So I posted a disagreement with the blog-wide simpering over Al Gore and his coy non-entrance into the electoral fray on the thread Al Gore and the next 44 days, by James Boyce here on the Booman Tribune.
And among other disagreements with my OWN disagreement…which was couched in terms that compared Gore’s seemingly endless non-run to the celebrity-drenched-but-ultimately-vacuous Live Earth Concert that so deservedly tanked in the U.S. last week…Booman posted a YouTube construct of Jimi Hendrix doing his commercially lucrative guitar biting thing onstage for the delectation of the marks (“LOOKIT, Brenda!!! He’s playing with his TEETH!!! Far OUT!!!”) while behind him played his truly fine studio-produced version of the visionary American poet Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower”.
Preceded by the simple message “Snob this.”
Now I am not totally convinced that Booman even knew that what he was seeing was not what was being played on the track, but…being an agreeable sort…I did.
Snob this.
Read on if you want to hear one serious musician’s take on what is up here in the seriously rotten U. S. of A. these days.
Or…just turn your radio up a little louder and fuggedaboudit.
I do not really give a shit one way or another.
I just keep on making real music. As do literally thousands of others .
Pick up on it or not.
At your own risk and at the risk of this entire society.
You want some “snob”, Booman?
OK.
Your wish is my command.
But remember…you asked for it.
The entire “rock” establishment as it was represented in those Dead Earth concerts…with VERY few exceptions…cannot tie Jimi’s shoes. They are big-money produced, studio-created ACTS, and their sole function is to make money and waste people’s time.
Now I’ll tell you a little anecdote.
Do not look away. The point will get here eventually.
A couple of weeks ago I was doing errands in midtown NYC. About 4 blocks from where the steam pipe blew up yesterday, as a matter of fact. It was a nice day, so I was doing the whole thing all on foot. It was SUCH a nice day, and I was so happy to be doing nothing in particular, that I guarantee I was as stoned as Jimi ever got. And I know that for a fact because I was doing the same drugs at the same time…a couple of times on the same stage (The Fillmore East) …as was he. This high is MUCH better.
Anyway…I got hungry, so I dropped into a little sandwich place that had caught my eye months ago during a similar trek.
Because I liked the name.
WichCraft.
Nice, eh?
I liked it, anyway.
There was a beautiful, happy young girl behind the register and any number of good sounding sandwiches on the menu, so I made my order and settled in at a seat by the window to pursue my ongoing fascination with the face circus we laughingly call New York.
Jes’ floatin’ along, waiting for my Tuscan tuna on an herbed roll…
I watched some pigeons on a ledge across the street. One male pigeon making blundering and consistently rebuffed attempts to interest one of a several adjacent females in a night on the town. (I can relate…)
I watched awkward tourist girls and spiffed up office workers, an undercover cop and a couple of tough looking Japanese guys who appeared to be involved in the almost down and out-looking Japanese restaurant next door.
NYC at its broad-based best.
And then I heard the music in the restaurant.
I had been ignoring it. Tuning it out. But a soft-rock/jazz lite saxophonist piqued my interest. A third or fourth generation Coltrane clone, watered down to the point that he would not interfere with commerce. And I thought of the many times that I had sat in front of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner in their prime. What a force of the universe ‘Trane had been channeling!!! How all things of that sort degenerated as their specific knowledge leached out into the huddling masses (Muddling asses?) over time.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
And of the miracle that is the constant rebirth of that sort of force throughout human history.
Like what happened with Jimi Hendrix for a brief moment in time.
Whence comes another such a force?
Why…right down the pike somewhere.
Bet on it.
And the next track on the restaurant sound system?
The Rolling Stones.
Satisfaction
Now…I PLAY the blues.
I LISTEN to the blues.
And I TEACH the blues.
The REAL blues.
From Robert Johnson right on through Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing to Ray Charles, Cleanhead Vinson, Charlie Parker, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix. And on into the rap era. I will be playing the music of the very FIRST commercially successful rapper tonight, as a matter of fact.
Live and pretty goddamned authentically.
Cab Calloway.
Check THAT shit out sometime.
Hi De Ho indeed, motherfuckers.
And I am here to tell you that those junked-up, egoed-out English Stones assholes…with the possible exception of the drummer, who has fairly good time and a smattering of chops…cannot play a LICK!!!
I mean…it was embarrassing even to listen to them.
Wrong chords, out of tune singing, bad bass notes, bad time…
Fucking laughable.
No wonder they can’t get no satisfaction.
They can’t even manage a passable hardon.
What does this all have to do with Gore and Live Earth?
This is what it has to do with that farce.
I will guarantee that almost every motherfucker who played in those shows or had anything whatsoever to do with that production would kneel down and lick that old fraud Jagger’s balls if he had shown up to even grace the proceedings with his oh-so-royal presence.
Which, I notice…he did not do.
The whole thing is rotten at the root, Booman.
Before the hypnomedia got its shit together…say up until the early/mid-’50s…if amateurish, untalented musicians of that sort had shown up at any musical scene in America, they would have been bumrushed outta the joint before they finished their first set.
I spent about 16 hours alone in a car over the last 5 days. With the radio on search. Driving through mainstream America.
AM and FM.
The only musics that are being broadly consumed in America that even have any semblance of their shit together?
Rap/hip-hop/so-called R+B (today’s newspeak for what was called race music pre-’50s), the South/Central/Caribbean American idioms, and segments of the country scene.
YOU know…the music of relatively poor blacks, Latinos, working class mostly non-urban whites and the middle class nostalgie de la boue -type (Fond reminiscence of the mud. The French are SO perceptive about these things.) wannabes.
Just as it’s always been.
The bourgeoisie are SO lame. (There’s that French again.)
You want some “snob”?
You got it’ bro.
This system is fucked up top to bottom.
I am a musician.
A specialist.
I see the rot in my speciality.
If I were a doctor or a plumber or a proctologist…I’d see it there as well.
Bet on it.
So keep on sucking up that ersatz music, Booman.
You might as well try to live on Ovaltine.
Same ingredients.
Powder and artificially produced flavors.
Smoke and mirrors.
Tales told by idiots, signifying nothing. Lacking even sound and fury,
If the fish rots from the head…and the presumptive head if the particular scene in question is Al Gore….well, there you jolly well are, aren’t you.
Put THAT in your fucking earphones and vote on it.
You were better off with Trailer Trash Bill. Who COULD play the blues. And whose hardon worked jes’ fine, thank ya ma’am. The mere fact that Hillary stuck with him is an endorsement of her own soulfulness that puts her head and shoulders above the rest of this pack of wannabes as far as I am concerned.
Later…I gotta go practice now.
Middle Bb.
A lifework all by itself.
And…have fun.
I am.
Bet on it.
AG
That’s how musicians used to get paid when people were really listening.
If you liked the music, you put some money in the tip jar.
Now?
You turn on the TV or radio and then ignore the motherfuckers.
Who are being WELL paid by the system not to play.
Not really…
So it goes.
Wake the fuck up.
You are being had.
AG
well, at least you understood the message. And, yes, I knew we were listening to a studio version, while Jimi pleased the crowd.
It is sinking into the horizon, and I do not believe that it is finished yet.
AG
Blues, this weekend.
I got your email, Supe. Been running. STILL running. Sorry I didn’t answer. Can’t come out this time. Shouldn’t be wasting what time I have on this thread. But it means something to me, I guess.
Have fun.
AG
Answered you on MLW. Can’t come. Too busy. Sorry to miss it. That was a good hang last year. Have fun.
AG
Eye of the beholder. ’nuff said.
What reason is there to think that?
I have a friend who is a big fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber. One evening as we were knocking down beers he put, I think, “Phantom” on the stereo. There was one melody there that threw him into rapture. “How did he ever come up with that melody? It’s so eerie, so powerful! Genius! Genius!”
Less out of fear of being branded a “snob” (for that was already a fait accompli) than out of a reluctance to spoil my friend’s enjoyment, I held my tongue. But what I thought was: “That is what is known as a descending diminished scale. You will find it in any decent method book written for music students who are beyond, say, their second year of study. And he doesn’t adorn it, doesn’t do anything with it; just bluntly runs down the scale. There was no creativity involved in the production of this melodic line, at all.”
Because my friend was musically illiterate — which is not his fault or something I would hold against him — he took something to be quite remarkable and creative that was in fact utterly banal and unimaginative. He was, quite simply, mistaken in his judgment of the merits of the piece in question. No doubt, if he had gone on later to learn more about music, he would have come to that conclusion himself.
Does Michael Jordan know better than I do what makes for a good basketball player? Sure. Better than any of us here, too, I would guess — at least unless we’ve played and watched an awful lot of basketball on a very high level. And I don’t think that judgment would be uncontroversial.
