I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog. Continue reading “Dave Allen: Every Force Evolves a Form”
Sound Unbound is out!
Sound Unbound is now available! I recently served as Assistant Editor to Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky on his essay collection, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Contributors include Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Cory Doctorow, Chuck D, Brian Eno, Dick Hebdige, Vijay Iyer, Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Lethem, Moby, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, and Saul Williams, among many others — and now it’s out. Continue reading “Sound Unbound is out!”
An Inconvenient Youth, Part Two
Remember when music was good — when bands stood for something and the music they created was from the heart? Remember when music was real?
I remember a college professor trying to tell me that Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine was “fake, plastic music” while Jimi Hendricks’ Are You Experienced? was “real.” I recently heard the same argument about the fakeness of My Chemical Romance, with NIN as the “real” example.
Since writing last entry, I attended a skateboarding session where there were several skaters much older than I am. One said skater couldn’t seem to get his head in the present. All he talked about was “how things used to be” — the tricks, the ramps, the attitude, the music — everything. Needless to say, this grew tiresome very quickly, and I was glad when the younger crew finally showed up to session.
Some cultural artifacts get “grandfathered” in before our critical filters develop — shows that you remember loving that would probably annoy you now. Others however are chosen by your newly discerning pre-teen mind. Be it Bad Brains, The Wipers, The Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Fugazi, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, or My Chemical Romance, everyone has that “punk rock moment” where he or she realizes that the shit on the radio or the shit that their dad likes is wack. This does not make the stuff that you used to like better than the stuff your daughter likes. This does not make Nine Inch Nails “better” than My Chemical Romance (there are plenty of other reasons for that).
As Doug Stanhope would put it, Nine Inch Nails is good to you because being young is good. Everything was better then, but not because it was 1991 (or 1968), for example. It’s because you were young then. The same can be said for the Jimi Hendricks example and my college professor above. Sorry, everyone, “Three’s Company” was not necessarily better than “The King of Queens.”
Part of this is cognitive. Our brains’ ability to create and store new memories simply slows down — to a near-stop, therefore making our most cherished memories those of a bygone era, those of our youth. And when we remember those times, we reify them, making them stronger (Freud called the process “Nachtraglichkeit” meaning “retroactivity”).
So, the aging skateboarder lamenting the olden days when skateboarding was more about gnar than fashion (Ed. note: it’s always been about both) might be suffering from cognitive deceleration, but most likely he’s just being nostalgic boor. Farbeit from me to quote Bob Dylan, but he once said, “nostalgia is death.”
My college professor (who’d probably be proud of me for quoting Dylan, even if I’m using it against him) was just being nostalgic as well. Nostalgia is not inherently bad, but when it comes from a sad place (as in our lamenting skateboarder above), then it indicates a dissatisfaction with the present. This, I believe, is when it becomes death.
We should all always be working toward making these the good ol’ days. The day I’m looking back, lamenting the now, is the day I want to cease.
Sources:
Johnson, S. Mind Wide Open. Schribner: New York, 2004.
Watson, J. D. Avoid Boring People. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2007.
Watson, J. D. “On Enduring Memories” SEED Magazine, April/May, 2006. p. 45.
Thanks to Reggie for sending me the Ruben Bolling comic.
The Just Noticeable Difference
Marié Digby was lauded as the internet’s next big find, a phenomena that had grown organically through digital word-of-mouth, but the media’s multi-roomed echo chamber told on itself. Maybe it was too much, too quickly, but just after Digby’s couple of homey, simple YouTube videos started spreading online, she was featured on radio stations, MTV, iTunes, announcing that she’d been signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records. The official press release headline read, “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records.” What didn’t come out until later was that her name appeared on that dotted line a year and a half previous. Her online “discovery” was orchestrated from around long, conference-room tables.
Digby wasn’t unlimited bandwidth’s first phony phenom. YouTube’s avidly watched Lonelygirl15, a high school anygirl with a webcam, turned out to be nineteen-year-old aspiring actress Jessica Rose. She’d answered a Craigslist ad for an independent film, landed the part, and — after the “directors” did a bit of explaining — became Lonelygirl15. There was no product attached to the project, but all involved made names for themselves and are now well-represented in Hollywood.
