Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Coldplay, Achilles, and Spiderman
Brian Theng writes in Antigone:
Some years ago, after receiving a rejection letter from a Cambridge college, I decided to go onto the Oxford website. I looked up the A-to-Z of courses available, from Archaeology and Anthropology to Mathematics and Theology and Religion. I crossed these off my list, and a couple more. But ‘Classics’ was sufficiently unfamiliar for me not to cross it out.
That was the start of a wonderful adventure. It is not one I can share with many where I live, Singapore, a city that is famed for good food and the general lack of chewing gum. (It’s not illegal to chew gum, but it can’t be imported or sold.) We are a modern nation, with swimming pools on a cantilevered rooftop, 16-storey-tall concrete and steel trees, and the world’s tallest indoor waterfall in our airport.
Besides a few copies of Robert Fagles’ 2006 translation of the Aeneid in the National Library, there are few opportunities to even hear about Classics in the first place. That is a shame, because Classics makes us think harder and differently about what it means to be human.
Once in a while, I come across little things in today’s world that drive this message home. It could be rapping (sometimes wrongly) about Romans, Trojans, and the Odyssey, wanting to smell like a Roman centurion, or some interesting tunes, as in this case…
The Chainsmokers and Coldplay’s 2017 electronic pop tune Something Just Like This starts off with the singer – let us call him Chris – doubting his worth as a partner, because he is no superhero:
I’ve been reading books of old
The legends and the myths
Achilles and his gold
Hercules and his gifts
Spider-Man’s control
And Batman with his fists
And clearly I don’t see myself upon that list.His significant other replies that it is alright. She just wants a love that is simple and honest:
I’m not lookin’ for somebody
With some superhuman gifts
Some superhero
Some fairy-tale bliss.It is not every day that we find Achilles and Hercules mentioned in the same breath as Spider-Man and Batman. To my mind, what divides them are what different understandings of ‘heroism’ entail and what different societies value. What unites them is far less their heroism than their conflicts and struggles despite their superhero abilities and feats.
What does it mean to be a hero? Taken together, gold, gifts (whether material or god-given), self-control, and fists form an intriguing combination of heroic references. Being a comic-book hero usually means saving the world. When we imagine Spider-Man and Batman, we may think of fighting crime and cosmic threats, or the famous clichés “with great power comes great responsibility” and “it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.” In the Homeric world, hērōs (ἥρως) “signifies a warrior who lives and dies in pursuit of honour (τιμή) and glory (κλέος)”.[1] Being a hero seems to mean more using one’s powers for oneself.
Let’s dive into some specifics, taking “Achilles and his gold” as our cue. Gold in Homer is often associated with the gods and immortality. It is surely associated with wealth, but sometimes it is not as highly “ranked” as we might think.[2] In setting out the chariot race prizes in Patroclus’ funeral games, Achilles offers a brand-new cauldron for third place, but two talents of gold for fourth (Iliad 23.267–9).[3] This opens up a whole conversation about symbolic and commercial value: what would we do if presented with choosing between a one-of-a-kind handcrafted kitchen appliance by a famed craftsman and a cash prize? The answer may be obvious, or not – the Iliad makes us think twice.
In any case, Achilles is not usually noted for his gold, even though he was rich in prizes and spoils. He tells us so in his great speech on honour and glory, when he rejects Agamemnon’s copious material compensation, which included seven whole cities (9.356–409). Others might say that the song lyrics refer to Homer’s famous ecphrasis, the shield and armour made by the god Hephaestus at the request of the hero’s mother Thetis (18.468–617). Achilles’ divine parentage and connection with the gods can go some way to explain why Chris does not see himself upon that list of superheroes.
To me, “Achilles and his gold” recalls the meeting between the hero and godlike Priam, who brings “countless ransom” (ἀπερείσι’ ἄποινα) for the body of his son Hector. This ransom included ten talents of gold (24.232; Agamemnon also offered this as part of his recompense in 9.122). It is a powerful and emotional scene (24.477–571).[4] Evoking Achilles’ aged father Peleus at the start and end of his supplication, Priam
roused in Achilles the desire to weep for his father. He took the old man by the hand and gently pushed him away. And the two of them began to weep in remembrance. Priam cried loud for murderous Hector, huddled at the feet of Achilles, and Achilles cried for his own father, and then again for Patroclus: and the house was filled with the sound of their weeping.[5]
Scholars raise many interesting points about the whole scene: there are themes of father-son relationships, memory, pity and anger, mortality and immortality, separation, and reconciliation with society.[6] But what strikes us first is a sense of tender vulnerability amidst overflowing emotion. For all the heroic associations we make, we find fragility. Achilles tells Priam, “this is the fate the gods have spun for poor mortal men, that we should live in misery” (24.525–6). We see and feel little fairy-tale bliss.