Given the choice between my evaluation of a painting and Picasso’s, I’m inclined to give more credence to the latter. That also seems uncontroversial.
But transpose the same perfectly reasonable principle to music, and righteous wrath is sure to follow.
I do not understand this.
Is it fair to say that learning music composition pretty much ruins the ability to enjoy most music?
Depends on the person a little, but ideally yes it does. Once you have the ears to hear and identify and understand great music, why bother with the garbage. What fun is that? The ability to “enjoy most music,” is just another way of describing ignorance.
Because composition is not everything. Plenty of great music has been made by people that didn’t even now how to read music.
I don’t know how composition got made the focal point. The methods I was speaking of are not composition textbooks, and the students they are for aren’t composition students (who tend already to have a substantial background). The methods I was thinking of are for young learners of instruments, the point being that introduction to the diminished scale is a pretty basic part of a musician’s education (at least in the West).
However, your question, Boo, could be generalized: does musical education (which need not be formal) spoil a lot of music for one? Here I would say, yes and no. In music as elsewhere there are such things as “guilty pleasures”: stuff you enjoy even as you recognize it to be junk, or at least mediocre. But it’s true, you will be a lot less easily impressed. At the same time, you will enjoy and appreciate a lot of stuff you wouldn’t have (at least not so much) if you hadn’t had the education. (Obviously I’m employing the general “you”, not addressing you, Boo, in particular.)
Just the same as with literature, film, sports, etc. Again, what I encounter over and over is people who are not perturbed by any of this in relation to these other genres. But somehow, when it comes to music, those same people often find it objectionable.
Well, it makes me think about homes I visited in the midwest when I went to school there. They would have the most godawful kitchy art (angels motif, e.g.) on their walls. But the bottom line is that that art made them happy, while Picasso would have caused them angst and discomfort. And if an education in painting would destroy their appreciation of kitchy angel art, then I’m not at all sure that they’d be better for it. And there is no objective standard that says that mass produced Wal*Mart art is inferior to Picasso’s misogynistic works.
If someone thinks Wham! is the best band ever then that is just their opinion. Although I’d tell them that George Michael’s solo stuff is far superior.
for example:
Now that is some good pop.
If “there is no objective standard that says that mass produced Wal*Mart art is inferior to Picasso’s misogynistic works”, then there is no objective standard according to which progressive politics leads to a better society than regressive politics.
Since art is autonomous from morality, whether a work is misogynistic or not is of no consequence when evaluating its artistic quality. Therefore, what you are saying is that high art is no better than common kitsch. But this view is nothing but po-mo nonsense. It is a pose adopted by intellectuals who feel guilty about feeling alienated from ordinary working people.
Oh, come on Alexander…
I know what you’re trying to say, but you’re wrong.
Let’s say that I think composite colors are superior to primary colors…more interesting, more complex.
How do I justify my position? Well, we could ask people what they think. Is red better than purple?
There isn’t any correct answer.
I’m just expressing an opinion.
If you think Jefforson Starship’s We Built This City is a good song, what can I do to prove you wrong? The song hit the top of the charts.
You can make a different argument. You can say that complexity has value, perhaps because it consumes energy. So, a human being has more value than bacteria. Or a concerto has more value that a 2 minute song by the Ramones. But most people would probably disagree with you, and what would you fall back on to justify your position.
And it has nothing to do with politics. If we start doubting that eliminating want is a mere aesthetic value then we are truly lost. Alleviating suffering is as close to absolute good as you can find and is in no way comparable to a discussion of whether kitchy art is really as good as art by that masters.
I am not saying that eliminating want is a mere aesthetic value. What I am suggesting is that the kind of reasoning we employ when making aesthetic judgements is also the same kind we employ in making moral or scientific judgements: there is only one reason, and we employ it across the different spheres of live we are confronted with.
Your basic premise is that there is no such thing as expert knowledge. That is the starting point of creationists: that they are every bit as well qualified to judge scientific theories as scientists with years of training in disciplines that are built upon centuries of accumulated knowledge.
In the examples you give of aesthetic judgements, you do not consider the possibility that there can be communities of musicians and musicologists who painstakingly work together to develop values and standards by subjecting their views to criticism by their peers, in the same way that scientists do. Because the social process that creates these standards is based upon rational criticism, the process itself is rational, so that one can conclude that the norms that emerge from this process are objective. Of course, these standards change over time, but then, scientific truth changes over time, too.
And there is a connection here with politics. If it comes to be accepted that it is a mere subjective opinion that Beethoven is better than Burt Bacharach, then that creates a social climate in which everything is subjective, which has been one of the main enabling features of American culture of Karl Rove’s program.
Beethoven is a fantastic musician and I own several of his symphonies and enjoy listening to them. But there is no way that I can concede that he is objectively better than Duran Duran. The vast majority of living human beings would much rather listen to Hungry Like the Wold. I don’t care whether there is a village of musicologists that look down their noses at such plebeian tastes, it isn’t remotely decisive.
I think Dostoyevsky is the greatest novelist of all time, but reading him destroyed my ability to do fiction. And I enjoy other fiction less as a result, too. Most people prefer Stephen King or People Magazine.
There is some sense in which people’s tastes change when they are educated or come to understand how something is produced. You may love veal until you see the process that brings it to your table.
But you can’t tell someone veal doesn’t taste good. That’s my point.
If people like something, that is pretty much the end of the story.
As for politics, catering to elite tastes is a sure loser.
As for politics, saying “If people believe it (or it makes them happy) then no criticism is legitimate” is even more of a sure loser, and is hardly your approach.
The use of the word “elite” here is yet another piece of cheap rhetoric that bypasses the point.
Booman…
Generally left to their own devices, well functioning cultures DO listen to great artists. And PRODUCE them as well.
This is a political blog.
And my point is and HAS been here that culture IS politics. And that bad politics produces bad culture.
We have been hornswoggled by the POLITICAL culture of our country, Booman. By laws that have allowed corporate interests to dictate what we learn and what we listen to.
And on all the evidence of your many posts on and around this subject…you are among the misled.
Sorry, Boo.
That’s the way I see it.
You can take comfort (if you so wish) in the idea that you are not only far from alone in this position but indeed you reside right in the middle of the pile.
But pile it is.
And it is beginning to reek.
Too bad.
Once, we listened to artists like Ellington and Sinatra.
Now?
Pretty lame.
As is the society in general.
No correlation?
My ASS there is no correlation.
Change the mode of the music and you change the culture.
The Greeks understood this centuries ago.
And we do not.
But SOMEONE does.
The devolvers.
The users.
The thieves.
The soul-stealers.
Bet on it.
As we turn away from the horror we have created in the Middle East.
To the accompaniment of souless, feelingless, tuneless ever-present background music.
Hmmmm…
No correlation?
My ASS!!!
AG
Who?
Who the fuck listened to Sinatra and Ellington?
Okay, Sinatra and the crooners got some play, but seriously. I love Sinatra but he wasn’t Elvis.
And Elvis is what people listened to.
You keep running down the music that actually DID something, the music that actually responded to the challenge of the pill, the civil rights movement, the assassinations, and the Vietnam War.
You think that’s crap? That was a RESPONSE. It changed things. Now? Nothing much. People are bought and sold, they’re not in the streets and they aren’t singing about what’s gone wrong.
But this idyllic past you have where soulless grunts were grooving to Ellington and Sinatra is a fiction. When it mattered, when it went down, people were listening to The Beatles, The Stones, Hendrix, Janis, Morrison, Floyd, and Zeppelin.
Call them hacks, but they tapped into it and they had their say. And it mattered.
It is NOT a fiction.
Jazz was the soundtrack of 40 years of America.
You think America started with the late ’60s?
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Ward and Beaver Cleaver were listening to Dizzy?
C’mon Arthur. Give me some evidence. Radio, record sales, anything.
I find it hard to believe that you are so ignorant of the cultural history of this country, Booman. Although since you seem to be honest about everything else, I guess you are.
Beaver’s parents COURTED to jazz.
To the big bands.
To Dorsey and Basie. To Ellington and Goodman and Artie Shaw. Bet on it. As did my parents. And probably yours did as well. If not your parents, then your grandparents. The singers to whom they listened were Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. Nat was a DOMINANT jazz piano player before he gained fame as a singer, and he never let his jazz roots go. Sinatra learned how to sing from Tommy Dorsey and the jazz musicians in Dorsey’s band. Ella learned how to sing as an 18 year old girl working with the Chick Webb Band. (Which was often fronted for a number of years by Louis Armstrong). Peggy Lee came of age singing with Benny Goodman. These people had TV specials, Booman. LOTS of them. And before TV? They WERE radio. The music that developed from the ’20s through the ’50s was the background music of America. It was the music that accompanied the mythmakers. Hollywood. The first 20 or 30 years of TV. Commercials. In elevators. Warner Brothers cartoons. Fleischer cartoons. On jukeboxes in diners and bars. Theme music for ALL of the hit TV shows. It was the music that soothed and lifted the souls of the people fighting through the Depression and the Second World War.
