
September 10, 2008 at 11:19 am
..only Clapton copped Freddy King, learning many songs note-for-note; that became his style; Armstrong had King Oliver; Eddie Van Halen learned Clapton solos note-for-note until he could play them flawlessly at twice the speed; and Charlie Parker learned Lester Young solos at double-speed from a hand-crank record player while he was away from Kansas City, playing a gig in the Ozarks. When he left he was a nobody; when he returned, he set the jazz world alight like wild fire.
I just hope potential new talents are able to find the good musical precursors.
Greg
September 10, 2008 at 11:37 am
Of course, Greg. But in those days, we were lifting a needle off a record trying to position it repeatedly to learn one lick. Today, import the midi, look at the tab, listen to it over and over again, speed it up, slow it down, done. As long as you know the basics of fingering (pivots, slide, three finger vs four finger, finger behind the fret tightly, hammer on, pull off, bend two, bend three, etc), it has never been easier to get good fast.
And it’s really cheap. The costs of the albums and the books were a barrier to the po folk.
They can find them. They can even better them.
len bullard
September 10, 2008 at 12:03 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxzk46iToo4
This guy is the best…
Rick Turner
September 10, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Ken,
Thank you for your generous welcome. I agree with you wholeheartedly about the “shrill”* political diatribe, much of it my own, in these spaces. I myself no longer have the spleen for it; rather, I find myself considering how hard everyone here — and most everyone in the electorate and even in the top race of the season — is trying to do just about one’s best.
We’re simply a good people, as good as many others are and have been. It’s just that Yanks seem never to get accustomed to this fact.
And BY THE WAY, this isn’t a STRING!
It’s a bloody cable of cables, like those twin fallopian tubes from which dangles the throbbing pulse that adjoins the golden ovaries of the headlands of San Pancho and Marin.
And if that isn’t graphic enough for you, allow me to mix my lurid metaphors…
Merely to stand a prayer of catching up with this wickedest of the wicked webs that only California can weave, I’ll have to replace my ink cartridge print out the sacred text entire in compressed 2-point Ancient Hebrew and wear the result around on my forehead for awhile in humble contemplation.
In the meantime I intend to soak up the TED website first-thing after falling asleep to the sounds of him upon whom Rick bestows such an estimable accolade. (Thanks, Rick, for the Sonny Landreth.)
Night all.
Hugo
September 10, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Amusing Dylan commentary, incidentally. Funniest thing since “Idiot Wind”.
Morgan: suggest you anatomize the Greek archaism “philodoxa”. Consider this a headstart: while a syllable longer than “paragraph”, it is nonetheless a full syllable shorter than “philosophical”.
Hugo
September 10, 2008 at 8:38 pm
My agogness to you Hugo, you still have your pipes. Dulcet indeed.
Len, I did not mean to equate the passing of the piano to the day the music died, as it certainly hasn’t. Was just giving some my personal perspective on why we just don’t see that many in working class homes anymore. Too high maintenance essentially. And it’s true, the electronic alternatives have given richer avenues of entry for those who are drawn to music.
But I will stand by my assertion, that making music has become less prevalent among average citizens, compared to consuming music. And believe that this has had an impact on general music appreciation.
Ken Ballweg
September 11, 2008 at 7:04 am
Here is a story I just ran across from earlier in the year. Cranky with the Culture south of the border, down Mexico way.
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1725839,00.html
T Bone Burnett
September 11, 2008 at 7:15 am
As I’ve pointed out before in this thread, homemade music is alive and well; it just doesn’t get any media attention outside of specialty magaziznes like Folk Roots, Acoustic Guitar, Dirty Linen, etc. Try signing up for any music camp within a couple of months of it beginning…you’re too late. You’d better buy your tickets for the Telluride Bluegrass Festival six months in advance. Ditto with MerleFest, either of the Strawberry Music Festivals, and the list goes on. Don’t think you’re going to get a table and chair at the Santa Cruz Ukulele Club meeting if you show up after 6:30, and you’d better bring a uke!
None of this stuff shows up on network TV, supermarket checkout magazine stands, or even such hallowed media as Rolling Stone. I would say that a majority of the folks who attend these kinds of events consider themselves amateur musicians, and some of them are actually astoundingly good. Music is a part of their active lives; it’s not just a passive activity. I know people who basically plan their lives around participating in music, and they’re not professional musicians, though many do gig semi-professionally.
Then there’s the house concert circuit, and talk about under the radar! There are traveling musicians who can gig three or four nights a week up one coast, down the other, and round and round in the middle of the country never playing to more than 100 people at a time, and they are making a decent living at it. Do the gig, sell twenty or thirty CDs, move on. Plug in the laptop, send out a newsletter, teach some lessons, play live on a college radio show, do a clinic or two…it works, and the major media has no idea about any of it. There are hundreds of performers doing this, and many are astoundingly good at it. This is going on in Europe and England as well, and there are many performers there who hardly even consider the US as a market; they don’t need us here. Check into Martin Simpson, Eddi Reader, John Martyn, and Marta Sebestyn, just to name four. You can find them on YouTube.
Rick Turner
September 11, 2008 at 7:51 am
I remember seeing three kids play a blistering rendition of “El Cumbanchero” on YouTube and that performance singlehandedly convinced me that not all of America’s youth have gone down the sinkhole after all.
Dan
September 11, 2008 at 8:22 am
“and the major media has no idea about any of it”
The modern music scene reminds me of Captain Picard and cohorts running amok inside a Borg ship, and the corporate drones are not even aware that they’re there.
Unfortunately, blowing up the modern music Death Star appears to be impossible. The only option is to ignore it as steadfastly as it ignores everything outside of the Music Factory.
There seems to be some kind of trend in our society. I bet about as many people who disapprove of the Bush administration also disapprove of most or all of what they hear released by major music studios, and yet the majority opinion continues to be ignored.
Dan
September 11, 2008 at 8:27 am
Sounds like we’re coming to consensus that: a) music is alive and well, though somewhat underground, b) that the MSM has moved on to covering other things; whereas in media’s birth period of say the 1950s they covered the arts in a more personal and less contrived fashion. I would wager that the folks who participate in the ‘House circuit’ wouldn’t want the cameras of the evening news anywhere close to their engagement. Once you open the doors to society at large, they’re liable to flood in and water it down like they do everything else. I’m sold. pity about the money part though, as Jon pointed out in a previous post, making a living touring is a grueling prospect.
Greg
September 11, 2008 at 8:41 am
Not only are songs covered, but movies with songs become bands. This morning while waiting to be checked in for one of those post-50 medical procedures and reading the local entertainment section, there was an article about a local touring group: The Last Waltz.
They specialize in re-creating Dylan and other songs in the movie.
There you go, Jon: you’re a monument.
I agree, Ken, except where I live, pianos are still relatively common. What is missing are the family sing alongs. A visitor to my blog would find an old video of my family’s ritual: the boys playing with Dad in his radio room at Christmas, or any other holiday, or really anytime he had any of the boys there. The joke was when anyone asked about my family, I told them we were the Darlings and it wasn’t too far off except for the jug. The song that got me past Amy at The Bluebird was “Daddy’s Guitar”. I had played at the Opryland theatre a week earlier for a televised contest with my band doing Reefs. My Uncle chewed me out and my Dad said I had to write a country song, so I wrote that and played it for him. He knew I would play that song at his funeral and I did. Someone asked me how I could do that and I said, “Practice…. and hydrocodone.”
When music is part of what a family does together, it becomes blood and sinew, part of every occasion. One of my friends who was raised NASA had lots more money, but said he was jealous of that relationship with my Dad. It’s only now that I get that.
I agree with you, Ken, something was lost when families quit sharing music. I’ve seen theatre families like that. They read at Christmas or Chanukah. That is another dimension of the culture meme. It distinguishes and sustains family units. I think that ties into the folk trope and the community trope. The 60s don’t start with bands; they start with Hootenannies.
Anyone know the origin of the word, Hootenanny?
len bullard
September 11, 2008 at 11:33 am
Cripes Rick, Sonny Landreth blew me doors off. Check this one out. Wherein he destroys pre-conceived notions of the guitar entirely, leaving ashes where my sense of order & decency should be:
Greg
September 11, 2008 at 9:54 pm
`The Twist’ is top song of Billboard Hot 100 era
http://www.austin360.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/Recordings/Music_Billboard_Top_Song.html
T Bone Burnett
September 12, 2008 at 8:07 am
Len, I thought it was a Pete Seeger adoption from another usage. But beyond that don’t know.
Also, it’s not just the failure of families to make music together that I see effecting the divide in music, it’s the exposure to more than the pop stuff that used to happen when Choir or Orchestra was an acceptable Jr. or High school elective path you could do for years, or when elementary kids were started out on recorders as a starter activity to plant seeds for those who learned to love making music and evolved into playing in orchestra or band. Again, I know that there are districts which have been able to hold onto arts programs through keeping it a priority, or doing outside fund raisers, but the diversity of musical options just isn’t as prevalent or valued in public education as it was in the 50s and 60s. Too often, kids learn about music the same way they learn about sex, from their peers with lots of mythology, and strange assumptions tagging along as a result.
