The Music Biz

First of all, let me be clear that I don’t have a problem with anyone making money off of music. From the sidewalk busker with the guitar case open and the homemade CDs for sale to the merch table at a punk show, to the web sites where you can buy jackets with the band’s logo—hey, musicians need to eat, and they are offering something for the money. I’m pragmatic about that. (I do think Ticketmaster’s cut is ridiculous, but that’s a separate story.)
 

I don’t automatically have a problem with studio-created bands either. My CD collection contains C+C Music Factory, Technotronic, No Mercy, and the Monkees, and if they don’t necessarily have the staying power of the Clash, well, not all bands that start as a bunch of friends playing in a garage have that staying power either. Some things work out, and some don’t, and it’s not always a matter of worthiness.

Sometimes when I am working on a topic things that would appear to be only tangentially related pop up that enrich the whole experience. So one interesting piece that I found was this:

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/09/thomas_kinkade_the_george_w_bush_of_art/

Without spending time on Kinkade, or even the article, the main thing that was interesting is kitsch is not necessarily harmless, and it is most harmful to those who do not see it as kitsch. So, back to that “pop” music.

I realize that there are people who are down on pop music in general, some because they consider it to be too shallow, and some specifically for the popularity from which it derives its name. That’s not me. First of all, there is a wide range in the level of depth and seriousness, and if a song about dancing makes you feel like dancing, well at least it’s accomplished something.

Also, I am not one to hate something for being popular. I deleted someone on Facebook once for using the term “sheeple”. Okay, there had been irritation leading up to it, but it all revolved around that attitude of superiority.  Lots of people liking something is not an automatic indictment, and the art needs to be judged on its own merit.  I do get irritated by hype, but that is more of an issue of the item not deserving it. I don’t hate “Twilight” because it’s popular—I hate it because it’s crap, and because it is crap, I hate that it is popular. There may still be some snobbery in my attitude, but I can’t just dismiss people or their taste in general. They need to be judged on their own merits too.

I suppose that is why I felt like I had to subject myself to listening to so much contemporary music, as opposed to just assuming I would hate it. Now I have listened to songs and watched videos (or parts of videos) by Justin Bieber, One Direction, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, 98 Degrees, (I felt like I already had enough familiarity with the New Kids on the Block), Jonas Brothers, Naked Brothers, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Ashlee Simpson, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Hilary Duff, Aly & AJ, Miley Cyrus, and Lindsey Lohan.

First point, and this is absolutely essential, my disdain has been vindicated. I realize my education may not be complete until I also watch a few episodes of American Idol, and if that is the case I am taking some time off from school, but yes, this is a ton of garbage, and I am lucky that my mind scrubs out stuff like this so none of it is stuck in my head. I can recall little phrases if I try, and I certainly got a few laughs along the way (especially Jonas Brothers “Bounce”; it’s their attempt at hip hop, and it’s funny and sad).

This is where I start rambling and having a hard time with organization though, and I’m not quite sure where to go with it. Actually, that’s not right. It goes in multiple directions, so the question is what order to hit things in, and also staying coherent, especially as we reach the point where I get mad. (Seriously, I have eleven pages of notes, and I am still neither done nor coherent.)

Really, in some ways I think I have done very well with this. I mean, I have been posting consistently, none of the posts are too long, and most of them have been pretty focused until the last two days, I guess, so that is going well. If you are not interested in music, or in my thoughts on music, it’s probably been pretty annoying.

What comes ahead is why this “music” is not merely not good, but potentially harmful, socially aware commentary, and parenting advice from someone who doesn’t have any nieces or nephews. Sometimes it’s hard to take the excitement.

Genre busting

“There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” – Duke Ellington

Actually, lots of people seem to have said that one, but apparently Ellington said it when asked to define jazz. At the same time, when I was updating my review for “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life” on Goodreads, I read some other reviews, and one person was complaining about the title because one of the featured bands was hip hop, which meant the title should be “Commercial Pop will Save My Life”.

The change in possessive is because he felt the book was too much about Steve Almond (fair), but I think some of the genre thing was also a slam at Dave Grohl, whom the reviewer referred to as a commercial pop hack (unfair) and who ended up being kind of the hero of the book as the one who was both successful and happy. I think the problem with the title is that it sounds cool, but is simply not demonstrated by the book at all. The inclusion of hip hop was a fairly minor part, and having that as a complaint seems churlish.

In addition, the more I listen to different music, the more I feel like I am moving away from finding genres helpful. They can be in a broad sense. Something that is likely to be called punk is unlikely to be called country (unless it’s punkabilly, I guess). If you gravitate towards the Ramones, it is likely that you will prefer the Clash to Tim McGraw, but you can’t be sure. I love both the Clash and the Ramones, but I have no use for the Sex Pistols (at least not yet), and yes, they are a legacy from college, but I have two Martina McBride CDs in my collection.

Going further than that, even within a band’s discography there may be a lot of variation. It would be wrong to stubbornly confine a band to their previous image. Ozzy Osbourne’s “So Tired” came around before it was fashionable for metal bands to have power ballads, and it’s not really a power ballad anyway. It’s not metal, but it is Ozzy, and he is metal, so what does that make it? Just a good song. Being able to grow and experiment can make artists happier and more fulfilled, and it can broaden your appreciation, so if your band keeps reinventing itself, give it a chance.

There was a story from Springfest that I had not recounted earlier, but I was thinking about. The winner of the Battle of the Bands was Shumba, which was a sort of a pseudo-African tribal music group with a lot of marimba and gourds and things. This is not to knock them—they were a real crowd pleaser— and where they really scored big points was in diversity. (Yes, diversity was one of the categories on the scoring ballot, and if you know anything about University of Oregon, that should not surprise you at all.)

Anyway, talking with John later (Something She Said came in third), he pointed out that they were scoring all the diversity points because they were different from the other bands, but there was not really musical diversity because all of their numbers sounded the same. He was right. He mentioned the Pogues as a good example of a group that experiments a lot, and I don’t know a lot of their stuff, but it seems fair. Some of the love songs I considered for the Valentine’s Day countdown ended up being dismissed because they sound too much like the band’s other songs, and that loses something too. (Fine, that was mainly anything by Air Supply and Journey, even though I like them.)

Anyway, genres came up again as part of this project, and this is kind of a funny, multi-part story, so I’m just going to throw it in.

One of the bands I listened to for my “pop” listening was One Direction. The reason I knew there was such a thing is that when I was listening to Justin Bieber I was not sure if I was listening to old stuff or new stuff, so I sent Lisa an instant message asking if his voice had changed yet. Yes, she is the one who gave me the Mean Jeans CD and provided the alternative love songs list, but also she’d had a little bit of the Bieber fever, thinking he was really adorable. What I had not known is that his “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was an abomination that turned her against him. (She was not wrong.)

Anyway, asking her about his voice changing (maybe a little), and explaining what I was doing, she said she was watching SNL and that I should check out One Direction, because they were a boy band based on the idea of Bieber. I naturally assumed they were something like 2Gether or the Meaty Cheesy Boys, but she said something else about them, and I had to pause, and write “You mean they were the musical guest? Not a skit?” She confirmed that they were real, and all I could type was “Hulk sad.”

(Which amused her more than I was expecting, but I believe her boyfriend is into graphic novels.)

After listening to One Direction and watching one of their videos, I was saying how much it reminded me of the Blink 182 video for “All the Small Things”, and suddenly Lisa was going off on how they were not punk because once you were making millions of dollars you were no longer punk. I see her point, though I am not sure I agree, but the other Lisa actually stormed out, unable to deal. I kind of think something else was bothering her, because she’s more in Christian music and rap, but it was really weird.

If I have a point here (which is a little questionable), it’s that I’m leaning towards Ellington being right. It is completely possible to disagree on what is good, and have it go back to your chemistry with the song, but there’s no point in being a slave to genres, and deciding that you hate country and like ska and love reggae but electronica is stupid (even though I kind of do want to say some of those things).

Saying that, I should probably just say that it is all subjective, and whatever you like is great; it’s all good. I can’t quite do that, though, and that’s going to be our transition into exploring the dark side of “pop”.

Lost in the Music

My opening anecdote for this one will only use initials. We have a friend who we believe is on the Aspergers-Autism spectrum. He is smart and high-functioning, but he does get lost in his thoughts pretty easily, and he is not good at picking up social queues, especially from girls flirting with him. We shall call him B.

