Curatorialist

Sometimes you can hit a bullseye and still miss.

The We Are The World remake for Haiti, 25 years after Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie rocked the world for USA for Africa, is sort of its own disaster in and of itself. My emotional preference would be to just go down the list of artists then and now and discuss the vast difference in artistic quality. Not that there aren’t some real deals in this video: Jennifer Hudson, Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Tony Bennet, Beyonce, Wyclef Jean, Usher, even Pink. There were some heavy hitters in there, to be sure. But the lows were so much lower as to bring down the overall quality quotient too dramatically. Popularity was never the casting spec in the ‘85 version. Jonas Brothers? Justin Bieber? Will i Am? Enrique Iglesias? Josh Groban? Miley Cyrus? I don’t need to discuss the differences between those artists and Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers or any single person who was invited into that studio in 1985. This isn’t an old guy’s “times were better when” speech, either. It’s a pure, one-to-one look at artistic integrity. Not about album sales, but about having undeniable expressive art in your soul. The kind that lasts. If you play the ‘85 video right this second (I just did), every one of those artists is undeniable. One look at the Haiti video and you just know that 25 years from now, nobody is going to want to open that time capsule. That’s a miss. Should have been part of the consideration process for something important, like disaster relief. It detracts from the integrity of the message and this message deserves it. The Jonas Brothers should have bowed out. T-Pain should have said, you know what, I’m honored to have been asked but the message is too important to make this about the trend I represent. Same with Miley Cyrus. But that’s not what goes through their minds. Not that they don’t care about the cause, I’m certain they do, but it’s the lack of soul-searching about the true meaning of something, obscured by the false rationale that popularity, in and of itself, is also a contribution to the cause, that disappoints. And nothing could sum that up better than the difference between Lionel Ritchie introducing the video in ‘85 and Jamie Foxx introducing the video in’10.

But there’s deeper issues at play here. On the surface, 2010 WATW seems to have the same premise as 1985 WATW – bring artists together for a cause. Did artists come together in 2010? In the 1985 WATW, disparate musicians stood shoulder to shoulder and finished each others’ sentences. You could barely tell where Lionel became Lionel and Stevie. Where Paul became Kenny. Where Warwick became Willie. And wasn’t that sort of the point? Quincy’s magic was in the pairings and the way the individual gave way to the duet, the duet gave way to the song and the song gave way to the message. Can we say the same about 2010 WATW? I hear the overlaps in the mix, but from the video, it appears that all of them were recorded separately. We open on Justin Bieber, HEAR Jennifer Hudson and Nicole Scherzinger come in and then hard cut to them by themselves. Where’s the sharing of the mic? Where’s two artists working it out? Where’s the “Check your ego at the door” sign? Seems to me, this is one big ego enabler: separate recordings, close-ups and a who’s who of most-Tweeted-about flavors of the month. What, Jennifer and Nicole don’t want to bend down to Justin’s height? Too good for that, are we? What a missed opportunity. And if you think that none of that matters as long as it gets people to watch and donate to Haiti, I’d beg to differ. I’d like to ask how much more money might be raised, how many more relief workers might be enlisted, how many more concerned and helpful people might come out of the woodwork with a better product? If you set out to make something of value, make it great – or you underachieved. This version drafts off the success of a predecessor, lazily substitutes artistic effort with buzz metrics and propels an already suffering industry of music into further chaos by continuing to confuse popularity for genius. Haiti and Music deserved better.

And I can applaud the intention of the people who put this together while still disliking how they went about it.

Group rapping is terrible. It should have just been Snoop, Wyclef, Kanye or maybe Lil Wayne. Diverging into a group rap segment belittles rap and misses the point of the whole get together. Let’s mix it up. It’s okay to blend Mary J. Blige in with Tony Bennet (sort of) but rappers need their own interlude? So much for creativity. Speaking of which, auto tune? Why why why would you employ a technique like this to a song with such a heartfelt message? Auto tune corrects tone at the expense of humanity, that’s why the more it’s used, the more robotic it sounds. Conceptually, where does that help in a situation where you’re asking people to have empathy for a cause?

The irony of all of this is that the ‘85 WATW starts with a slate of the USA for AFRICA logo with all the artist’s signatures on it, but all you remember is their voices. The ‘10 WATW video is a lot of voices, but all you remember are their signatures.