Outside of those who are drawn to it, and good at playing good music, my perception is that the average white teen’s perspective of the value of music is more on the line that it is a celebrity lottery like “American Idol”. I think for African Americans, hip-hop is viewed in a similar way; an avenue out of poverty, like sports.
Ken Ballweg
September 12, 2008 at 8:26 am
So, I’m sort of dovetailing back into Jon’s original assumption that, for the pop culture crowd, Music = a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Of course, as I said previously, my friend and I tried to learn to do Kingston Trio covers in the hopes of getting laid, so that “means to an end” wasn’t unheard of in the 50/60/70 s.
Ken Ballweg
September 12, 2008 at 8:33 am
Ken:
Yes. They still fund it here. Our marching band is better than our football team. You might think it otherwise in Alabama, but actually, we emphasize music. Being 60 miles from Muscle Shoals and south of Nashville, a career in music is considered elite.
BTW: “Reefs” refers to a song “Reefs of Contentment” which was my comment on the fate of the 60s kids, not the other meaning. It is Floydesque and we weren’t beaten by that at the contest as my Uncle surmised. We were beaten by an A&R rep from Atlantic that decided to skew the score for his client.
Welcome to the Machine.
Part of the current pop culture crisis is that. Consider asking a father to put his daughter in a business where the top of the heap is Britney or even Carrie in a skin tight see-through because the old men like that. It isn’t that there aren’t other examples, but ever since M-TV became One Station for One Nation, that’s been the dominant trend. A star has to be a model first, so thank our stars for YouTube, but even on the web, take a look at Obama Girl and tell me what that’s all about: a girl in her underwear dancing on a desk?
C’mon.
A friend of mine when I was twelve was a country star. Her name was Sandy Posey. T-Bone might remember her but most won’t. When I was 21, she invited me to come to Nashville to live with her family and work on getting in the biz. I had a band and was pre-occupied so I declined. I accompanied her for a wedding some years later and she said declining the invitation was “A blessing” as she put it because of her thorough disgust with the biz. The billboard of J.R. Cash put up by Rubin after he won the award said it all.
Welcome to the Machine.
I don’t know a way to change that, so I write my songs, put them up for free downloading, and figure I’ve done what I can do. It may be futile but like breathing, it’s what I do. I can’t fight the machine. I ignore it. As a bass player friend used to say
“I got my own sh*t.”
And that is the good of the cheap production equipment. We don’t have to join the biz to record or get a gig. Just a Big Name. Who needs it.
There are lots of ways out of poverty. A degree in math is harder but surer, and that is the nut of it. People want an easy way out, and no matter what way one takes,
“ya gotta pay your dues if you wanta play the blues because you know, it don’t come easy”.
len bullard
September 12, 2008 at 8:49 am
This has gone from being my favorite Taplin comment thread to my favorite active online discussion period.
To the articulate, intelligent, culturally conscious majority here: gratitude and respect. Keep it coming!
Just to contribute a few more favorites:
Old: (Jimmy Page solo acoustic)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSRChVdIDeA
New: (MMW encore)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enlw1xxhIpY
My house has three hand drums and two guitars in easy reach on the main living floor and drumming/clapping/playing/singing are a big part of our family time. No piano (too big) but families making music together is not a thing of the past, for us. /anecdote
Chris Weekly
September 12, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Did I post a link to my ex-wife’s wonderful program, “Guitars in the Classroom”? If I did, please forgive my senior moment. If I didn’t, check out her work. She’s the perfect person to have done this…BA in child development, MA in clinical psych, taught guitar at the Old Town School as a teenager, wrote the #1 selling kids’ guitar method, “Smart Start Guitar” in the mid 1990s, etc.
http://www.guitarsintheclassroom.org
Rick Turner
September 12, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Cool! Your wife? Lucky sod!
Can I blog that site?
Hey folks, people are on the run down Texas way. If so inclined, say a prayer.
Here’s one I like a lot…. easy and right. Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alaama
Well Well Well
len
September 12, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I’m pretty partial to this clip of Charlie Hunter playing the 8-string guitar. Not only does he play 2 & 3 parts at the same time effortlessly, but it’s got soul baby — bucket loads of it.
Greg
September 12, 2008 at 11:24 pm
That clip of Jimmy Page, triggered my cranky again.
Would TV even dream of having someone playing guitar on now? No way. Even if they had on Incubus’ guitarist to do his worst, that’d be something at least. And I guarantee you that tens of thousands of young, land-locked teenagers interested in music would stop what they were doing and pay attention. Hell, I’d watch that, just for the novelty of it.
Long ago, I was once a kid, trapped in the mid west. Mid-westerners are that much further away from the coasts, where the real, bona fide artists are found. That’s why TV is important. Because in many house holds it is a mainstay, always on; sort of a reality creating device; mediating consciousness.
MTV used to have instrumentalists on sometimes in the 80’s and early 90’s before they realized that they no longer had to play music videos. I would tape Joe Satriani & other performances, just to have more footage of real guitarists, actually playing, to learn from; to grok on.
Speaking of Bjork, one time she performed with a trio: standup bass, jazz kit, piano & flute(?), and it was the best Bjork performance I have witnessed to date; deep and sonorous.
Electronic music is cool and great, but I think it’s healthy to maintain a discreet level of suspicion. Probably for the simple reason that when you play the cello, it’s all you, but when you play midi cello, it’s about 40% of your input, and 60% of the computer running a program, and programs don’t groove, they just don’t. There may be one sample for each note, and the computer plays the sample the exact same way every time.
I think there are under-currents that run throughout the human physiology, which are where the rhythms found in music and dance come from, which are why it works. Patterns: 4/4 layered with syncopations, the ebbs and flows like the human heart and breathing; sometimes conforms to a story arch: build up in the beginning, frenetic in the middle, winding down in the end, returning to the pastoral. Computers don’t do these things automatically. They could, but someone has to actively program them to. We’re not always cognizant of this requirement.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 8:30 am
Len, I know you use midi, and I do too sometimes. It strikes me that a midi arrangement is kind of like an illusion of good enough. Used poorly it sounds like a machine playing in robot time. But with enough tweaking, a midi arrangement can sound good enough to fool the listener; good enough to attain the desired effect. I’m definitely not saying that all midi is bad. But that it has its place and its own set of limitations and that we would do well to maintain awareness of what those pitfalls are. It’s no magic bullet. Just a tool.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 8:44 am
“Mid-westerners are that much further away from the coasts, where the real, bona fide artists are found.”
*spraying coffee over monitor*
Dan
September 13, 2008 at 8:47 am
Dan, you must not have grown up in a town where every band was a cover band.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 9:08 am
@greg: Thanks for the CH tube. I’ve not seen an 8 string played well. Not sure I’d try that now as the arthritis is taking down the left hand, but wow.
I am not into guitar calisthentics though I respect the work that goes into that kind of performance. When I was studying Bach on guitar, my teacher told me it is bad for guitar and bad for Bach, but a great showpiece. At the turn of the century, playing fast ragtime banjo destroyed the art because it became about physical prowess over good sound. As Joplin said, ragtime is meant to be played slow. I like the Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama sound because it is as simple as it is yet has such heart. It is approachable. It can be learned. That is the power of folk music that rock and jazz can’t touch.
ANY style can be turned into calisthentics and it is great fun for the players just like touch football, but ask yourself if that performance has the potential to live as long as Mama Cass singing Dream a Little Dream or Janis Ian singing Seventeen. These are all different approaches to different kinds of performances for different things to say, none better or worse except in appropriateness for the music.
“There are only two kinds of music: good and bad, and I like both.” – Duke Ellington
Midi is a notation for a machine. If you have a lot of patience, you can make it sound good but you have to analyze a performance in deep detail. In Ground Level Sound, Max Hunter, our drummer, would spend weeks programming a part. He refused to loop and would program each hit individually, varying the intensity and tone. As a result, he could create very lifelike parts
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/ReefsofContentment.mp3
Note: when Dave Gallaher (Microwave Dave) comes in on his solo at the end, he slides in on a bend. That is an accident. I recorded over the first few notes of his solo accidentally. When we heard it on playback, he slapped me on the back and said, “don’t touch it; that’s perfect”. That’s the Happy Accident, serendipity, when stupid and art combine to make something live.
We would use midi when we were producing a long piece (theatre rock) and needed the solid timing to make other parts solid. It is actually much more time consuming than live. The song lost the contest at Opryland, but the guys in the recording booth were ecstatic for it. Different strokes….
Alone I use midi for song writing. I can create the orchestration that way. It opens up composition and there does need to be some allowance for enabling the writer to do that. Otherwise, as in the days before midi and synths, music would be an industry owned by the rich and controlled by them. Access to studios was quite limited. The gear Rick points out is pro gear and if you don’t have deep pockets, you don’t get to play.
So horses for courses… authenticity is not about the real time reality; it is about getting down what is intended. Fixating on the physical motor skills of musicians is like fixating on a woman’s tits; you might miss what’s going on in her head or her heart.
As to the coasters, well, in the last two years I buried two friends who could stand up to the guitarists featured here by other posters note for note (Ray Brand and Ted Arighi). North Alabama is a hotbed of pickers and it comes down to the time, not the location. It doesn’t matter where you are; it matters how much you want it and the RoadRunner effect (natural talent beats scheming). Guitarists here are born with the blues. I’m an exception. Never had the touch and never will. It’s a spirit and mine is from another place.