When we were still getting to know him, we would hear things back from other girls about how mean he was or how stuck on himself he was, and it did not make sense at all, because we had found him really friendly and engaging. We happened to share some interests, and we started a conversation that was great, and we thought he was fine.

As we had more encounters and saw that you did need to work to get his attention, and observed girls trying to hit on him, and figured out whom the negative reports were coming from, it all started to make sense. Needy insecure girls would try very hard to get B to ask them out, or to compliment them, or something, they would fail miserably and decide he was a jerk.

This was not B’s fault. First of all, they were game-playing, which most guys do not do well with anyway. Honestly, it’s the guys who play the game exactly right that you should worry about. They don’t usually get that way by being great boyfriend material. So the girls were starting out wrong in the first place, and in the second place B had no idea that there was even a game on.

I do not think this means that he can never be successful romantically. What he will need is a woman who is confident in herself, not only in that she does not need a lot of building up, but that she is comfortable in asking for what she does need, clearly. Also, it would not hurt her to keep something shiny in her pocket, maybe be willing to jangle keys or something as the occasion warrants. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I was watching a video by a band I like (not My Chemical Romance in this case), and they were showing the drummer, and he was really focused and in the zone, I guess, and it flashed over me that if B was a drummer, that was exactly how he would play.

This is not in any way to imply that R (the drummer) is on the spectrum as well, but it started me paying more attention to how musicians play.

Not all of them get lost in their own little world. Sometimes it is a shared world between two guitarists. With the Goo Goo Dolls, Johnny Rzeznik and Robby Takac are very connected while playing. You totally buy them as best friends. 

There is room for different contexts as well. A musician in the middle of composing, versus practicing, versus performing, is going to be operating at different levels. Nonetheless, it is often easy to see that they are being transported by the music.

Even if it’s not as easy to do now, I used to watch music videos all the time, and they weren’t all elaborate shoots in Sri Lanka. Sometimes it was just a band playing on a dark set with leaves flying around or something. I enjoy these videos a lot too, though, because often you can see the pure joy that they get from the performing. And if you think about what goes into a regular film shoot, it’s amazing that they are looking joyful, because this could easily be take 30, and they keep getting stopped in the middle for touch-ups or camera adjustments, but there is still that love for what they do.

That’s why I can’t really be surprised when bands that used to play arenas play small towns like Lewiston, Idaho, or when a few weeks after your friend’s band breaks up, he’s formed a new one (or he’s in multiple bands at the same time). It’s in their blood and they can’t stop.

I know there are girlfriends who hate this, and girlfriends who appreciate the time off, and really, it can totally play havoc with the schedule. It’s love, though, and so I can’t help but approve. Maybe that’s part of why my experience with musicians has generally been that they are really kind people. They have something bigger than the individual that brings them together as groups, and then brings more people together for an audience. (And no matter how many times you disappoint them, they will never quit inviting you to their shows. They can’t.) I know there are obnoxious musicians, but it’s more something I’ve heard about than experienced.

By the same token, it’s gratifying that when I listen to interviews with the bands that I like they seem likable. Some of it could be image control, but maybe their personality comes through their music, and that’s where some of the chemistry comes from.

(It’s not foolproof. I have not really seen any Gin Blossoms interviews, but I worry that I might not want to be around them when they’re drinking, and I can’t shake this nagging feeling that John Waite is a jerk, or at least has been one. I hope I’m wrong.)

Music, Movies, & Books

Today’s post is going to be kind of trivial. It may be somewhat interesting, but I’m also using it to buy time. My musings from listening to the “pop” music ended up a bit more serious than I intended them to be, with a lot playing into it.

One potential issue is that it will result in an unusually meandering post, even for me. That can work for a complex topic, but it can also dilute things, and this is important. And it’s kind of getting into the social/political realm again, where I really thought I was just going to write about music for a while, then some television writing, and have kind of a break from the serious. Long story short, I’m ordering my thoughts, so here’s some filler.

Recently I have listened to mentions of both musicians having movies running in the background while they are working, and of writers having music in the background when they are working.

This makes sense. There is artistic stimulation, but not of they same type you are working on, which would interfere, and someone asked what songs do you play when you are writing.

Well, it depends a lot depending on what I am working on, but I can cover the major screenplays and projects here.

Obviously I am listening to Danger Days by My Chemical Romance for the graphic novel. The other CDs I am listening to more when I am working or blogging, and they do have parts that relate, but it is really mainly Danger Days. In fact, one song, “The Only Hope for Me is You” relates so well to the Christmas Eve scene that if it was a cheesy musical, the two leads would sing it together, and I can see exactly how they would circle, not facing each other, to convey that they are distant, even though they are both on stage. And it is not at all that the song is cheesy, or that the emotions in the scene should be, but musicals can be, and you need to make sure not to get overwrought when you are dealing with strong emotions, so having that image tells me she needs to not say very much, and he needs to not be shown at all.

Something that I am going to be working on soon, for television (but I am not ready to talk about it yet), I believe will be a mix of the Damned and the Eurythmics. It works. On to the movies.

First of all, Jade Mask and Past Present do not have associated music. I guess there just isn’t really anything to fit them. Jade Mask would almost certainly have a sound track, but Past Present is kind of heavy, and neither softening it or accentuating it would work. I think you would need to kind of go like Hitchcock did with The Birds. Coulrophobia did not have any specific music for it either, and I have no good reason for that. I guess Slipknot or Insane Clown Posse would have made the most sense, but no.

The two dance movies have the strongest musical associations. Between the Lines started with line dancing, so it is all songs that have dances, and one that totally should. They are Dance with You, by George Strait; Any Man of Mine, Shania Twain; 500 Miles, the Proclaimes; and Karma Chameleon by Culture Club (you listen to it and tell me that it is not a little bit country). I think I played Footloose a few times too, which also works.

Incidentally, you are not supposed to designate songs in a screenplay, because the director will probably want a say, and then a lot of it will come down to obtaining song rights, and I get that, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t know what it should be.

With Out of Step, “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer, and “Barely Breathing” by Duncan Sheik are really pretty necessary, along with various ballroom dancing type pieces, and also “Bring Me to Life” by Evanscence.

Against the Grain will pretty much be a lot of punk, and especially needs to have “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones. It is the perfect song for their first encounter. The untitled Scottish movie definitely goes with “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton, but I suspect I will also be listening to Big Country, Bay City Rollers, and more Proclaimers.

Working on Counting the Cost (that was the one that had both a writing partner and it was a novel adaptation) had a key scene where “Put You Little Foot” was featured, so I would play that and then other songs with similar moods, like “Tennessee Waltz”.

Hungry does have some known songs, including both a slow and a faster version of “Forever Young” by Alphaville (actually, I changed the scene that would have used the faster version, so maybe not), as well as “Howling at the Moon” by the Ramones. There would be one pulsing techno track that becomes just a beat during the attack. However, I also ended up writing a lot for it. Some were songs that would belong on the soundtrack, and then sometimes I would be working on something that I would think would be for the movie, but then it didn’t fit when I was done, and yet it was still connected. And while the song for the photo shoot “More More More” is kind of weak, and could easily be traded out, the song for the end credits is perfect, provides a nice motif for the score, and would sound perfect sung by David Bowie who has a good vampire connection.

I think that ultimately that will be one I will have to produce on my own. It has been such a part of my life for so long, starting with a scary dream I had when I was 14 and changing and growing with me, and I have such strong ideas about it, that I can’t imagine handing it over to someone else.

What about the book connection? Well, as I have been taking this musical writing journey, and wishing I knew more about various things, and in many cases, there are books on my reading list that if I had already read them, they would probably be quite helpful. That’s just what I get for always being behind on my reading. (Sadly, I find books I want to read about three times faster than I read them.)

On the plus side, having already read Talking to Girls about Duran Duran and Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield and Rock On by Dan Kennedy has been good, and although I did not enjoy Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond as much as I wanted to, it provided some food for thought as well. Anyway, here are some titles that I expect to enjoy:

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, Jeff Chang
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Oliver Sacks
No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, David Walley
Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & the Shondells, Tommy James
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, Rosalind Wiseman
The House that Berry Built, Dornford Yates
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, Ellen Willis
Guitar Player Presents Guitar Heroes of the ‘70s, Michael Molenda
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Craig Marks
The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best Kept Secret, Kent Hartman

Some of those may not seem to fit, but believe me, they will.