These two stories are postmodern-day examples of what it takes to break through our media-mad all-at-once-ness and get noticed, to float some semblance of signal in a sea of noise. To experience the new is really just to notice a difference. In psychophysics it’s called the just noticeable difference (the “jnd”). Creating that difference is becoming more and more difficult as the tide of noise rises higher and higher.
Where Hollywood records and the Lonelygirl15 crew manipulated an emerging media channel, Miralus Healthcare took the opposite tack with their HeadOn headache remedy. They took one look at new media and ran the opposite direction. The original HeadOn television spot, which some ironically claim induces headaches, looks like a print ad and sounds like a broken record. But it worked. The commercial stood in such stark contrast to everything else on TV that the product is known worldwide.
It is sometimes claimed that technology makes it so that anyone can perform a certain task, like Photoshop made everyone an artist or Pro Tools made everyone a record producer. We make or tools and our tools make us (as Marshall McLuhan once said), but our tools do not make us great.
The idea that the internet and Pro Tools and — whatever else the advent and proliferation of the computer hath wrought — enables anyone to be an artist is both true and false. True, everyone has the tools to do so, but so few people have the talent. The latter is and always will be the case.
New technologies are normalizing events. Think of it like a crosstown street race where the traffic signals are normalizing events. One might be in the lead for a good bit of the ride, but as soon as everyone is stopped at a traffic light, the race effectively starts over. By way of convoluted analogy, one might be “ahead” in the home production process until Soundforge’s new software hits the scene.
Sure, there are people making money producing music who are not that good, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can compete with Dr. Dre just because he or she sets up a MySpace page and posts some loops from Acid. I’ve heard this argument so often lately, that anyone can cut-and-paste a record together and become a producer. If that were true, then why does Dr. Dre even have a career? Simple: Because he’s good at what he does. Let everyone try it!
Yes, building a name is a huge part of this and one person’s bloated name can overshadow someone else’s immense talents, but the proliferation of tools and channels does not dilute the fact that it takes talent, skills, work, and chance — as an artist and a marketer — to get noticed. Computers, the internet, weblogs, and everything else haven’t made everyone a great writer and killed authors’ careers.
DJ Scratch nailed it when he said, “The reason we respect something as an art is because it’s hard as fuck to do.” Good production, good writing, and good marketing are still hard to do — and it’s getting harder and harder to get them noticed. New tools and new channels don’t change the talent and effort it takes to capture the attention and the imagination of the masses, but a new twist here or there can make the just noticeable difference, and that can be all the difference in the world.
Jonah Lehrer: The Fourth Culture
In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented a chasm between what he called the Two Cultures: artsy types on one side and stuffy science folks on the other. Well, Jonah Lehrer has been trying to bring them back together. His book Proust was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) makes large strides toward their collusion by showing how the insights of several artists, musicians, writers, and one chef were a step ahead of the science of their time. In spite of Sir Karl Popper’s insistence that “real” science be falsifiable (though even he respected the authority of the artist), art often tells us more about ourselves.
Noam Chomsky once said, “It is possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Examples of the overlap between art and science are not difficult to unearth. World-renowned physicist Richard Feynman was known to draw, Philip K. Dick‘s A Scanner Darkly (for one example from Dick’s vast canon) explores possible effects of a corpus callosotomy, and Lehrer himself reveals many more in his article “The Future of Science is Art” from Seed Magazine, where he is Editor at Large.
Up against Lehrer, with his post at Seed, his oft-updated blog (The Frontal Cortex), and his well-written, well intriguing book, the rift between the two cultures doesn’t stand a chance.
Roy Christopher: How did the people in Proust was a Neuroscientist come together? Was James Joyce too easy an example? How about Philip K. Dick?
Jonah Lehrer: I’m always a little embarrassed to admit just how idiosyncratic my selection process was for the eight artists in the book. Once I had this idea about artists anticipating the discoveries of modern neuroscience –- and I got that idea when I started reading Proust in a lab — I began to see connections everywhere. I’d mutter about the visual cortex while looking at a Cezanne painting, or think about the somatosensory areas while reading Whitman on the “body electric.” Needless to say, my labmates mocked me mercilessly. But, in general, my selection process could be boiled down to this: I began with my favorite artists and tried to see what they had to say about the mind. The first thing that surprised me was just how much they had to say. Virginia Woolf, for instance, is always going on and on about her brain. “Nerves” has to be one of her favorite words.