I get the cover band bit, though. That really is the trap we get into because the club owners insist on it and the crowd does too in all too many places. I wrote a rhyme for that one time called The Songwriter’s Lament:
To play with only this and that old bit is such a bore
But I sadly fear the love of the ear is to hear what it heard before.
That means going adventuring can be a solo trek. It takes a special group that will put their egos aside and go searching in the void the way the Dead did. Take a look at the Last Waltz sometime and ask yourself for all the feel the musicians are producing, which is considerable, how much of that is really original sound in the sense that you’ve never heard anything like it before.
Something really new and different is completely unrecognizable and the first instinct is to reject it as noise or caca. Paul Simon said when criticized for his work with the South African musicians that people underestimate how hard it is to take native sounds and turn them into saleable pop.
What really makes me angry and keeps me in my Jeremy Bentham Bentham world is that audiences won’t let us breathe anymore. We go into a club and they don’t give us the room we had three decades ago. They demand that THEY are the stars. I blame disco for that.
BTW, what you miss in midi is precisely that: breath. Breathing introducings little bits of ragged time and it makes beats longer and shorter, notes unsolid, and phrases extend or truncate. Breath is the feeling of life. Musicians spend years trying to get perfect meter, but when you put a group together even with very good chops, until they learn how to breath together or in rhythm, they sound ragged. In bands like the Dead who have played together all of their lives, that comes as naturally together as breathing alone.
But do read that piece by Emmett about the Band recording sesssions. No matter how good you are, in the studio, it is all sweat equity and the occasional happy accident.
len
September 13, 2008 at 11:21 am
Greg, you must not have ever set foot in a blues or jazz club in Chicago, to name just one place where the locals would be surprised to hear that “real” musicians are found only on the coasts.
I’ve also heard that real musicians, real artists, real actors, can be found only on the East Coast. Or only in New York City. Or only in Manhattan. Or only in a certain section of Manhattan. I suppose it depends on your definition of real musicians.
The town I grew up in had *no* bands of any kind. I would have been only too happy to have half a dozen different cover bands to choose from.
I’ve seen original bands that were simply awful, and cover bands that were a lot of fun. And vice versa. My assessment is that cover bands tend to be mediocre. Original bands are more often in one extreme or the other, and the large majority of them are in the bad extreme rather than the good.
The cover band I play in is simply awful, for the record.
Dan
September 13, 2008 at 11:48 am
@dan:
Jam. As often as you can. There is something there if you work for it, believe in it, want it bad enough.
My older brother who was a band leader told me, “There is something to be learned from even the poorest player.”
Find it. You don’t have to be stars. It’s only a race if you think it is.
See Bugs Bunny and the Opera Singer.
len
September 13, 2008 at 11:54 am
The problem with musical gear (and I make the stuff…) is that it becomes an end unto itself. When I lived in LA and did a lot of guitar repair work, what blew my mind was the number of third string musicians who were one piece of gear away from being able to finish their home studio CD. There was one nice backyard recording environment in a nice freestanding building that I called “Black Hole Studios”…gear went in and music never came back out.
When Little Village was recording their last album together, it got into major programming…hours and hours and days and days of drum loops, etc. It was like some of my studio nightmare days were someone wanted to spend four hours getting a snare drum sound. Thwack! Thwack! ad infinitum to the point where ear fatigue set in making the whole thing just stupid. Anyway, there they are beating it to death day after day, and Ry also was on the verge of having no time to do the sound track for Geronimo. Then V. M. Bhatt was available for two nights only to record with Ry up in Santa Barbara. Ry worked all day in LA studios and then drove up to SB to record starting at 10:00 PM. In two nights and maybe five hours of tape running, he had his first Grammy winning album…
So you can MIDI ’til you’re blue in the face, or you can get down to it and make exciting music… The best nights are when the gear just disappears and what you have is a musician’s heart connecting with people.
Rick Turner
September 13, 2008 at 12:02 pm
True. Gear gets in the way. I have stacks in a closet. It gets old, gets noisy, doesn’t add anything to the sound. With some time spent, though, one winnows out the bad and keeps the good.
But let me come to your guitar shop and take my choice of 50% of your tools and see how your production quality holds up.
A heart connects to another heart. It’s not my job or yours to tell them how to do that.
len
September 13, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Len, so eloquently written. You are a great communicator, my friend.
Dan, respectfully, yeah, that was a gross oversimplification meant to display the dichotomy between the ‘burbs and a major cultural hub like an LA or NYC. From my own experience, I remember clinging to every scrap of information that leaked into our sheltered existence from the outside world about music. I don’t know why it felt so closed off, but it was. Of course, this condition can be easily remedied by a dose of reality from a quick trip to the coast, but that’s not always an option for many a starry-eyed mid-western teen.
The migration path of the musician is a well known in the lore of the greats. That they start off in a backwater somewhere, learn their true identity, and if the urgency is there, they split. In Louis Armstrong’s day the destination du jour was Chicago.
Len, is this correct article by Emmett about the Last Waltz recording sessions?
http://theband.hiof.no/articles/lw_oui_grogan.html
I think the point about calisthenics is well put: “playing fast ragtime banjo destroyed the art because it became about physical prowess over good sound”. This has happened over and over, in Jazz especially, several times. And there’s nothing better in Jazz than a ballad like Embraceable You.
One of my favorite quotes is what Zappa said when asked about Be-Bop. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It all sounds like noodles to me. I know why they’re noodling, where they are noodling, what rules they are noodling to, but it all still sounds like noodles to me.” Instead, Zappa liked Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse, which could be very notey musics, but the notes were carefully planned and planted to elicit exact feelings from the listener. In the sense that the composer is causing the situation to happen, exactly as prescribed. Not noodled over, by some guy endeavoring to just find the right scale to play over each chord change; Less happen-stance, I guess.
One thing I do notice about players of great facility though, is their ability to be much more lyrical than the next guy when playing slow pieces. Their control of the instrument is just that much more that the little flourishes don’t encumber him/her as much. All chops aside, you still have to meddle in the physical world in some fashion to get the job done.
(from Dan^) The Tuttle kids play El Cumbanchero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTHgDQFnMZc
Talk about pickers.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Len, a couple of years ago guitar maker Michael Gurian ( now maker of exquisite guitar trim…inlays, binding, purflings, etc.) and I were hanging out at one of the luthiers’ events; I think it might have been a Guild of American Luthiers convention, and the room was filled with young and enthusiastic luthiers all discussing the latest jigs and fixtures…stuff we all love and use, but… Michael turned to me and said, “You and I are the only ones here in this room right now who could build a guitar with no more tools than would fit into a briefcase.” He was right. Of course both of us now also use the latest computer controlled, automatic tool changing CNC machines, and he’s ahead of me in using CNC controlled lasers to cut out parts, inlays, etc. But we both came up with the basics and we could both return to basics if we had to. We just wouldn’t make much money at it, and it’s already tough enough.
In much the same vein, luthier Charles Fox and I co-lectured at the Roberto Venn School of Lutherie about eight years ago, and he told the students, “Drop me in any city in the US with a hundred bucks, a change of clothes, a briefcase with my fret dressing and guitar setup tools, and I’ll be making a real good living in a week.”
So come take half the tools, and I’ll still be a guitar maker. Take 90% and I’ll go setup guitars and fix them in any music store in the US. Take it all away, and for $200.00 I could be back in the repair/setup biz and earn my way back up the ladder anywhere they play guitars, wear the parts, and break them.
I love the tools. I don’t absolutely need many of them. I built my first electric guitar with no more power equipment than a Craftsman electric drill and a sewing machine motor with a counter for making the pickups. Gear is just a means to an end, and if you really understand the end, you’ll get there with or without sophisticated gear.
Rick Turner
September 13, 2008 at 1:35 pm
@greg: Yes. That is the right URL.
I LOVE that video. That’s what ahm talking about!
@rick: Spoken as a true craftsman. Tools is tools. The difference is with fewer tools your guitars will still be better than almost all others made with the same tools. Master luthier.
I can do the same with one guitar and a change of strings as long as I don’t mind the divorce.
Would I? Nah. Done that. Long hours and time better spent writing unless done with other musicians I care about. It seems as I age, it’s not about the audience being there but being in front of an audience with musicians I would be with if there were no audience.
Noodles and gear: When I do record live tracks, I do layer, but the tracks are live, no click, no backup, just me, instrument, chord, board, and computer and it’s just a deck with effects.
Noodling is fine. Zappa didn’t smoke enough dope.
Noodling is a way to let it out, that’s all.
A noodle: Cecile
http://www.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/Cecile.mp3
Two tracks of guitar and just a little ambient synth played live. Cecile Muller is a VRML goddess. Never met her but she’s shared her work with me and others for years. On the web, you can love someone deeply and eyes never meet once. People let their spirits out.
len
September 13, 2008 at 2:00 pm
fixed link: http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/Cecile.mp3
Rick, did Ry and V. M. Bhatt even rehearse for that record, or did they just show up and play? I ’spose it’s doable for musicians of their caliber, especially when gigging all the time.
