Booman has a piece up here, Remember When Pop Was Great. In it and in the (so far) 33 responses, the ongoing demise of this culture is being discussed on the very focused level of “pop” music.
Read on for a musical expert’s take on the matter.
Expanded.
Bet on it.
I am a working professional freelance musician in NYC…40 years and counting…and I have lived through the change being discussed in Booman’s thread. My own take on it? As “pop” music…including all of the music that we hear on the media (Background music, advertising music, etc., easily more than 90% of the music that the average American “hears”)…as the music that we consume stepped away from acoustically-based to technologically-based performance and production, the excellence to which the people on this thread are referring simply disappeared. This was an economically driven change. It is quite simply cheaper to use electronics to produce music than it is to use the musical expertise of real people.
This is the culture’s loss, and it goes way beyond “pop” music. It is a sea change that affects the very basis of this society…its people and how they function on a day-to-day basis. So-called background music…film + TV scores, music that is left on as we go about our daily lives, advertising music…subliminally affects us in very serious ways. It times in our motions, so to speak. Our emotions as well. The complexity of the sounds that human beings make with instruments that have as their base a physical existence in the world is literally thousands of times greater than sounds that are produced electronically, yet from the advent of the synthesizer as a practical, easily usable musical instrument…say the late ’70s/early ’80…through to the present the acoustic content of almost all of the music that we consume has steadily declined. Even the voice…the first and most important instrument, really…is now basically synthesized in most of the music that we hear. That is, vocals are electronically controlled so that the final product most often sounds absolutely nothing like what the singer was singing.
Add to this movement the digital recording and propagation techniques that compress sounds so that they are more easily stored and reproduced on small media…first CDs, now mp3s and the like…and what you get is almost a flatlining of the music. It’s “there”, but it’s not beating. Barely beating, anyway.
Long story short?
No emotional content. Like fast food. It’s there, but there’s no there there.
This is not just a “pop” phenomenon, either. I rarely listen to recorded music except for research…who’s doing what and if it’s interesting to me, how they’re doing it. (Technical stuff…if it’s interesting enough, I transcribe it by ear in order to better understand it.) I’m involved in making great music on an almost daily basis in live situations, so not consuming recorded music is no great loss to me. But just a couple of days ago I was driving in midtown Manhattan traffic…don’t ask, we all make mistakes sometimes…and I got bored. So I put on the local jazz station, WBGO. Now I don’t listen much to WBGO either, because most of the “jazz” on it is really mediocre. It’s simply rewarmed, 2nd, 3rd and even 4th generation remakes of the music of the great bop and post-bop jazz masters. If I want to hear Miles Davis or John Coltrane, I listen to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Duh. Hell, I heard them live. Anyway, WBGO was playing a track by a fantastically good trumpet player who shall remain nameless because I have to work with him once in a while. I didn’t know who it was while I was listening, but he was playing the horn as well as it can be played and the piece of music he was playing was amazingly complex. Harmonically, rhythmically…every way possible. A very fast tempo, and he and the rhythm section were doing absolutely incredible things. (I don’t say this lightly, either. I have played with the best of the best for a long, long while.)
So I pulled over at a fire hydrant and sat there, listening. But after a minute or two I began to get…antsy. Like…where’s the emotion? Where’s the blues? Where’s the feeling? I have a pretty good sound system in my car and I keep it well balanced in terms of EQ, so as I thought about it I realized that:
1-The recording mix…the way the instruments had been balanced after the music was recorded…was missing a lot of information. It was clear, it was easy to hear every note and every part of the drum set, but there was no fire left in it. It sounded…like a synthesizer! Like the world’s greatest sampler had sampled what the musicians were playing and then recreated it without any mistakes. Without any apparent “effort.” It sounded totally inhuman. I have played music on that level, and let me tell you…there is effort there. Listen to ‘Trane or the great Miles groups on the original vinyl or on the (increasingly rare) digital versions that have not been remixed to near death for evidence of what I am saying. The humanity coming out of the speakers is palpable. But here? Again…no there there. Musicians call it “presence.” The notes were there…you could hear them all…but they had no presence. No weight.
