I just found out that a guy I used to see singing in various heavy metal tribute bands at my local bar is the new singer for Quiet Riot. I’m not sure how this band can really be considered Quiet Riot — the only original member is the drummer — but that’s the music business.
If you care, you can read more about it here.
As everyone across the world knows, I do a lot of song writing and recording. As a result, I spend A LOT of time sitting around listening to works in progress and trying to figure out what needs to be changed, what’s working, what’s not etc. What can be surprising is the disparity of reactions I can have to my own work. Sometimes I’ll listen to a rough mix and think it’s pure genius, other times I’ll think it’s pure dreck. The same can be said for a piece of writing or other artistic pursuits. But this seems strange. It’s the same piece of music or text. Shouldn’t my reaction be the same every time?
Of course, music does not exist by itself; it requires an audience. So, if the music isn’t changing, I have to conclude that I am changing between listens. By this, I mean my general emotional state is changing. And it’s true that if I’m riding a coffee or alcohol high (or even heroin, OxyContin or lighter fluid high) I tend to think my work is genius. And when I’m in a more sedate mode, my opinion is more critical (this isn’t always the case; sometimes I have the inverse reaction.) So the question becomes, which is the correct interpretation? One would think that being sober would apply to more “sober” appraisal. But I could argue that when I’m in an elevated emotional state, I’m more responsive to the emotional aspects of the music, and willing to overlook rather meaningless flaws.
Ultimately, when I’m doing these critiques, I’m trying to listen to the music from the point of view of the likely listener. I’m trying to listen with “their” ears. But how can I predict their state of mind? For all I know, they don’t even like me, and their view is colored by their jealousy of my massive accomplishments compared to their utterly meaningless existence. And the opposite could be true: everyone knows that their grandmother’s opinion of their work is not as meaningful as an art critic or writing agent.
I believe there are some eclectic artists who have even commanded their audience to ingest drugs or meditate before observing a piece of art. This is, of course, rather kooky, but it at least recognizes that the emotional state of the audience will color their view of the work.
And, this doesn’t even get into the topic of your emotional state while CREATING art.
Wow — here’s an overwhelmingly positive review for my alt-country album, “Shadey’s Jukebox.”
No one would call Wil Forbis average. If fact, it would probably be fair to say that Wil Forbis and The Gentleman Scoundrel’s new alt-country CD “Shadey’s Jukebox” is one of the two or three most eclectically entertaining albums of the year.
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“Shadey’s Jukebox” is a solid effort by one of the most interesting California musicians to ever enter the alt-country music scene.
I was at Denny’s earlier today, and they seem to have an annoying habit of playing the most atrocious of modern pop music through their speakers. I’m talking about the Beyoncé “Single Ladies” song, and all sorts of horrible dreck from Miley Cyrus. I found myself thinking, “how can anyone, even today’s brain-dead youth, like this garbage?”
Of course, I knew full well that in the early 90s, when I was in my early 20s and enjoying at least some of my generation’s pop music, there was probably some dejected, degenerate geezer complaining about then contemporary music. And he’d probably faced similar complaints from his elders 20 years earlier. And on and on, backward through time, towards the period where primitive cavemen were slapping each other on the head for not liking the latest beats being pounded out on the skulls of sabertooth tigers.
A belief I’ve long held is that only the young can truly enjoy the pop music of the day. Their ears are still virginal; they have not been soiled by repeated listens to melodies, chord progressions and lyrics that were stolen from songs of yore. To the young, everything is fresh. To see their dreams, they need only look up to the rainbows, as opposed to gazing down into the liquid filth of a train station men’s room while a medical syringe pours its poison into their yellow veins.
Beyoncé still sucks though.
One of the great questions in life often pops into my head when I walk past some hideously obese person sitting down at a Chinese buffet, stuffing pork dumplings and tangerine chicken down their gullet. I’m not talking about “fat” people, I’m talking about people who almost resemble moons. I think to myself, “how can they possibly be happy?”
Now, of course, a lot of them are unhappy. A lot of them flagellate themselves with the barbed self-loathing they so thoroughly deserve. However, some do seem happy. Why?
For most of human history, we’ve associated happiness with our situation — if we are super rich and living in a mansion, we’re happy. If we’re stuck in prison we are unhappy. We tend to view happiness as a rational analysis of how well our needs are being met. And this isn’t an unreasonable way of looking at things: I imagine most rich people living in mansions are happier than most prisoners. But, there do seem to be a lot of unhappy rich people, and we’ve all heard the stories of prisoners who get out of prison, and then immediately commit a crime to get sent back to prison.