It reminds me of when I was at a pub in Galway Ireland; there was a guitar player, flute player & fiddler playing the smokinest Irish music, I could hardly understand it. I asked a kid watching them what song it was they were playing. He said that it wasn’t one. I pressed further, “Well, how do they know which line to play?”
“They just do.” he assured me. So apparently, I am to believe to this day, not knowing the first thing about Irish music, that those really complicated scalar jigs that they play, that somehow, native Irish musicians are able to improvise a complicated winding melody, and play it, 2 different people, side by side, in unison, perfect, because they’re Irish and they just get it. It’s in the air or something.
@Len, yeah I like noodles too. nice tune.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Thanks Greg. And thanks for taking the time to listen and fix the link.
It’s in the spine. Do it long enough and it can just happen. It’s partly understanding the style, and a lot, repetition with purpose. It’s easier live than when recording. A good noodle can be the start of a good song. It’s not all math. It’s emotions. When you can finally forget the math and let the ear and the hand speak the heart, it’s music.
I find myself here arguing with people who’ve been my heros. Very depressing. Very. Time to go walk the dog.
len
September 13, 2008 at 6:04 pm
nahh, you’re not arguing with anybody. He was talking about jazz. The thing that probably made that question interesting to me is that I would’ve expected his answer to be “sure, I love be-bop.” but instead Frank, in his characteristic fashion had some well reasoned, brainiac response, which kept me scratching my head for more than a decade, trying to figure out what he meant.
Case in point: The Jam Session. (I just watched the encore jam from the Last Waltz)
It’s a very social activity, isn’t it? and a pretty even playing field. An unwieldly mixer. But the Jam is an activity common to the last generation. You don’t see it so much now. Instruments have become fancypants and electronified, and stars have become higher-maintenance & perhaps more medicated (thinking prozac, not dubage)
but consider this glorious thing, the jam: you just throw a bunch of old hand instrumentalists & vocalists on a stage together, set the bar somewhat low, like a blues vamp, let go and sit back. Anything can happen. Any one can take charge. Really good jam sessions change hands all night till the cock crows, everyone getting a good shot at the microphone. That’s the beauty of a jam, it’s artistic democracy in action. Give everyone a turn, and the one who tells the best story, who exudes the greatest charisma, gets a 2nd & 3rd shot. It refines the music, sort of a organic, self-distilling process. Probably dating back thousands of years into our collective pre-history. The jam is social.
Greg
September 13, 2008 at 6:47 pm
“Meeting by the River” is quite literally a meeting of two musicians talking to one another in their string language for the first time. They met at the motel in SB where we were staying, and said little more than “hello”. Then we went over to the church where the gear was set up, and they set up, started to play, and Kavi immediately started to roll tape. There were no rehearsals other than one or the other of them would lay out a short theme, and then they’d start playing. It was remarkable. At one point they took a break and Ry came over and said to me, “I guess I’m here for my guitar lesson…”
Rick Turner
September 13, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Greg,
“I think there are under-currents that run throughout the human physiology, which are where the rhythms found in music and dance come from, which are why it works.” Very true, and more coming out every day as the neuro-researchers get more sophisticated about looking inside an active brain at what areas react to different stimulus. Music is still a puzzle but
There is a book I’ve been wanting to read called “Rhythm, Music, and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications” by Michael Thaut. Unfortunately the hardcover is one of those limited printing academic texts that cost AnArmAna…. Just checked and B&N has it in a much more reasonable trade paper back so probably will order it.
This is the table of contents:
1. The structure of rhythm : the essence of time in music
2. Aesthetics and psychobiology
3. The neural dynamics of rhythm
4. Biomedical research in music
5. Rhythm-driven optimization of motor control
6. Music in therapy and medicine : from social science to neuroscience
7. Neurologic music therapy in sensorimotor rehabilitation
8. Neurologic music therapy in speech and language rehabilitation
9. Neurologic music therapy in cognitive rehabilitation.
Part of the fascination is the chapter on the neural dynamics of rhythm. I grew up immersed in music in my Jr. High and High school years, but never learned to sight read. I got by on a a large voice range, great pitch, and tone, but sucked small rocks when it came to rhythms if I wasn’t with a group to keep tempo for me. Making my choice of bass as my instruments strange, but only if I was solo. Could fake it with a good drummer. However, all attempts to learn guitar were doomed as there wasn’t anyway to hide the fact that was like a white guy trying to clap in a black church choir. Inept touches, but only the surface of my shame the day I actually tried that. Very much Len’s Wiley Coyote hanging in air holding the Acme anvil.
Anyway, the poiint is that all the research says that the brain is indeed hardwired to be receptive to hearing music and to creating it. It appears in all cultures, and all ages of history. Kids show musical aptitude and taste before entering school.
There was a NYT article that got me looking into this stuff, which I was able to find again, which covers some of the current thought. It’s got an ungodly long URL, but search the NYT archives for “Music of the Hemispheres”, by Clive Thompson, and you should find it easily enough.
It’s a fun read (and older than I remembered it being, oh well), that covers the research of Daniel Levitin, who heads the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University but started in the biz as a producer. One quote gives you the flavor:
“Dr. Levitin originally became interested in producing in 1981, when his band — a punk outfit called the Mortals — went into the recording studio. None of the other members were interested in the process, so he made all the decisions behind the board. “I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes,” he said. “They were stealing them from the guitarists.”
Producers, he noted, were able to notice impossibly fine gradations of quality in music. Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiers and recording tape used on an album.
“So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?” Dr. Levitin said. “What’s going on there, and why are some people better than others? And why is music such an emotional experience?” He began sitting in on neuroscience classes at Stanford University.”
Like I say a fun read, and confirms several things Greg and Len have been saying.
It is indeed in the spine as Len asserts. What’s more, kids who learn to play an instrument at an early age get brain benefits equal to learning a second language, so good on your wife Patrick. She would probably like the book too.
It also accounts for why the music continues even when people don’t earn a living at it. It’s in us, and someone will always be doing it, because it’s innate to us.
Ken Ballweg
September 14, 2008 at 12:40 am
Authenticity.
The day we buried Ray was hot as hell. Over two hundred people, bikers, pickers, family and one guy in a suit: me. The head of the Saints, the local Harley lords, gave the eulogy. In the crowd was thirty years of the cream of the pickers, night club vets all, tour wasted and gray and most of them still out there.
Ray was the big daddy of the blues guitar players. A complete master. Tasteful. Cleared the way. Any time I’d be worried about the status thing, he’d say, “Len, we’re lucky. We get to do this.”
Lots of famous people hereabouts. But fame is just more stuff and cooler people, I guess. If I had to trade his day for days of people with lots of press and all the fawning fakers, I’ll take Ray’s day.
When I got home, the weather man on the TV said it was so hot outside, it couldn’t rain.
So I wrote Ray a good bye song and did it the way he liked me best: one guitar, one mic, one pass. As authentic as I know.
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/CallRay.mp3
len
September 14, 2008 at 7:01 am
Rick, what amazes me then is the foresight & the confidence of Ry or whoever deemed the “Meeting by the River” a recording session, and not just a casual jam session. I’ve had several serendipitous jam sessions throughout my life that weren’t recorded, and that’s the part that I regret the most now. There is something so ephemeral about music, that you can pour such heart and soul into several hours of activity, but without proper care and preservation it just evaporates up into the night sky. It sinks into the consciousnesses of the folks around, and then fades after a while.
The best show I ever did was in a bar called The Deadwood. My band was unusually tight; we had been rehearsing several hours a day the whole week. The night was perfect. We played in front of a huge plate glass window back lit by a gorgeous lightning storm that seemed to last all night long. The place was packed to the rafters and the music was solid. A friend of one of the guys was supposed to tape us, but didn’t have his gear. I offered to pay him to go get it. He went, but he couldn’t find it for some reason. A tragedy for me. My musical career seems like a comedy of errors, spilled into the haze of many an ecstatic, smoky night, now lost.
Let that be a lesson to you all, musicians, record EVERYTHING.
Greg
September 14, 2008 at 9:39 am
Credit goes to Kavi Alexander, the recording engineer/producer/record company (he IS Water Lily Acoustics). I introduced Kavi to Ry after hearing the first recording that Kavi did of Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, “Saradamani” which is also an absolutely exquisite CD of light Hindustani classical pieces.
Rick Turner
September 14, 2008 at 10:34 am
Look at this string, People! How glorious!
I really congratulate you all — and both thank and congratulate our host — for sustaining such a beautiful thing.
Afraid I’ll have to spill off the curl now and belly onto my board for the duration, but should any of you others wish to take this set all the way into the shorebreak, then by all means…
Hugo
September 14, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Just for the pure fun of it…
Mason Dixon
September 15, 2008 at 10:59 pm
That IS funny. Definitely with captions.
Did you see the SNL with Belushi doing Cocker while standing next to him?
len bullard
September 16, 2008 at 5:47 am
MD, that reminded me of a similar treatment of Carmina Burana: http://carmina.ytmnd.com
@Ken, haven’t had the time to fully digest your post yet, but I think there’s some critical stuff there. I have a funny anecdote about discussing music with a famous computer programmer that I’d like to tell too. Probably won’t have time til’ later tho. Life is swift right now.