Were they listening to Diz?
No.
Not all of them.
But there WERE literally millions who were listening to Diz and everybody else who was affected by the bebop revolution of the ’40s. I need no references, because I was there. In the black neighborhoods of the ’60s through the ’80s. All over America. I was lucky that way. For a Baby Boomer white man. Lucky.
I sat in local bars in Roxbury and Harlem and Indianapolis and Baltimore and Atlantic City and Philly and fucking Freeport New York (You could look it up. It’s on Long Island) throughout that time and there it was. Organ trios, good quartets, and if not live, on the jukebox.
FUNCTIONING AS THE MUSIC OF THE CULTURE.
It was a common ocurrance for me right through the ’90s to get into a cab or sit down at a lunch joint in most American cities with my horn case in my hand and have a black cab driver or couhter guy look at the horn, start a conversation to see if I was a square or not and end up telling me how he used to hang at Birdland (or wherever) whenever he could scrape some money together to go hear Bird and them. Not college professors. Working people. Faces SHINING with the recollection.
Ditto in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, only it was about Machito and Tito Rodriquez and Tito Puente. Or…and this felt VERY good…it was about the bands with which I was playing during the height of the Salsa boom. Larry Harlow, Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colon. Jes’ folks, Booman. Not intellectuals or artists or hustlers. Jes’ folks.
You and almost the entire contemporary white culture have been denied this knowledge. Literally DENIED it, Boo. To the eternal loss of this society, I am afraid.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to try to do something about this mistake. As a musician and increasingly as an educator and writer of words as well. And I am here to tell you that you have been hornswoggled. Denied your own cultural heritage as an American in the interests of keeping you docile and confused.
Yes, docile.
The docile left JUST as well as the docile right and center.
In truth just a MASSIVE middle that lacks the spirit to effectively resist the Borg-like corporate entity that continues to engulf us as I speak here.
You hearken back to the ’60s as if it was a time of some sort of effective resistance?
SHIT, Booman!!!
LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED!!!
That “resistance” lasted about 6 years.
And then came Nixon and Ford and Reagan and the Bushes.
Crack and amphetamines and Altamont and Iran-Contra and this hell in which we are living today.
And you quote “Sympathy For The Devil”!!!
You were BRAINWASHED into having sympathy for the devil.
All the while thinking thaty you were somehow grooving.
Look where it got us, Booman.
LOOK AROUND!!!
This country has lost its soul.
Look around.
And then stage a personal intervention, man.
Before it’s too late.
You cannot heal a society until you awaken yourself.
Believe it.
Those who do not understand history…the societal and cultural history of their own country…cannot get anything done.
Clomp clomp clomping along to the Stones and other falsely promoted so-called “revolutionaries”?
There was a B’way show named “Your Arms Too Short To Box With God”, which was based on the book of poetry “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse” by James Weldon Johnson.
Well, Booman…your time’s too weak to DANCE with God. With the future. And your pitch is too weak to sing with It as well.
God don’t clomp, Booman.
Bet on it.
Stage an intervention.
Take whatever you need to relax (Some good smoke will do quite nicely, maybe a little wine…whatever) into a small room with a good sound system and listen to…ohhh, say Louis Armstrong from the ’20s, Count Basie from the ’30s, Duke Ellington from the ’40s, Charlie Parker and Diz from the ’50s, Coltrane from the ’60s and Miles Davis with Gil Evans and also with the Wayne Shorter/Tony Williams quintet that Miles put together, plus a HEAVY dose of Goodman, Shaw, Dorsey, Sinatra, Billie, Ella, Sarah, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans with some Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke and Fatha Hines mixed in for historical seasoning.
Don’t leave that room until you get it.
You be bettah off.
MUCH bettah off.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
“fucking Freeport New York “
where in Freeport? and when, what years?
That’s my home town.
’61 through…ohhh, through ’65 or so. My best musical friend was an Italian tenor player whose grandparents still lived in what had at one time neen an Italian neighborhood in Freeport that had white-flighted into a black neighborhood. Right behind the stadium where the stck car races were held. We used to go overfto his grandmother’s house and eat down home Italian food and then go hang at a black club that had music on the weekends. I don’t remember the name. It was just a little bar. Maybe didn’t even HAVE a name. They allowed us to sit in sometimes.
AG
I was born in ’62. We lived on St. Marys Place at the time. Back when I was hanging out around Freeport in the late ’70’s was about the time that the whole town started going downhill. We used to hop the fence at the track and get in for nuthin on Saturday nights. Go up north of Sunrise cuz that’s the only place we could get beer. Otherwise, musically there was one place called the Right Track Inn on Merrick, over on the east end of town that had a decent rock and roll band once in a while. But it was almost exclusively white. The black kids and Puerto Rican kids lived mostly north of Sunrise and everybody pretty much kept to their racial clique. We did share some weed every now and then though. There weren’t really any gangs back then and you could get in a fist fight without worrying about getting stabbed or shot. Not like today. Freeport is a shithole. Even Woodcleft isn’t Woodcleft anymore. It’s a shame, but that’s progress for ya.
That is NOT progress, super.
It is devolution, and it is what I am addressing in this entire thread.
It PASSES for progress because this society has been run by the wrong folks for 60+ years.
I specialize in the musical aspects of this problem.
Re-education, whenever possible.
But the hooks are sunk deep.
Witness this thread.
Sunk deep into some of the GOOD folks.
Sad, really.
But I do keep trying.
Imagine if real integration and real education into the contributions of those black communities had been spread throughout this culture with the same fervor as no-playing motherfuckers have been hyped here for the past 40 years or so.
Imagine.
EVERYTHING would be different.
Everything.
Later…
AG
AG,
I’m a sarcastic ass from time to time, so I understand what the process is and where it’s taking us all down to. American progress is all devolution, but that’s a different subject.
Here’s where I was at when I came back to Freeport in my late teens at the end of the 70’s. I could never understand the division between races in the microcosm of American racism that was, and still is, Freeport. I think, first of all, that the geographical lines were drawn by economics, and the economic lines were drawn by race. It’s the same all across the country. I was a willing accomplice to the division because it was the soup of the generation attitude. But I never understood it. And my questioning of the dynamic got my ass in some serious trouble a few times. i.e….who wants a patronizing white kid trying to make (what I’m sure looked suspiciously like) I wanna get in your pants small talk with Puerto Rican or Black females just out of, you know, genuine curiosity and attraction? I was out of my place. Out of the prescribed territory. Not cool. AT all. We all had our boundaries, and they were not to be crossed.
What’s funny about that time to me, among other hilarious hypocrisy’s, was that almost all the kids I knew, white kids, Italian, Irish, Jews, Russians…you know, white, except for the few endangered species burners that I hung with, were listening to disco. And 99% of the bands that performed disco were Black. On the one hand, they loved and emulated the culture portrayed through the music, while on the other hand sticking just south of that Sunrise Hwy. That’s an important aspect of American identity, isn’t it? We bask in the accomplishments of our minorities because they make us look good, while simultaneously harboring hatred and contempt for those same defining voices. Not because of how they sound, but because of how they look. Because of how we’ve allowed ourselves to be taught to see them.
If you ask me it’s rape. Pure and simple. You (us white Americans) take what isn’t yours and make it yours, while denying the humanity of the original giver. Then, worst of all, you brag about it as if it was yours all along.
I reluctantly point out a front page post last week by BooMan that asked, who best portrayed the spirit, or words to that effect, of Rock and Roll? The Stones, or Led Zeppelin? The majority answer was the Stones because musically they rarely strayed far from the simple Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry style of late 50’s R& R. The truth is, at least to me, that Zepp was truer to the roots of R&R because they took from the backbone of the blues, the real daddy of R&R. It’s all over their records. And what ses them apart from the Stones in that regard is that they expanded on that backbone. They weren’t content to remain commercially viable and compliant.
Now, despite this rambling post, I do agree, more or less, with BooMan and Boran2 that beautty is in the ear of the behearer. Record execs and backers will always look for the cheapest, least challenging way to making a buck. They’ll continue to churn out empty, uncomplicated and unseeking music, all in the dollar hunt. It sucks. It’s shallow, ugly, and uninteresting. BUT, when I hear my daughters singing someting as depthless and meaningless as the latest Christina Aguliera song, something that she strives to emulate and smiles while singing, just as much as she does when she’s pushing her limits to attain a high note in a Barbra Striesand song, I don’t waste my time wondering why my daughter is singing such an uninspiring song. I only see the smile on her face and the joy that makes that smile possible when she hits Cristina’s high note.