2-After having done nearly a thousand recording sessions, I could hear that the musicians themselves were separated from one another acoustically, that they were receiving each other’s information through earphones and that they were each in a fairly small space, physically separated from one another. I could sense this by the way that they were playing.
Now think about this idea for a minute. Think about the difference between:
A-Four people sitting at a table having an intense discussion, passionately improvising around a subject in which they were all masters.
and
B-The same four people having the same discussion, only in separate little rooms listening to the others’ voices on earphones. Good earphones, but still earphones. And someone else was deciding how much of each voice they were receiving in those earphones. Someone who was a master of recording but not of the particular subject that was under discussion. And not only were they listening to the others on earphones but since they had to wear earphones they were also listening to themselves on the earphones too. Reality takes a step away. So does passion. Bet on it.
Then add to that difficulty the following. A couple of them farted or burped or misspoke or simply didn’t get their point across clearly during some parts of the discussion. No problem, Fred…we’ll just redo your part for that sentence. We’ll punch it in. And…what’s that you say, Mikey? You don’t like the way your voice is sounding today? You have a little cold? You’re jet-lagged? Don’t worry, baby…we’ll fix it in the mix. What? You want to do the whole thing over? No way. Sorry. Too expensive. On to the next discussion. Trust me. It was fine. Next!!!
And so it goes.
I was listening to a digitally altered recreation of a make-believe version of how people play this music live, on stage.
It’s not like there was no “there” there. There most certainly was, but an important part of it was missing. It was partially a remembered there. A reanimated there. An undead, Draculaized there. A digitized there.
So now the recording goes out into the world. And people who know very little about the reality of the music listen to it, which is the way it’s supposed to be. No sense playing if there’s no one listening, right?. But…to what are people really listening if not the actual “music,” if not the notes, the rhythms, etc? They are listening to the effort, to the expertise of a lifetime of talented effort. And it is that effort…that heat, that passion…that has been edited out and dumbed down by this process. So people don’t listen, and in not listening they don’t get tuned up.
Now go back to the ‘Trane or Miles recordings…or Basie or Ellington or Louis Armstrong in his prime or Bill Evans or Stan Getz or any of the other live music masters of jazz. It’s all there. Heat, passion…the works.
Expand this syndrome throughout the music world. This is not a “jazz” problem, it is a societal problem. It’s the same up and down, from pop to country, from latin to jazz to Western European style orchestral music. The funk is missing. It’s been digitalled out. It’s been moneyed out.
Now expand it to the other arts.
Same same.
Now…expand it to the political and media info world.
Same same same.
We got a cool Prez, right? He works on digital. But the important info? You can’t hear it. He’s been digitized. Will we ever again hear a public servant say something like “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” and witness that expression make real, emotional waves in the culture? No, it would be digitized out into just another soundbite.
What y’all are complaining about?
It’s the sound, babies.
It’s the sound.
We have all been soundbitten. Digitized. Compressed. Aurally undeaded.
Turn the shit off and go walk in the sun. Go listen to live people saying and doing live things. Go have a party. (No, not the DemocRatpublican Party. Something not prerecorded, not synthesized.) Go do something, goddammit!!!
You be bettah off.
Bet on it.
Over and out…
AG
It’s right next to the piano.
And no, we don’t take requests.
(Unless of course they’re the right ones.)
Later…
AG
I gotta say, I think this is one of your best, Arthur. Remembering back to the civil rights movement when I was a kid and later the counter-culture of the 60s, there was passion and emotion in much of the music we heard every day. I’ve been waiting to hear the same come out of Occupy, but nada. Or am I just not listening in the right places? Could be living in Memphis in the early 60s spoiled me. There was plenty of soul down on Beale St. in those days.