Greg
September 16, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Once again the pedant rambled to unnecessary lengths. Need to learn to hold off on the submit button until a day goes by, and some serious editing goes in. But it’s true that current neuro research can bring some interesting insights into some of the mysteries you three have observed in the process of making music. For example the special shared feeling after an afternoon of making music in your music camps, Patrick, really is because all of you were feeling much better than average as a result of the oxycontin the music produces. I suppose you don’t need to know the specifics to that level, but there is an affirmation there that something is going on that is special and is genuinely shared. That there is a physical connection that you are not just reading into the session.
Also that music does produce something called state bound learning where two moods form an association between what was happening at the time, so hearing a bit of a song can release visceral memories of events happening when that music was impressed on you, or something that physically reminds you of the event can set off vivid recall of the music as accurately as if it was being performed again.
Opened the Newsweek that came yesterday, and there was an interview with Levitin along with some good pop neuroscience articles that give a fairly factual Reader’s Digest version of recent research findings.
The URL to the short NW interview which will give a good synopsis of the long post above, is
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158755
One of the more interesting things he says is that there is an approximate 10% of the population that simply doesn’t respond to music.
Gotta love that Levitin still plays with a group of other brain researchers at McGill in a band named “Diminished Faculties.”
Ken Ballweg
September 17, 2008 at 9:13 am
Good article, Ken. It makes some points worth remembering:
1. Good at math and good at music aren’t necessarily correlated.
2. Make lyrics more detailed for greater arousal. There is also a rhythmic component if you want to excite crowds (analyze chants).
3. Music is an emotional language and the other bits of advice work to make that work better.
Spend some time studying eastern composition, particularly the raga/tal systems of India. They are very advanced in their knowledge of this. It can become pedantic, but a master/pandit sitar player can not only play the instrument, but you as well even if you’ve no taste for the style and the sound. The knowledge of moods/rasas and how these are related in both music and dance is deep and difficult to master. Western knowledge of harmony is more complex, but eastern music can do without that almost entirely.
When combined, better still but strange to the ear in someways. Harmony forces one to winnow the modes, avoid micro-tones, etc. A happy medium is blues which seems paradoxical but isn’t. Note what he said about emotions seldom being experience purely. They are mixed. These are the domain states I’ve mentioned. Emotional vectoring in individuals and large statistical groups relies on understanding these and how they work in combination similar to a dynamic color palette.
len bullard
September 17, 2008 at 9:50 am
@Ken, that was an awesome post btw, I just haven’t had time to reciprocate it. (which would entail reading thoroughly, checking out the research, and then coming to some sort of right-side-up appraisal of what I think is going on between the interplay between music and science and perhaps concocting a metaphor or tale to boot. All in all, a lot of work, that I would gladly do, but for the time I haven’t had to do it.)
Just drove through Olema California, where someone had taken the time to tape/paint the city-limits sign to read “Obama”! Hells yes.
I’ll read Levitin and work my way backwards. Anyone who’s playing in “Diminished Faculties” already has my vote of confidence.
Greg
September 17, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Olema has an interesting history. In the 1800s there were a bunch of bars and whore houses there frequented by the politicians of San Francisco on their getaways. It was also on the route of the narrow gauge railroad that went up over Mount Tam, through West Marin, and on up into West Sonoma County.
The first place I lived in California was in Inverness Park, just up the road from Olema. $50.00 a month and credit for working on remodeling the place. Of course that was in 1968… I wound up working as a studio musician with Jerry Corbitt, ex of the Youngbloods, and then going out with them handling equipment and mixing their sound before I hooked up with the Grateful Dead crowd.
Rick Turner
September 17, 2008 at 10:21 pm
So how and why did you end up with the Dead?
len bullard
September 18, 2008 at 8:27 am
To the DoubleJack, 4th commenter:
“In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of the artist.”
Dude. Not when they’re charging over $200 dollars for entry. That’s called the Burning Money festival.
madmonq
September 18, 2008 at 10:43 am
Len, the short version is this:
I was working part time for the Youngbloods as their sound guy/roadie, starting to make electric instruments, and making my own pickups in 1969. The Youngblood’s manager’s secretary was Phil Lesh’s girlfriend. She saw my early instrument work and introduced me to Phil who invited me to visit the ‘Dead’s warehouse in Novato. I did, they all liked what I was up to, and a guy named Ron Wickersham did frequency response tests on my hand wound pickups and found them to have better response than anything on the market. We started doing some experiments and learned what everybody in the business now knows…less wire=wider bandwidth…and we learned some stuff that really only now is generally understood having to do with the 3D interface between the strings, magnetic fields, and coils. Since I was kind of a polymath…sound mixer, musician, pickup maker, instrument maker and repairman, and also had some experience in multi-track recording studios…I was a perfect fit. Owsley urged Ron and recording engineer Bob Matthews to take me on as a partner and out of that came the incorporation of Alembic. We wound up doing all the early Dead PA gear up to and including the Wall of Sound (on which I designed a lot of the speaker cabinets), and we did their live 16 track recordings. I also wound up building very high tech and hippie artsy instruments for Phil, Jack Casady, and eventually many others, and I trained a whole “school” of luthiers, many of whom have gone on to do their own thing, heavily influenced by our work of the early 1970s. So in my career, I’ve been a pro musician, sound mixer, record producer, assistant engineer, pickup designer, machinist, and luthier. I still do a bit of it all.
Rick Turner
September 18, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Wow.
Ken Ballweg
September 18, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Oh, not Patrick…me. Warwick…me! And music…no oxycontin…more like endorphins and getting satisfaction, if you know what I mean…
There was an interesting study/survey that I’ll have to find where the basic question was put to musicians, “Which would you rather give up, sex or playing music with people?” Well, the majority would give up sex before music. There are few things more intimate than playing music in an ensemble; the level of connection is just amazing. But get a bunch of good musicians together in the woods for a week or so, and you’re just going to get a goodly amount of both. And the endorphins do flow…
Rick Turner
September 18, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I’d like to hear the long version of the story some time, Rick. Wow too.
Greg
September 18, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Sorry Rick, total brain fart. However, read the Levitin article. He does specifically say that the neurochemical the brain produces is a form of “oxytocin, a trust hormone”. Again my bad, I seem to have had a tincture of memory failure when I was posting.
Know you are buried Greg, but do encourage you all to read the longer NYT article, it gives much more detail, and is as easy to take in as the Newsweek interview. (here we go with tinyURL again, hope it works this time). This article is from 2006, and called “The Music of the Hemispheres”.
http://tinyurl.com/3tb9wt
Warwick signing off
Ken Ballweg
September 19, 2008 at 7:18 am
Oh and you are right on one level, Rick, he does say that listening to live music does release endorphins, but that specifically playing together releases oxytocin, a trust hormone.
Which reinforces your earlier statement:
“There’s nothing like playing music with people and then playing with them. Musicians really do have a lot of fun… Playing music with someone you like is incredible foreplay.”
Ken Ballweg
September 19, 2008 at 7:31 am
Oxytocin, as I recall, is the so-called ‘love hormone’ also stimulated by chocolate. Music is the only thing as good as sex, except it lasts longer and you can have it with more people to better results at the same time.
It doesn’t lose lustre with age, and unless one is a porn star, one can record. Recording is the Proof. Live is the Magick.
Fascinating story, Rick, and thanks. That was a pivot point of worldwide culture and you were at the perfect place and time to watch. Jack Cassady was our favorite bassist in my early band years and Kaukonen an impossible to replicate guitarist. We listened to Hot Tuna for hours and hours.
The choice of the name ‘alembic’ is evocative. An alchemist’s still. My favorite Alembic story is how our bass player put his on the gate of his pickup one night after a gig when we unloaded and forgot to close the gate. Of course, he drove ten miles before he remembered. It was gone when he returned. We put the word on the street and it showed up in a repair shop having been picked up by the guy who ran over it first. Amazingly, the neck took the beating well. It was restored.
The 3D interface fascinates me, that being a hobby of mine. I realize those are likely trade secrets.
Did you work on the Europe ‘72 album? That is my favorite Dead. I caught them in Tuscaloosa where I found out that it was absolutely true: there was nothing better than Live Dead. Except for Workingman Dead, I wasn’t that impressed with the Dead until I heard Blues For Allah and we learned some of those for our gigs. Very tough chords but instructive.