In a different way, the premise of the Spider-Man character elicits the same feeling.[7] Stan Lee explained how he created a superhero who “would lose out as often as he’d win – in fact, more often.” Peter Parker is a relatable teenager, self-absorbed, awkward, and misunderstood. As Brandon Wright explains, this could not have been farther from male DC superheroes, who were all the same: rational and in control, predictable, and wholly altruistic. Soon superheroes with “awesome powers and human shortcomings became the defining feature of Marvel Comics”, though in fairness I should mention that Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy does well to draw out the conflicts and complexity of Bruce Wayne. Despite their gifted abilities, theirs are not the lives we unquestioningly yearn for.
Finally, the song’s reference to “Hercules and his gifts” opens up a whole new . . .
Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned
David Treffert published an interesting article in Scientific American in January 2015. It begins:
I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the many savants I have seen is that that they clearly know things they never learned.
Leslie Lemke is a musical virtuoso even though he has never had a music lesson in his life. Like “Blind Tom” Wiggins a century before him, his musical genius erupted so early and spontaneously as an infant that it could not possibly have been learned. It came ‘factory installed’. In both cases professional musicians witnessed and confirmed that Lemke and Wiggins somehow, even in the absence of formal training, had innate access to what can be called “the rules” or vast syntax of music.
Alonzo Clemons has never had an art lesson in his life. As an infant, after a head injury, he began to sculpt with whatever was handy–Crisco or whatever–and now is a celebrated sculptor who can mold a perfect specimen of any animal with clay in an hour or less after only a single glance at the animal itself–every muscle and tendon perfectly positioned. He has had no formal training.
To explain the savant, who has innate access to the vast syntax and rules of art, mathematics, music and even language, in the absence of any formal training and in the presence of major disability, “genetic memory,” it seems to me, must exist along with the more commonly recognized cognitive/semantic and procedural/habit memory circuits.
Genetic memory, simply put, is complex abilities and actual sophisticated knowledge inherited along with other more typical and commonly accepted physical and behavioral characteristics. In savants the music, art or mathematical “chip” comes factory installed. In addition to the examples mentioned above, I describe others in my book, Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired and Sudden Savant.
Genetic memory is not an entirely new concept. In 1940, A.A. Brill quoted Dr. William Carpenter who, in comparing math prodigy Zerah Colburn’s calculating powers to Mozart’s mastery of musical composition, wrote the following:
In each of the foregoing cases, then, we have a peculiar example of the possession of an extraordinary congenital aptitude for certain mental activity, which showed itself at so early a period as to exclude the notion that it could have been acquired by the experience of the individual. To such congenital gifts we give the name of intuitions: it can scarcely be questioned that like the instincts of the lower animals, they are the expressions of constitutional tendencies embodied in the organism of the individuals who manifest them.
Carl Jung used the term “collective unconscious” to define his even broader concept of inherited traits, intuitions and collective wisdom of the past.
Wilder Penfield in his pioneering 1978 book, Mystery of the Mind, also referred to three types of memory. “Animals,” he wrote, “particularly show evidence of what might be called racial memory” (this would be the equivalent of genetic memory). He lists the second type of memory as that associated with “conditioned reflexes” and a third type as “experiential”. The two latter types would be consistent with the terminology commonly applied to “habit or procedural” memory and “cognitive or semantic” memory.
In his 1998 book, The Mind’s Past, Michael Gazzaniga wrote:
The baby does not learn trigonometry, but knows it; does not learn how to distinguish figure from ground, but knows it; does not need to learn, but knows, that when one object with mass hits another, it will move the object … The vast human cerebral cortex is chock full of specialized systems ready, willing and able to be used for specific tasks. Moreover, the brain is built under tight genetic control … As soon as the brain is built, it starts to express what it knows, what it comes with from the factory. And the brain comes loaded. The number of special devices that are in place and active is staggering. Everything from perceptual phenomena to intuitive physics to social exchange rules comes with the brain. These things are not learned; they are innately structured. Each device solves a different problem … the multitude of devices we have for doing what we do are factory installed; by the time we know about an action, the devices have already performed it.