Fame and the system killed the time-honored farming of talent. Somewhere in our lifetime, fame and talent switched positions on the time line. Guys were geniuses first, then they went mad. For real. Then, guys were genius and they wanted the image of going mad, so they wrecked hotel rooms, laced people’s drinks for fun and caroused with women, because they could, it was fun and they didn’t seem to get in trouble for it. The “bad boy” was invented. And girls loved it because, underneath, the bad boy had a genius to it – a skewed outlook. Something admirable. But Street Car Named Desire became Rebel Without a Cause. Then Rebel Rebel. Then Rebel Yell. Then Tom Petty’s Rebel Without a Clue. Then Courtney sang “Celebrity Skin” and then the whole world just started watching American Idol and Rock Star: INXS and the process reversed itself. We asked the audience to vote and to find a star that had “it.” But these boys and girls are music academy snobs with helicopter parents who’ve never really lived. We elect them based on a history of what genius is supposed to look like. Carrie Underwood? There’s no there there. There’s no genius. There was never any genius. There’s a look and there’s a voice. The rest is all manufactured.

And not to get political, but Ronald Reagan had a part in this, too. I know history has rewritten all of it, but I will die knowing that that man was a dumb actor, not a genius. And although he wasn’t the worst, he paved the way for guys like W. Bush to become POTUS. It’s a straight line from there to Carrie Underwood.

And the radio stations play them because the people know them. And we say “see, it’s successful because people buy it” or in the case of politics “look at the approval rating!” All backwards. Having made it USED to be the proof that you were talented, now I don’t assume you’re talented just because I know your name, or you’re on TV, or you won an award.  And, consequently, the predominant style of music today is not “beat” or “pop” or “rap” or “rock” or “country.” The predominant style of music today is a formula. Sure, blues is a formula, too. But genius does something with it. Blues is a raw material. There’s no raw material anymore. Manufactured cardboard cutouts just do what the computer prints out. Rick Rubin, Timbaland, will.i.am, John Shanks – they aren’t supposed to BE the talent, they’re supposed to help the talent put some shine on their raw genius. Mold the clay. That’s how it used to work. No longer. Linda Perry had one hit as a singer. She couldn’t sell an album as an artist today. Then all of the sudden she’s writing songs for Kelly Osbourne??? The un-genius daughter of one of the true geniuses? All  backwards. Ozzy was the old way, Kelly is the new way.

We can’t look for talent within the system anymore. The system develops money, not talent. And the formula, although designed to make money is also designed NOT to make genius. Shave off all the corners and call it a perfect shape. That’s not why we love music. I don’t need it perfect, I need it pure, driven, full of life. And the system is lifeless and creates the veneer of art out of a composite of lifeless elements. We’re not building out of clay anymore, we’re carving out of cardboard.

Nice accomplishment for $12:

If I had to pick one artist/band from each decade I’ve lived in, the one that personally defined that time period for me…. it looks like this:

60’s – Bob Dylan. I was only alive for a couple years of the Sixties, but it seems like Bob Dylan was being played since a crib really was a crib and well into the 70’s. His music defined my childhood, introduced me to song, storytelling, poetry, critical thinking and the world.

70’s – Cat Stevens. His voice IS the Seventies to me. I listened to him just about every chance I got. Because of him, I didn’t know the difference between children’s songs and adult songs (“Moonshadow” still sounds like a kid song to me) and I think I am better off for that. If Dylan gave me a view outside my private world, despite a questionable singing voice, Cat was the polar opposite: the most charming voice that has ever inhabited a singer with songs amazingly personal.

80’s – Van Morrison. Obviously, he has seminal work from the 60’s and 70’s, but for me, his music was the go-to songs of the 80’s. And since he was still making music (really good music) well into the 80’s, I feel okay about it. Van got me through a lot of hard times, he was almost a guiding voice to me. I feel like I learned as much from him as I did from a formal education.

90’s – U2. Perhaps not coincidentally, U2 being heavily influenced by its relationship with Dylan, Van and Keith Richards, became the major band of the 90’s for me, even though my favorite album of theirs was released in ‘87, my second favorite was in ‘91 and I listened to them regularly throughout. Bono’s achilles heel is his preachiness, but I respect his passion and what seems like a true desire to give equal weight to both parts of the term “pop artist.”

00’s – Beck. Like U2, you could argue that Beck is from the decade before, but it’s an imperfect concept to begin with. Regardless, Beck is to U2 what Cat Stevens is to Dylan: the introverted, or inside out, version of the other. U2 faced me outward, preached and wined about the world whereas Beck faced me inward and found a new strange inroad into the deeply personal, especially with his work in the 2000’s.