I’ll say it again, Indiana. All “available” music is corporately owned and corporately controlled. Thus the beginnings of a music that might come out of a movement like Occupy never gets a chance to blossom unless it takes some convenient form for recording and hyping. The art of gimmickless recording is almost lost…bet on it, I swim in those seas…so even if some burning young Bob Dylan were singing simple songs with real fire he would arouse no interest whatsoever from the music machine. It’s not a question of content, either. The machine doesn’t give a damn about revolution one way or another except in terms of how much money can be made from it. If he’s down there writing songs and singing them, you will never, ever hear about him. If Dylan himself were to be somehow miraculously reincarnated down in there doing his thing in a modernized way, he’d just be singing for his supper. You would never hear him unless you went to the Occupy camp. Sorry…that’s just the way it is.
This holds true for the jazz scene as well. I don’t know if you are a jazz listener or not, but here’s what’s happening…across the country, but strongest in NYC. You have the “establishment” jazz corporation…mostly backward-looking groups like The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and other mostly derivative people who are recording for relatively large, corporate-owned labels, working the academic/state-sponsored arts/large jazz clubs/music festival circuit and being played on jiveass radio stations like WBGO; and then you have what I like to call the Lincoln Tunnel Jazz Orchestra. Some 300 or more players (In NYC…there are others elsewhere.) who are keeping the music alive any which way they can. There is some crossover between the two groups…people gotta make a living…and members of the latter group also often work as hired help for Broadway and/or the academic jazz scene as a matter of necessity.
The difference between the two?
Passion. Fire. Being able to make a mistake in search of something good or new without some arts administrator making little pouty faces and looking for a safer replacement.
There it is from the inside, brother. Bet on it. The “Lincoln Tunnel” group…I call it that because it seems always to be standing in a shadow, like playing at the mouth of a tunnel…is functioning in some ways like the Celtic monks who preserved the Greco-Roman knowledge tradition during the Dark Ages, only instead of simply writing the shit down (That’s already been done by the academic establishment. Often very badly, but now it’s the official version. So it goes.), the tunnel folks are keeping the performance tradition alive. Playing in large and small groups basically for expenses. Literally. $15, $20, $30…whatever. Doing free rehearsals, doing whatever is necessary to play the music right. From the heart. And…miracles do happen…there are more and more fine young musicians allying themselves with the tunnel guys. I had a 20-ish one recently say to me “Man, now I know what you mean about about the Lincoln Center group.” (I have crossed over a number of times and played with them…as a hired hand, just like Broadway. And just like here, I am not shy about stating what I know to be true.) “I went to hear them, and it was just plain bad!!!” And he didn’t mean bad-good; he meant bad boring. Bad safe. Bad dull. Bad jazz played well by a group of really good musicians. For big money. So that goes as well.
Now these tunnel rats are not doing this out of some altruistic sense of duty, either. They are doing it for the same reason that real jazz players have played for 100 years or so. Because they get off on it. It’s like heroin or great sex, the real music rush. It’s addictive. Bet on that too. I am a proud, non-repentent addict, myself.
You were in Memphis in the ’60s? Ever hear the brilliant tenor player Travis Jenkins or the wonderful pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. ? They were both there at the time. Travis taught me so much about inspiration, passion and not worrying overmuch regarding taking chances and failing.
And the tradition continues despite the wishes or needs of the machine. It’s like the Terminator series. Eventually SkyNet will fall, and here we’ll be.
Burning.
Blake knew.
Way back in 1794.
What?
You thought it was about an animal?
Hell no!
No. It was about bigger cats.
The baddest cats.
Later…
AG
Memphis 1963, I don’t remember the names so much, but the sounds were magic.
Academics killed jazz.
I said that very thing on a panel at UCSB in 1998 where I was the token “student” panelist by virtue of acing a “History of Jazz” class with enough I-can’t-believe-how-easy-this-is attitude–which tickled the fancy of the iconoclastic Black Studies professor who taught the class and assembled the panel.
He deployed me–a spoiled white male suburban no-hoper rock band hobbyist–with the precise goal of popping the pompous bubble of alleged “expertise” as evinced by all but one of my fellow panelists (to a person, all old white men). The only guy who didn’t take it personally was a visiting Chinese player who probably didn’t understand what I said anyway.