Once I got to a live concert, only then did I really get it.
len bullard
September 19, 2008 at 8:48 am
http://xkcd.com/339/
see, the younglings do get it
Greg
September 20, 2008 at 9:28 am
I stayed home for Europe ‘72. We had just taken over an existing recording studio in San Francisco, Pacific High Recorders, and we had a massive amount of remodeling to do there, plus I was setting up our first instrument production facility up in Cotati. Mixing and overdubbing Europe ‘72 was the first project we did at the Alembic studio at 60 Brady St. there in the city. A couple of years later, we sold the studio to Elliot Mazer of His Master’s Wheels. Ultimately, it became a nightmare because when the city put the BART subway in up under Market Street, the low frequency rumble of the cars would get into the mics no matter what we did short of building a floating room inside the already incredibly expensive big room that we had built. It was a beautiful studio in its prime, though…a very large room with acoustic panels that could be moved to change the low end response, a vocal booth, two live echo chambers, an EMT plate, three 16 track machines, two Neve consoles, a SpectraSonics console, tons of great outboard gear and mics, four track and several good two track mastering machines…you name it, between Elliott and us we had it. But it all cost more than it made… We got into the studio biz at the perfect wrong time…just as many Bay area musicians were putting in decent home studios…
Rick Turner
September 20, 2008 at 10:02 am
Almost heaven…. then a pile of stuff in a garage somewhere. I was in Santa Barbara in the 80s attending a songwriter klatch and the fellow running it had bought up a ton of professional gear and put it in a room where he had knocked out walls.
I came along just as the first home studios were becoming affordable, eg, the TEAC 4-track. Since the industry was imploding, I was left in the do-it-yourself brigade in our 1000 square foot hippie apartment. Good times even if an egg carton deluxe. We would come out and find complete strangers sitting in our living room who would drift in from the street listening to us. Very loose but fun.
And lots of street rumbling because we were on the second floor next to a main drag. Also inside a saddle downtown so every scream in the night was audible for a mile. When the football stadium was full or the train went by a mile away, we had to stop.
Marriage meant getting the gear and guys and smells out of the apartment and into a basement, then a storefront. We operated a private studio for a little over a decade but all semi-pro gear.
As a Muscle Shoals producer, Terry Woodford, said to me, it turns one into a board jockey instead of a songwriter. I watched most of my maintime band go down that path. They produce other people and make bad singers sound good (melodyne, etc.) but lose their writing chops. Trade-offs… When I got out of the band, I set up at home with 16 track digital console, then finally it became just a board, a computer, headphone amps, powered monitors, a Roland 1040, a decent phantom powered mic, Adobe Audition and Guitare Pro. I have Sibelius for printing.
So just and only what a songwriter needs to demo. Sparse is better for writing. I’ll drop the mp3s on the web for folks, or write for others, but wouldn’t consider the home CD route these days. No point. If someone wants to do a real project and has some shekels to spare, there are lots of upscale studios to rent from friends.
Europe 72’s mixing is stunning. It really sounds in places like it was all planned. It was the first Dead album I bought for myself having sponged off well-off friends before that. I need to get it out and listen to it again. I keep a turntable plugged into my board so I can take old vinyl, clean it up, and listen being that digital mastering loses the original range and noise of RIAA and somehow that became part of the memory.
len bullard
September 20, 2008 at 10:29 am
@greg:
Iconic humor….
The irony is success is of a time. Stairway to Heaven can teach younglings how to beat the Boomers but only because the computer in front of younglings can teach them Stairway to Heaven.
Successful culture is a bridge.
len
September 20, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Most of the vocals on Europe ‘72 were overdubbed in our Brady St. studio. To capture the ambience of backline amps into the vocal mics, we set up a mini version of their stage back line and fed the recorded instrumental tracks into their amps. We set the mics at the normal stage distance from the amps, and they sang as though they were on stage.
Smoke and mirrors…
In those days we dragged around an Ampex MM1000 repackaged into an Ampex video machine rack. The transport was originally their big video recorder, but the normal MM1000 had eight sets of electronics below the transport deck and eight in a bridge above. We didn’t even have to modify the wiring loom to repackage the whole mess, and it put the transport on a nice 45 degree angle. We liked that machine because it would handle 14″ reels of tape which gave us twice as much recording time before having to switch reels which was like race car drivers coming into the pit for tire changes. We got good and fast, but still we’d lose music during the tape change. One more reason for multiple night recording. On some of the other gigs we did, we’d actually stop a band to change tape. Now, of course, most of those tapes would have to be baked in order to play them back…at least the post 1973 stuff.
Rick Turner
September 20, 2008 at 5:43 pm
HA! That’s how we did our club demos. Play a live outdoor concert to get the ambience, then play over that with studio parts for thickening and clarity. Thanks Rick. Now I don’t feel guilty.
My favorite art is the intellectual throwaway, the demonstration that with knowledge comes beauty of making to ones own caprice.
Dave Pawson sent this to XML-Dev:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO1JTNPPOU
I love it when really smart people do really smart things just for the thrill of it.
len
September 21, 2008 at 7:38 am
Thanks Len. I recently watched the BBC movie about John Harrison that stars Jeremy Irons. Wow, that clock is just .. amazing.
Greg
September 21, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Read the book that film was based upon, “Longitude”. Fabulous book. Then read “Compass” for the other piece of the navigation puzzle, and you’ll see that in some ways, they had latitude and longitude figured out before they had accurate compasses.
Rick Turner
September 21, 2008 at 10:14 pm
seems like some ideas have their time for a lot of people simultaneously, like a Jungian synchronicity.
Greg
September 21, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Berners-Lee writes that when trying to decide if an idea was a good one for the web, he applied the principle of independent invention. That is, if an idea likely did or could occur to several people at more or less the same time independently, that adds to its credibility.
Unfortunately, that same thinking wasn’t applied to the EOLAS patent or the Sun patent on hyperlinking despite the amount of non-webish prior art. As with Harrison, it can be devilishly hard to claim the prize for originality. In science as in politics and the entertainment industry, the idea of the ‘chosen winner’ is just as insidious. One not only has to be original, one has to be presentable to the spirit of the time. It’s a sickness of culture that ensures injustice is not only thinkable, it endures.
See “V for Vendetta”.
len bullard
September 22, 2008 at 5:56 am
One could easily argue that the Disney concession on copyrights created an artificial bubble for IP copyright holders that had a similar effect on arts/ideas as deregulation had on finance. It was, arguably, the initial impulse to wrap every extreme innovation up, and create an entire industry of patent squatting
The irony is that one requires gov intervention to help the “free” market entrepreneurs, the other required essentially complete non-intervention.
Mind, I’m totally in favor of an inventor, artist making a living, and firmly believe in the need for some level of IP protection. However, as you say Len, so many would never have been granted in an active patent office.
I suppose, when you compare with the system John Harrison went through to develop the marine chronometer – where such a major innovation could become a political battle – it’s not too bad. In the context of his struggle, the “chosen winner” idea is not so new. It’s current application, I think, is an extension of the current system of capitalist greed.
Art and innovation suffer for it, indeed.
Ken Ballweg
September 22, 2008 at 6:56 am
A problem is when the spirit of the time collides with the rewards of innovation. It is a classic tyranny of the majority problem with a Clockwork Orange-like over reaction.
A weirdness of the early web was how many of the inventors and pioneers ended up face down with arrows in their backs because a mob had taken the upper hand as press darlings. It was like watching Ayn Rand’s worst nightmare come true. Historical revisionism works best when the events of consequence were only witnessed by a small and easily dismissed minority.
A good friend of mine was the patent reviewer for EOLAS. He said, “You geeks really should learn to use time stamps.”
len bullard
September 22, 2008 at 7:38 am
Philo T. Farnsworth vs. David Sarnoff…
Innovators very often get leapfrogged. It can cost so much to innovate that your burn rate wipes out your marketing budget. I’ve been part of this with my concept for “Mama Bear”, a digital modeling acoustic guitar preamp. We did it first, we did a damn good job, and we burned up too much money doing it. Our main competitor had the advantage of working with a Japanese company with years and years of experience in digital audio, so the R&D burden was much less… Oh, well. I demoed in public first!
Rick Turner
September 25, 2008 at 6:04 pm
And as a result, the smart inventors patent early and often. Then it comes down to partnering with lawyers who will spec the results.
The people who tell the kids that open source means don’t patent don’t understand. It leaves all the gold in the middle of the village square with nothing to protect it. Predatory patents such as EOLAS, these are bad for markets. They game the patent system as was explained to me because the patent analyst is essentially a logician and can only vette the essential claims. The patent submission tries to make the claims as broad as possible and the patent analyst keeps asking questions to narrow them as much as possible. After that, however the dates and the submitted prior art works out is tight as Aristotle.
Where the W3C screwed up was being egotistical. They considered themselves, and so did the world, the originators. In truth, the US Army and others had plenty of prior art to the web but admitting that meant admitting the web wasn’t quite the invention it had been presented as. Myth trumped right.
And so it goes.
len
September 25, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Len-I think we have to differentiate between protocols and applications. It’s critical that the protocols (TCP/IP, HTML, etc) stay in the commons. But applications are the only possible income stream for software and need to be protected by patent. How long that get’s extended is the big issue for me. I’m with Larry Lessig. You can’t extend either patent or copyright forever.
Jon Taplin
September 25, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I agree with most of that, except that HTML isn’t a protocol, Jon, it’s an application of SGML. It actually would have been better had the browsers not been hardwired to HTML because it creates a very fat framework with unneeded duplication as well as a very messy Document Object Model.
Spilt milk, though. HTML is kudzu. It won’t go away. It is an example of what is called ‘gencoding’ which has one virtue: easy to learn. It is very difficult to extend once in the wild.