I am pretty sure I will check out Nile Rodgers’ memoir at some point. I would love for Bob Rock to write one.

Notes from a fan-girl

I thought it would be a good idea to address the My Chemical Romance obsession, because I know it’s noticeable. I am completely comfortable loving the band and listening to the band, but there is also this sense that I have reverted to being a 14-year old girl, and I’m not quite as thrilled about that. Let's be clear what that entails, also. I am not dreaming about marrying any of them, doodling their names into hearts, or changing my user name to MCRfan, but I am listening obsessively, wanting to talk about the music, and verging on gushing.

Although I had seen clips of someone (not a band member) talking about ”Helena” on some VH1 show, you couldn’t really hear the song from that, so all I know is some guy was talking about remembering a hot dead girl. I was not really watching music videos at the time really, as the music video channels were now showing shows about people’s memories of music videos (and other things) rather than videos themselves. My first actual introduction to the music came when I was writing the ward history for 2007, and I wanted to interview all of the people who had gotten baptized that year. Ryan’s ring was “Welcome to the Black Parade”, and even though it was just the “We’ll carry on” part, I loved it. I had to ask Maria to tell me what it was.

Now one would think that I would have gotten into them then, and I can’t really give any good reason why I didn’t. Maybe I was not ready for them yet, except I did end up being totally ready for “I’m Not Okay”, and getting really into that about a year later. This happened after the world economy collapsed, and I lost my job, and I got the flu, and one morning I woke up to hear my mother crying, and found out Zio Paolo had died, and the last thing that happened before I went to bed that night was finding out that Josh had died, and we were iced in for four non-consecutive weeks, and I got the job offer from HR Block right after I signed the non-compete clause with Liberty, but before I found out that he was not really going to have enough work to keep all of us busy, and there was more but basically, yes, during that time I can promise you that I was not okay. I listened to that song a lot, and sang it a lot, whenever I was in the house alone.

It would have made sense for me to have clicked around more and listened to more songs, but actually, I was listening to a lot of Keane too. I was drawn to them by “Somewhere Only We Know”, but the one that ended up really keeping me was “Everybody’s Changing”. Based on the title, that was not really my problem. My life was upside down, but everybody else seemed pretty stable. Still that line, “Trying to make a move just to stay in the game, I try to stay awake and remember my name,” resonated with me. Often I kind of listen to music in pairs, and “I’m Not Okay” and “Everybody’s Changing” were it.

So time went on. After about a year temp jobs came that kept me going, a real job came that has a lot of good things about it, but there was certainly some stress in the adjustment, and it came at a time when there was a side project that was driving me crazy, and then there was the refinance and Mom’s surgeries and other stressors which I have not really written about yet, but will, and there was never really time to breathe.

On the simplest level, the change came from the Valentine’s song list, when Lisa provided her alternatives. As I was listening to “Saturday Night” over and over again, it formed a new couplet with “I’m Not Okay” (in some ways they are more compatible than the original pairing), and this time I started clicking on other things. Yes I did click on other Misfits songs, and I like a lot of it. Even more though, I clicked on more My Chemical Romance songs.

The tipping point was really “Na Na Na”. Suddenly I was listening to everything—all songs, all interviews, and even related bands, like Pencey Prep (Frank Iero’s old band) and Mindless Self-Indulgence (Gerard’s wife’s band).

I think there are two points to the obsessive part. One is that this is all new. Usually when a new song gets to me, I will play it repeatedly, but it is only one song. Right now I am listening to three of their CDs plus Pencey Prep, and counting bonus tracks that’s about fifty different songs, and I have had days where I have listened to all of them, some of the tracks multiple times, plus whatever I was working on for the guitar list. I have said that I lean more towards OCD than ADD, and that is true, but I can still get a bit on the hyperactive side, and I am prone to getting over-stimulated. So there’s that going on, and that is probably a big part of how I may resemble this teenager hopped up on music.

There is a bigger picture though. Going back to the end of 2008, and all of the awful things that followed, at that time I was so stressed out that it was easy to know that I was not okay.  As things settled down, being out of crisis mode was good, but I had been in it so long that I did not even realize that I had built up a sizable fun deficit, and a satisfaction deficit.

Now I’m getting at the point where things are turning around. I am getting into a regular exercise routine again, and making sure to get outside again. Those are huge for me. We have traveled again, and we have more travel coming up. And I am writing again. When I wrote out my ten year plan in those areas after my birthday, I was not specifically thinking about how much I had been missing them—I just wanted to make sure that I had good things going on in my life, regardless of what else might or might not happen. It’s only starting to hit me now how much I had been missing it, and the writing was the final key.

It was hard to get started again. First of all it takes time, which is always in short supply, but there is also an element of habit, and no matter how many times I would try and eke out a blog post, even succeeding sometimes, I was not really there.

So, My Chemical Romance is a big part of that. First of all, musically it’s been a while since I have really taken to anything new. Even when I find a song from this century that I like (“World Spins Madly On” by the Weepies, “Never Forget You” by the Noisettes, “Hey Soul Sister” by Train), I don’t tend to like anything else by them. I’m fine listening to older stuff, but it’s nice to know that the music has not actually died.

Also, they are a huge part of my writing again. The graphic novel is because of them, and even with no expectations for it specifically, it feels good to be writing in that format again. It has been a long time. The blogging is sticking now, and they are a big part of that. Not only are they inspiring it, but they are playing most of the time when I am writing it.

I know their fan base skews a lot younger, and I don’t know whom I would attend a concert with, but it’s something, and it is exciting for me. I remember once noticing that a lot of people in the age group right above me were country fans, and I wasn’t sure if they had always been, or that they just changed, and their tastes changed (and degraded). Nope, I still want to rock. And as much as a relief as it might be to not be a teenager anymore, I don’t want to be mentally old either. I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Favorite music memories, not specifically guitar

I am enjoying tripping down memory lane, so here are a few more.

In honor of Record Store Day, I must mention trips to Tower Records with Mike—not that we did it that much, but he had always heard some thing new that he was checking out, and he really knew a lot about music. I have seen him play drums, guitar, banjo, and piano, including an absolutely beautiful piece that he composed, and that I really hope he did something with. So really, it is memories of Mike. Other good memories are…

Mom banging her cane up and down to “Howling for You” by the Black Keys: It was after her second knee surgery, and the recovery was going a lot better than the it did for the first one. Maria had her iPod in the docking station, and that came on, and Mom started going down the hall, rocking out to the music. Because her cane had this metal ring that was kind of loose, basically she became the percussion. She doesn’t use her cane anymore (sometimes I think she should), so even though she may still rock out on occasion, it will never be like that again.

Riding out to Sherwood to Hunting High and Low by a-ha: As long as we are going with family memories, this happened all the time. We had friends there, and Mom and Julie and Maria and I would pile into the Colt to go see them. I had recorded my vinyl copy of the album onto a cassette, and it was always in the tape deck, and we would sing along the whole way. I bet we still all have the entire album memorized.

Group sing to “Bohemian Rhapsody” (in the style of Queen) at Voicebox: A group of us for work had gone for happy hour. Voicebox has private karaoke rooms. I suspected this would be fun, so I insisted that we do this number, and all sing along, and it was awesome. Everyone was singing and passing the mic around, and not only was there air guitar, there was air piano. The only person who did not get really into it was Scott. Poor kid was not only too young for Queen—he was even too young for Wayne’s World.

Choreographing dance numbers for ward talent shows: I choreographed numbers for ET twice: one with her husband for “The Music of the Night”, and one with Mollie to “’Cause I’m a Blonde” by Julie Brown. Then there was one with my sisters and some friends for “Ice Ice Baby”. We did use humorous elements in all of them, but there were some cool things too, and they were crowd-pleasers, and it was just kind of fun.

Now, attending jam sessions does not exactly make the list, just because while I find them interesting and always learn something new, as the one who is just observing and not jamming, I tend to feel a bit awkward and useless. Sometime I should try one where there are groupies or girlfriends and try to blend in. I am confident that someone handing me a tambourine would only make things worse.

Here’s the one I have never told anyone: One night I had just attended a dance performance, and I had some waiting time alone at the train station. There was wind, and a flagpole with some rope and hooks, that was being blown in such a manner that the clanging of the hook and the scraping of the rope was making a pretty steady rhythm. Bum-bum-bum, bumm-bumm-bumm. So I did the only logical thing and started dancing.