Joyce makes a few appearances in the book, but so much ink has already been spilt on Joyce and “consciousness” that I wanted to find something a little more surprising. And Philip K. Dick will definitely appear in the sequel, when I get around to writing it.
RC: In light of all of the parallels between the Two Cultures that you’ve documented, do you think that C. P. Snow’s insight was a fallacy?
JL: Of course, there are real differences between our Two Cultures. Artists speak with metaphors, brushstrokes and plot, while scientists rely on acronyms, experiments and control variables. Sometimes, the languages of art and science can be so different that it’s hard to imagine a consilience ever taking place. But I think that cheap and easy binary distinction is also a little misleading. For starters, artists often rely on experimentation while making art -– they’ll try out different approaches and see what “works” –- while scientists often depend on their imagination.
Finally, I’d add that you don’t have to go very back in time before this cultural distinction disappears. George Eliot, for instance, famously described her novels as a “a set of experiments in life.” Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the “psychology should be done very realistically.” Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: “To improve my stock of metaphors.” In other words, the poet didn’t believe that art and science needed to be separated.
RC: Snow’s Third Culture has given way to John Brockman’s Third Culture. Do you think the latter will inspire a proper version of the former?
JL: They’re fundamentally different enterprises. I believe that a third culture should ultimately be about re-creating a dialogue between our two cultures, which is what C. P. Snow was referring to. John Brockman, on the other hand, believes that the job of a third culture is to translate science for the masses. (As he puts it, “Science is the only news”.) That’s certainly a worthy endeavor — educating the public about science is really, really important — but it’s not a Third Culture.
RC: Is there a cultural divide between East and West? I ask because it seems to me that Eastern cultures — specifically Japan — are more open to what we would consider noise. Your chapter on Stravinsky got me thinking about this.
JL: That’s an interesting idea. I’m not aware of any research on that subject, but it’s certainly a testable hypothesis. I’d only add that I think neuroscience is really beginning to discover the importance of culture. We’re slowly beginning to learn all of the different ways the inputs of the arts — from “American Idol” to Wagner — can literally shape the brain. In other words, ideas are powerful things.
RC: What are you working on next?
JL: I’m currently hard at work on a book that should be published next year. (I just knocked on wood, in case you couldn’t tell.) The book is still coming together, but it won’t involve Proust, unfortunately.
Commercial Art: Belvedere Vodka
Something about this Belvedere Vodka commercial has haunted me since its constant airing during the holidays last year. I must’ve seen it fifty times. I’m not shilling for Belvedere here. Hell, I’ve never even tasted the stuff, but I can’t get this ad out of my head.
Directed by the chronically flannel-wearing fashion photographer Terry Richardson, the spot is set in a self-consciously “downtown” party featuring Richardson himself snapping pictures of fellow party-goers, including actor/director Vincent Gallo and graff artist Earsnot. The soundtrack, which sounds drunk itself, was composed by Gallo and The RZA.
It’s obvious by the parties involved that Belvedere is trying to position itself as the hippest vodka at the party. So obvious in fact, so over-the-top, that it ceases to matter. The ad-overdosed cynic in us all sees Gallo greet guests and scrawl a face on a painting with a marker, Earsnot saunter in with a hottie on his arm, Richardson blatantly snapping his point-and-shoot, Gallo under the piano with some woman, RZA mumbling over a drunken bassline, and it’s all so contrived…
…but, it’s also so cool. there is something qualitative about this ad that nails exactly what I think Belvedere was shooting for when they conceived it. Somehow all of this pretense, all of this obvious posturing, gives us a thirty-second glimpse into the world of cool. Somehow, the ad works.
The problem with advertising in general is that it’s ineffective. That’s why it’s everywhere. As much as the industry tries to quantify and coordinate dollars to sales, theirs is a qualitative enterprise. Did Belvedere sell more vodka because of this commercial? No idea, but it’s rare occasions like this that we see the art of advertising shine.
Here’s the commercial in question (runtime: 0:30):
How We Became Post-Rock
There seems to be very little consensus on exactly where Rock crossed the line and became Post-Rock (a term popularized by Simon Reynolds), but most people agree that the two bands that galvanized the movement in the last two decades are Tortoise and Mogwai. The roots of the genre run deep and in many directions (e.g., Prog, Brian Eno, Jazz, CAN, PiL, Industrial, Jim O’Rourke, et al.), but for our purposes, we’ll start roughly with those two.