That bit of technical rant aside (I worked on the team that created markup browsers that preceded web browsers, so I know a bit about this), you are right about the patents and copyrights being extended for profit past the necessary rights of society to overturn them. The problem is by following Lessig without paying attention to the details, the baby went with the bathwater. It keeps people like Helm and others poorer earlier and longer than should be the case.
Realistically though, with digital duplication and formats and internet file copying, as long as there are speaker wires, copyright infringement can’t be stopped. What we really need are different business models. Just understand that what was done to the musicians and composers first, is now being done to any form of digital information. The Internet protocols are to software what those speaker wires are to music. If we can see it, we can steal it.
And so it goes.
Personally, I write, record, release and forget. It takes so much money and infrastructure to profit from my songs, I don’t bother. It would be nice to get some money for them, but if I can’t be a part of the Big Machine , then I’ll keep writing anyway. When we did IrishSpace, we assigned the collective copyright (the work) to the Trallee museum in County Kerry to protect it. So far so good.
I have enough stuff. A better retirement would be nice. As t’is, I have to die at my desk.
len bullard
September 26, 2008 at 8:14 am
Len, I always thought that the recording industry’s big mistake in the early 90’s was to blithely stick to the CD-Rom as it’s method of content transfer. What they should have done around the time of Windows 95, was to see that the future wasn’t looking too good when all anyone had to do was to stick their music in this powerful machine to strip it of its riches. They should have created a new format, turned the industry of manufactures on its head, and went to a top-secret oblong disk that is encrypted and wouldn’t fit in CD drives. It would have been an impediment at least to the ease of the mass digitization of music, stalled napster, and kept the bucks rolling in for a few more years. (that is, until those Make guys showed up and started posting kits on boingboing)
Very nice Sonny Landreth story on the NPR this morning. They characterized him at age 57 as ready to “break out”. Sometimes you’ve got to stick to your craft a long time until you hone it to the right edge, or in this case, the world becomes ready to listen. I definitely want to see him live now.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95101083
Greg
September 27, 2008 at 8:03 am
They believed in their domination over the artists and the promotion outlets. So far, they haven’t been too wrong about that but we are starting to see breakout artists from the web. But it does take a building full of specialists to push an artist into the superstartdom realm.
American Idol works. Sort of. Look at Bo Bice, though. The machine can put you on top but only real chops, drive, humility and the ability to grow can keep you there.
If you look at sales, the long tail is longer but the density at the top of the curve (the tip of the witches hat) is still the same and that is where the big bucks are.
My take is it doesn’t have to matter. It depends on what you want from the craft and the art: better music or more stuff? I have enough stuff. What I think the upper end of the curve provides is the opportunities to associate with better players, deeper artists. Notice Rick’s description of Ry’s session or Emmett’s description of the Last Waltz recording sessions. That’s the level where a very rarefied magick is happening and we further down the curve would be rude or foolish not to admire that. We don’t have to envy it.
So Sonny is a good example, although I don’t think he is waiting for anything or anyone. He is what he wants to be, where he wants to be, and now it’s all just opportunities to play with other better players. That’s how we grow. Be grateful for the opportunities. Respect the privilege of an audience.
Take care of the music and the music will take care of you.
len
September 27, 2008 at 11:33 am
I’ve got a couple of patents. One made me some dough; the other was assigned to Gibson and they just buried it. Patents are just a license to go to court and that’s going to cost about $125,000.00 before you see a judge. Too expensive for me these days…
For anyone in Southern California who wants to see Sonny in his first appearance with David Lindley, check out the opening of the slide guitar exhibit at the Museum of Making Music in a couple of weeks…oops, sold out…
http://www.museumofmakingmusic.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=41
Maybe they’ll move it to a bigger space…
Rick Turner
September 27, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Exactly right. It’s the same with the copyrights. If you can’t enforce it, you can’t collect. I was working a club once when the owner, a young fellow, told us the mugs from BMI had visited that day explaining that there were fees due for the performance of music. He asked us if we would play there if these guys came back. We told him no, they work for us.
Sad but so. We live in a society where anyone who wants to collect has to have there own collectors.
I like the sibelius model. Put up the file and they collect for you. It isn’t a lot but it’s honest.
len
September 27, 2008 at 3:13 pm
BMI’s thugs go all over, and they take from whoever they can bully or scare into ponying up. A friend of mine owns a falafel place and they told him, “you are playing music. surely, we own 35% of what you’re playing, you owe us $800.” He told them stick it, and said that all the tapes they played were demos made by his kitchen workers. How could they substantiate otherwise? Point is, they go to every place in the western world that plays music aloud and give them the “you owe us” routine, and whoever pays them is a dipshit. but just like junk-mail scams, they get enough dough to make it lucrative, I’m sure.
Greg
September 27, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I wonder how the candidates stand on rewriting the copyright laws? Anyone know?
Ken Ballweg
September 27, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Good question, Ken. The problem of copyright is the very definition: the right to make copies.
In a digital age, that’s a spigot on a waterfall.
Greg, I understand. Thugs everywhere. Welcome to the capitalism of art. Performance royalties are bad for the business because they put the income stream of the artists in the hands of collectors instead of the software.
Artists will wean themselves of the need. It sure drops the noise level.
len
September 28, 2008 at 8:31 am
It was mean, what Belushi did that time, given where Cocker was with his own sobriety. Belushi was out of control. Hurtfully so.
Hugo
September 29, 2008 at 8:19 pm
So Greg, are not composers to be compensated? Thugs? One of them happens to be an old friend of mine. I see him as helping to collect that which is due to the copyright holders. Why doesn’t your pal hire some real musicians to play their own music in ye falafel house or just not play canned music?
Rick Turner
September 29, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Did Cocker ever say anything about that? I couldn’t tell if he knew or it was artful shock?
The model of copyright collection for live performance venues isn’t going to change. They sue the venue owners and they pursue until they collect or put them out of business. The point I was making is if asked to stopy playing, we would. We were BMI artists. On the other hand, when you dig into the way playlists are managed and falsified, an indy is better off playing the gig because neither BMI or ASCAP are there to help them.
For digital copying, it’s clear we have to adapt to new means. Some suggest that a Paypal button like the one Jon uses for this blog is the future.
len
September 30, 2008 at 6:15 am
The answer to your question, Len, is yes. And it wasn’t pretty. He was agrieved, and the producers never did get him to come around, as far as I know. My only guess is that the timing could not have been worse, for Cocker.
That’s compelling, what you say about the PayPal button and its implications for future prospects. I’m afraid that “communication” is irresistably corruptible because, really, no one has any grounded notion of what “communication[s]” means. We have only a dissolute opinion that it is something good.
And that thing, that dissolute opinion, is in no way good. It is, in all likelihood, so very basically idiotic that no good ever could come from such nonsense as to pretend that a very prevalent and dangerous bacillus, ubiquitous “communication”, somehow is anything more than the flushing of the apple-cheeked pneumonia patient.
With a healthy respect for our host and for his digs, calling a thing a “school of communications” really is tantamount to calling a graduate program a “school of prattle”. (And presumably that would be the law school anyway, if only because no one since St. Augustine dare call it by its name, the school of prevarication.)
So we lean, as though on Dali’s melting crutches, upon nonsense words possessed of more emotion than of import, or even of content. It seems never to occur to the denizens of such dens that the actual justification for the existence of such places might just be the phenomenon itself: the tendency of contemporary people to take nothing at all for something; even on many prominent occasions for something worth the bother.
Hugo
September 30, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Great post, Hugo.
On another blog, someone called it the ‘babbleocracy”.
When we were working on standards for these systems in the 80s, I noted the problem of dense feedback and superstitious learning. The semiotic skills, the ease with which people do trust the wisdom of crowds (an oxymoron if ever there was one), the speed of the copying and replication, all were aspects that seemed to me then to be dangerous precisely because they mimic biological systems and I was paying attention to that. I published the paper, Information Ecosystems at a Hytime conference. Doug Lenat was dismissive but on the whole, it was right. I would later see the term ‘meme’ substituted and it won the Label Wars which are themselves symptomatic because one discovers who gets to name the names is a political popularity contest. At that point, the fluidity and tenacity of nonsense came to me fully. Later I would publish the Golem paper at The MIT Press, but the specific publication on markup systems went defunct.
So knowledge of how easily these systems would be gamed and their direct immediate effects on culture was very evident to anyone with a background in communications and some behavioral psychology. When I worked on Beyond The Book Metaphor at GE in the 80s, I was entranced because tool-making is an evolutionary force and language shaping was an extension of that. It seemed to me that shaping the system that would later find form in the WWW was an act of assisting evolution itself.
Then I got it one day. This thing was a golem and very subject to abuse.
None of this is really different from any medium such as TV, movies, hell drawings on rocks, but the immediacy, the reach and the astounding rate of distribution suggested that its scale might be different in some way. I think the jury is out. I knew it would speed events up, but it was never clear if damping filters would kick in.
I saw the fall of the Iron Curtain, but that was still old school tech. Then I saw the Red/Blue divide and noticed it was becoming a permanent feature.
In complex systems theory, there is the notion of annealing, that cultures like metals subject to communications where such take the place of thermodynamic forces anneal the culture. In annealing, a metal or process can enter a sub-optimum state or minima much like a rock falling downhill getting caught in a crevice. Then the system has to be shocked or ‘thumped’ to get it to continue the process. I’ve wondered where we would see that model play out in culture, and I think we may be seeing it right now in the Red/Blue divide.