Let’s consider the view of happiness from the chemical/neurotransmitter level. You get “happy” when your brain releases certain neurotransmitters — serotonin and dopamine being two prime examples — into your system. Certain drugs like cocaine and Prozac can lengthen periods of happiness by allowing these neurotransmitters to swim around in your system for a period longer than normal. By applying this explanation of happiness, perhaps we can see why the horribly obese would be happy.
We, or least I, tend to view extremely fat people from a situational prism: how can these people whose corpulent forms stand in direct opposite of my trim and beautiful physique (though, getting less trim) be happy? The reality is that if they’ve got a decent amount of neurotransmitters flowing through their brain, they can’t not be happy.
That’s an oversimplification of course, but I’m trying to point you, my dear reader, towards an appreciation of the chemical/neurotransmitter view of happiness.
There’s an inverse to this. How is it that people who seem to have everything can be unhappy? Obviously if they’re low on the proper neurotransmitters, or are otherwise getting signals causing negative sensations, their wealth becomes largely meaningless. Would you be willing to become a millionaire if it meant that you would have a constant, nagging neck-ache? Some people might, I suppose, but it doesn’t sound very appealing.
A frequent target of my jabs has long been Kurt Cobain. I feel his music is mediocre and his coronation as the musical messiah of his generation was misguided. And I suppose I even at times wondered why a guy who was at the top of the music business would decide to turn his brain into SpaghettiOs. But we do know he had aggravating stomach issues. And that constant gnawing at his gut might have rendered everything — his wealth, his status, the love of his child — meaningless.
For some time now, I’ve been pondering a dystopian vision of the future where any entertainment content that can be digitized — music, movies, books — ends up being pirated and thus no longer generates revenue. The end result of this being that these industries shrink substantially. We’re already seeing this process in regards to music. I suspect we’ll soon see it for e-books. With movies and television it’s been less of an issue because it’s still a substantial hassle to download a video as either a movie file or bit torrent. However, a new article in the LA Times says that the advent of streaming pirated video is alleviating this hassle.
Megavideo and other sites like it offer a vast unauthorized selection of popular television shows and movies that can be watched with the click of a mouse, using the same streaming technology found on mainstream sites like CNN or Hulu. It demands none of the time or technical sophistication required to download a video file via BitTorrent or other file-sharing technology.
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The fear is nonetheless palpable throughout the entertainment industry. Executives worry that improvements in Internet speeds and in the software that compresses movie files into easy-to-distribute packages are making matters worse.“It’s made streaming a lot less clunky than it was even three years ago,” said Darcy Antonellis, president of Warner Bros. Technical Operations.
Of course, a world without music, movies and stories is a world without magic. I suspect the children of tomorrow will grow up emotionally vacant and spiritually null. We will gaze into their eyes and see only a blank empty soul gazing back at us. If you want to spare yourself this agony, I suggest you kill yourself right now by eating a flaming stick of dynamite.
Yesterday, while wondering whether a computer could write a book, I noted that computer software is already composing music. This reminded me of a friend of mine who has a MIDI piano. It’s a standard acoustic piano, but can be fed a digital MIDI file which it will then actually play, in the same way that old player pianos of yore would “play” a role of perforated paper. Being that you can now craft fairly nuanced performances of music using MIDI, it would appear that a composer can write quite beautiful music and have no need of an actual pianist to perform or record it.
I started wondering if this idea could be applied to other instruments. Could you create a robotic type device that could be fed MIDI input and then play the music on a trumpet or guitar? Probably not now, but I suspect the day is coming. With a stringed instrument like a guitar or violin, a robotic hand would have to fret the notes on the neck, and then use another robotic hand to pluck or bow the string. Brass instruments might be a little trickier, since much of the nuance of the tone is created by the ever shifting ways that the performer breathes and employs his or her embouchure. Nonetheless, I suspect it could be done.
Neo-Luddites might say, “but could a robot play music with the delicate sensitivity of a human?” Well, I’ve been messing around with writing classical style MIDI piano compositions, and I have to say, the performances end up sounding remarkably real. Part of it is, I think, having a range of velocities used to hit the notes — some louder than others. You can also tweak the tempo so the music speeds and slows with the dynamics. Being conscious of these two attributes of music — velocity and tempo — is fundamentally what people are referring to when they talk about “sensitive” playing.