Steven Pinker’s 2003 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, refutes the “blank slate” theories of human development. Brian Butterworth, in his 1999 book, What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math, points out that babies have many specialized innate abilities, including numerical ones that he attributes to a “number module” encoded in the human genome from ancestors 30,000 years ago.
Marshall Nivenberg, from the National Heart Institute, provided insight into the actual DNA/RNA mechanics of this innate knowledge in an article titled “Genetic Memory” published in 1968 in JAMA.
Whether called genetic, ancestral or racial memory, or intuitions or congenital gifts, the concept of a genetic transmission of sophisticated knowledge well beyond instincts, is necessary to explain how prodigious savants can know things they never learned.
We tend to think of ourselves as being born with a magnificent and intricate piece of organic machinery (“hardware”) we call the brain, along with a massive but blank hard drive (memory). What we become, it is commonly believed, is an accumulation and culmination of our continuous learning and life experiences, which are added one by one to memory. But the prodigious savant apparently comes already programmed with a vast amount of innate skill -and knowledge in his or her area of expertise–factory-installed “software” one might say–which accounts for the extraordinary abilities over which the savant innately shows mastery in the face of often massive cognitive and other learning handicaps. It is an area of memory function worthy of much more exploration and study.
Indeed recent cases of “acquired savants” or “accidental genius” have convinced me that we all have such factory-installed software. I discussed some of those cases in detail in . . .
Raymond Scott’s bizarre but intriguing ideas
Being ahead of one’s time is a serious curse. Ted Gioia has a most interesting column that begins:
Background: Below is the latest in my series of profiles of individuals I call visionaries of sound—innovators who are more than just composers or performers, but futurists beyond category. Their work aims at nothing less than altering our entire relationship with the music ecosystem and day-to-day soundscapes.
In many instances, their names are barely known, even within the music world. In some cases—as with Charles Kellogg, recently profiled here—they have been entirely left out of music history and musicology books.
In this installment, I focus on the remarkable legacy of Raymond Scott. During the coming months, I will be publishing more of these profiles. Perhaps I will collect them in a book at some point.
The Secret Music Technology of Raymond Scott
Unfortunately, I need to start this article by talking about Porky Pig.
Raymond Scott deserves better. He never intended for his legacy in music to depend on cartoon animals. But his largest audience, as it turned out, would be children who laugh at Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and the other animated protagonists of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons released by Warner Bros.
Scott didn’t write cartoon music—at least, not intentionally—but his music appears on more than 100 animated films. For that give credit (or blame) to Carl Stallings, who needed to churn out a cartoon soundtrack every week, more or less, while under contract to Warner Bros. Stallings found a goldmine in the compositions of Raymond Scott, whose music had been licensed to the studio. These works, which straddle jazz and classical stylings, possess a manic energy that made them the perfect accompaniment to a chase scene or action sequence or some random cartoon-ish act of violence.
Scott called his music “descriptive jazz”—his name for a novel chamber music style that drew on the propulsive drive of swing, with all the riffs and syncopation of that dance style, but with less improvisation and proclaiming a taste for extravagant, quasi-industrial sounds. It was like techno before there was techno, but with a jitterbug sensibility.
When I first learned about Scott, I was taught to view him as a music novelty act, akin perhaps to Zez Confrey or Spike Jones, and the most frequently cited examples of his work (to the extent, they were mentioned at all) were these cartoon soundtracks. But Scott had higher ambitions. He was, after all, a Juilliard graduate, with a taste for experimental music, and worldview more aligned with Dali and Dada than Daffy Duck. But Scott also wanted to be a technologist—his early aim had been to study engineering. He dreamed of combining these two pursuits, and gaining renown as one of the trailblazers in electronic music.
Under slightly different circumstances, he might have become even more famous for music tech than for his cartoon music, as well-known as Robert Moog or Ray Dolby or Les Paul or Leon Theremin. But those dreams were all in the future, when he picked the name “Raymond Scott” out of a phone book—because he thought it “had good rhythm.” . . .
Continue reading. It gets stranger and stranger. He invented a music synthesizer, for example, hiring Bob Moog to design circuits for him. (Moog later made his own synthesizer, of course.) Amazing story.