Springfest Battle of the Bands: Springfest was put on by the dorms, and I volunteered to help with the Battle of the Bands. I got to help a lot. There was a lot to do, and I think we were basically a committee of five. A lot of the pre-work was cool. I made some awesome posters, we screened demo tapes of different bands, and we went to Duke’s to procure equipment.

Duke had a bar in Springfield, but he also rented equipment for music events. If you were a musician in the area back then, you knew about him. I don’t know if he’s still around, but he was great—super helpful and cool.

The day of the event itself was busy—I don’t think I participated in any of the other Springfest events—but it was a good kind of busy, working with the bands, helping with setup, getting ballots to and from the judges, and eventually the take-down, which was not awful because suddenly there were quite a few people helping.

The great thing was that after it was over it was not really over, because there were a bunch of musicians in the area and they all had their instruments, so we were just sitting in the grass and there was random music and dancing going on.

It’s weird how some things are still so clear years later. Like one of the bands, Skunk, that did not even make it in, but I still remember their demo tape, and their logo of a skunk formed by the word.

Looking back there is a sort of wistfulness to it, knowing some of the things that would come later. One of the guys on the committee, who was so helpful and engaged, would later get into drugs and kind of burn out, and I don’t know if he ever came out of that. One of the bands, Something She Said (I still have their tape), broke up shortly after. I had been friends with John, and later on I ended up working with Kurt (at Intel of all places), and he blamed his ego and really wished I could have put him in touch with John (I would have liked that too), but everyone had lost touch, and as far as I can tell neither of them are on Facebook now, and neither is Andrew Diamond of Movement (super-cute—he reminded me of Simon Lebon, they incorporated Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusic into one of their songs, and also very appreciative of my help), If Facebook had already been around, things would have been different, but most people weren’t even using e-mail yet back then.

So looking back there are things that are kind of sad, but that day was golden. We had orchestrated a good time for people, and it certainly would not have been possible without the bands, but this bunch of non-musicians had still been a part of making it happen, and it felt really satisfying.

So many of these memories are about a response that you get. Sometimes it is a physical response that is almost involuntary—you could control it, but why? Sometimes there is an emotional response in you, or the response that you have gotten from others, and there is this unity as you connect to the music together. It can be deeply personal, but also incredibly communal. And I realize that I would totally participate in putting on a music festival now, as scary a thought as that may be. Well, I do have a dream lineup ready to go, so at least there’s that.

Guitar stuff that makes me happy

Rolling Stone was entitled to their opinion, as I am to mine. Without any of the pressure of trying to come up with a comprehensive list or rating, these are just random guitar things that make me happy.

First of all I should say that I listened to “Smoke on the Water” again, and as well as Boston’s “More than a Feeling” (also one debated in the comments). I have thought of both in the past has having good parts, but not really being great songs, but they sounded better to me today. Perhaps my ears have grown three sizes today.
Maybe someday I will even like Tool. For now, these are things that I already like, and liked right away.

12-string guitars: I still remember the first time I heard one. I think I was heading to soccer practice, and there was a guy sitting down on the grass and playing, and I had never heard anything like it. Honestly, it was kind of magical.

Guys playing Van Morrison on the grass—specifically Brown-Eyed Girl: I suppose it could be overdone, or that other songs could work, but there was this really nice guy in the dorms that was playing Brown-Eyed Girl outside one day, and if I had not liked him before, that would have tipped the scales.

“Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes: If I understand correctly this is actually the bass, accompanied by the guitar playing the bass part an octave apart. Still, there is a guitar, and a bass is a guitar, right? So I’m counting it. There was a girl in the dorms who would play this and “Kiss Off” in an endless loop. Actually, I think it was the same person who was always playing the Warlock Pinchers “Morissey” song. Ah, college.

The Presidents of the United States of America: Speaking of non-traditional, they are missing strings from both their guibass and their bassitar, and it still totally works.

“Burning for You” by Blue Oyster Cult: It is really the only song I know from them, and it doesn’t really seem all that metallic, but I love it.

“Just What I Need” by Rufus King: This is also known as Cliff’s Song from “Bring It On”, and it is almost impossible to find anything on the performer, including whether it is a person or a band (this is partially due to there being a Rufus King High School, and historical figure for whom the high school is name, that clouds internet searches. I still love this song. Actually, both the guitar and the drums here make me happy.

“Take it Easy” by Andy Taylor: Yes I used both this and The Neverending Story to thwart Danielle, but this one rocks in a way that the other does not, and decades later it is still infectious. I usually listen to it with “Wild Wild West” by Escape Club”, and maybe “Inside Out” by Eve 6, because they kind of do the same thing for me.

“My Sharona” by the Knack: I was at a dance after not having been dancing for a long time, and this came on, and I just went nuts. I pulled out dance moves that I did not know I had. Honestly, I always thought it sounded like a Kinks song, and that is a compliment.

“Saturday Night” by the Misfits: This came up on the alternative love songs list. When I was memorizing this, in addition to the regular recording I listened to a few clips of Michale Graves doing an acoustic version too, and let me tell you, it is not the same. There guitar here is amazing, and you need the full effect.

I know I am obsessing a bit on the My Chemical Romance front lately, but I am going to limit myself to two here.

First off, “Summertime”. Unlike “Saturday Night”, this works as both acoustic and regular, which is nice because that makes it easier for kids to do in talent shows, which makes me kind of happy. And it is just beautiful. I can’t explain this right, but I was thinking maybe there was a mandolin or something—there is just a really different sound. It looks like it’s just regular guitars, though, and simply gorgeous.

Also, “I’m Not Okay”. This was my anthem for a while, so it holds a soft spot emotionally anyway, but when I did it for karaoke (after wanting to for three years and being intimidated), I was amazed at how the opening guitar affected me. Usually I was listening to it while working on the computer, or singing it around the house a capella, but standing up there something happened to my legs, like with “My Sharona”, where it was just ‘Where did that come from?’

Often music will suggest various visual images to me, and for that part, even before, the image was of turning up the volume. There is kind of an ascending thing going on there, which could explain it, but mainly I think it’s just because the only logical response to that music coming up is to play it loud. Love that song.

Rolling Stone‘s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs Of All Time

I just finished yesterday. This is a relief, though I was enjoying it more as we got closer to the top.

I personally got the list from Stereogum, through a simple Google search:

http://stereogum.com/10114/rolling_stones_100_greatest_guitar_songs_of_all_ti/list/

Actually, I am not quite done, because although I have gone through and listened to all of the 100, as well as read all the comments, I still want to go through and listen to music from the comments, and this will take a while, as there are many, and most of them are dissenting.

Obviously I have my own disagreements too, but I always feel that way about American Film Institute lists, or book lists, or lists of 100 places to go or foods to eat. 100 is a logical number to use for people who operate on the decimal system, especially when you are in a broad category where just using a top ten would be too restrictive. However, even if picking the number 100 is not arbitrary, once you are making your selections fit inside that number, things do get arbitrary.

Also, I think there can be an issue with definitions. Are the greatest guitar songs great songs that feature guitar, songs that were culturally significant, or songs that are really hard to play? I think the list does some of all of the above.

Personally, I did not find a lot of new stuff that I need to listen to over and over again. Actually, I think I found none of that, and it’s questionable whether I will as I go through the comments. Still, there were things that were good, especially in terms of putting the familiar in a new setting.

First of all, yes, I had heard Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” (69) and The Smiths “How Soon is Now” (90) before, and not thought much about them one way or another, but yes, they do have something interesting going on with the guitar that I had not noticed. That’s kind of cool. (Also, Billy Corgan has hair in the Pumpkins video, and I had not seen him that way for ages. A lot of people say that haired he resembles Gerard Way, but he reminded me most of Tom Delonge.)

It was also very interesting to listen to the Metallica selection, “Master of Puppets” (33). Now, Metallica is a lot like Duran Duran for me (bet you’ve never heard that before). My sisters (and my brother) are big fans, so they have been played a lot around the home. Even our mother recognizes James Hetfield’s voice right away. (Maria had set Mom’s ring tone to “Master of Puppets” briefly, but Mom gets flustered easily, and we just knew that someday it was going to go off in a bad situation and she would not be able to turn it off quickly, and that just was not a good thing.)