So when I said what I said, where and when I said it, I was subjected to the ugliest, sneeringest most insecure proejctionary crap from my fellow panelists. Who the hell was I, a mere student, a mere hobbyist, a rock fan no less, to lecture THEM about jazz? What the hell did I know about jazz?
Now, I’d been dumped by a goofy hippy girl a few days previous, so I didn’t really give a flying fuck what these posturing, pretentious assholes thought about music. I was also getting over a recent past that involved too much sneering about music on my own part, as a rock album reviewer for the student paper. I told them that I knew enough to know that when you make something a museum piece, when you nail it up on the wall to be studied and pored over like ancient history, it’s already deader than dead. The kids aren’t gonna care, no matter how much you praise it.
The kids will, however, get interested in something that shows life–even if it’s the cloned simulacrum of life as espoused (remember, this is 1998) by the so-called “swing revival” that assaulted the late ’90s. I mean, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and their one-microphone technique were briefly novel, but I didn’t like Brian Setzer. However, lots of other people my age did at the time, for some reason (when they weren’t inhaling bad ska revivalists or boring jam-bands or snotty punk wannabes). How do you “make the kids interested in jazz?” I asked them. “Stop treating it like it’s made of glass. Stop acting like you have to do years of listening before you actually ‘get it.’ Stop acting like intellectual gatekeepers of the only opinions that matter.”
The academics (and some musicians) on the panel didn’t like that at all, but my Black Studies professor sure did, and I got some applause from the peanut gallery. A 22-year-old kid can get used to that kind of applause. The Chinese trumpet player even winked at me.
There was supposed to be a “jam session” after the panel, but I didn’t stick around. I was still bent about my ex-girlfriend and wasn’t keen on foisting my amateur-bassist skills on people who’d just applauded me. Instead I went home and wrote a bitter breakup song (which my first fun-but-awful band later recorded in surf-noir style), and then got drunk with the rest of the animals in Isla Vista.
I was too angry about other stuff to realize what a point I’d made. I didn’t really think about it until a few years later, when of course Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis did their own share of murder too, with that ho-hum PBS documentary that ignored any jazz made after 1970 (despite some reluctant lip service to “Bitches Brew”).
But enough about my desperate grasping for credibility. As an amateur, I actually really do like digital music. I like how easy it makes editing/recording. Some of the recordings I’ve done have been done digitally, by great engineers who then mastered to tape. I don’t own any vinyl. Just not interested. So I’m probably full of shit–but I still know that academics killed jazz, just like it could kill rock or hip-hop or anything else. Music isn’t just for the brain. It’s for the heart too.
I knew my post would inspire a diary, and this is a great one.
One interesting thing that pertains to our ongoing disagreement about The Dead is that they suffered from precisely the “head-phone” problem you describe every time they went into the studio.
Other than their two acoustic albums from 1970, which are excellent, the Dead could never create any magic in the studio, at all.
Their studio albums lack exactly what you’re talking about. They aren’t playing together, they’re listening to each other. They tried to fix this when they made the “Touch of Grey” album by actually playing together, and they had better results, but it was still produced to death until it had no life.
The Dead are unique among rock bands in that the songs are mere vehicles for a journey in search of synchronicity. It’s all about hearing each other on some almost supernatural level and trying to reach a point where all the gears magically come together. As a result, most of what they produced was a failure. Most of it is unlistenable to someone like you who has a highly refined ear and tough standards.
But it’s the triumph that makes the rest worthwhile. With the Dead, what paid back the price of admission could be 45 seconds of one song when they achieved something almost incomprehensible in its beauty. Some nights it never happened. Other nights it happened over and over again. But it was simply impossible to even come close in the music studio.
And, yeah, you’re right, the same phenomenon is killing music across the board. I also liked your point about the synthesizer taking a lot of the blame. It’s expanded use does coincide with the period of I’ve identified as the turning point. But, do a large degree, so does MTV.
MTV, synths…both part of the corporate culture, Booman. Whatever’s most profitable short-term.