Peace
Hi, super!
Hiya MM :o)
My parents, who are a little older than you might expect, listened to classical and swing, and that is pretty much it. They never got into rock and roll at all and pretty much gave up listening to music after a while. They liked Herb Alpert’s tijuana brass.
So they fit your description, I guess. They never made the jump, though, from swing to the jazz masters. They listened to Louis Armstrong, but not Charlie Parker or Dizzy, or Coltrane, or Miles. Too bad, it might have made them hipper.
They probably dropped out when they became parents in 1956.
As for the rest of your argument, you seem to be suggesting that Perry Como and Tony Bennett were jazz musicians which expands the meaning so far as to render my point meaningless.
Yes, Como and Crosby and Sinatra and Bennett were once popular. I’ve never considered them to be jazz, however. Sure, they used jazz musicians, but that’s different.
Jesus.
“Swing” IS jazz.
Have you swallowed that bullshit rock ‘n roll swing revival hype whole?
Please!!!
Bird rew up in Kansas City. Where Basie was king. His prime influence? Lester Young, Basie’s tenor soloist. The first “cool” player. Way back in the ’30s!!!
Tony Bennett???
Wake the fuck up.
Really.
From an Tony Bennett interview on MSNBC last year:
A: That was the greatest. I didn’t know who Charlie Parker was, and I went into Birdland with a friend of mine and we had front-row seats. Charlie Parker performed, and it was so percussive and something so different from anything I’d ever heard that I actually got up and ran out of the club and regurgitated in the street, I was so moved. I didn’t know who he was. I’d never heard anything like it.
Q: How did you find your vocal sound?
A: My vocal teacher Mimi Spear was on 52nd Street in New York City. Across the street from her brownstone, we could see marquee signs that read “Count Basie,” “Art Tatum,” “George Shearing” and “Stan Getz.” They were all on that street.
She said, “Tony, go down there and listen to all the musicians and find out who you like and imitate them. Don’t imitate singers, because if you do, you’ll just be one of the chorus.” That’s how I got my own style. Fifty-second Street was the best. At 3 a.m., the clubs would close, and it would be Billy Jo Jones, Miles Davis, [John] Coltrane, and I would sit there and listen to them until 12 in the afternoon. The clubs were dark, no lights. I’d walk out and be blinded by the sun and sleep in the afternoon. That happened day after day after day. It was the greatest. They don’t do that now.
Q: You were the first white singer to perform with Count Basie. What was that like?
A: It changed my career even though people didn’t like it. He always had the right tempo.
Q: Did you encounter a lot of racism?
A: There was a lot of it. It’s still not right, even now. Look at [Hurricane] Katrina and the United States, with the money and power that we have in our great country. I have traveled around the world to Asia and Europe. They show you what they have contributed to the world. The British show you theater, the Italians show you music and art, the French show you cooking and painting, and the Germans show you science. The only thing that the United States, which is still a young country, has contributed culturally to the world is jazz –elongated improvisation.
Fifty years from now people will be bowing to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, just like the impressionist painters like Monet, who were starving in their day. The Americans don’t even know what they have come up with.
Crosby? He ROOMED with Frankie Trumbauer.
Sinatra may be the single greatest jazz singer, short of perhaps Ella and Billie Holiday. And of course Louis Armstrong, who invented the genre. Never a wrong note, never a dull note. Always JUST RIGHT.
Como? The great jazz critic Gene Lees had this to say about him in 1968.
“All one can do is try to sing as well and as honestly as Como, and any singer who does that will end up sounding like himself, not Como.”
The ESSENCE of real jazz.
You gotta get out more, Booman.
Really.
AG
Of course swing is jazz. But Frank Sinatra is jazz?
I would never have defined him that way.
But I won’t argue with you. If you think the crooners were jazz musicians then fine. I would have differentiated them from swing, which I do consider to be jazz. But they both used big bands, so I guess you can lump them together.
Why is Sinatra not “jazz”?
He sings JUST like Billie Holiday in many respects.
Where is the difference? Except of course Sinatra had better chops.
Tell me.
Tell YOURSELF.
AG
The OED defines swing as “a style of jazz…” So this is not controversial.
Find me the Jazz.
Man…you need some American cultural history.
People who learned their craft at the feet of jazz players…most often as singers in big bands…or who EXTENSIVELY used jazz players as arrangers and accompanists from that list?
Too long to list.
A brief survey of the first part:
Andrews Sisters
Ames Brothers
Frankie Laine
Teresa Brewer with The Dixieland All Stars (Duh!!!)
Guy Lombardo And His Royal Canadians (Started out as an Ellington clone band.)
Perry Como (FEATURED great jazz artists on every TV show. Used great jazz guitarists on every show as solo accompanists. Had a band that had nothing BUT fine jazz players playing in it. As did every other TV variety show of the time.)
Nat “King” Cole (He was a STAR jazz piano player. You could look it up.)
Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra and The Weaver (One of the great jazz orchestrators.)
Patti Page
Sammy Kaye (Started out as what was known as a “territory band”. Working one nighters, playing “jazz”. Swing. Bet on it.)
Les Paul (INVENTED the modern electric guitar. Serious jazz musician.)
Rosemary Clooney. ( A real jazz singer. Heavily influenced by Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.)
Tony Bennett (Ditto. Became a musician the day he first heard Bird. Bet on it. Had an enlightenment moment.)
I could go on…it’s the same story all the way down…but I won’t.
That list is almost ALL “jazz”, pretty much. Except for the country stuff. Which was itself heavily influenced by the Western Swing movement.
AND….,it is in tune, in good time, and harmonically quite interesting, most of it.
is it ‘saaerious art”?
No. It is not.
But it is POSITIVE CULTURAL INFORMATION. In a musical sense. And it is almost all INFORMED by the jazz experience.
Sorry, Booman…you are WAY off base here.
AG
Your comparison of Beethoven and Duran and Duran is thought provoking. I have to concede, without much regret, that there is not much point in arguing that Beethoven is better than Duran Duran. But that is because both are good at what they do, and we can agree that while what they do are different things, both things are good.
I was prompted to think along similar lines by my question to Arthur, who is a jazz musician, while I am not into jazz. I think that both classical music and good pop music are better than jazz, but is that objectively true? To get back to the community of experts that I was talking about, I think that the problem is that the traditions of classical, jazz, and pop music are so disparate that there are not enough common values and standards between them for one to be able to musically compare them. So if one were to compare them, one would have to go outside of music, to an abstract, philosophical level, to compare their form. Few people would be willing to do that, and although I am one of those who would, I would not go so far as to say that this is an important problem, so that I would try to convince other people that they should worry about it.
But the point is that within genres, there are (socially constituted) objective standards. Beethoven is better than Charles Ives. Siouxsie (of Siouxsie and the Banshees) is better than Britney Speers. So to get back to Picasso and Walmart art, do I still disagree with you? I think I do, but my case is now less firm. I think that example involves comparing great high art to bad popular art. The “genres” are different and so “incommensurable”, but the case can still be made that a good thing of one kind is better than a bad thing of a different kind. (If you had used Target in your example instead, I would probably concede the point. That is why people shop at Target.)
In my previous comment, I said that your premise is that there is no expert knowledge. The issue is deeper than that: it is what is the nature of knowledge? Is it constituted by the individual, or is it social? That is a very deep and fundamental philosophical problem that professional philosophers are currently grappling with, so we are not going to resolve it here. I’ll merely note that given the individualistic nature of American society, American professional philosophers have a bias not to think of knowledge as being socially constituted.
Well, I could give you a dozen reasons why Beethoven is better than Duran Duran and they would go over a spectrum…from their relative historical significance to their wardrobes. But then some twelve year old would come along and say, “Beethoven’s boring” and that would pretty much end the discussion, wouldn’t it?
It’s not about different genres. It’s about different tastes. You want something objective? Steak Tartar is better than arsenic. Okay? That’s an objective argument.
But when you try to tell me that someone that really likes Duran Duran better than Beethoven is some kind of philistine, then I say you’re being an elitist. If Beethoven wanted everyone to bow down to him his should have written catchier tunes.
Now, I know there is an art to creating music and there are rules. And a great musician is like a great mathematician, and a great chef is nothing like a short-order cook. But if people want a bacon cheeseburger then that is what they want.
And ultimately, art is not for edification, but for sale.
If “art is not for edification [of the individual], but for sale [for profit]”, then the market exists not for the benefit of individuals, but the function of individuals is to populate markets (that is, provide profit streams for corporations).
If you really believe this, you should switch parties, or at least sign on with the DLC.