Anyway, I have heard Master of Puppets many times, but never really listened to it. While speculating about the list, Maria had thought maybe “Enter Sandman”, and that certainly has strong guitar work, but listening to them both, “Master” is the obvious choice. It starts out intricately, and it is strong and powerful, and then there is a changeover into a completely different theme that is still powerful, and there is just a lot going on.

Now let’s talk about expectations. While speculating, before actually viewing the list, my first thought was that “Eruption” by Van Halen would have to be on it. It comes in at 6, which seems reasonable, Follow up thoughts were that I would expect to see Hendrix, Eric Claption, Jeff Beck, Santana, and Yngwie Malmsteen, and then I wondered about the guys in GTR.

Hendrix (I am totally good with “Purple Rain” being number 2), Beck, and Clapton get multiple mentions, though Clapton is always under a group, not under his name. Incidentally, I had only heard the acoustic version of Layla before, and the other ways makes a big difference there. Santana is there. Malmsteen is not, and from the comments Steve Vai is not. I admit I had forgotten about him, but that does seem like a fairly glaring omission.

I was not too surprised to not find Steve Howe or Steve Hackett represented. I remember when GTR formed people saying it was like if Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck were forming a band, but I felt that they never lived up to the hype. It’s not that their music was bad, but it wasn’t what the expectations seemed to be leading to, and maybe they just never had a clear enough vision of what it should be. My understanding is that Hackett is not particularly happy with it in retrospect. Still, nothing on the list from Yes, Asia, or Genesis either.

Another thought that I had later was I remember many years ago thinking that it seemed like all the bands with the best riffs were kind of obnoxious. I can tell you that the bands who inspired that thought were Warlock Pinchers, the Offspring, and Blink 182. None of them made the list. I am glad to see the Clash (“London Calling”, 48) and the Ramones (“Blitzkrieg Bop”, 18) on there. I’m not sure it’s their greatest guitar work, but I’ve never really thought of it. I do sort of feel that Steppenwolf “Born to be Wild” should be on there.

There was a lot of flack about the omission of “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. I suppose the argument against it is that every beginning guitar player picks it out, so it can’t be that hard, but at the same time, doesn’t that right there prove that it is classic and influential? I remember hearing my brother play it over and over again, and so when Jack Black has the kid try it out in “School of Rock” or Jake is moody and just keeps playing that and nothing but that on “Two and a Half Men”, it makes me smile.

I think the counterpoint to it is number 21, “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes. Someone in the comments complained because he had seen a 7-year old kid playing it, showing how not great a song it was. Of course, someone else complained that “Eruption” should not be on there because it was not a great song, it was one person showing off. So we can go back to definition, but also, I remember when I first heard “Seven Nation Army”, and even though I didn’t exactly like it, I remember thinking how it was brilliant in how it just stripped down and went back to basics after so much overproduced crap was out there.

I did not expect to find My Chemical Romance there, because there seems to be a strong bias towards older music, and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about how brilliant their guitars are, but remember, part of why I even decided to do this was because I was thinking how much I loved guitar, and I was thinking that because of listening to them. Just wanted to point that out.

Also, I have only just heard the song recently, so I may not have any perspective on it, but "Triumph of Venus" by Torche seems like it could reasonably be included. It just seems special to me.

Other listening material was that I pulled out my Best of Santana CD and all three of my Charlie Sexton CDs and gave them a listen. I don’t think any of Charlie’s work is on there. As a session musician, you don’t always know who is where, but I believe the Stevie Ray Vaughn songs predate Charlie. (He started working in 1983.) Still, interesting thoughts there, that will come back up later.

Also interesting was number 1, “Johnnie B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. My first thought was okay, that makes sense. It is a powerful riff, and it also must have been so new and revolutionary at its time. However, in researching more, I saw this on Wikipedia:

“The opening guitar riff on "Johnny B. Goode" is essentially a note-for-note copy of the opening single-note solo on Louis Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" (1946), played by guitarist Carl Hogan.”

Well I tried listening to Just Like a Woman, and it may have been the version that I found, but I didn’t hear it. Still, it’s interesting. Who did invent Rock and Roll anyway?

Non-annoying love songs and the alternative list

Here are the songs that do make me feel something. The number is which day of February I posted them on. They aren’t really in any particular order, except I started with the ones where love was more of a bummer and moved up to the ones where it might still be hard, but you have some hope.

1. Joey, Concrete Blonde
2. The World Spins Madly On, The Weepies
3. Only a Fool, Byron Lee and Mighty Sparrow
4. Best I Ever Had, Vertical Horizon
5. More than This, Roxy Music
6. Hey Jealousy, Gin Blossoms
7. Overjoyed, Stevie Wonder
8. Everything's Magic, Angels and Airwaves
9. Mayor of Simpleton, XTC
10. The Promise, When in Rome
11. Bizarre Love Triangle, New Order
12. Tired of You, The Exies
13. Collide, Howie Day
14. All I Want, Toad the Wet Sprocket

As you can see, it is heavily geared towards the past, which goes back to my being out of it, but this listening to new things has not done a lot to convince me that I am wrong. If I were to add another song, it would probably be “Summertime” by My Chemical Romance. (More on that a different day.)

I have a coworker with whom I often discuss music, and I let her see my list, and she provided me with her own alternatives. The lists were quite different, with not a lot of overlap. (Notes are from Lisa.):

1. True- Spandu Ballet (Oh god, that Bithday Cake Scene in 16 Candles)
2. Little Birdhouse in your soul- They Might Be Giants
3. El Scorcho- Weezer
4. Eaten by the Monster of Love- Sparks
5. Everlong - Foo Fighters
6. Saturday Night- The Misfits
7. I got you Babe- As sung by The Dictators
8. I Will Always Love You- Dolly Parton, and I am emphatic --NOT Whitney Houston
9. Maps- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
10. You Make my Dreams Come True- Hall and Oates
11. Unchained Melody- Righteous Brothers
12. Glory of Love- Peter Cetera (Karate Kid 2 oh jeez)
13. Whole Wide World- Wreckless Eric
14. And For Personal Reasons, “A Quick One While He’s Away” By The Who

Spandau Ballet’s “True” and The Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody” were both ones that I considered, but decided against. Also, I am not really against “And I Will Always Love You”, but it would have to be the Whitney Houston version for me, not the Dolly Parton version. “Whole Wide World” I prefer by Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhall. Also, it doesn’t matter who sings it; I hate “I Got You Babe”.

There were also two songs that I considered to be real finds. The first was Spark’s “Eaten by the Monster of Love”. It’s pretty cool, and I had never heard of it before. (I’ve never seen Valley Girl.)

Even more, I was just captivated by “Saturday Night” by the Misfits. Talk about great guitar and vocals. And, there was a real feeling of emotion, though you don’t want to take the lyrics too literally. I was singing it non-stop, and I would like to try it for karaoke, though whether anyone will have them is questionable, and really Lisa should be there. (Not that I would dedicate it to her; that would just be creepy.)

So yes, after immersing myself in love songs for two weeks I did need to kind of limit myself to punk for a month to recover, but I gladly do this for you. And now you have, right here, 28 songs that are more interesting than “Baby”.

Annoying love songs

Regardless of my issues with the music K103 was playing, it was also very popular, so it was reasonable for them to play it. While I do have some thoughts on this being the fault of "the man" controlling airplay now, I have to admit that these popular songs are catchy. This only increased my frustration. I usually have music in my head of some kind, and when it is music I like it's fine. When it is stupid, shallow music with a poorly informed worldview, I feel like I’ve really let myself down.

I mentioned disdain for Taylor Swift and Sarah Bareilles; in addition I grew to really hate Michael Buble. I know at some point he was doing a lot of Frank Sinatra type-stuff, but I had never really heard any of his music. Now there were two songs that I was hearing all the time, and they both irritated me.

The first one, “Don't Go Higher”, just seemed hypocritical. So what are we saying? Is everyone in Hollywood phony except for you? Somehow I have doubts. Yes, the quest for fame can certainly kill your soul, and you can worry about that in the middle of still trying to make it, but it should probably come out sounding a little less danceable--maybe more like “Hotel California” perhaps?