There’s an old country song called “Pictures from Life’s Other Side.” This whole piece reminded me of that.
A jazz great who died too soon: Austin Peralta
Austin Peralta recorded the album above when he was 15, with Ron Carter on bass. Ted Giola writes at The Honest Broker:
Frankly, I don’t recall why I reached out to pianist Austin Peralta back in 2008 or 2009. I vaguely remember that someone told me about him in an email—but I get recommendations like that every day. So why did I pay attention to this one?
It must have been someone whose judgment I trusted. Not a paid publicist or record label flack—probably a seasoned LA musician whose opinions I took seriously. The advice, as I recall, was short and to-the-point, along the lines of: Ted, pay attention to this LA teenager named Austin Peralta. He’s going to shake things up.
I can say with certainty that I had no interest in Peralta as a jazz child prodigy. There are few music critics less interested in child prodigies than I. I hear about them all the time—they’re everywhere nowadays—and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are just two kinds of child prodigies in jazz, and it’s wise to avoid both of them.
The first type is the over-hyped talent who is nowhere near as good as the press releases claim. This is not an infrequent situation—and usually because someone stands to gain from exaggerating the child’s ability. If I had a taste for jazz gossip (which I don’t), I could share shameful details of parents who invest a hundred thousand dollars or more in creating a reputation for their youngster as a prodigy, built largely on smoke and mirrors and cash payments. The kid must have a modest level of talent, but we’re definitely not talking about the next Mozart—more like a school band standout. If you have enough money to spend, you can even get radio airplay and fawning reviews. It sure looks good on the college application.
On the other hand, there are genuine child prodigies, with enormous talent. But even here, I find the whole situation distasteful. No matter how awesome their ability, children should not be releasing jazz albums. They need time to mature and find their individual sound and approach. If they’re rushed at this juncture, they may never achieve any genuine depth as artists.
Consider the case of Joey Alexander, the most hyped child prodigy in jazz in recent memory. The first time I heard him play, I knew immediately that he had huge upside potential. Alexander is the real deal. But I also knew that he shouldn’t be making records at age 11—and the New York Times wasn’t doing him any favors by proclaiming his greatness in large font headlines.
Even if the finger dexterity is impressive, the emotional depth and sense of individualism—absolutely essential elements in jazz—will be lacking at that age. There’s only so much soulfulness a preteen can put into a solo, and it barely fills a thimble. More to the point, too much praise too soon can stunt a child’s development. (If you have any doubts, just look at the teen sports world and count the tragic stories.) Alexander recently turned 18, and I’ve started paying closer attention—with the highest of hopes. But he may struggle holding on to his audience, because he built his public image as a precocious whiz kid, fast and glib at the keyboard—a rare adolescent, no doubt, but embraced by various interests as a marketable commodity. The time will come when Joey Alexander genuinely deserves a Grammy nomination, but when he was 13, there were a thousand jazz players more worthy than him. Yes, the marketing hype won out, but that’s a risky way to embark on your life’s work—you can only be the whiz kid for so long.
So I certainly didn’t reach out to Austin Peralta because he was promoted as a prodigy. That probably made me more skeptical than anything. But in all fairness, there wasn’t much promotion. I’d never received a press release, and few were aware of Peralta’s precocious music skills back in those days—at least in the United States. There was no fawning article in the New York Times or any other leading newspaper, as far as I could tell. I had never heard his name until someone told me about him.
But a Google search informed me that Peralta had achieved a degree of jazz fame in Japan when he was 15 years old. He even made two records in Japan—both of them released in 2007. The first one, called Maiden Voyage, featured Peralta playing with bassist Ron Carter. That caught my attention. Carter is one of the most respected bassists in the history of jazz—what’s he doing in the studio with a 15-year-old pianist? And that same year, Peralta recorded another album for the Japanese market, but this time with another world class bassist, Buster Williams.
At this juncture, I decided I should listen to this music, just to stay informed. I had low expectations—as mentioned above, the prodigy angle always turns me off. I’m old enough to remember the rise and fall of Craig Hundley—these youngsters come and go, usually sooner rather than later. But as a jazz critic, I still need to listen. I spend a lot of time doing just that, staying abreast of trends, whether I like them or not. Stan Getz once told me: “I listen to music the way a stock broker follows Wall Street”—a comment which puzzled me at the time, but I now understand exactly what he meant. You ought to know whose stock is rising, and whose is falling, even if you’re not making an investment.