And the Dead? I could reliably walk into any good jazz club in NYC while the Dead
were still alivewere still active and hear “magic” happen a large percentage of the time that the players were on the stand. Hell, Bill Evans created magic every time he touched the keyboard, and so did Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron, Roland Hanna and a slew of others. And that’s just pianists. Sit for hours to hear the (possibility) of magic? Not me…kinda inefficient, don’tcha think?Now Jimi Hendrix, the Cream or James Brown? That’s a whole ‘nother story. Ditto George Jones and lots of them other country/bluegrass folks. Heard the Louvin Brothers in their prime? Two voices was all it took.
Ain’t about idiom, Booman. Not with me. It’s about being consistent with that magic. It’s like Charlie Parker said one day at Charlie’s, a midtown musicians’ bar. he kept playing the few country songs on the jukebox over and over again. One of the other guys finally said “Bird!! Man, what’re you doing playing alla that country shit!!!???” And Bird said “The stories, man!!! The stories!!!”
The magic, man!!! The magic!!!
AG
Yeah, it’s inefficient. And frustrating. But once you’ve experienced something like the following, you’ve got to chase the tiger for the rest of your life.
There’s magic and there’s magic.
I am sorry, Booman. There are so many bad, out of tune and gratuitously stupid notes being played here that I find it totally unlistenable.
It’s like watching magic being performed by a relatively untalented, 12 year-old amateur magician.
Sorry.
Houdini or bust.
AG
out of tune notes?
who is out of tune?
Who?
Where?
In the 1st 4 seconds? The note D is sounded and another guitar…acoustic, it sounds like…plays a D “almost” an octave higher. Not quite. Then the louder guitar plays A->B-C and then an F. The C and F are nowhere near where they should be. A few beats later, the softer guitar is just wandering around in some other sonic world. Wrong notes and out of tune. This continues, but not as badly. Then the voice falters in. What? About three beats later…I give up.
Sorry, man. This is not about idiom, it’s just about bad, untalented musicians who don’t even know that they can’t play and thus convince a number of others…including you, quite obviously…that they indeed canplay.
There is a word for this condition.
Anosognosia.
You could look it up.
It’s actually quite common in the music world. Jazz musicians have another, slightly less technical name for it.
As in “There we were on the bandstand and some no-playing motherfucker came up with his axe and tried to sit in. After about 6 notes Mingus stopped the band and said ‘Get the fuck off the stand, fool.’
And he meant it.”
This syndrome is not idiom-specific in the music world, nor is it by any means confined to music or any of the other arts. If members of this sad band brought that lame shit into a session with say the Buffalo Springfield musicians or the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, unless some kind of serious financial situation was taking place the same reaction would ensue. (Money talks. Almost nobody balks.)
It’s even popular in the political world.
Bet on it.
I mean…you don’t actually think that he was aware of his own stupidity, do you? Hell no!!! He thought that he was a master statesman, and the Cheney/Rove connection used his dumb ass like the talented hustlers that they are.
These poor schlumps actually think that they’re laying something down.
God bless ’em, one and all.
And God keep ’em, too.
Keep ’em away from me.
Later…
AG.
Ah, yes. What you are critiquing is the “getting their shit together” element of The Dead. They don’t know what Jerry is going to play until he signals it with the first notes. So, it’s normal for there to be some sputtering in the first five-ten seconds of a new song. It’s also not unusual for them to sputter during improvisational transitions. They can lose the time. They can miss a beat. They can even come unglued for a while.
However, I’m more interested in two things which I am asking sincerely. First, are you saying that the two guitars, which are both electric, are not tuned to each other? Is that the case throughout the song? Or are they hitting the notes wrong?
Second, no Deadhead gives a shit about the singing or the sputtering. They care about when it all comes together, as it does with this legendary version of Morning Dew in the last three or four minutes. I don’t know how anyone could listen to the end of this song and say that they were no-playing motherfuckers. I have heard this entire concert discussed for decades. The town of Ithaca had a 30-year anniversary party to commemorate the genius that took place on the stage that night. And I’ve never heard anyone say that they were playing out of tune.
I’m not saying they weren’t, but I’m just trying to clear up what you’re saying.
