In the thread Obama Makes HUD Pick Booman approved of Obama’s choice, saying:
It appears that Donovan anticipated the housing crisis. I think that is a good sign.
I replied…only half tongue in cheek:
So? I anticipated the housing crisis too.
And the financial crisis as well.
And the Iraq quagmire, the total ineptness of the entire Butch regime, Hilary’s inclusion in the Obama administration, and…
And, and, and…
Why go on any more.
Where’s MY appointment?
All’s I want is Minister of Culture.
(Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh…I’ll RULE AMERICA in less than two years. Heh heh heh heh heh. Lemme at’ em.)
AG
And then Booman asked me the magic question.
And what would you do as minister of culture?
Read on for my answer if you are so inclined.
What would I do?
I have often said here that if you change the music, you change the culture. This is not a new idea; it has been around since the time of the Greek philosophers. Ditto the rest of the arts as far as I am concerned.
I would immediately aim as much money and power as I could muster in the direction of:
1-Arts education in the public schools. ALL of the arts, including language arts.
2-Grant monies…administered by real, working artists, not by bureaucrats…again, including all of the arts.
3-A series of concerts and performances AT THE WHITE HOUSE if at all possible (I can hear it now…”Live from Washington DC!!! It’s the Finally Ready For Prime Time Players!!!”), but if not, certainly approved of and attended by the President…featuring the best of the best of the best in the underfunded American styles of art music and the other performance arts.
Televised nationwide.
4-An “Arts Corps” much like the Peace Corps idea, although aimed both within AND outside of the country. You want public service? Me too. Hire fine artists and pay them to create and perform. Send Afro-Cuban musicians to Mali. Send jazz musicians to Cuba and Chile. Send great blues and bluegrass musicians to Madagascar. Send great, rockin’ gospel groups to North Korea. In fact…send ’em all to Detroit, Watts and the South Bronx while we’re at it. Let this presently almost entirely underground segment of culture bloom and blossom. Show the third world that not all Americans are Abu Ghraib-style torturers and Blackwater mercenaries.
SHOW them.
Make the arts as popular as is baseball.
Cuba has been doing this with its musicians for over 40 years.
Why can’t we?
5-Some sort of public awareness/PR thing in this country regarding the arts. Regarding how important the finest expressions of those arts were during those parts of the 20th Century where America actually functioned well. Again…lots of money (as much as can be assembled given our financial situation, anyway) spent on public service advertising and public education.
6-Monies to support public radio and TV so that they do not have to grovel to the lowest common (middle class and above) denominator for each and every dollar, which groveling produces masses of truly awful “arts” programs and and almost nothing else except money to sustain that presently almost useless system and its doubletalking bureaucrats.
7-Another public awareness program to combat the whole “Fuck dat bitch!!!” and “Shoot da man!!!” music, film, TV and game cultures. Do you think that’s a racist concept? Bullshit. The constant portrayal and glorification of black gangsters in our media is racist. Bet on it.
That’s what I would do.
And it would literally change America in a single four year presidential term of office.
In eight years?
Fuggedaboudit!!!
A new world ‘a comin’!!!
For every dollar spent we would reap literally thousands of dollars in cultural health…less prison time, less drug use, fewer school dropouts, the works…and more thousands of dollars in international goodwill due to the belief that the U.S. has actually turned a corner.
It is our culture that is sick, Booman.
Not just our political, financial and corporate cultures.
The whole damned thing.
Offer a generation or two viable, high-level alternatives to American Idol and the latest lame rock/pop/rap group and things will change here on an almost cellular level. Do NOT heal this culture and we are headed down, down down into the dustheap of history.
But…I can hear it now. The Elitist Chorus singing that fine old song But The People Are Too Stupid!!!
Bullshit.
The “people” who listened to Duke Ellington, to Basie and Sinatra and Dorsey and Goodman during arguably our finest time, the recovery from the Great Depression and the war against fascism, the “people” who paid attention to Bird and Diz and them, to Miles and Mingus and Getz and Monk and ‘Trane during the changing years, to Tito Puente and Machito and Tito Rodriquez, to Eddie Palmieri and Ruben Blades…I was there for some of that and I SAW those “people”. They were cabdrivers and bartenders just as often as they were college profs and lawyers/doctors/corporate Indian Chiefs. Bet on it. More often, truth be told.
