I can dream...

...of being as serene as Hank the Hermit, brought to us courtesy of Again With The Comics, via the always-interesting Boing Boing.




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On Selling Out

The subject: Iggy Pop's car insurance adverts.

I encountered this by way of Michael Bérubé's blog, and this BBC News article on the subject, and originally wrote what's below as a response to the BBC website. By the time you (all two of you) read this, it may be on their page as a comment, depending on if they let words like "piss" and "arse" through their filters... anyways.

I'm in the jaded and apathetic camp as regards the concept of selling out. Indeed, this is the only rational position to take about it, because what we're really talking about is nonconformity. Nonconformity is great, and I consider myself a nonconformist, but a lot of people seem to mistake ANTIconformity with NONconformity, when in fact anticonformity is indeed simply an inverted form of conformity.

That being said, I did find the "Get @ Life" shot of Iggy's ads both jarring and oddly fascinating, and after reading this article, I figured out why: The "Circle A" is a venerable symbol of the anarchic, punk spirit of true personal and artistic freedom. It is, to people of a certain age and mindset, as sacred an icon as the virgin is to Catholics, a fact which is self-reflexively subverted by the fact that its original association was with pissing on the very idea of the sacred.

And that's what we need to keep in mind here - the punks of Iggy's era, particularly the Raw Power-Sex Pistols-CBGB late 70s, were a raw assault on all mainstream sensibility. When the Pistols rented that boat and blared God Save the Queen from the Thames for all of London to hear, they were going beyond the Do-Your-Own-Thing freedom of the 60s straight to the jugular, in hopes of tasting the blood of mainstream society's fragile (and hypocritical) sensibilities.

Fast Forward to 2009, when Iggy Pop stands in front of the most nakedly cynical and hamfisted attempt to coopt punk, the "Get @ Life" graffiti bomb. Leaving aside the possible textual readings (Get at life, get anarchic life, get a haircut and a job and a "real" life), we have a man whose punk cred is (was?) unassailable standing in front of this banner, this clumsy attempt whose main offense is the abject stupidity of whoever came up with it, and Iggy is trying to SELL US SOMETHING. To people of a certain age and mindset, this is as deep an insult/assault to the sensibilities as was the famous boat ride of the Sex Pistols during the queen's jubilee.

That assault on the sensibilities, friends, is punk. Don't howl in protest, because you know I'm right. Iggy is laughing his ass off, I'm quite certain, because it's been literally decades since he was able to raise more than a sigh of boredom by rolling around in peanut butter and broken glass. But to turn on us, to "sell out" and to do so with people who clearly have no clue? That is provocative, in an age that has become largely immune to artistic provocation.

I wish him well, and hope just as fervently as I did a week ago that I'll be able to catch him live before he's gone, because Iggy rules, and his picking up a few bucks while thumbing his arse at the people who would tell him what he's allowed to do will never change that.

Free comic/cartoon idea:

Howl, The Beatnik Werewolf. Or the werebeatnik. You could work in the curse of Moloch in there somewhere as the cause of his, umm, "lykeruanthropy".

Someday, one guy will read the above and laugh his ass off, and possibly run with it. Just let me know if you do, cause I'd like to read it.

Death to the industry!

This is a repost of a response I made to an entry on Elliott Randall's MySpace blog back in 2006. If you don't know the name, you know the man's work: he played lead guitar on Steely Dan's Reelin' in the Years, which starts with the 11 notes that, when I was a mere toddler, catalyzed my lifelong obsession with music. Mr. Randall is arguably the reason I'm sitting here writing this. Anyways, the entire entry and thread are here, if you want to check it out, but I've always felt that this really comes very close to encapsulating my views on music, so I present it here as well.

Also, I was considering cleaning up some of the text, but I decided to just leave it as is, if only for the amusement you'll feel at the rather quaint idea that I had, waaaay back in 2006, that $80 was an expensive concert ticket... and here we go.

Lots of great replies to this already, and I'm probably gonna echo a couple of them here.

There's a lot of things that have played into bringing us to this spot, but I remember when Napster was still around, people (the RIAA's people, mostly) were sounding the deathknell of the recording industry, and my immediate reaction was "we can only hope."

Now, take that the way I mean it, but as Elliot already pointed out, artists have been getting shafted by the industry for decades already, and while all this file downloading is certain to have a LOT of casualties, I can't help wondering whether, when it all shakes down, artists won't end up being better off.

It's been mentioned that the notion of intellectual property is on the way out, and I tend to agree with this, but there are powerful people who are going to fight hard to keep it. This goes way beyond the recording industry: look at biotech, for instance, who are pushing for the right to patent human DNA, or the pharmaceutical industry, who are pushing doctors to prescribe their expensive, and often unsafe, pills, and who will not budge on things like reducing prices for AIDS medications for victims of the epidemic in Africa. This, too, is intellectual property at work, and I don't think that the eventual death of intellectual property would be all bad either - this debate goes far beyond the borders of the music world.

