Sorry for not posting in a while, I’ve been captivated by Frontline’s awesome underview of the Bush Administration in my extra time at work this week. In terms of my last post, I’m just going to link ya’ll to Columbia lecturer Scott Horton’s excellent distillation of Obama posted to Harper’s the other day. The cat is pretty much in the bag in terms of the cast for this year’s reality show ‘The US Presidential Election,’ and Clinton’s death throes (here, here, and here) are going to make a hilarious montage for our non-Idol contestants, John and Barack. But I digress. Speaking of Judases: Battlestar Galactica had a two-page spread ad in Rolling Stone this week that parodies da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper,’ with Six as christ and Apollo as Judas. Eight days!!! OoOoooOoh!
The cultural insularity of music today is not simply the consequence of deficient pedagogy or propagation. It would be too facile to groan over the conservatories or complain about the record companies. Things are more serious. Contemporary music owes this unique situation to its very composition. In this sense, it is willed. It is not a music that tries to be familiar; it is fashioned to preserve its cutting edge. One may repeat it, but it does not repeat itself. In this sense, one cannot come back to it as to an object. It always pops up on frontiers.
-Michel Foucault
Yeah, so on that note, link dump:
Believe it: Four glorious hours of In Rainbows‘ haunting closer “Videotape”, committed to an obsolescent media format, with accompanying visuals from Philip M. Lane and some pretty swank cover art designed by Jacob Blandy.
Shejay: A world-wide network of female DJs, producers, vocalists, promoters and musicians in the field of electronic and dance music. (MP3’s here)
Dave Matthews tickets go on sale this Saturday! Matthews and Bob Dylan are shockingly some of the only two mainstream live acts that offer tickets for a ‘reasonable’ fee (usually between $45-60). So why on earth would someone pay $85 to go see these fucktards play? Can’t we just start a national recycling drive to hand out old copies of boybands of yore to the twelve year old girls that will go see them? God I can’t wait until Hannah Montana has an abortion scandal because of them. SOS, really? ABBA should come and slap the shit out of them. Someone please give them some LSD.
Greg Kot over at the Chicago Tribune reported last week (whoops, I missed it) that Pitchfork is set to launch an online 24-7 video channel April 7th! Wait, you mean we’re actually going to have a music channel that’s about music? And one that doesn’t feel like I’m watching a single continuous commercial? Whoa. Pitchfork rocks. From their site:
Pitchfork.tv will become the first online video channel to screen full-length feature films, vintage concerts, and music DVDs free of charge. From the Pixies’ 2004 reunion tour film LoudQuietLoud and Todd Phillips’ notorious GG Allin documentary Hated, to Jimmy Joe Roche & Dan Deacon’s acid-drenched visual art piece Ultimate Reality, Pitchfork.tv will highlight a different film each week in its entirety.
Well here’s an interesting turn of events. The flailing Warner Music has now hired former Napster senior executive Leanne Sherman in an effort to develop digital markets in Europe, Africa and western Asia. Huh. They claim:
“The breadth of her experience will be invaluable as we evaluate opportunities in music, music-related and wider entertainment sectors, and her proven ability as a dealmaker, coupled with her high-level understanding of new technologies and business models, makes her a great fit for the team.”
Things are getting heated for record companies, and no one is developing new models for music consumption in the context of capitalism. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (in addition to performer-first [called 360-degree deals] contracts for Paul McCartney, Madonna and Coldplay), seem to be at the forefront of our ‘digital music age’. Evan Serpick for Rolling Stone reported this week (RS1047) that EMI’s new chief Guy Hands’s big new idea for the company is simply to downsize and spend less. To his credit, there’s a lot to be said about the music industry’s taste for bling and big lunches:
Hands was appalled at the label’s wastefulness, citing expensive gifts sent to artists, multimillion-dollar severance packages for executives and salaries the rose even as revenues drop.
All true. But why are they relying on artists to come up with the silver bullet? The facts are plain and simple: aside from a dedicated audiophile core (myself included), they way people experience music has fundamentally shifted from quality to convenience. While it’s true that CDs have incredibly higher quality audio, it’s fundamentally easier for someone to quickly download an over-compressed version of the song straight to their computers (when you’re listening to the majority of your library through crappy laptop speakers, the nuances of audio quality aren’t that important). The backlash since P2P systems have become widespread, have not been toward the innovation of the record industry, but directed at consumers, who now face a jungle of digital restrictions, lawsuits, and the increasing fascism of the RIAA. John Naughton of The Guardian makes this point last week:
Accepting the music industry’s demands would mean a radical transformation of the ISPs’ role – changing them from common carriers into organisations which have to know about every file they handle. This would be technically challenging and have terrifying implications for privacy; but it would also create horrendous legal liabilities for ISPs. As common carriers, they have very limited responsibility for what users do with their services; but as Taylor’s proxy snoopers they could be held liable – and not just for copyright infringement, but for lots of other questionable or controversial activities that people get up to on the net.
…
An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.