So, there you go. If you got the time and the desire, I’d love to hear your list. Throw it down…

As I watch Wilco and Feist perform together on Letterman – not on TV, mind you, but on YouTube, two days later – I’m laughing at my own comment about Indie music being one band with many voices. But as I look at the two of them and consider the long roads that lead them togehter, I realize it has become confusing as to what is Indpendent and what is just Alternative music that reached critical acclaim. It doesn’t really matter to me, so long as good music gets played.

Alt rock bands in my day were called College Rock, as they got played on the college radio stations. It wasn’t so much that they were independent as they were playing stuff that didn’t get on the corporate-owned stations. R.E.M., for example, and punk. That sense of being “outside the mainstream” and true to their own vision was appealing to me even back then, at the same time (probably not coincidentally) that the music industry was starting to harden its secret formula. Again, the silly putty metaphor – national radio starts getting squeezed, personal music pops up somewhere else. That’s not entirely different than what is happening today on the Web with artists that have no label at all. Substitute “college radio station” with sites like My Old Kentucky Blog and Gorilla vs Bear. Or even consider the role of the mix-tape for rap artists. It all amounts to the same thing: a distribution channel to match up fresh, interesting, different music with ears that enjoy it. If there weren’t a lot of people just like me, with my kinds of taste, those channels wouldn’t exist and thrive. Thankfully, music makers and music listeners always seem to be able to find each other.

It all hinges on a new kind of financial model where the “DJs” (now bloggers) are free to use their ear to choose what they play, where money is not leverage in that decision. The bloggers get their money from the ads on their site and the artists get their money from people who find them and buy their independent albums or tracks off of iTunes or go to their concerts. It is a symbiotic relationship insomuch as they DO NOT exchange money between them. This is the right model (and the same model we had before radio stations were bought by corporations who influenced what was played) as it eliminates the backroom deals that lead to compromises on quality that eat away at the genre, from the inside out to all the edges. So long as this stays true, we all win.

But the important part of it all (for me, of course), is that my kind of music has place to be discovered, promoted and played. And it’s not just my kind of music, it’s the kind of music that made music music. It’s freeing the songbird. The girl or guy who can express herself or himself better with a guitar in hand than with words or anything else. That person isn’t a business person, I don’t want them to be. American Idol (to agree with you, Hirp), promotes business music, where human expression is emulated, not felt. The contestants are egged on to have “that thing” which is a euphemism for “what emotion looks like,” not what emotion is. Some can fake it, some can’t. But make no mistake, nobody up there is singing about the human plight, or feeling the human plight. They are coddled in the sparkly glory of adoration, a part of the music-making process that should come last, not first. All part of the backwards model of success we’ve promoted these days where you are praised first and have an accomplishment later (or, as I used to call it, “Pretty Girl Syndrome”).

As the Wilco/Feist duet comes to an end and I hear that clapping, that real clapping, I am encouraged. Hooray for music that reaches into the soul and tells us we’re okay for being human, fallible, confused, angry, despondent or in love. Hooray for humans who continue to evolve and create revolutions in the arts, so we all can sing.

I’ve been listening to mostly all independent music for the last few years. Not to say I don’t have a go at more established bands, and not to say I don’t like a lot of established bands. I do. But if I’m counting my time spent on deep music-listening, it’s mostly with independent music stations, blogs and unknowns, recommended by friends. I still sit down with a CD and have a real audiophile-type listen on my real stereo every once in a while, but if I’m thinking about music the way I did when I was a kid – a form of expression that enhances my mood and soundtracks my life (my preferred listening) – it’s my go-to classics and independents. Why?

Because music-making has changed. And so has the music industry. But I have not.

The notion of an “album” is a relic from a day when music came from music stores. The ones you walked into and around, discovering. With that all but gone, most of that construct dies, including hard packaging. There’s very little reason, today, to group songs together, other than for some artistic purpose and habit. A purpose that very few young musicians grew up experiencing and so have little connection with. The album was born of necessity and became a flat round box within which an artist “had” to work. Artists thrived in that construct. As those limits vanished, nothing took its place and the industry meandered without purpose, divvying up selections of songs based mostly on time between tours, not the evolution of the artist.