And just how legitimate is this notion of owning a song, anyways? In fact, this is a very recent phenomenon, placed in the context of the whole history of music, is it not? I don't know exactly how classical music worked, but most of us work in the milieu of popular music, and any folk music fan knows that the idea of authorship is actually quite a hazy one. Traditional folk music draws on a number of key chord progressions, rhythms and lyrical themes, altering them slightly, rearranging them, moving one set of lyrics to a different set of chords - any blues or folk music (which are really the same thing) fan will know exactly what I'm talking about.

One of my favourite albums right now is Richard Thompson's '1000 years of popular music,' which runs the gamut from 'Sumer is Icumen In' all the way to 'Oops! I Did It Again!' - a great concept, though it could easily have filled a box set, or several box sets, and still remained incomplete.

But I digress. Jazz musicians, I am told, draw on 'standards,' which enable them to instinctually know where a jam is going. Similarly, the virtuosity that can be observed in the rhythm section at any blues jam is remarkable - somehow they know when the song is stopping, where it's going. Country musicians have what a friend of mine's musician father called "Nashville tab," a shorthand way for an experienced musician to walk onstage, speak to the band for 30 seconds, and then they all play, flawlessly. From this, I tentatively extrapolate (I know there's a lot of musicians present - feel free to correct me) that all musical forms have a basic vocabulary, a set of giants' shoulders if you will, on which all individual creativity rests, and a big part of becoming proficient in said form is learning this language - to know in a blues song, for instance, when you hear the I chord turn to a 7th, that you're about to go to the IV.

Song ownership really began in earnest, as I understand it, with the Tin Pan Alley era, where every good house was expected to have a piano, and would then, of course, require a collection of sheet music. Later, that paradigm became a phonograph and a collection of disks or cylinders, and then a Hi-Fi and LP records, and then a stereo and CDs, and then...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Something bad happened in there somewhere: the invention of the phonograph. Previous to that, music was something that you DID, not something you bought. In that era, music could be a profession if you were good - bars with pianos would hire people, for instance - but mostly women just sang while they hung out the washing, farmers practiced the fiddle over the winter (and read books, another activity that's increasingly unpopular these days), kids were given lessons and expected to learn. Music permeated the lives of everyone, not just people to whom the label "musician" was applied.

The death of the recording industry won't bring that era back, as nice a thought as that is, but perhaps along with the many casualties that are coming from this era of shaking things down, some of the more odious aspects of modern music will also die out:

Things like the idea that a musician, as well as being talented, must also serve as eye candy. The primacy of visual beauty has gotten so ridiculous that nowadays, you don't even have to be able to SING - they've got pitch correctors for that. Once upon a time they were trying to make machines sound human, but now they'll settle for making humans sound like machines.

Maybe Clear Channel will croak, and their stranglehold on the airwaves, in which the same damn 500 songs get played over and over on every damn station on the dial, maybe that will end.

Maybe the idea that a live show needs to be a song and dance spectacular, with billion-dollar lighting rigs and ten costume changes and rising platforms and big screens and sattelite feeds, maybe all that can die out, and people will stop going to shows to "Be Entertained" and start going to "Hear Music" again. When that happens, concerts will no longer need to cost $80 for the worst nosebleed tickets.

I'm sorry, I babble and babble. Hopefully y'all get that when I say we can only hope that the industry dies, I actually say that out of my love for music, not my disrespect for musicians. We all, musicians and fans (of which I am both), deserve better than this.

Special bonus Steely Dan oddity for making it this far: a live performance of Do It Again featuring David Palmer instead of Donald Fagen on vocals.



Palmer is an interesting example of the record industry at work - as I recall, Fagen was not originally acceptable as the group's frontman (whether because his vocals were not considered up to snuff or because he was such an ugly bastard is open to debate), so Mr. Palmer was brought in to front the band, and was long gone by the time the second album came out.

That's it, I'm moving to Sweden.

This is the coolest workplace ever. And of course, like all awesome things*, it's in Sweden.



*Except Abba. Abba sucks, they have always sucked, they always will suck, and nothing anyone says can change the fact that Abba is the sucky black hole into which Sweden channelled all of its lame, unleashing it upon an unsuspecting West which was too gullible to realize what was going on. And that's why Sweden today is full of awesome.

This is a goddam hook.

I really have to be careful with youtube - one video leads to another to another to another, and next thing I know it's four hours gone by with nothing to show for it but a brainful of 80s music.

But anyways, I wasn't really thinking about what makes a pop music "hook," but when I stumbled into the Sheena Easton section, I rediscovered this funky [per/con]fection, which in my opinion really is a nearly perfect example of a great pop tune, no matter what year it is.

Sure, it starts with and heavily features that most 80s 0f musical conventions, the triggered percussion sample, but there is little else here which is dated by the ensuing years, partly because in its own age, the song was also anachronistic, with the horns lifted straight out of some 60s soul record, and the funky sound of slap bass has yet to wear out its welcome. Well, ok, Sheena's hair and earrings are pretty horrific as well.