So, if robots can replace musicians, what does that mean for the future? I imagine musicians will be cast out on the street, forced to approach strangers and beg for a few tuppence to play a tune. And the stranger will say, “I’m sorry, my XTRO-2000 here is quite capable of rendering the most beautiful music.” And the musician will scream, “the XTRO-2000 is a queer!” And the XTRO-2000 will say, “Technically, as a robotic device, I have no gender and therefore cannot be homosexual. But please do not malign my character. I am very sensitive.” And the musician will scream, “I hate you, XTRO-2000!” And the musician’s wife will appear and say, “Bob, I am having an affair with the XTRO-2000. He… it… whatever, is capable of making love to be in ways you could never dream of.”
I have seen the future.
As a teenager, I used to have very passionate crushes on pop songs of the moment. These would be then contemporary tunes that were circulating in the top 40. I would become obsessed with them, driven by an almost addictive need to hear them. “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles was one such song. I think “Material Girl” by Madonna was another.
As I’ve gotten older, the time in between song crushes has grown longer and longer. I will confess that my latest crush is this Sarah Bareilles’ song, “King of Everything.”
As I was listening to the song last night, it occurred to me that this language referring to the relationship with such songs as a “crush” is really quite apt. You develop an all-consuming fetish for the music, but after a certain number of listens, you tire of it, perhaps even grow to loathe it. And it’s the same with teenage romantic crushes. You fixate on the object of your affection, but after several nights spent peering into her bedroom window with binoculars, or actually breaking into her room and standing over her sleeping form while touching yourself, you grow weary of her charms.
This idea, this concept that we can have the kind of emotional relationships normally reserved for people, with objects, or sounds, is interesting and should be explored further.
I came across an interesting post over at the blog “DIY Musician” asking the question “are you too old to make it?” In my view, the piece never answered the question, but it did get me thinking about the subject. There’s some added resonance due to the fact that I’m close to 40, an age the music business considers to be the equivalent of being a dried up fossil suitable only for museum display.
So, can you get too old to make it? On one hand, I’ve seen or known a lot of people in their 50s or 60s (and beyond) who had thriving music careers. On the other hand, there’s clearly a lot more young people on the pop charts than geezers. Obviously audiences favor younger artists. Does this make sense? If music is a skill like any other, shouldn’t we prefer an experienced hand? If you have an appointment to meet your heart surgeon and it turns out he’s a 16-year-old kid, you get nervous. Why would we prefer 16-year-old musicians?
I think there’s a number of answers. For one thing, music is not a skill like any other. Frankly, it doesn’t take that much ability to play most rock music, and it’s certainly not comparable to cardiovascular surgery. Secondly, the ability and freedom to support live music is really specific to young people who have the energy, disposable income and don’t have children at home. When you’re 45 and playing music, most of your peer group can barely get off their Barcalounger’s. Thirdly, as I’ve commented on in the past, the process of a musical act pursuing fans is a bit like a courtship. The prettiest girl (or guy) gets more attention, and prettier usually means younger.
There are some exceptions to these rules. Certain styles — country, blues, jazz — tend to prefer older people, both as the audience and performers. I think bands are seen as more “authentic” if they feature more aged players. John Lee Hooker, for example, seemed like a far more legitimate blues act than Kenny Wayne Shepherd or any of those “young guns” that popped up in the 90s. (An interesting sidenote: it may not be so much age that appears to be a deficiency, as a lack of sexual potency. I remember reading a Rolling Stone article about Hooker close to when he died, and the reporter described walking into Hooker’s hotel bedroom and seeing him lying in bed next to two attractive, much younger women. Now, obviously this was staged — it’s unlikely that the then octogenarian Hooker had just satisfied two women the age of his granddaughters — but it was an important illusion. If this is the case, I have nothing to worry about. My vast sexual potency will doubtless last well into my 90s.)
British country mag Maverick gives “Shadey’s Jukebox” a five-star review in their September 2010 issue. I include a link to a PDF for those of you who don’t routinely find yourself browsing magazine racks in Europe.
I’m also pretty impressed with the magazine itself. It seems like an able heir to now deceased No Depression.
The cover story is on Jewel. While I find her music quite flaccid, you can’t help notice how flawlessly beautiful she is. Nice rack too.