We can do that again.
Open up the bottom line-related corporate brick walls that have been erected against the new, and it will come pouring through.
Again.
Or…just keep on Lindsey Lohan/Paris Hilton/Fifty Centing away.
It’s our choice, now.
Ours.
Whatchoo gonna do about it, America?
Huh?
Whatchoo gonna DO about it?
Later…
AG
Let’s get this culture ROLLING!!!
Why not?
It’s as easy a 1-2, 1-2-3.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Well, Art,
I agree with 90% ish of what you have written here.
However, people really DO get stuck in that the “arts” of their personal coming of ages are the only art worth a damn.
Take Sinatra, who is/was nothing more than a created “Pop” star who bullied his way into the business with Mamma’s mafia weight. He had good phraseology, but overall, he has no more intrinsic value than Brittany Spears. Love songs for a generation. Blah blah blah…
I would venture people like Santana, or Dave Matthews, or Crosby, Stills and Nash are not “the latest lame rock/pop/rap group” and that Rock as a style has no less value than jazz. Those three come to mind, because each has introduced things into music that were pure genius.
So, your idea is beautiful, but the meme of anything “new” as worthless is just plain prejudice.
No, Diane. It’s not about nostalgia. It really isn’t. It is about craft, about intonation, about the use of lyric as poetry. Sinatra was a genius at presenting a song. He simply couldn’t sing a bad note and every word had as much meaning as it could possibly contain. So were Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn and Peggy Lee and Joe Williams and Jimmy Rushing and any number of other great jazz and blues singers of that period.
His big-time “stardom” may have been mafia created, but then so were the stardoms of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Tito Puente, just to name a few that I know about as an absolute, first-hand (or at worst second-hand) fact.
What he did…what the people who wrote his arrangements and played his music “did”…was play on a world-class level of musicianship. As good or better than their contemporaries in the Western European orchestral world. Bet on it. And it is that information…not the “moon is blue and so are you” kind of lyrics…that is the force that through the green fuse of humanity drives the desired flowers of sanity and good balance.
Subliminally.
Had Beethoven or Mozart been products of this society I would be saying the same things about them in this context.
If Dylan were a musician as well as a poet…and on this level he is merely a guitar hacker, great poet though he most certainly is…I would be talking about him.
And if “Santana, or Dave Matthews, or Crosby, Stills and Nash” had been on that level…ditto.
Fucking Santana couldn’t even tune his own guitar without the aid of a roadie; Dave Mathews and everybody in his band would be at best “C minus”-level musicians if they tried to survive in the scenes about which I am talking, and Cropsby Still and Nash? Maybe they might have been able to make a living in the Nashville studios, but play on the level of the gteat Basie bands…even in another idiom?
Sorry.
Ain’t happening.
I mean…feel free to listen to whomever you want. The people you mention are at the top of the available popular culture. It’s just that the top ain’t very high these days.
We swim in our culture. Diane. As unconscious of it as a fish is of water. But pollute that water and the fish sickens.
I am speaking here of cultural ecology. To the degree that you succeed in improving the culture…and again, I mean the culture of literacy, of acting, of the visual arts, of EVERYTHING…so do you improve the human beings who swim in it.
You walk into a store and hear out of tune, insensitive mechanical bullshit as background music. You are cheapened by that experience even though you do not know it.
You watch bad actors prance around on a screen.
You read semi-illiterate newspaper writers.
You are surrounded by lousy architecture.
Your automobiles look like shit.
And on and on and on.
And the culture regresses.
Which regression begins a feedback system that produces an even WORSE culture.
So it goes.
The reverse is possible as well, but it must be CONSCIOUSLY MANDATED or else all falls to the lowest segment of the mean.
Which is pretty much where we are today.
I do not want a “return to the past”. I simply recognize that within living human memory there was a functioning American culture that uplifted its people, and that the talent to produce another one lies waiting underneath the layer of corporate bullshit that has been used to bury it.