What I find really interesting, though, is the relative complexity of the lyrics, and how this manages to enhance rather than get in the way of the flow, which is syncopated as fuck - unless you're too hip to dance, this should fill you with the urge to engage in some earnest bootyshaking. Anyways, the verses consist of long sentences, a single rhyming pair with a setup in the first and a payoff in the second:

He said, "Baby what's wrong with you? Why can't you use your imagination?" (oh no, oh no)
"Nations go to war over women like you, it's just a form of appreciation."

It's not really hard to successfully do this, if the vocals are done with a good sense of rhythm, which is definitely the case here, but have a quick listen to the FYC song linked above - it's got some musical hooks, to be sure, but the lyrics are both simplistic and overused; indeed, the singer could be replaced with another synth track, and the song would lose nothing for that. Anyways, I don't know if Sheena had any input into the vocal delivery or if she's simply reciting someone else's melodic lines, but either way she hits and rests and holds in all the right places, dancing over a set of complicated set of floating footprints.

More interesting still is the subject matter. This track was from A Private Heaven, the album in which Easton reinvented herself in a more sexy and provocative mode than her Morning Train days. Note that it was called 9 to 5 in the UK, presumably changed to avoid confusion with Dolly Parton's smash from the movie of the same name. I've always been more partial to her cover of Mule Skinner Blues. Dolly Parton with a whip, yo...

But I digress. This Sheena Easton album also included the then-controversial, now-quaint Sugar Walls, which made the PMRC's rather silly top 15 list. Speaking of the PMRC, I still maintain that it was Tipper Gore's erstwhile attempt to appoint herself moral censor of the nation, and not any failings on her husband's part, that cost him the election in 2000. Like Obama this year, Gore in 2000 needed the enthusiastic engagement of young people to win, and I believe that it was the long memories of my generation that couldn't stomach the thought of Tipper living down the hall from the oval office.

But I (haha) digress. We were discussing the fact that on A Private Heaven, Sheena Easton came back on a strong tide of lyrical innuendo, playing up the sexy, and musically speaking, Strut is pure aphrodisia in that very mold. But if you look a little closer, the lyrics subvert that very image, revealing a female protagonist who is fed the fuck up with her body being used as a canvas for creepy men to paint their boring and cliche'd production line sexual fantasies:

Come on over here, lay your clothes on the chair, now let the lace fall across your shoulder
Standing in the half-light, you're almost like her, now take it slow like your daddy told ya.

And while I obviously can't tell women what songs they should use when they want to feel emancipated from the patriarchy, I personally think that Strut fills that role much better than Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, especially when it comes around to the chorus, which is defiant and cutting and way way way more in your face than Gaynor's narrative:

Strut, pout, put it out, that's what you want from women
Come on baby, what you takin' me for?
Strut, pout, put it out, all takin' and no givin'
Watch me, baby, while I walk out the door...

See, now, let's just look at that for a second. Easton's protagonist finds herself in a situation where she's briefly fallen for a shallow and hyperbolic "compliment" in the first verse, but then finds that his game is all about his own gratification, and his interest has nothing to do with her at all - she is literally a blank canvas to him, ideally with an empty head who will do as says so he can get his rocks off, most likely before she even gets fully turned on. So, rather than allow herself to be used like a girl for hire prostitute, she points out just how pathetic the guy really is, and then invites him to indulge his voyeuristic leanings for a few last seconds as she leaves him to his sad little life. Sheena = winner.

Gloria, on the other hand, has some serious flaws in her narrative. No matter how emancipated she may feel at the moment, the story here does not speak well to her strength of character. Rather than a strong woman with good critical thinking skills like Sheena, Gloria is a recovered victim clinging to her tenuous and uncertain freedom. She's been wounded, and badly, and laments that she didn't change her stupid lock, and indeed one has the sense that her freedom and emotional well-being is definitely threatened by the looming presence of her ex-whatever he was. Sure, she shows some strength when she sends him on his way, but what's she got to look forward to? "As long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive?"

Come on, dammit, you can do better than cling to the hope that you'll meet someone nice and merely survive. Sheena's gonna walk out of that dingy little flat and go become a fucking CEO of a major corporation or some shit. She's gonna go kick some ass, is what she's gonna do. Gloria's gonna make some chamomile tea, mentally go over her litany of greivances, and hope that someone better comes along, because it's only by loving a man that she's gonna be complete. Now really, ladies, which one do you want your daughters to emulate?

And if the respective subject matter of the two songs doesn't convince you, you could also take into account that while I Will Survive was written by two men (hardly surprising, that), Strut was co-written by an obscure but rather excellent singer and songwriter named Charlie Dore - she had a hit in the late 70s called Pilot of the Airwaves (the harmonies on this track remind me of a more pop/country version of Fairport Convention), and is still writing for some rather famous singers as well as recording her own material. She has a MySpace page up here with some of her tunes. Highly recommended, and I'm going to bed.

Gay for Stephen Fry.

Stephen's got a blog, and on that blog he has some words. EIEIO.

For instance, this entry features a lovely sentence indeed:

How can we hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture with which music originally smote us amidships and enslaved us for ever?