“Making it,” in this day and age, means joining forces with a marketing team, of sorts, that has a formula, of sorts. However, it’s not a creative structure, it’s a selling structure. So, it doesn’t promote innovation or new kinds of personal expression. It doesn’t not want that, it just isn’t what drives the industry, so it cares about it about as much as oil companies care about car design. Artistry isn’t disliked, it just dies from neglect. It reminds me of the concept that our school system isn’t in the education business, but rather the graduate business. Or that movie theaters aren’t in the movie business, they’re in the popcorn business. This is the nature of capitalism and it has its advantages, too. One must only be aware that giant success in business is based on some kind of populism, homogeny or ubiquity and, by nature, forces out that which is odd and, often that which is deeply personal. So, I am at odds with what the industry produces, which is, for the most part, singles, not full albums. Styles played until they become played out. Vocal qualities with little regard for the words conveyed. It is music unbundled. Parts which equal no whole. At least not for me.

We are in a world of mid-fidelity. MP3s are, really, the high end of quality now. Studies have shown that Teens actually prefer the sound of MP3s to most other music types, simply because they are used to it. The way kids in Beverly Hills prefer the look of silicone-enhanced breasts. You like what you know. MP3s have unlocked a type of convenience in music-listening that trumps the subtle differences in quality. Having it on my phone, on the bus and in an airport is too good of an opportunity to say no to. And, so, knowing that high-end audio experiences have gone the way of the two-martini lunch, musicians too have relieved themselves of the pressure of the subtle nuance of music-making, trading instead in the business of hooks, vocal gymnastics and, often, just simple loudness. Imgagine if all art was only seen from moving cars; it would change the way the artist thought about how to reach people. Some distant version of that is happening to music-making.

I, on the other hand, have not changed. Popular music from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s resonate with me more than popular music from the 90’s and 2000’s. Or, for that matter, the ’40’s or 50’s. My music collection reflects that. I have a taste for the singer/songwriter sound and music with certain amount of raw humanity to it. And I’m fairly unwavering on that. That’s what resonates with me. That is said without any judgment at all on the music that doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t regard it as “worse,” simply as not as resonant to my ears. I am, after all, born to a specific era and I am shaped by my surroundings, like anyone. So, when I seek out music to listen to that’s not part of my permanent collection, I look for something that moves me in similar ways, not necessarily something current.

What does this all leave for me? Independent music. On the whole, people are making music more to my specific preferences when they have an unbridled passion for it, sans the influence of mainstream media’s tastes and realities of today’s music industry. Fortunately, there is now an industry that surrounds being outside the industry. The best live music events of the year predminantly feature independent bands: SXSW, Coachella, Pitchfork, etc. Also, the Web is a major listening post for independent bands, who freely offer their music up, in the forms of streams, videos and promotional videos. Even satellite radio has a station for independent music, brought to you by bloggers. And that’s what I listen to.

But that comes with a certain sacrifice, too: I miss familiarity. It is said that tennis is one of the few sports where people don’t root for the underdog. We want our long-standing champions: our McEnroes, Samrpases and Federers. These people drive the sport. Music is a little like that for me, too. I want so badly for a sustained music career from an artist that I deeply enjoy. I loved runs from bands like The Police, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, KISS, Queen, Tom Petty, Van Morisson and The Who. These kinds of bands had both commecial success and the latitude to experiment and evolve over time. I miss that. But what has replaced it is the aggregate of all independent music. It all moves together now in a group sway kind of way. Watching themes rise and fall within the walls of this entity called Independent Music is a little like watching David Bowie go from Psychadelic to Glam to Soul to German(?) and on and on. Independent Music is like a single band that I’m really into made up of thousands of musicians who take turns at the mic.

Independent music can go places that nobody else can. Talk about things that nobody else can talk about. They can try different notes. They can afford to fail because no one’s paying them to stay the same. That to me is the heart and soul of music and nobody could have drawn it up this way which speaks to the power of music, and art. Whatever  forces push in against it, the true essence of it will continue to pop up, somewhere… like squeezing silly putty.

I’m sure as you get older you learn to romanticize the imagery of your youth. Certainly, that is the subject of many a song, novel, script, poem, probably even architecture, dance and other things, like how you parent. Down home this past week, I travelled through my own ghostly playgrounds and flashes of images past seeped through in flickery, Proustian, Christopher Walken in “Dead Zone” kind of way. No coincidence, then, that I’d wander upon this video today, looking like memories I didn’t know I had and, who knows, maybe they are mine, it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. The band is new (Bibio), the look is old, but the effect is nothing less than stunning and has me lost in a daze of childhood school days of overhead projectors, endless educational videos and banal things seen for the first time. It defies description, I am only glad that certain artists are able capture small pieces of it so I don’t feel crazy when the flood comes.