BooMan — you know damn well that folks either get the Dead or they don’t. And never the twain shall meet.
Just sayin’.
Here is an ironic quote from a vey wise musician after we had rehearsed a show for a singer…somene /wwhom we had worked before, someone who was faking almost as badly as the singer in this track.
“You know…she’s getting better. Now she’s singing some of the longer notes in tune.”
I mean…this is simple triadic harmony w/an occasional 7th chord. Nothing fancy. And he’s not even singing most of the long notes well.
“Emotion,” you might say.
“Bullshit,” I’d answer.
Bad singing…and that’s what this is, Booman, simple, bad singing like you might hear at a 1st grader’s birthday party or a from a second rate church choir…is not about “emotion.” It’s about not beng connected to the moment. It’s about not hearing what is going on around you. And for someone who calls himself a musician, it is about deliberately remaining ignorant in the search of some sort of mythical “purity.”
It’s just stupidity is what it is, Booman.
Bob Dylan at his rawest and least controlled always hit the right notes on the good beat. Ditto Wody Guthrie as did the earliest, “purest” blues singers and backcountry mountain hollerers.
This? It’s just the purest crap. Right on to the end. Sadder than shit.
Ithaca “celebrates” this concert? This is genius? No one has ever pointed out the many out of tune and just plain wrong notes in your presence?
Sigh.
Wilderness wench says that you either get the Dead or you don’t.
I say you either play or you don’t. And you either hear or you don’t as well.
If badly played music gets you off somehow…if you cannot hear the sheer, willfully ignorant, amateurish fakery of this shit…then it must be part of some parallel history of yours. Something good happened at Dead concerts. You got high; you got laid; you felt young and free…something.
It’s nostalgia, Booman. Must be, because it sure as shit ain’t good music.
Sorry man, but…there it is.
I had a fiercely good time as a teenager on the beaches of the South Shore of Long Island. Sex, drugs, alcohol, good friends, fast cars, mindless rebellion..the works. The alcohol was cheap beer…Pabst, Bud, etc…out of a poisonous tasting aluminum can. But I know how bad that beer really is when I occasionally make the mistake of starting to drink one, even though it was a boon companion in those years. So I stop.
Ditto here.
Bet on it.
Over and out.
AG
stop the presses!! Garcia can’t sing!! Who knew?
You knew?
Then why listen to him?
Unbelievable.
AG
P.S. He couldn’t play, either.
Here’s your nostalgia:
My son’s taking a doctorate at Cornell. I’m gonna go out of my way to visit him on May 8th if I can do so, just to see how nonexistent and generally lame this bullshit really is.
I can see it now…a few fat civic hustlers in cheap suits making speeches on the Commons to uninterested passersby and the usual twenty three and a half washed-up hippies who hang there.
Can’t wait!!!
AG
I don’t think it’s an annual thing. However, this year is the 35th anniversary, so they may do something.
I think this is the best piece you’ve ever written, and is my favorite diary posted on this site in years.
Thanks AG.
You are more than welcome.
Seeing as how I spend about 90% of my waking time involved in musical activities of one kind or another…a great deal of my dream-time, too…and have done so for over 40 years, I guess it stands to reason that when I write about the scene I’m writing about something I really know.
But…and here is the interesting part in a Sufic, “As above, so below” sense…just as the various octaves of what we call “music” (sound, really) function according to identical laws, there are octaves upon octaves in the universe, above and below the sound octaves to which we usually refer when using the term. And…bet on it…they also obey similar laws. When I write here about political and social issues, I am merely applying what I have learned in my study of music to other octaves.
Bet on that as well.
My ongoing war with the media-controlled system here in the U.S and elsewhere in the so-called developed world? I first understood what was happening in that system as I observed what was happening in the music scene.
It’s all of one piece, ejmw.
As above, so below.
Watch.
“Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away”
Written 46 years before the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Octaves upon octaves, all obeying the same laws.
Stop, Look, and Listen.
And then…wake the fuck up.
Later…
AG
Yup.
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away.
That’s been my sig line over at GOS for some time…