Jon’s interregnum idea may be just that. Here’s the problem; the shock can lead to more minima. We really don’t understand cultural annealing and the right blends or forces to apply. I do think we are seeing an organic order in the way these blogs sort us toward those we need to or wish to play with. If communications is nothing more than an expression of pleasure, even if perverse, affected or willful (I go to lists like this where I am sure to get flack precisely because of that; one learns nothing from yes. One has to find worthy opponents like an Irish prize fighter to get better af it), then we are still desire’s golem, something being shaped, clay that when given authority, becomes the rabbi’s master until he can wrest the incantation from its mouth and the aleph, the symbol of authority, from it’s forehead.
And how my friend do we know the golem from the teacher? Surely that is what we must do with the web that we may shape it to be a worthy rabbi and not a monster of our culture’s inability to derive a record of authority from communications.
We have to give it power. First, we should ask what we need it to do.
Paypal buttons are a start.
len bullard
October 1, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Apply a perceived version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the Red/Blue divide, and you’ll start getting somewhere. The right wing has become very expert at scaring the living crap out of people who by whatever nature…undereducation, culture, whatever…are not interested in digging very deep for truth. When people are paranoid, then get a bit of bad news or a real scare, they are putty in the hands of the right wing. There’s a golem under every table in the Red States.
Rick Turner
October 1, 2008 at 2:46 pm
It sounds like what you’re asking for is the return of mass culture.
There is nothing like the Beatles because people these days just DON’T have that much in common with each other. And I think that’s a good thing – I don’t think we need millions of people listening to exactly the same music, watching exactly the same movies, reading the exact same books, and pretending that they’re all individualists.
But then I speak as one who never really got the Beatles, though I was around in their day. The music-hall aspect just annoyed the shit out of me, and it didn’t disappear until the White Album, at which time they were going down.
The other thing that’s different these days is that most musicians no longer EXPECT a mass media machine to take them in, groom them, and feed them to the whole country. Many of them don’t really expect to engage with the economy at all.
KFW
October 1, 2008 at 5:10 pm
“It sounds like what you’re asking for is the return of mass culture.”
No, I think that is what you have. Nothing contrary to it survives it. It feels fractured but it is packaged to the hilt. It isn’t that you can’t find alternatives. You can and always could. It is that alternatives have even less chance than ever of climbing up through the crap in some media (music). On the other hand, where the web has really not done too much damage (say comedy), it still can. Games really got a major evolutionary kick while they were off the web. Now that they are being forced on to it, quality is dropping to increase reach.
But the ideas I’m talking about are different and really centered on taking control of it rather than having it take control of you because if you though McLuhan was right about TV and then didn’t understand why TV didn’t make everyone smarter or more empowered, the web is more insidious by several orders of magnitude.
As for the musicians, musicians are dogs.
len
October 1, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Len we’ve got a bone to pick. You know very well that musicians are not dogs.
Dogs are musicians.
Your own experiential learnings of the perversion of Communion into Communications, communicants into communicators, is layered and nuanced half-way to full-flower allegory. I’m grateful for your fluency and most of all your conscientious gravity, the specific valence of which however I can’t quite yet assay. But I do very much want to pursue the matter with you.
Hugo
October 3, 2008 at 12:16 am
Hugo:
ARF!! as Sandy would say.
The web is a different critter as media goes. Massive feedback with hidden controls makes it unlike anything we’ve ever had at this scale. But it is not smooth as models go. It is lumpy.
Take the iPhone Obama application. It is designed to mobilize young Obama voters but what is the demographic of this class of voter (who can afford it and of those who can, which ones care enough to vote, and so on).
Are musicians really benefitting from the web and by what terms? It killed the market for selling by flattening out the distribution payback while promising equal access to the distribution yet within a decade, the same old controls reasserted themselves in the form of Apples’ ITunes. Qui bono?
It seems that if a power domain (concentration of power by restricting access) doesn’t emerge, there is no market. Certainly there are more alternatives (the long tail gets longer) but the density of available quality at the top of the tail remains more or less the same.
Things are speeding up. That was predictable? Are things improving?
They should. As I said, the millenials want to beat the boomers by besting Stairway to Heaven but the way they do that is learning it from the machine in front of them. So now I can go hear a note for note cover in almost any bar but Jimmy Page isn’t making a dime unless the BMI/ASCAP thugs are still doing it the old fashioned way: one bar owner at a time.
Is that an improvement?
I covered Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” because I could get my hands on a perfect midi rendition. I overdubbed the guitar, sang the vocals, boom, done.
That did the job I needed to do, but did it add anything of value to the culture except yet another bad cover of Elton?
One of the problems is having to dumb down art to sell it. The same goes with politics. We can move dumb faster cheaper but unless the feedback has a corrective component, it doesn’t get better.
1. Distance learning improves the distribution. It doesn’t improve the quality.
2. Measurements of the actions of the police in Cinncinatti improved the handling of racial discrimination. The DOJ monitoring did the trick. The point is we can instrument social processes and shape behavior. It’s straight forward Skinner box work. Now the question is, how widely and how targeted do you think we should apply that? The technology is there. The policy isn’t.
Today the system is shaping culture in a mix of policy-driven, organic or locally determined and random ways. That may not change but it can and the aggregation of these into portals means private companies and even individuals are in control of that.
Caveat emptor.
len bullard
October 3, 2008 at 7:52 am
Expecting the trend of human behavior to follow a line of constant improvement may be as fruitless as expecting the housing market to follow a trend line of constant increase in value.
Humanities’ gains are slow and gradual and subject to die outs; people pretty much are what they are and pretty much what they have been. What we look at as wondrous improvements (e.g. internet) are just the current ribbons on the package and we have no idea what piece of glitter will be picked off by posterity to add to the core.
Ah shit, “Candide” has taken over my little existential world for the moment it appears.
Ken Ballweg
October 5, 2008 at 9:07 am
Ken, forgive my mock erudition, but you’ve synopsized not only “Candide” but also the vast learnings of the 12th Century. The only real Progress, progress that is enduring and not merely fleeting and illusory, is the progress of the individual human soul in communio with other striving souls — not in the collective nor in the polis, but within and amongst. Human beings are fully human only in community; in community are we completed. There is no human Adam without Eve, no Eve without Adam. And no Eden save the Eden within.
yr Hugo of Saint Victor
Hugo
October 5, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Incidentally this is also, and nothing less than, the University Ideal, available to all persons.
Hugo
October 5, 2008 at 4:17 pm
It is also and definitively neo-Socratic, with a huge wink to the pre-Socratics, especially to the Rabbinate universal; and also with a sweeping Salaam to the intervening mullahs of rigorous and catholic scholarship. It is, in short, a gesture of Peace.
Hugo
October 5, 2008 at 4:27 pm
It’s too easy to go abstract and general and miss the real and local. Socrates and the Nine Rabbis didn’t know about behavioral psych. The power of the stimulus-response paradigm implemented with instrumented observation and measurement is key to the case I’m making.
It works. The question to your philosophies is what do you think are appropriate applications?
len
October 6, 2008 at 4:58 pm
That’s very good, Len. A little unfair to the robed ones on the Psych front (consider the great Jewish pre-Socratic Quohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes), but fair enough. And I can’t disagree with your prescription for what “works”.
May I ask you for another hint? Toward what contemporary problem would you like to see an illustrative application of such thought?
Hugo
October 7, 2008 at 4:45 pm
And Len, the Systems Approach is a postmodern species of old-fashioned Jewish idolatry: the making of The Other (ever and always the immediate face of the Maker) into a disposable otherling. Mean people suck, especially when they wear suits or bolo ties or white smocks.
“I know, I know,” said the Assistant Vice Undermanager at Customer Service, “and were I in your position I’d feel the same way, but what can I say? It’s the way the system works, and we’re not allowed to make exceptions…”
A device to open plastic oyster-packs, sold in an oyster-pack.
Hugo
October 7, 2008 at 8:42 pm
As Seen on TV!
Hugo
October 7, 2008 at 8:45 pm
For something light, Rick, have you seen this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkTF5DRBxpI
Hayley Westenra performs Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights live. Not many even attempt to cover this much less do it well.
len
November 10, 2008 at 9:35 am
Events I missed and should have been there. Karla Bonoff performed in Huntsville last spring according to dates on her web site. Who knew? Not me. Rats.
Some people are better than the covers made of their songs and she is one of those. I stumbled into the site while listening to her version of the The Water is Wide, a recording made with James Taylor who also covered it with a better string section but not nearly as good a vocal. A melancholy sad song that one, old but never over done and seldom done enough live.
My folkie roots are really starting to fall out of my shoes. I don’t know why. The times, I guess.
len
December 2, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Easily could’ve missed another cover of the old traditional “Water Is Wide”, len, but still I could kill you dead for making me lament forever having missed Karla Bonoff, so near to me.
She’s the essence of Melancholia, like it or not, but the loveliest at it I’ve ever heard. She’s so beloved here in Georgia. She really is.
Hugo
December 2, 2008 at 2:26 pm