The site is called Curatorialist, but although I kind of know what that means, I’ve never really bothered to explain it, in full. Maybe because it’s more of a process than a thing. I have a particular way of finding things. It involves, usually, reading something, but sometimes seeing something, or hearing something. But that is not usually the thing that ends up making it here. I am looking for something, I just don’t know exactly what it is until I find it. It echoes the way I write, draw and photograph. The beginning is never the end and, usually, the beginning is even erased. The first sentence, the first lines, the first shot — by in large, nobody ever sees those. I am, in fact, mostly embarrassed by them. When I write, the first thing I write is mostly something trite or said before a hundred times.  I self-loathe over those first lines, written or drawn, all the time. I know others do, too. Working past those initial knee-jerk thoughts is where the work comes in – and the struggle.

Curatorialist is the process of finding something through that darkness. Stumbling onto it through a form of study that I invented when I was a kid, in school. I found it hard to stay on track with books and my mind wandered. However, study time was study time, so I fished around in my room until some kind of connection was formed. I might have a book report to get done, but it was rarely that book that helped me write the report. My inspiration happened when I wasn’t looking at it, but listening to the radio, thumbing through encyclopedias, Time Life books or just day dreaming. The ability to make the two things connect was out of necessity – time was running out. It was either that, or fail.

I was reminded of all this because I felt the same patterns tonight as I was reading a LA Times article about the Asia America Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven’s Ninth this week. Before I could even get through the short article, I went to see about purchasing a ticket for myself online. I was already scrambling about. Hit play…

I came across this Leonard Bernstein-conducted version of it and listened in awe (it was performed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an amazing side story in and of itself – another hour gone), particularly to the vocal amazingness of Shirley Verrett. That lead to me more videos of her and then wondering what the hell they are singing in Ode To Joy (something I’m embarrassed to say I’d never looked up – the filling in of embarrassing gaps in knowledge is a major energizing force in my process). That lead to reading about Beethoven’s life. That lead to Schiller’s life, the poet who wrote Ode To Joy (actually just called “To Joy”). Somewhere in that reading, I discovered that another of Schiller’s poems was also put to music. Beethoven chose Schiller’s poem because it was great. That was a harder path for him because, in the process of adapting it for music, the challenge would be harder (how do you improve upon greatness?). His darkness.

Continue reading ‘Ode to Joy/A Song of Mourning’

I haven’t even seen it and I know it’s interesting. Just the premise alone is worthy of spending some time on. I will be furiously hunting for re-airings of this show, so I can get the full story, but until then, I’m watching these little clips on the PBS site. Everything from scientists studying how birds make songs, to songwriters getting scans of their brains to Bobby McFerrin discussing the different roles music has between cultures. One of my favorite books ever is Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” which opened my mind to the inner workings of the human brain and redefined cultural standards for how we think about linguistics, which influence many parts of Western thinking. Coincidentally, or not, this show is called “The Music Instinct” and it seems to be further proof that humans are more amazing, by design, than we give ourselves credit for. We have a cultural bias to believe that you have to work hard to become creative, but in fact, it seems to be in us from the get go. That’s a great, hopeful, thought and could mean a lot for the field of education, if they were paying attention. It is, after all, PBS – can we get these people to talk to those people?

The site is here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/

The schedule tool to figure out when it’s playing next is here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/schedule/

Posters back in the day weren’t that easy to get your hands on. Not the good ones, anyway. The record store my band hung out in on the weekends had posters on the wall that were terminally Not For Sale. Which made me want them all the more. The most coveted ones were the black and white Specials and Selector posters that Chrysalis and 2 Tone labels put out. The look of those were raw and graphic, playful but serious. Nothing else in the record store looked anything like it. We got our cues as to how the rude boys in the UK were dressing from those posters, and we followed suit. Pins were a big deal back then, too, and nobody was pumping out more black and white pins than The Specials. We wore them on our black suspenders, we wore the white socks with the black shoes, we drew black and white checkers on everything. But I never got my hands on one of those posters.

I guess the chance has come up again as many of them are being reprinted. David Storey, one of the guys behind that iconic look, has a limited edition set of six that he’s offering on his site. A bit on the pricey side, but if adulthood isn’t for buying the crap you couldn’t get as a kid, then what good is it?

Check it here: http://www.david-storey.co.uk/shop.html