Look. What I do is art. Feel free to call it low art, high art, bad art, or whatever. But it is for sale, just as Arthur’s music is for sale. That doesn’t make us sell-outs. Jesus. Look at our tax returns. But it’s a fact. There is very little art that has ever been produced that wasn’t ultimately for sale. And that means that people need to like it. Some of us are happy to serve a niche market that keeps us poor. But none of us is immune.
And the idea that the only good art is art that can only be appreciated by the highly educated is a conceit played by the purist against the successful.
Sorry. I had no idea that you are an artist. I understand that “There is very little art that has ever been produced that wasn’t ultimately for sale.” The great composers (Friedrich the Great was not among them) had to make a living, and they did so by selling their art.
I don’t mean to be presumptuous and don’t take this the wrong way, but I would suggest that in this discussion you are perhaps taking things a bit too personally and should try to have a little more distance. I don’t think that anyone on this thread has suggested that “the only good art is art that can only be appreciated by the highly educated.” I certainly have never believed that; I think that good taste is largely a matter of nature, not nurture. But the point still holds that with good education or not, there will be good taste and bad taste.
I think it is important to realize that there are two completely separate issues here. One, the artist needs to survive, and to do so, he is dependent on the market. Two, the market may fail completely at arriving at a correct valuation of a work of art. In other words, an artist’s reception in the marketplace need have nothing to do with how good his art actually is. Mozart died a pauper.
It is a peculiarly American myth (now spread to the rest of the world, thanks to neoliberalism) that the market arrives at a correct valuation of things. How well something sells and how good it is are two completely different issues.
But this gets back to where we started in this thread: can aesthetic judgements be objective?
no, aesthetic judgments cannot be objective. No way.
However, people can achieve higher levels of aesthetic appreciation through education.
I think your remark that “aesthetic judgments cannot be objective” is a non-starter, because probably both you and I have both gone to see bands at local clubs when we where in high school and soon after we graduated, and we and our friends did not hesitate to conclude that some bands were more tight than others. Really, you are sounding like Tony Snow here. You are holding up some abstract, theoretical standards for how we make discriminations, as opposed to reflecting upon how we decide about things in everyday life.
Furthermore, the claim that “there is no way that aesthetic judgements can be objective” clearly is an assertion that falls within the academic discipline of philosophy. There is a vast literature on the subject. For us to discuss the issue further without bringing that literature into the discussion would be like creationists acting like they have anything of value to say about biology. (I don’t mean for this to be a conversation stopper. I could give you citations supporting my position, if you like. All that I am saying is that we are getting into expert opinion territory here, and that we need to consider that opinion, if we are to continue the discussion.)
But, since you say that “people can achieve higher levels of aesthetic appreciation through education”, I’m willing to say that we have no quarrel here, just so long as you scale down your claim that “there is no way that aesthetic judgments can be objective” to “it is not clear whether aesthetic judgments can be objective”. Both you and I are taking extreme positions. My position is extreme with respect to mainstream Anglo-American philosophy; your position is extreme with respect to German philosophy and, I would say, common sense. So let’s agree on a middle position, that the issue is a matter of dispute.
This is not a controversial assertion within philosophy. I know of no philosopher that would argue that it can be objectively determined that Pink Floyd is better than the Sex Pistols.
As I said elsewhere, steak tartar is objectively better than arsenic as a foodstuff. Pink Floyd is objectively better than noise that causes deafness.
But there is no objective standard that can tell you that one form of music is better than another.
It is not controversial at all.
Fuck the philosphers.
Sex Pistols?
Pink Floyd?
Compared to what?
Bartok?
Ellington?
Miles Davis?
The only objective discussion POSSIBLE given that kind of competition is whether one of those lame bands sucks worse than the other.
And which one was worse for the social environment.
I am all about social ecology here.
Spew bullshit into the air and call it oxygen and I am ON YOUR CASE!!!
AG
I know people that just as passionate and knowledgeable about music as you who would go on at great lengths about the importance of the Sex Pistols.
And that is really my point.
Really?
Lemme at ’em.
AG
Any philosopher who argued that Pink Floyd is better than the Sex Pistols would be an idiot, because that’s simply not true: British pop simply underwent a productive change, which is what happens when a musical culture is healthy. However, many people familiar with punk and post-punk would argue that Joy Division is better than the Sex Pistols, and they would be right, I think. The whole idea of post-punk, new wave, or whatever you want to call it was to build on punk, while introducing some virtuosity and discipline. Thus, one can make the general conclusion that post-punk as a whole is better than punk, since post-punk is the mature form of punk. But I think must people would consider them to be two different genres, although as in most classifications, there will be gray areas.
The position you are advocating is the prevailing orthodoxy, nothing more. It is called positivism or, more politely, empiricism. You are evidently not familiar with philosophers working at the frontiers of research like John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Its empiricist bias is one of the main things wrong with Anglophone culture.
If you would seriously deny that bands like U2 and Radiohead are better than country music (crossover acts like the Dixie Chicks excepted), then you and I inhabit such different worlds that I do not think that we will ever see eye to eye on this.
Notice that I did not deny the possibility of objective truth but, rather, gave you examples of objective truth.
First you have to find a positive good. Self-preservation is a positive good. Working faculties are a positive good. Therefore, any music is better than the sound of a jackhammer, and any food is better than poison.
But when you get beyond the realm of positive goods you lose any grounding for calling something better than something else. Better for what?
What is the point of listening to a concerto or Dark Side of the Moon or Never Mind the Bollocks?
Depending on your sensibilities you will enjoy one more than the others, or even depending on your mood.
But what good is coming from the listening?
Isn’t it simply your enjoyment? A pursuit of happiness? And what makes you happy is what must serve as the measure of ‘good’.
This is not an objective thing. It is completely subjective. And there is no truth about it. If you like Joy Division more than Pink Floyd then that is your opinion and it is true for you, but it has no objective basis whatsoever.
This is not positivism. It’s just common sense.
Also, pulling from Wittgenstein’s proteges is probably not the best way to rebut my case.
I have avoided using philosophical concepts to bolster my point because this is just a silly argument about what kind of music is better.
But, if I were you I’d fall back on some kind of objective perspectivism. Essentially, you need to make some kind of argument that there is (or can be) a integration of perspectives that constitutes a objective truth.
If you want to use Inferentialism I think you’re going to run into the ‘good-for-what’ problem.
Actually, I think that is an insurmountable problem which is why I hold the position I do.
I think you’ll find that some music is good for lowering your blood pressure, arousing your libido, causing a feeling of well-being, etc. And it can be judged in those objective terms. But it can’t be judged on the basis of what you like or prefer.
Sorry I couldn’t reply to this sooner, since I couldn’t connect to the server (although otherwise everything about my network connections was normal).
The value of all good art is that it gives us access to the infinite; beauty is a good in itself. Your common sense is just a vapid, phlegmatic utilitarian dogmatism.
I think that anyone who takes art seriously understands on some level that it serves a function analogous to that of religion. But of course such a view jars with the kind of “entertainment” with which our corporations present us. The line you are taking is precisely the one that is most convenient for the entertainment industry: everything’s the same, so you shouldn’t be bothered that we keep on feeding you crap.
This is no coincidence. Empiricism and utilitarianism arose as part of the process of British society attempting to understand itself in response to the rise of capitalism.
Okay.
How is it utilitarian?
I could say that Madonna is the best musician because she brings the most happiness to the most amount of people. I could argue that art can be judged on this basis and that it leads me to conclude that pop art is better than highbrow art.
But I’m not making that argument.
I think you are objecting to me asking the ‘what-for’ question when it comes to judging art. But I’m not doing that either. I am asking a ‘better-for-what’ question, which is essential if we’re going to agree that one piece of music is objectively better than another piece of music.
As long as you can answer the ‘better-for-what’ question then you are on solid objective ground.
What’s better dance music? Abba or King Crimson?
Answer: Abba.
But tell me one band is objectively better overall? You can’t do that.
You can say ‘Miles Davis is a more accomplished and skilled musician than Kenny G’. That’s true and you can measure it. But that doesn’t mean that Miles Davis’ music is objectively better than Kenny G’s. That’s strictly a matter of taste.
I conceded very early on that in many if not most cases, musical genres will be incommensurable.
You seem to want to put me into a straw man’s position where I am arguing that one can objectively determine the one best group or type of music. I am not saying that. I’m merely denying your claim that no objectively valid aesthetic judgements at all are possible, a claim which you seem to be stepping back from.
I think I have already answered the “what for” question in my previous post. The best art produces feelings akin to rapture, and helps us progress along our path to self-awareness. That is the function of art, as should be clear to everyone. Both a piece of trance music or a piano piece by Shostakovich can both produce those effects, although in different ways, so that both are good, although one cannot say which is better. Country music on the other hand is not intended to produce those effects, but to produce sedation, to pick up a theme of Arthur’s. Therefore, it is bad. The same goes for most popular music and art.