![Mogwai live [photo by Leif Valin]](http://roychristopher.com/images/mogwai-live-big.jpg)
Mogwai is consistently one of my most-listened-to artists. This is partly because they make great sleepy-time music, but also because their blend of mellow prog, raging guitars, and soundtracky drama has held my attention for years. Where Tortoise tends toward a shuffle and strum, Mogwai has a propensity for rumble and roar. Structurally, if the former were a lattice partition, the latter would be a brick wall. Simply put, there’s just a lot more tension and release with Mogwai.
With that said, the brand of Post-Rock that I am drawn to owes more to Mogwai than Tortoise (Explosions in the Sky and Kinski, for example), but this is not to paint Tortoise (and their brethren, June of 44, Rodan, et al.) out of the picture. Each of the new crop of these bands owes a great debt to the mathematics of Tortoise and Slint, the guitar textures of My Bloody Valentine and The Cure, the orchestrations of Radiohead, and the experiments of electronica. But they’re each taking this loose foundation in new directions. Hood, 65daysofstatic, The Notwist, and 13 & God all slouch toward electronica; Isis, Cult of Luna, The Ocean, and Jesu all lean on the metal; dälek blast Hip-hop through their wall-of-sound; Explosions in the Sky, God is an Astronaut, Caspian, Saxon Shore, and This Will Destroy You all play the middle ground, holding the core of instrumental post-rock together with fervor.
Thanks to a series of tips from longtime music friend Wayne Wambles, these last few bands are among my recent most-listened-to artists. I’ve been listening to quite a lot of Explosions in the Sky over the past year or so. Wayne caught wind of this and recommended several bands to me, all of whom toil similar musical soil to Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai.
These four bands are the logical heirs to the Post-Rock torch. Their compositions wax and wane in a similar emotive fashion to their forebears, building tension and releasing it in flurries of guitar noise. There’s not much more to say by way of description, but here are brief synopses of each.
Caspian often starts off with near silence but builds into a wailing wave of guitar. They’re the most organic of this new crop, careening off the rails and staying at the edge of control at all times.
With vocals sometimes employed, but used as not much more than another instrument, God is an Astronaut flies somewhere between Sigor Ros and Mogwai. With four great records out, they’ve been around seemingly forever (see one of their videos below).
On the flip-side, Texas’s own This Will Destroy You has had a brief but successful history, having only been a band since 2005 and having blown up right out of the box. The youngest of all of these bands, they’ve already proven themselves worthy of the post-rock mantle with 2006’s Young Mountain EP (Magic Bullet) and their recent self-titled full-length.
Saxon Shore remind me more of Mogwai in that they seem to rely on electronics more, and, like Mogwai, they’ve worked with David Fridmann (who is best known for his pioneering work with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev). Fridmann produced their last record, The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore (Burnt Toast Vinyl, 2005), and his influence is heard in its epic drive and many climaxes (They’re currently working on new material).
Here’s the video for “The End of the Beginning” by God is an Astronaut from the record of the same name (runtime: 3:43):
The Strength of Weak Ties Among Music Fans
One of the main ways I’ve gotten into music since I first started buying and listening some thirty years ago is through friends. I’ve made many friends because if a mutual interest in music, and I’ve gotten into many bands and artists because of my friends. Continue reading “The Strength of Weak Ties Among Music Fans”
Amen, Brother
V. Vale sent this out in his most recent newsletter (thanks, Vale). It’s a mini-documentary of a six-second drum break from the B-side of a Winstons’ record, a track called “Amen Brother,” that’s been sampled, looped, and reapproriated — by everyone from N.W.A. to car manufacturers — since its release in 1969. This is Nate Harrison’s meditation on that break, the “Amen Break.” It is “Amazing Grace” to his Bill Moyers, and this is a deep monologue on the ownership of cultural artifacts, the legality of sampling, and this six seconds of recorded history. Continue reading “Amen, Brother”
Hangar 18: Hip-hop Babylon
Hangar 18 is a crew from the Capital of Hip-hop: New York City. Over the past several years of live shows, staying at my house, drinking, and shit-talking, the emcees — Alaska and WindnBreeze — have become good friends of mine. I’ve been wanting to nail down an interview with them for a minute now, and, finally, Alaska conceded. Continue reading “Hangar 18: Hip-hop Babylon”