But I ran into a problem. I couldn’t . . .
Continue reading. There’s much more.
A tradition successfully handed on to the next generation to protect, practice, and grow — and hand it off again
And this totally awesome video, even better. The tradition lives — and evolves. Good meme strength.
The value of imitation in the arts
Interesting quotation from David Perell’s newsletter:
I once met a painting coach who tells students to copy their favorite artists.
At first, students resist.
In response, the coach tells them to listen for friction. “Do you hear that resistance? It’s the whisper of your unique style.”
Through imitation, we discover our voice.
The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music
Ted Gioga writes in Culture Notes of an Honest Broker:
I’ve long been obsessed with the hidden power of song. I’m not talking about how music entertains us, or even its higher artistic potentialities, but something bigger and grander. I look to music as a change agent in human life, even as a transformative force in human history.
It perhaps sounds simplistic, but this is the most important core value in my life’s work, the central tenet underpinning in my vocation. Song is a source of enchantment and a catalyst for change. Any philosophy of music—or even a journalistic approach to the subject—that doesn’t respect this remarkable capacity misses much of the point of human music-making
As a music historian, I’ve learned that we hardly possess words to describe this potentiality of song—although each of us feels it in our heart and soul. At times, this power is so strange and beyond expectations, that it almost seems magical. I have tried to write the history of this musical magic, and celebrate its great practitioners, many of them almost completely unknown, even to musicologists.
One of these hidden masters is a man named Charles Kellogg. And in the course of many years, I haven’t met a single music scholar who recognizes his name. I didn’t learn about him myself until long after my student days had ended, and I was already embarked on a career as a music writer. But he’s become a hero of mine, although it’s taken me many years to piece together the basic details of his life story.
I first learned about Kellogg from an unusual source—a book that has nothing to do with music. At least on the surface, that is. In fact, much of my most productive research has been the result of digging into sources of information that apparently have little to do with music. In this instance, my discovery of Charles Kellogg came from a peculiar footnote in the book Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946 by Paramhansa Yogananda.
Here is the footnote in its entirety.
I took note of this remarkable story—if I was looking for music as a change agent, here was an undeniable example. What could be more impressive than putting out fires with your songs? But several years passed before I could learn more about Charles Kellogg.
Finally in 2002, I stumbled on more information while doing research for my book Healing Songs at the Geisel Library, an architectural monstrosity (named after Dr. Seuss) located on the campus of UC San Diego—a strange, claustrophobic facility, but the closest major library to the beach home where I was living at the time. There in the stacks I discovered by chance a book written by Charles Kellogg himself, entitled The Nature Singer, and published by a small California press in 1930. I photocopied a few pages, but decided I needed to track down my own copy. That took several years, but I eventually acquired a rare first edition of The Nature Singer signed by the author. My understanding is that only one thousand copies were printed.
In these pages, Kellogg boasted of musical talents few performers could hope to match. For example, he describes his ability to draw bears to him with his songs. And they came not to attack, but as enthusiastic attendees for Kellogg’s outdoor concert: “All [the bears] sat down on their haunches. For fully ten minutes this curious audience sat listening with evident enjoyment.” If you’re skeptical, he shares photos to prove it.
After a childhood spent largely in small towns and the wilderness of the Far West, a hundred miles from the nearest railroad, Kellogg gained considerable fame for one of his most esoteric skills: his extraordinary talent for imitating bird songs. From his earliest days, Kellogg had conversed with birds and insects, and by the time he was 16 or 17 he realized he could imitate almost any sound they made. This would be the talent that eventually secured a recording contract for Kellogg and launched him on the road as a vaudeville performer. (His recordings are now available online.) . . .
Justin Bieber today is stunning
Just read Zach Baron’s interview of him in GQ:
Justin Bieber and I have just met when I ask him something and he talks and talks—for 10 illuminating and uninterrupted minutes he talks. He talks about God and faith and castles in Ireland, about shame and drugs and marriage. He talks about what it is to feel empty inside, and what it is to feel full. At one point he says, “I’m going to wrap it up here,” but he doesn’t, he just keeps going, and that is what it is like to talk to Justin Bieber now. Like you’re in the confessional booth with him. Like whatever rules about “privacy” or the thick opaque wall of massive celebrity that people like Bieber are supposed to follow don’t apply.