All you free-market capitalists must be scratching your heads. But let’s put this all in perspective: there is no threat to music here; music will still be produced by people in the world inspired to do so and consumed by everyone who has access to it. What we might see, on the other hand, is a tanking of pre-packaged bands sold to consumers as art. And I’m okay with that. Bye-Bye-Bye Justin!
The record industry is also responsible for disseminating musical art to the masses; I agree. Talent needs to be heard. Music is a source of change personally and politically. We need to stop worrying about our idols ‘making it’ in the biz, and starting listening to music that is made and supported by our appreciation of it.
Sound is free, and in the internet-saturated age (widely available to 1/6 the world’s population), our access to orchestrated sound should also be free. Live music and hard copies of music are where the record industry needs to focus, not on the facsimiles of songs themselves.
A couple posts ago local Cincy music blogger Each Note Secure directed readers to commercial advertisements featuring music from current lesser-known bands. One of them was an Axe ad featuring a favorite band of mine, Brazilian Girls.
If anyone has some information regarding the ‘uncensored’ tag at the YouTube clip, pass it along; I can’t seem to confirm any information about it being censored in regions of the world (Although I wouldn’t be surprised if networks chose not to pick it up because of its Jesus-hating rompiness).
I know bands need to make money, but I tend to die a little when the music I experience and discover is later used to move a few crates of, say, overpriced soap. The most disheartening, personally, is the double-whammy my lover Bob Dylan did after his famous Victoria’s Secret commercial, selling SUVs and anorexic downloads. (Actually, I find the strangely juxtaposed lingerie incident, set to ‘Love Sick’, pretty hilarious. Why? Aside from the timbre and salty reverb of the actual song, it makes absolutely no sense to hear it in the context of the commercial. What shoppers is Les Wexner eager to attract–aging hipsters expecting a sea of boobs? Dylan did it for the shooting of the commercial, not the money). The Torygraph had a take on it back when.
For the Brazilian Girls, an MTV News (ugh…) article may have some insights into their decision to sell out to Axe (Sabina Sciubba is the band’s frontwoman and singer/songwriter):
“I hope through my words that I am not coming across as vulgar,” said the Italian-born Sciubba, who was raised in Munich, Germany; Nice, France; and Rome. “Sex is being used to sell everything. It’s part of the joke of being called the Brazilian Girls.”
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Sciubba says she doesn’t watch television, but she doesn’t seem to mind capitalizing on it. “If I would make lots of money that would be great,” she said, evidently not worried about going mainstream.
Cheeky? I think I might have bought her words if she were actually involved in the commercial.
New Scientist magazine this month is running an excellent series on music and (obviously) the science behind it. Fascinating stuff, really. The cover story (‘The Music Illusion’) is penned by Daniel Levitin–a long-time music producer who’s worked with some of the greatest rock acts since the 70s (including Dylan and The Band). His article is a distilled version of his awesome book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music,’ which I’m currently finishing. He now approaches music, having worked in the producing and mixing field for years, as an academic, and more specifically, an evolutionary psychologist (read Wired’s related story from last year here). And man, he get into the nitty-gritty of not just ‘music’ as a cultural production, but how individual pitch vibrations are intercepted by the ear and distributed throughout the brain, giving rise to emotions and behavior.
By better understanding what music is and where it comes from, we may be able to better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories, and even communication in the broadest sense. Is music listening more along the lines of eating when you’re hungry, and thus, satisfying an urge? Or is it more like seeing a beautiful sunset or getting a backrub, which triggers sensory pleasure systems in the brain?… This is the story of how brains and music co-evolved–what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves.
Good eats, guys. Check it out.
Also, after talking with a political science professor friend of mine Monday, she suggested I read some George Lipsitz. He’s a professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz (as well as being part of the Black Studies faculty at UC Santa Barbara) and last year published ‘Footsteps In The Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music.’ I just scored the book yesterday, but so far, it’s an amazing collection of the genealogies and migratory patterns of the musical influences heard in many bands and genres. I approached with caution because I’m aware Lipsitz’s framework is based on essentialisms of cultures (actually, ‘anti-essentialisms’, but it rallies the same origins of the arguments, hence giving them a passive credence), but I’m definitely impressed by his sonic mapping skills thus far. A gem in the first section of the book about boy bands:
Of course there are plenty of reasons to dislike boy bands. Every aspect of their identities–from the physical features of group members to the songs they sing to the answers they give in interviews–is scripted and carefully coordinated on the basis of market research. They are never original, innovative, or unpredictable. In their stage personas and song lyrics, the boy bands succeed because they hint at the provocation of erotic desire only to contain it by presenting themselves ultimately as adolescent, innocent, wholesome, and cute, simply longing for longing rather than for love or lust. Their celebrity status seems to reduce the dignity of their fans, enlisting them as spectators and admirers of boys they do not know, apparently for the simple reason that other girls have focused on the band members as objects of desire.
As opposed to, say, musicians. My sentiments exactly. Wow, so two of the three posts on this blog so far have bitched about crappy consumerist record labels (thanks Jive)… I promise more love in the future!