Still, the one that bugged me even more was "Haven't Met You Yet". Yes, yes, everything will be perfect when you meet the "right" one, because that's totally how it works. The "You'll make me work so we can work to work it out" is paying lip service to the idea that relationships take work, but then why is she having to make you work? There is an echo of the same thing in the line about promising to give so much more than he gets. Even if he really believed that, that would indicate an unhealthy relationship where one person is constantly trying to compensate for their own unworthiness. How is that good?

The one that I was kind of torn on was “Break Even” by The Script. Musically it was interesting, but I had started getting cranky. Well if she’s able to leave you so easily, without losing any sleep, maybe you’re better off without her. And if the best part of you was always her, no wonder she left; she doesn’t need you. From a relationship point of view those criticisms are valid, but I also know that you do feel things that are illogical and unfair, and you catastrophize, and you can’t pick on every musical exaggeration.

I guess where The Script came off better is that the song felt like it carried some actual emotional weight, rather than just pretending to.

And again, this could be somewhere that I am completely unfair. Just because it sounds shallow and superficial to me does not mean everyone will feel that way. I’m bringing up these songs on Youtube—I see the comments. There are always comments on Britney songs or Miley songs “This is just how I feel!” Maybe I’m just mean (and romantically frustrated). Still, if we argue that any emotions are valid, that should cover my sentiment that this stuff is crap.

As we approached Valentine’s Day, I thought about how many awful songs were going to be featured, and I came up with my own list of romantic/love songs. I ran a 14-day countdown on Facebook, to be even better than my one week Halloween countdown.

Tomorrow, songs that actually make me feel.

Musical Chemistry

Hey, we’re crossing disciplines. It’s art AND science.
I have been thinking a lot about why people like what music, or not, and part of that is the mechanics of the attraction, but part of that is also what liking means.

For example, some of the pieces that I liked better on the Top 100 guitar list were by Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughn, and I would characterize them more as blues. I like blues, but I never really bring it up to for listening. Where I end up hearing it is at the Blues Festival, and live on a sunny day feels like the perfect way of enjoying blues to me. (I started going to the Blues Festival for zydeco, and that is something I actually have a CD for and play on occasion.)

Actually, it is similar with Duran Duran. I have watched and liked their videos, but somehow I never really listen to them. I do, however, attend their concerts when they come to town, and they put on great shows. I really love them, in that I appreciate their showmanship and I feel affection for them as people. That being said, I don’t own a single CD, and the only time I have brought up one of their videos recently was when I was thinking a character I was working on might dress like the girl in New Moon on Monday. (And I was remembering it wrong, and Jane dresses more like a Ramone.)

Some of this may be that I get plenty of exposure without seeking it out. Both of my younger sisters are huge Duran Duran fans, which is how I ended up at a concert in the first place. In addition, a friend I spent a lot of time with growing up was a huge fan. She is the reason I have seen A View to A Kill. Julie and Maria are the reason I have seen The Saint. (I may not have watched The Living Daylights without a-ha doing the theme song, so I’m not judging.) To some extent I am fine with that, because I do like them, but I don’t usually need them, and it was part of my ornery nature that whenever Danielle would have me pick something to play, I would either choose “Take It Easy” (which I love, from Andy’s solo efforts) or the theme song from The Neverending Story by Limahl (which she had because Nick Rhodes produced it.)

Actually, with my group of friends from junior high, we had a lot of crossover, but none of us had the same favorite bands. Karen leaned more towards the Cure and Dead or Alive, though she and Nicky both loved David Bowie, though that was more for his acting (the Monkees too), and Ericka was very into INXS, though she loved Charlie Sexton like I did, and I was really all about a-ha. (I don’t remember Ann being really into anyone, which makes me wonder if she wasn’t, or if I was just insensitive.)

We all respected each other’s tastes. Back then my only shared concert was with Nicky. We saw the Monkees, along with Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the Grass Roots, Herman’s Hermits, and a baseball game. It was kind of a long lineup. Later on I saw Faith No More and Billy Idol with Ericka, and Karen and I have seen the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, and Gogol Bordello together, and we would be going to the Black Keys together if I were not going to be out of town. (Well, and I did not attend Duran Duran with Danielle, but she was there.)

Then and now I had different relationships with each of them, even though there were definitely times when we were functioning as a unit. I guess I have different relationships with different artists and different songs. Some are fine to be around, and some are like fingernails on a blackboard, and some I downright need.

One reason I can’t bring myself to really try computer dating is that I am really a love at first sight kind of person, and no, it’s not practical, but it’s how I roll.
Wondering if I was crazy once, I sat down and analyzed the times where it had happened. While in each case it was an instantaneous thing with no background information, both were artistic, and musicians actually (one more than the other). Both were very kind, also, though not particularly patient. When I had a similar attraction to someone else, though it never got as serious, well, I was not particularly surprised to find out that he was a drummer. Of course he was. I guess I had a type.

(Fine, they were also all tall, lanky, and brunette, with good hair and good biceps, but if you are a drummer or a guitar player the arms tend to get developed, and I do not respond that way to people who match the physical description but are not kind and creative.)

To some extent, I have a music type as well. I respond a lot to melody. That is probably why I tend not to like rap, grunge, and metal, where there is more of an emphasis on other things. I like there to be depth of emotion, but also that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I suspect this is why I prefer how the anger as it comes out in punk than in metal. Punk is more humorous than metal. It is probably also why despite my appreciation for “Viva La Vida”, I am not a big Coldplay fan—they’re a little on the serious side too. Maybe that’s my problem with Bob Dylan. And U2! (And my preference for melody may explain why I like some punk bands more than others.)

I was discussing with a friend once that liking someone is more of a compliment than loving them. You’re supposed to love everyone, and when you are a good person it becomes more natural to love people more, so that might be the given. Liking is a gift. I don’t just feel a desire for your welfare—I enjoy spending time with you.

Songs can be like friends and people you know. You like some, and you need others. Some you outgrow, and some, no matter how long it's been, take you right back.

In other words, Alex Chilton is on the radio, and I’m in love with this song.

Music Appreciation

One thing that my music exploration has in common with my reading is that I don’t always know where it’s going to go. Sometimes I have an idea of where it’s going to go, and I’m wrong, and other times I seriously don’t know, but I figure it will go somewhere.

With listening to the “pop” music, I believed it was really just going to be a matter of confirming that my sentiments are correct, and I am not missing anything, and they suck. With the guitar songs, I was hoping that I would find new and cool things for my listening pleasure. Neither has really gone as expected, but they are still going somewhere. (And I am just going to keep putting “pop” in quotes, because it meant something different back in my day.)

With the “pop”, yes, I am perfectly fine not liking it or listening to it. There have been a few laughs, certainly, and I am not a fan of anything new, but there have been some other musings, and I will get to those eventually.

With the guitar, although I haven’t been finding that I really liked (and I am only on number 35), it does at least make me think of things differently. There are some songs that I knew before, but I never really thought about the guitar elements specifically. Listening to them in that context does take me back and think, Yeah, I can see that.

One thing I have been thinking about though, is who likes what, and why. Obviously, there are people who are huge fans of Justin Bieber, and I guess there are reasons for that. Also, though (and this is where it may be perfectly reasonable to question my taste), there are a lot of well-regarded bands by people who know something about music that I do not like at all. I don’t really care for the Beetles, or Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan is, for me, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I have been thinking about him specifically, first of all for the Desolation Row connection, but also, Charlie Sexton plays for him. He has a huge following, and when that very annoying woman on the train indignantly said he was the voice of a generation, she was not wrong.

It reminds me of back when MTV would have guest VJs, or when I would read magazines about my teen idols, and there were bands that I loved that cited influences or chose playlists that really had me going “Huh, really?”

I suppose some of it is a matter of personal chemistry and I will explore that more, but I have also been thinking that it is logical that a professional musician will have a wider range of appreciation.

It is commonly attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, but maybe started with K. Anders Ericsson, this idea that it takes 10000 hours of practice to master something. So, even with no aptitude for guitar, with 10000 hours of practice I could be really good. I still think aptitude is important. For example, I have some drawing ability and I bet I could develop it in only 5000 hours. Writing came faster to me, but between journals, blogs, stories, letters, screenplays, television pilots, and one novel, there could easily be 10000 hours in there anyway. I have not been counting.

I suspect that if you have some natural talent or ease of learning, putting in the time becomes easier, because some of the normal starting frustrations can be moved through more quickly. More than that, though, I think there has to be some great passion. I do kind of like performing, but not specifically performing on an instrument—I will pick comedy or karaoke or a skit first. I am passionate about music, but more as a listener.