These ideas are not new. They merely involve a refusal to accept your understanding of a work of art—that it is a commodity, like a cheeseburger or an SUV, so that the only thing that matters is whether the consumer’s arbitrary preferences are satisfied.
if you’re saying that listening to Miles Davis is better for achieving rapture than listening to Dolly Parton, then I’ll concede the point. But depending on the person, they can be more likely to cause a headache.
Ahem, her Horns and Halos album was cool…
Finally, a common ground! We both hate country music.
But I’d have to agree with Cabin Girl: a wouldn’t lump Dolly Parton with bad country music.
I think most country music is bad, but chances are there are exceptions. (I think probably neither of us would be able to name the worst offenders.)
I don’t hate country music. I don’t listen to it very often, but I don’t hate it.
Bono can’t even carry a tune.
AG
Your claim that “there is no way that aesthetic judgements can be objective” falls within the subject matter of the academic discipline of philosophy, and currently, this issue has not been settled within that discipline. So either we start debating the issue by bringing in the relevant academic literature, or we accept that the matter has not yet been settled.
I propose we do the latter.
Boo, this is a non sequitur (one of the standard ones I’ve become accustomed to in discussions about this issue), beguilingly adorned with question-begging assertions.
There are people — and I know this for a fact — whose sole source of comfort is digging into an occasional Big Mac. That doesn’t make it artfully-crafted food. And my saying that it isn’t artfully-crafted food doesn’t imply that I think we should send some aesthetic police around to grab Big Macs out of people’s hands and force-feed them with some more savory dish whether they want it or not. Similarly, tI here are people who get great satisfaction out of the types of romance novels we (when I worked in a bookstore) called “bodice-rippers” and even thought them to be, not just pleasing time-passers, but great fiction. I can say that they are mistaken without implying that they should be locked in a room with a stack of Dostoyevsky novels. Etc.
Time and time again, I get the same defensive reactions — the same non sequiturs — from otherwise rational people when this subject is broached.
“So, you wholeheartedly denounce [fill in genre here]?”
No. Not implied by my position, either.
“So, you think that unless someone went to Julliard …?”
No. Not implied by my position, either.
“So, you think that people with so-called uneducated tastes should be deprived of what makes them happy in favor of what you like?”
No. Not implied by my position, either.
“So, you think you are an infallible judge of what is good and bad?”
No. Not implied by my position, either.
I return to my point about Michael Jordan’s being a better evaluator of basketball plays than the average observer, Picasso’s being a better evaluator of paintings than I am or you are. Doesn’t make them “better” people. They have more finely-grained perceptions in the domain in which they have had so much training and experience than do those of us who haven’t had those things. And the same applies to music.
Why does this seemingly modest claim get people so riled up that they have to project some patently obnoxious view, not implied by it, onto the people who make it?
My answer?
Why does the hypnotized person in the hypnotist’s stage show have a negative reaction to people pointing out that he gers up and makes clucking chicken sounds every time someone says the word “tomorrow”?
Because he has been programmed and does not remember the act of programming.
Is why.
So it goes.
Interventions all around.
Quickly.
There is SO LITTLE TIME LEFT!!!
I do keep trying…
Thanks for trying too.
Later…
AG
What is it about Picasso that makes him a better judge of what makes a great painting than I am?
I took art history as a throw away course and learned more in it than in any other class I took in college. I do feel like I have a better appreciation of what goes into making a painting and also how different artists built on the accomplishments of their predecessors. My minor in history affords me even more context for appreciating the social conditions in which different art movements arose and to what sentiments they appealed. All of that makes it possible to ‘see’ more in a painting, just as a trained musician can ‘hear’ more in a song. But what does it all amount to in the end? I don’t think it amounts to much. I’ve changed my perceptions but I haven’t made my perception better.
And I still don’t really care for Picasso’s paintings even though I have one hanging in my living room.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist: if you don’t really care for Picasso’s paintings, why do you have one hanging in your living room?
Honestly?
Google: Lester Longman
He was my grandfather.
link.
Well, that clears that up. So you inherited it. Fair enough.
Sorry, the possibility had not occurred to me, since I have been too disorganized to hang up anything I inherited, due to circumstances beyond my control.
Your comments are excellent imitation of a first year art school student who has just realized that he has no talent and has to find some intellectual justification for why he’s wasting everybody’s time and taking up classroom space, just so he doesn’t wind up offing himself. Yeah dude, everything is equal and the meta narratives of modernity are trite and confining. It’s just keeping you down man.
But hold on. Do you actually subscribe to the limp dicked postmodern bullshit you’ve outlined here? Oy. Just walk towards the light and keep repeating “objective reality does exist” like you believe it.
Well, honestly, I don’t think objective reality exists in any aesthetic level. I like cheesesteaks from Pat’s, you think that’s moronic, and no diploma will decide it.
No.
It is bullshit.
Is it fair to say that learning how to play basketball ruins one’s ability to enjoy the game?
Please.
AG
What reason is there to think that?
If the beholder enjoys a certain artist, his/her choice of music need not be further questioned.
What reason is there to think further inquiry is required?
What reason is there to think further inquiry is required?
I answered this question in my initial post.
Really? So, your answer, as I understand it, is that because it is insufficiently sophisticated, the said music is worthy of contempt, or something like that. Mediocrity has existed alongside excellence for all of time. I’m still unclear exactly why further review is needed. Not everyone has the time or inclination to be schooled in the basic elements of music, better to have people interested at some level than not at all.
Further inquiry is NOT required.
On the individual level.
But when a whole society’s musical tastes devolve in so rapid and extreme a manner, and when that society has been subjected to the most powerful mind control mechanism ever invented DURING THE EXACT SAME TIME AND TO THE EXACT SAME DEGREE AS THAT MECHANISM HAS BEEN PERFECTED (A mind control system that is owned, operated and controlled by the extremely rich and their secret police.) …then questions must be asked.
I am asking them.
What do YOU think happened?
We all got dumb at once?
Like the dinosaurs?
Please.
“Whadda buncha maroons!!!” (Bugs Bunny, 1948 or so. Yup.)
Later…
AG
So sorry to hear that you’ve been subject to mind control. Somehow I’ve been able to avoid it. I’m sure that you’ll claim otherwise, but since you don’t know the first thing about me, you’ll just have to accept my assertion.
Later,
boran2
Did you grow up in America?
Did you watch TV before your mind was sufficiently developed to make valid critical judgments?
Did you ever smoke cigarettes?
Ever have an unexplainable craving for a Big Mac or a specific kind of blonde or a particular automobile?
Ever watch a TV show or movie through that you knew damned well was mediocre or worse?
NO?
Hmmmm…
Mus’ be one ‘a them spiritual geniuses ah keep hearin’ about.
Kin I kiss your (a)hem?
AG
Wow. I don’t smoke, never craved a car (or a “specific kind of blonde”) and don’t make a habit of sitting through bad movies. And don’t even think about kissing me.
(much) later.
AG
Ear of the be-listener, actually.
Most of that music is ONLY to be watched.
Not “Let’s go listen to the Stones.”
Because there is nothing to listen to.
Just a make believe show.
They are fakers.
Believe it.
AG
I remember the last concert I went to. It was one of life’s transition moments. The thrill was no longer there, no excitement, I had in fact outgrown the whole thing.
I still enjoy the music but all of the celebrity status of groups and the Boston Garden tradition of joint lighting at the start of the first song would remain only a distant memory.
Big Al though had the audacity to sell his own people a false concept as one can easily equate China and India’s industrial gold rush type boom with the 1997 Kyoto decision to exempt them from any carbon restrictions. And the factory building did in fact ensue.
You woke the fuck up.
Welcome in.
AG
you kids get off my lawn!!!
This is not about kids.
NOR is it generational.
I felt the same way about them when they were young. The clomp clomp clompers. They are MY generation. And they were fakers when they were 20.
At the same time that they were just beinning to repetitively pound away at their several chords, John Coltrane was prying back the covers that hid the secrets of the harmonic universe.
Why listen to these fools when there are geniuses at work right around the corner?
I didn’t understand it then.
I do now.
The corporate world did not WANT people to think or feel. They wanted sleeple consumers.
And they used the hypnomedia to create them.
Left, right AND center.
The fools who suck up this pap?
They are 40+, most of them.
“Get off the grass???”
It’s more like “Hey!!! You geezers!!! Isn’t it about time to wake the fuck up?”
AG
Yeah, there was definitely a corporate takeover, no doubt.
But you’re in danger of echoing the voice teacher that hates Dylan because he can’t sing.
But, here’s the thing…
When sing songs like this, you don’t want a good voice.
FUCK Dylan’s singing.
He was a possessed poet.
Even HE knows it.