The PermaGov does not want uplifted people, Diane. It wants assenting slaves.
Fight or die.
I mean it.
Fight this shit or die.
Later…
AG
Speaking of what our ‘culture’ deems at any given time as a great singer let me bitch about my personal pet peeve….women singers who have great voices yet seem to think that ‘power ballads’ are somehow the definition of a great singer. It becomes all about the sound of their voice and how loud or dramatic they can get and the phrasing and lyrics are secondary to the song itself. All of Sinatra’s songs were power ballads..not for the overthetop singing but the emotions you felt when it seemed he was living the lyrics that he sang of.
Like the man said…
I like it Arthur – I like it a lot.
Mr. Gilroy for Minister of Culture.
Well played.
Bet on it. You can`t lose.
I like the way you think man……
total agreement about our society go’n down, if we don’t change some things…spot on.
ya gotta vote here….peace
I’m pretty sure it was Plato that wrote about changes in musical canons presaging huge political changes. I recall reading a great essay on this with respect to Plato’s notions (in The Republic?) and trance/rave music a LONG time ago (in internet terms) but I’ve been unable to rediscover that essay.
Also, I could swear that I’ve read a diary, maybe on dkos(?), in the past few days, about this exact thing. Public works program for the arts get the funding down into schools. Google hasn’t coughed up those links, either. But there is this one, which notions along the same lines.
Wonderful ideas, Arthur!
Sounds like what the Beatles tried in the 70’s with pretty mixed results.
If you throw money at ‘the arts’ what you will get is bad art. Particularly if it is thrown by ‘real artists’.
And the comments about Sinatra are ridiculous. Ya, all those millions who loved his music? Mob influence! A little historical research, and less reliance on ‘The Godfather’ for information might be needed there.
Sorry, AG, you got the makings of a boondoggle.
nalbar
I have heard this bullshit about Sinatra long enough. I do not give a rat’s ass about his success, his act or the people behind him. All’s I know is…and I know this from as close to an objective position as any human being can come to a fact that exists in this universe…all that I know about him is that he was as gifted a melodic and lyrical interpreter of songs as has ever walked the face of the earth.
In ANY idiom.
Like it or lump it.
I do not really give a shit.
How do I know this?
Because I live in a world where that sort of talent is the currency of life and I have succeeded in doing so at its very highest reaches for about 40 years. People who think that they know what they are talking about in terms of pure music and simultaneously mistake “the Beatles” as musical artists on that level (“Sounds like what the Beatles tried in the 70’s with pretty mixed results.” coupled with the term “real artists” above.) evince the same level of knowledge that you might hear from someone who once or twice went hunting for squirrels and then presumes to give a lifelong professional woodsman lessons on survival in the wilderness.
Nothing wrong with the Beatles.
Nothing wrong with listening to their little songs, either. They’re a very nice cultural artifact.
But Sinatra and the whole American jazz apparatus of which he was an integral part?
Please.
Wake the fuck up.
Paul would have been a second-rate boy singer in a territory band; Georgemight have made it as a guitarist somewhere like Cincinnati; John would have been a really good, very witty political columnist and Ringo would have been laughed out of every session from New Orleans through Kansas City right to the Big Apple if he had tried to play with real players.
Their songs?
Pretty good.
Irving Berlin wrote some pretty good songs too, and he could only play piano on the black keys. Really. You could look it up.
They wrote a few whistleable songs? And lucked into being the pinup boys for a a short-lived cultural change? (More accurately, they lucked into being the pinup boys for the co-opting of a serious cultural change that still hasn’t really happened.) So what? They still aren’t great musical artists, they are just very successful POP artists.
As is Britney Spears .
So what.
Plus, you write:
How the fuck would you know?
Number one it’s never been done, at least not in America.
And number two, I doubt that you would be able to tell a real “musical artist” from a hole in the wall if you were not loudly informed of their status beforehand by the hype machine in which you live.
Get lost.
GODDAMN I am sick of ignorant, posturing fools.
Later…
AG