Imagine, though, the person who really loves music and loves performing music, and the hours they put in practicing and arranging and getting gigs. You know people who have day jobs but they still end up playing around town, and are always in one band or another (or four at the same time), because they just can’t let it go. It does not seem unreasonable to me that such a person would be able to appreciate lots and lots of different kinds of music, because they are appreciating it on multiple levels. And it kind of gives me warm fuzzies inside, to know that it’s possible.

This is not to say that I will not be doing any more slagging on anything in this series of music blogs, but I am going to try and open my mind more in my regular listening, and just find new things. Maybe it won’t change my normal listening habits much, but I am at least going to be open to it.

Native American Heritage Month 2011

And now for a brief interruption of my musical exploration to catch up on my reading. Obviously I am running late, but not quite as late as I was running with Black History Month 2011, and with luck I will finish my 2012 Black History Month reading no later than June!

My material for this last round included Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr; 1491 by Charles Mann, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie; For the Generations, which was a television special about working with Native American youth so they are in touch with their culture.

I also read some academic articles a friend found for me. One was by James Allen on the LDS Indian Placement Program and was quite good, one was by Vine Deloria Jr on Intellectual Self-Determination and Sovereignty, also good; and then there was one on the writings of Vine Deloria Jr, and I can tell you it was by Troy Richardson, but I would also need to say that it was so clearly a graduate work essay which used many words and never said much. Well, they can’t all be good.

I finished the last book on April 9th (Custer…), but I am currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and I thought that would make a nice supplement to 1491, but it was kind of a tough slog. I was talking to a friend Wednesday though, and while she and her husband both loved it, they spent a year reading it, because you can’t get through it quickly. The information is too dense. So I will keep reading that one, but it is outside the body of this work, and anyway it does cover Native American topics, but not exclusively.

It’s a fairly random sampling, which will make this more of a shaggy dog review with no clear theme, but I was having a hard time choosing, and I can live with this. One thing that makes selecting books difficult is that there is a strong emotional element to these issues, and so there were some books that I considered, but I felt like there was a bias, and that I don’t have enough of a background to know how what to trust.

For example, Custer Died for Your Sins at times veers into polemic, which is fine. Deloria is very intelligent, and an interesting thinker, and generally where it gets more emotional is not in parts where I am trying to learn history. However, there are books about different incidents where I can see that it would be really skewed towards one side or another, and that doesn’t have to rule it out automatically, but I would need to know more.

I think that’s one way where I’m lucky with the Black History Month readings. It’s been going on longer, with the issues more mainstream, so there is a lot of material out there, and there is material on the material. Plus that was kind of my major in college, though more geared towards African Americans in the American West. I feel more confident there.

Incidentally, a note on language: as much as I have this sense that I should use Native American and African America, all of the Native American writers use Indian, and there are cases where black is appropriate and African America is not, so I may switch back and forth on these terms, and there is no intended insult or ignorance.

Back to the actual books, 1491 was great. Again, it is not a quick read, but you learn a lot, and especially you see how many of our common conceptions are wrong. That may actually be a reasonable tie-in to the question of image, which was a factor in the other books, the essays, and even the television special. There is the image that others hold of Indians, but there is also how they view themselves.

For the Generations was about balancing the two. You can be both a skateboarder and a spirit dancer. You can sing contemporary music but have your costume be inspired by your heritage. In the one case she seemed to show her pride by dressing very scantily, but in buckskin and feathers. I’m not sure that is the best expression of cultural pride, but that was really just the one story, and they had many.

One quote that moved me a lot was by Chief Dan George:

“I was born when people loved all nature and spoke to it as though it had a soul. . . .
[But] then the people came. More and more people came. Like a crushing, rushing wave they came, hurling the years aside. And suddenly I found myself a young man in the midst of the twentieth century. I found myself and my people adrift in this new age, not part of it.
We were engulfed by its rushing tide, but only as a captive eddy, going round and round. On little reservations, on plots of land, we floated in a kind of gray unreality, ashamed of our culture that you ridiculed, unsure of who we were or where we were going, uncertain of our grip on the present, weak in our hope of the future. . . .
And now you hold out your hand and you beckon to me to come across the street. Come and integrate, you say. But how can I come? . . . How can I come in dignity? . . . I have no gifts. What is there in my culture you value? My poor treasures you only scorn.
. . . Somehow I must wait. I must delay. I must find myself. I must find my treasure. I must wait until you want something of me, until you need something that is me. Then I can raise my head and say to my wife and family, "Listen, they are calling. They need me. I must go."
Then I can walk across the street and hold my head high, for I will meet you as an equal. I will not scorn you for your seeming gifts, and you will not receive me in pity. Pity I can do without; my manhood I cannot.”

One thing that I got clearly out of my last year’s reading is that while shipping the tribes off to the reservations would have been bad enough, it never ended at that. There were always other moves, so no matter what they had built in terms of homes and schools and farms, it was constantly being lost again. This turns out to have still been an issue at least into the 60’s, not so much with more relocation but with funding issues and planning issues. So if they feel like they do not have gifts to offer, there was a lot of work put into getting them there.

Deloria’s answer is tribalism, that more separation is the answer, not less. My initial thought is to disagree, because he finds differences between the races that I don’t, and I don’t think the cultural differences are so insurmountable. However, I am a white liberal, and I’m expected to think that way. That actually may be the best part of reading “Custer Died for Your Sins”, is being on the receiving end of being judged on race. When I was writing about Jeremy Lin I had to admit that doesn’t come up very often, so I don’t relate to prejudice the same way as someone who has to deal with it all the time. Maybe it’s good for me to feel that sometimes. And he does judge.

(Also, he and Mann both leave you with not the highest impression of anthropologists and social scientists, but not in the same way. Academia is really cutthroat, no matter how boring it looks.)

Sherman Alexie’s book was the one that affected me the most personally. It is semi-autobiographical fiction, and I don’t know what specific details are real or changed, but it is emotionally very real, and it was devastating. And it was funny too, and somewhat optimistic, but I kept crying, and wishing things were different.

And this may be where more tribalism is the answer. In the book, Junior is advised by a teacher to get off the reservation, because there is no hope there, so he transfers to a school where most of the students end up attending college. He is still living on the reservation, but he is truly entering a different world, which is why he is a part-time Indian.

He initially encounters a lot of prejudice, but many of those people become friends, and you know that he will be able to go to college and graduate and have a future, just like the author did in real life. However, that leaves everyone else on the reservation with no hope.

One of the points made by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow is that people use black exceptionalism as proof that the system works. Obama became president, Denzel and Halle won their Oscars, there have been two Supreme Court justices, so obviously anyone can succeed, when really the deck is stacked against most.

Maybe there is a similar issue with Indian exceptionalism, except that they are so invisible most of the time that people don’t even worry about it. It may be more valuable to bring hope to the reservations than to wish for everyone to find it outside.

That sounds like I am advocating separation there, and no, I still don’t feel good about that. In addition, I think now we are moving into poor people exceptionalism, where if some poor people can finish school and find good jobs, than any can. Ultimately we need to build a society where anyone can do well, rather than one where the haves just assume the have-nots are lazy.

Really, I did not come away with any answers. I still just have this commitment to at least trying to find out what the questions are, and I believe that looking outside of my personal experience twice a year is not too much of a burden, even if I will always be running late. No, this November I will start on time, and the 2012 Native American reading will be completed in 2012.

Don’t forget the lyrics

One key inspiration for my musical odyssey started when I was carpooling to work. One of the great annoyances of that time period was the radio.

It was the K103 morning show, and I did not really have a problem with the crew--they seemed like nice enough people, and the Stump the Jock guy was clearly pretty knowledgeable--but so much of the music was just so crappy.

It wasn't all bad. They played a fair amount of Pink and the song you had to guess was often from the eighties, and decent, and then they would play the rest of it, so it could have been worse. In general, though, the music was mediocre, and played over and over again.

Where I would sometimes resent the crew is when they would say good things about the music. Sarah Bareilles is so rebellious! Taylor Swift packs so much meaning into her lines! No, and NO!

Refusing to comply with the requests of the people who are helping you make money, and silently ignoring advice while thinking bad thoughts about the person giving it, isn’t really all that hardcore. As for depth and meaning in Taylor Swift, where do I start?