AG
Arthur, I agree with you that American pop music culture has seriously devolved. But you are a jazz musician, whereas I have never been able to get into jazz, although I have tried on several occasions. I like classical music and British and German pop.
So, I am curious: are there any pop acts, going back to the start of punk, that you find musically respectable? And if there are, what pop groups or musicians would be the latest ones that you deem worthy of respect?
I was prompted to ask this question because when you gave examples of “real guitar players”, they were all jazz musicians, none of whom I have ever heard of. What do you think of people whom I consider to be real guitar players, such as David Gilmour, Robert Sumner, or Kevin Shields?
Gilmour? Very limited. A slightly progressed folk strummer.
Sumner? Don’t know him. With whom does he play?
Shields? Noise. Ignorant noise.
Pop acts?
The Beatles had some melodic and harmonic stuff that worked. Compared to any journeyman jazz player they could barely play their instruments, but they had talent at the very least.
The whole soul movement…Wilson Pickett, James Brown, etc. Real players, most of them,. With real emotional content.
Most of the country singers before the Disneyfication of Nashville.
I had hopes for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
A LOT of rappers.
Dylan, of course. Not musically…but as a poet.
The Band.
Iggy Pop was at least outrageous.
John Cougar could tell a story.
Springsteen (his bands, actually) is passably proficient musically. But MASSIVELY boring, in the long run. Tendentious.
Some of the English blues players…whatsiname, Clapton, a few others…would pass as a pretty good blues players if there was no one around who could REALLY play.
The whole Celtic movement? Pretty interesting. You cannot fake real Celtic forms.
Ditto real bluegrass.
Marley and the Jamaican thing? Marley was a genius.
Trinidadian forms? Burning.
The whole latino pop culture? Even MORE burning, at least until corporatized.
Afro-pop? It has its moments.
The last 20 years or so of rap? Rhythmically and lyrically brilliant, much of it. Technically brilliant too, in terms of production. Lacking a great deal melodically and harmonically. Still developing.
Punk in general??
Noise, mostly.
Some energy.,…usually amphetamine driven, but energetic.
And stupid.
Listen, Alexander.
Here’s the scoop.
Human beings are the only three-brained animals on this planet, at least as far as is commonly understood.
Physical, emotional and mental brains.
Great music..ALL great performance art, including high-level athletics…uses all three of those brains at roughly equal and at very high amounts of energy.
There is almost NO “mind” in the pop music you seem to like.
Not much body, either.
Just emotion.
NEGATIVE emotion, most of it. Which is NOT strong. Not long term it isn’t. It burns itself out and ends up weak and washed up at 23. Or starts to caricature itself and makes a lot of money. Like the Stones.
Or does the Guns ‘n Roses/Nirvana thing.
There was a time…and do not start to get all generational on me, because it was before MY time as well…when the dominant pop music of this culture DID use all three brains.
The Swing Era.
And there has been a steady downward spiral in that system ever since the ’50s.
You say that “you never heard of” the three jazz musicians I mentioned.
And yet…trust me on this…they and literally hundreds of others were (and are today) literally as virtuosic and musically deep as the so-called “classical” musicians to whom you say you like to listen.
You say “I have never been able to get into jazz”, yet if by the words “classical music” you mean people on the level of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Stravinsky and Bartok, the “jazz musicians” to whom you cannot listen are their equals and quite literally their true inheritors.
So you have to SERIOUSLY ask yourself…if you trust me here, and I do not know why you shouldn’t, because I am far from the only person on earth who is saying this…”WHY IS IT THAT I CANNOT GET INTO THIS MUSIC?”
I do not know who you are or how you grew up or were educated, but dig it, ‘bro.
You done been BRAINWASHED.
Go back, find out HOW they got you, and stage your own intervention.
You be bettah off.
Trust me.
You be WAY bettah off.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. First thing?
Look at racial matters.
Are you white?
Middle class white by birth? (Just a guess. Sue me if I’m wrong. “I like classical music and British and German pop?” I’m not wrong.)
Dig it.
You were surrounded by elders who grew up during a time when a white person had to be truly original to be able to see the fact that there were indeed a numkber of black people who were not only equal to you but were massively superior in some respects.
Mentally and emotionally as well as physically.
And they edumacated you out of being able to hear and see this.
Stage an intervention.
Quick.
Before It’s too late.
Arthur, if you go back to Vienna and look at who was actually listening to those Beethoven symphonies, you’ll discover that they were all blue-blood aristocrats. Maybe, maybe a few really rich and well established Jews, but for the most part it was Von so and so and the baroness.
And the same is true today of people that go to symphonies, ballets, and operas.
Jazz is a little different since it comes out of the third estate and continues to fuse third world influences…but it still has a highly educated audience…at least among white people.
It’s not so terribly different from the student’s lounge of any state university’s english department. In some ways…strictly for effete cloud-dwellers and do-nothings. That is, if you choose to be condescending to people of the arts.
I don’t.
I have respect for literature students and for serious musicians and for painters and for any kind of real art.
But there was never a period that I am aware of when these predilections were not the strict province of some idle elite.
And that doesn’t make it better than a tractor-pull, pro-wrestling, or The Troggs.
To each his own. There are some artists that I hate even as I recognize their technical skill. Doesn’t change the fact that I hate them.
Ever listen to Iron Maiden? You should. Those guys knew how to play. But I still think they sucked.
“Jazz”…and by extension the latin music that is my second musical home…until VERY recently was a people’s music. In the well-functioning urban minority neighborhoods right on up to their demise after the assasinations, riots and crack epidemic, and in the culture at large at least until the ’50s.
It has crosssed over into being an “art” music, to its own detriment. But it will survive this crossover becauser of its amazing content and history. At least I believe this to be so and have staked my life upon it.
If I’m wrong…it’s my ass.
AG
Just a taste of just how much of a people’s music jazz was (and hopefully still is) is chronicled in Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life – yeah I know, it covers that free jazz stuff I seem to dig, but just reading about the lives and backgrounds of the artists makes it achingly clear just how far from “blueblood” jazz is.
It’s true that Jazz’s origins are not blueblood. But that is not necessarily encouraging in Arthur’s context. Remember, a key thesis for Arthur is that musical tastes have undergone a devolution and that this devolution is mirrored in society at large and helps explain the current political problems we face.
Popular music is relatively new. Swing music was dynamic and innovative, but it was also mainly diversionary. That was followed by crooners and ballads, and then by rockers. By the mid-50’s we had a new style of mass consumption music. By the early 60’s we had Motown and other high-quality mass consumption devices. It has remained that way, only interrupted by the musical revolution of the late 60’s.
My point is that Jazz was never popular music. It went from underground to elite niche. But it has never been popular.
I don’t think you’re right about this. Popular music is older than you think. The phonograph and records were mass produced early in the 20th century; long before that there was a tradition of town bands. The middle and working classes were aware of the great composers and more recent popular music.
And I definitely don’t agree that jazz was never popular. You call swing “dynamic and innovative”, I call it a safely whitified popularization of jazz. IMO, “jazz”, loosely defined, was a leading popular music style in America for the 1920s into the 1960s. AG may of course disagree with me.
Actually, the swing era WAS dynamic and innovative. A whole working class/middle class white culture discovered the great black jazz players, and musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James and above all Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden were players on an equal footing with the GREATEST black players.
This was really the first time that a group of white people in ANY segment of the society…a group strong enough and talented enough to change the whole majority culture, eventually… looked at some black people and said “HEY!!! These people are heavier that I am!!! What’s up here?” You have to…you must… appreciate what a risk that was for those early white jazz musicians. Black men were still being lynched for even LOOKING at white women in the south, and the popular white image of black people pictured them as almost subhuman.
And here were Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke…two midwestern German boys…two Jewish clarinetists (Goodman and Shaw) two Irish Pennsylvania coal miner kids (The Dorsey brothers) a part-Indian Texas white boy named Teagarden, a Polish drummer named Krupa and a WHOLE bunch of others saying “FUCK alla that!! These motherfuckers are HEAVY!!!”
Revolution!!!
Bet on it.
And within 10 or 15 years, these people had brought the music almost totally undiluted to the majority audience of America. Featuring black musicians every fucking time they could get away with it without being lynched themselves.
Bet on it.
I am in the process of producing a series of jazz repertory concerts in New Hampshire. (Go here to learn more. Two concerts left. 7/28 + 8/11. Good stuff. The best of the best from NYC playing the best of the best from the ’30s through the ’50s.) With a fine (totally multiracial, of course) NYC band, playing the authentic music of the Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Dorsey and Shaw bands. (Plus the Kenny G of the era…Glenn Miller. Gotta rope the audience in somehow. But as little as possible) in a nearly totally authentic manner. No mics, no amps. Just people playing instruments. I have been involved in this jazz repertory movement since its inception in the early ’70s, and I am here to tell you that the music the white bands played takes a back seat to NO ONE except to the towering genius of Ellington.