He has lived a well-documented life—maybe among the more well-documented lives in the history of this decaying planet. But to my knowledge, there is not one example of him speaking this way—in a moving but unprompted, unselfconscious torrent of words—in public prior to this moment. I will admit to being disoriented. If I’m being honest, I had been expecting someone else entirely—someone more monosyllabic; someone more distracted, more unhappy; someone more like the guy I’m pretty sure Justin Bieber was not all that long ago—and now I am so thrown that the best I can do is stammer out some tortured version of… How did you become this person? By which I mean: seemingly guileless. Bursting with the desire to connect, to tell his own story, in case it might be of use to anyone else.
It’s a question that’s not even a question, really. But what Bieber gently says in response is: “That’s okay.”
He knows approximately what I’m asking—how he got from wherever he was to here, to becoming the man in front of me, clear-eyed on a computer screen from an undisclosed location in Los Angeles. His hair, under a Vetements hat, is long in the back; he is in no particular hurry. He is married to a woman—Hailey Baldwin Bieber—who cares for him like no one has ever cared for him, he says. He is happy. He is currently renovating the house in which he will live happily with his wife. He’s spent the past several months piecing together a new record, Justice, which is dense with love songs and ’80s-style anthems—interspersed with some well-intentioned, if not totally well-advised, interludes featuring the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.—that are bluntly honest about his bad past and equally optimistic about his future. (“Everybody saw me sick, and it felt like no one gave a shit,” he sings on the cathartic last song on the record, “Lonely.”) He’s still so overflowing with music that he puts out Freedom, a meditative, postscript of an EP about faith, just a few weeks after Justice. He is, if anything, the empathetic professional in this interaction too as he goes about trying to help me understand how he’s arrived at where he’s arrived. . .
Continue reading. And do read the whole thing. He does explain well how he arrived and where he arrived.
The Harlem Globetrotters of piano quartets
The video is via John Zech’s article in Your Classical, which begins:
How dare these women take such liberties with Vivaldi and other greats?! I’m shocked … SHOCKED I tell you!
In honesty, I’m quite impressed. The women of Salut Salon quartet — Angelika Bachmann (violin), Iris Siegfried (violin and vocals), Anne-Monika von Twardowski (piano) and Sonja Lena Schmid (cello) — combine virtuosity, acrobatics and a sense of fun in their performances. The result is surprising, enchanting and overall, entertaining.
According to their official bio, . . .
The typewriter
Many — most? — today have never used a typewriter. (I thinking only of the advanced countries of the West, where the typewriter once was common.) They were ingenious devices, and curious habits had to be developed so that no conscious thought was required to strike the “m” key hard and the “.” lightly so the impression on the paper would be the same. The key was to maiintain a regular rhythm, which with practice could be accelerated. In my typing class memories the sound of Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock” still is strong.
A cogent rebuttal to a comment by Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell made a comment in 2004 that has recently become popular — or, as people now say, gone viral:
I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look at a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to co-operate is what is necessary to be an artist – not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music, that’s why I spend my time now painting
Steve Lawson has 14 questions about that quotation. From his post:
1) Who was this ‘someone from the music business’ and which bit of the music business were they in? Why is this one unnamed person’s pretty gruesomely commercial focus being held up as a template for understanding the motivations and behaviour of everyone in ‘the music business’?
2) What the hell is ‘the music business’. I’m in the music business, clearly this person’s thoughts don’t reflect on me… were they in publishing? Sync? A&R? Running a label? A sub-label? The ‘music business’ is gargantuan – finding a person with really terrible opinions within its bounds has never been hard.
3) For every renegade artist through the history of music, I’ll show you a thousand successful and often brilliant artists how had a certain look and were willing to co-operate. Frank Zappa was a total one off. Find me the label that launched 500 Frank Zappas and we can have a talk about Zappaism as a business model.
4) I adore Joni’s music – Hejira is my favourite record of all time, and she’s easily in the top 10 or so most significant musicians of the last 100 years, but when she was signed, she was a beautiful young acoustic guitar playing singer-songwriter in the golden age of acoustic singer/songwriters. She didn’t need to co-operate, she was exactly what they were looking for. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter was what she could do after a decade as a global icon, not the demo that got her signed in the first place.
5) Why are co-operation and artistic vision contradictory? . . .