You know a song that impresses me in its layers of meaning? Coldplay's “Viva La Vida”. First of all, they set up rhymes that are not completed, so they can move on to the next phrase while you still hear the phrase that was not completed.

For some reason I can't explain
Once you were gone it was never--

And they say "Never an honest word", but "Never the same" is still suggested, because that would be the logical rhyme. So it is conveyed both that the loss of the person changes things irrevocably, and that there is also a loss of honesty, sincerity, and possibly even comprehension of this new order of things.

People ask "But who is it talking about?" looking for someone specific who literally went through all of those things. That’s not the point. Usually the most powerful rulers end up dead when deposed, rather than sweeping the streets, but there are wealthy people who can end up in menial jobs, and fill that role. Probably the closest thing you have to a specific reference is that "Seas would rise when I gave the word" kind of sounds like a reference to Canute, only he gave the word for the sea not to rise and it did anyway, which was his point.

Anyway, what we clearly have instead of something literal is image after image that evokes an emotion of having lost and been overturned. The images are more for political power, but for someone who has felt in control of their life, and found out they weren't, or someone who has lost innocence, the emotions work. It can have emotional resonance for anyone.

I'm not saying that there are not many people who can relate to the line "And there's a drawer of my things at your place", but there’s not much poetry. Isn't the point of music that you don't have to be that literal? Music is exactly where it is appropriate to speak of the pompatus of love and not provide an answer key. I have as much fun looking for the symbolism in American Pie as anyone, but it's mental. The emotional resonance of the song does not change if you know that Bob Dylan had a jacket that looked like James Dean's.

And yet with saying all of that, I also have to acknowledge that I’m a punk rock fan, where the lyrics are often quite simple, and I’m not that big a Coldplay fan. I listen to “Viva La Vida” and sometimes “Talk”, and that’s about it. I do remember a quote from Chris Martin though, where he was saying something along the lines of they weren’t really going to get any bigger, so the goal that made sense was to try and be better—better at their instruments, work at the music harder—and work that way.

Taylor Swift is cute, and she writes her own songs and plays guitar and so right there she is way ahead of a lot of tween idols. At the same time, she comes off as a little shrill to me (Is that what they call “pitchy?”), so I think maybe some voice lessons aren’t completely uncalled for. Though also, that means she is probably not using Autotune. And sure, she is young, so there may be a limit to what sort of depth you can expect, but can’t you try a little harder? Yes still, she really tries harder than a lot of them, and still I reject her.

And this strikes at the heart of why my music post keeps expanding—there are just so many contradictions, and so much of it is not logical. We will keep exploring that.

Exposure

As I explained yesterday, I always want to know more about music, and sometimes I realize that there is a lot I am missing. Without going into the why and how of that, I am currently working on three things to broaden my knowledge of music.

The first one is that while I am scornful of music popular with tweens, coming from people with Disney shows or from American Idol, or where you might use the terms “pop princess” or “boy band”, it is not really an informed scorn. At times I have thought that I should force myself to listen to some of these things, so I could earn my disdain. Still, the thought of doing so was kind of horrible, and Maria was worried that it might leave me suicidal (whether from aggravation or from discovering I liked it; either way).

In addition, recently Greg Glover (94.7 Alternative Portland) pulled his 8 at 8 from Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of all time. (It was when Jim Marshall, creator of the Marshall Stack amplifiers, died). I had not previously known of the existence of such a list, but that seemed like something worth checking out, especially since I have been remembering how much I love guitar lately. If I balanced listening to the dreck with classic guitar, maybe it would be okay.

Well, there are downsides and upsides. The downside is that I hate a lot of these guitar songs. I suspect the list is questionable, based on the comments if nothing else, so I will listen to the songs mentioned in the comments too. Still, it’s disappointing when you think you are going to rock out, and then you are just gritting your teeth. And some of these songs are so long! If you’re going to suck, at least get it over with.

On the plus side, when music does not really work for me, I tend not to retain it. I just have this vague sense of generic noise, and I can remember thoughts I had during it, so I know I was taking it in, but it did not stay. This is helpful for both the guitar side and the auto-tuned side (and seriously, do they all do that now?).

Also, remember I am getting really into My Chemical Romance now, and since our incentives came through (it’s like a bonus, but they don’t want to call it that), I bought their last three CDs and Pencey Prep’s CD (that’s Frank Iero’s previous band). I did not get their debut CD yet, because it was kind of expensive, but I will either buy it electronically or find it somewhere else. Without the Watchmen CD, I don’t have “Desolation Row” either, but one of the CDs got me a credit for one electronic download, so that will work out perfectly.

Now, bad music leaves me quickly, but music that I respond to haunts me, so my tendency is to listen to it over and over again until I have it memorized, looking up the lyrics if I can’t make them out, and just totally having them become a part of me so I can hear it any time I want to. (Yes, an MP3 player would probably be easier, and I will open up mine at some point, but I think I will still do this, more proof that I lean more towards OCD than ADD.)

Anyway, getting four CDs at once gives me a lot to listen to that I am responding to well, so I do have some balance there, and I don’t think that I will need to hurt myself. Also, I don’t think that I will abandon either of the annoying projects, because I am pretty stubborn. I’ll write more about all of those as I get closer to completion. I have to pace myself.

I should be fine, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on me. If I seem like I might be a danger to myself or others, pump in some Ramones. That usually fixes things.

Musical Journey

Lately I have been thinking a lot about music and talking a lot about music, reading about it, and definitely listening to a lot of music. I had started one blog post a while ago, but it was just getting too long and rambling too much. I had at one point thought I could divide it in two, but new heads kept sprouting up. I’m going to try and do a series of short posts, and see how it goes.

First of all, let me give you my qualifications. I took piano for a few years (6th through 10th grade, I think), and was okay at it but not gifted. I probably should have started earlier, and gotten those practice habits ingrained sooner. I learned shortly after graduating from high school that no matter how much I practiced I could not accompany people singing in any but the most rudimentary manner.

In 9th grade some friends and I started a band, sort of. Instead of doing the logical thing and having me play keyboard, I was going to be on guitar and vocals. I did not know at this time about all of the vocalists who have to give up guitar because doing the two simultaneously is too hard. It did not really matter, because I have no aptitude for guitar, and if you took Beginning Guitar at Five Oaks in 1987, you know it. (And at one point you probably tuned my guitar for me, because I never got the hang of that.) I peaked at picking out Ode to Joy. I know I have no credibility, because I never even tried Smoke on the Water.

Just before 11th grade I bought a drum kit, and was too self-conscious about how noisy they were. I did have some aptitude, but obviously the wrong personality. The other drummers I know are proud when a noise complaint gets called in. What I should have been doing was practicing on cushions, but I did not know about that option until later.

During this time I wrote music on a regular basis, but I always had to keep the tunes in my head because the ear issue that keeps me from being able to tune my guitar also keeps me from being able to figure out which notes on the keyboard match the ones in my head. I did record (portable tape recorder in the bathroom) a couple of songs I wrote in French for extra credit. Otherwise, I guess I’m just lucky to have a pretty good memory. This is actually the part that I would most want to fix, though getting back into piano would probably make sense.

So basically, I do not have any credentials. This is important, because I am unlikely to write anything that cannot be understood by a novice.

What I do have is a lot of passion for the subject. I am constantly amazed by how much I love rock, and other types of music, how much it means to me, and also how much I want to know about it.

I have written before that I know I am not a tech geek because even though there are some things that I can fix, I just get irritated by them, and the real geeks I know get excited when something needs troubleshooting.

I might be a music geek. For example, the other day I was listening to “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance. There was a segment in there that reminded me a little bit of a segment in “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, so I had to listen to that, but also it is reminiscent of Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner, so I had to listen to both of those, and then I wonder if the notes that reminded me of Twisted Sister came from the Geldof “Desolation Row”, and then since I was listening to 80’s rock and I brought up some Quiet Riot and Slade and I live for stuff like that. There are some Cars keyboard bits that really remind me of Iggy Pop, which is cool because Rik Ocasek’s son Christopher did a cover of Pop’s “Real Wild Child”. These things are probably silly, and I could be hearing things, but I love that.

However, I realize there is also a lot that I don’t know about music, and some of what I have been thinking about now relates to educating myself more about music, which has not been a totally happy experience, but I’ll explain that tomorrow. For now, just put another dime in the jukebox.