Who looms over EVERYBODY.
No one.
WE know it.
Y’all should too.
Later…
AG
your conceit is that you don’t see the same thing in a young Keith Richards and Eric Clapton sitting in their rooms listening to Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy and Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
It was the same process all over.
It’s not that I do not “see” it, Booman.
I simply do not hear valid results.
AG
I hear something valid.
Yiu are right, of course.
A VERY highly evolved garage band.
Very rich, too.
John oughta have stuck with the Walrus.
AG
You are right, of course.
A VERY highly evolved garage band.
Very rich, too.
John oughta have stuck with the Walrus.
HE’D ‘a been bettah off.
AG
AG
OOPS TWICE!!!
I think that I am being told to go practice.
Bye…
AG
Of course I’m right.
That’s some valid blues right there. From a bunch of British wanker wannabes that figured out how to play as well or better than their mentors. And then they went on to play with those musicians whenever they had the chance. They didn’t face the same obstacles as Tony Bennett, but that was just because the times changed.
I see them as every bit as talented and authentic as the earlier group that you rightly revere.
This is a lousy video, even for a “home movie” type one, but if a few bumps don’t rise on your forearms, you are dead.
Let’s see…jazz, blues, folk…composition, it’s all there.
Yeh these two are a sign of devolution….sheesh!
BooMan, this is just wrong.
I’m a symphony subscriber and I’m insulted. It may require a more educated audience, but plenty of popular music concerts are more expensive than my symphony seat. San Jose CA has a symphony and a ballet and an opera, and we have a lot of different kinds of people, some of them rich, but we have very fucking few blue-blood aristocrats.
In Italy, opera was an expression of nationalism. I think people from all classes were into it.
I was pleasantly surprised by your answer; thank you for it. It answered my question better than I was hoping for, and there are only a couple of points of yours that I cannot accept.
Obviously, if I say that I am into British and German pop music, I am white. I agree that if I were black and had grown up in a black environment, my musical tastes would be different. But I am a first generation American; while born in Long Island, my first language is Russian. Given that, I view my not being into jazz or rap for that matter not as a matter of race, but of having a European background. And while my sense is that black culture is responsible for most of good American music, I simply prefer European music, whether classical or pop. (Which is not to say that I do not get into the odd American act. I am in the middle of watching a concert of the Scissor Sisters, who are from Brooklyn. But they are much more popular in Europe than in the US.)
I have no reason to doubt that your view of Gilmour is correct. I value his playing for his particular style, as it fits into the Floyd’s music (to use an archaism). Sumner played with Joy Division and New Order.
I never heard of your idea that humans have three brains (I had heard about lizard brain vs. neocortex) and that great music uses all three brains. It is very suggestive. (It helps with an issue I discussed with Booman above, about whether different kinds of music can be compared.) Where I must disagree with you most strongly is in your characterization of Kevin Shields’ music as “ignorant noise”. It is sublime noise. I would suggest you give it another try. But I can of course not compel you to do that, since I have no immediate intensions to give jazz another try, as you recommend.
If you think there is not much body in My Bloody Valentine, then my guess would be that you have never seen MBV perform. Most of the songs on Loveless are about sex. As for mind, two points. (1) Loveless evokes the state of waking up from a dream. I would call that as having to do with mind, rather than body or emotion. (2) What strikes one about Loveless above all is how it creates beauty from noise. I am aware of no other work of music in any genre that does this to the same degree. Experiencing this transformation of noise into beauty compels you to reflect on it. Thus the music is very mental indeed.
To take Joy Division, of course there is emotion in it, but it is despondent. Yet it is great dance music. (New Order was one of the greatest 80s dance groups.) Despite being emotionally despondent, with lyrics that remind one of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the music is paradoxically uplifting. Here is something I just got from a Google search: “The band inspired a critic named Neil Morrow from New Musical Express to write the following lines that sum up the band better than anything that’s ever been written about them. ‘Joy Division,’ Morrow wrote, ‘convinces me I could spit in the face of God.'” I think that involves the mental.
I don’t have any reason to doubt that the jazz musicians you speak of are as technically proficient as classical musicians, and vastly superior to someone like David Gilmour. I cannot however see jazz musicians to be the inheritors of the classical composers, as you claim them to be. This is—because of the central value of spontaneity in jazz music—there is no work: only a performance.
I do nopt have the time to answer you here at length.
But the thing about “spnteneity” must ber addressed.
ALL of the great Western European masters…Bach, Mozart and Beethoven among them…were renowned for their improvisatory skills. The music that they wrote down…PRECISELY as is the case with such compositional masters in American idioms as Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Bob Brookmeyer, Thad Jones and Gil Evans…was written down because they wanted larger ensembles to flesh out their improvisations.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
damn, I should have got into this discussion earlier, but I can’t resist
arthur – I’ve always enjoyed your music diaries, but skippy was right, the main part really is a caricature of the grumpy old man complaining about the noise these kids are listening to. Thankfully the discussion has gotten much more interesting.
It’s tough to criticize that list of rock music you do like. And you’re dead on with the line about “seeing” the Stones. The most money I ever paid to attend a music or theater show was for the Stones, Mick earned every penny, but he’s a great showman, not great singer let alone musician. And I haven’t been tempted to see them again.
but the “three brains” stuff – that, I’ve never heard before and it’s brilliant and I need to go think about it. If you’ve written about this before please point me there.
Sufi teaching. Through Gurdjieff. Directly to MY three brains by way of a master.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S.Ain’t no grumpy old men here, esquimaux.
Bet on that as well.
Just the world’s oldest 19 year old.
I am NOT about the primacy of the old over the new.
Except where the new has taken a bad turn.
Listen to some contemporary Cuban music for all you need to know about THAT.
I do.
There is no art, unless it is perceived.
True art is an interaction between the creator of that art, and that of the person observing that art.
As in Quantum Physics, the act of observation changes that which is perceived.
There were many artists that created things, that were not well received, until the perceptions of the viewers changed. The art had never changed, only the perception, and therefore, the art itself.
Jazz had its roots in a subculture of poorer peoples, not elites. The elite perceptions changed jazz. For that matter the majority of music and art was created by the lower classes, maybe financed by the wealthy elite, but nevertheless created by the non-elite.
When the rich wanted to finance art, the art was changed for their pleasure.
When art is produced for its own sake, it is purer than the art that is created for money or accolades. You can think of rural primitive art as an example of this.
The fine arts, generally an intellectual pursuit, are accepted as examples to attain to, but never as an example of “better”, only as an agreed upon perception, or recognition of skill.
Culturally accepted art is an agreed upon form that elevates, adds to, or reinforces the experience of those involved…
In other words STFU, enjoy what you like, and don’t let anyone tell you what to like. Period.
My point above exactly.
It is rapidly sinking into the horizon, and I do not believe that it is finished yet.
AG
AG
Well, I KNOW I can’t play, and I don’t WANT to be a technician, and I don’t try to be a dick about it, but still “play” anyway. I’m so used to being shit on by “real” musicians that the smugness doesn’t even register anymore, and I just do it cause it’s fun. I’ll take self-respect over “professional” respect any day.
Yeah, yeah- what the fuck do I know? I’m only an amateur mediocre bassist enslaved to a benign dictator of a drummer. I’d be worried, but the lyrics come easy.
But I WILL snob this. I call out snobbery of the worst kind. I’ll take fun over skills any day.
It’s not ABOUT “you” playing. Or me OR Charlie Parker.
Go ahead. Play your ass off.
Have fun.
Read the post.
It is about a whole culture that is NOT having fun.
Not really.
And it’s about a jive lefty pol using the devolved culture to his own weak ends.
Listen. Please. Play all you want as an amateur. I’ll never be Michael Jordan or Bruce Lee, but I play their sports.
More or less.
However…I would not pay a plugged nickel to see “athletes” on my level perform.
Let ALONE base part of a society on their excellence.
Yet that is just what has happened in the American pop music scene.
The Emperor’s got no clothes on, keir. And you and almost the whole of the culture is going “Yes, BOSS!! You sure do look good in them new clothes you got there!!!”
And believing it.
The rock press is part of the hypnomedia.
And you done been sold, sold, SOLD!!!
Bet on it.
AG
Oh, I read the post, but read it again because you asked so nicely. I was merely bitching about the bit that I misinterpreted and took too personally, both literally and figuratively, and did not make that clear. My sincere apologies for over-reacting.
And of course I’ve been sold. Don’t think I don’t know it. Buyer’s remorse takes many forms, you know. Bet on THAT.
But I do hope you are granted the patience you seek, and in the amounts you need. Really. I’m still waiting for MINE.