So I am thinking of songwriting again, as I have been in the past few posts, and I want to write up a little something that I was just discussing with a friend (on text message) about how so much of the "modern reality", I feel, is no longer reflected in modern songs, in the way that "Reality" often was reflected in older songs, from the 70s and so on.
I think a good image to start with will be one we take from the John Mellencamp song "Pink Houses", which was a fairly big hit in the early 1980s. The first verse has long been one of my favorite verses, and it paints a beautifully simple scene :
There is a black man, and a black cat
Livin' in a black neighborhood
He's got an interstate running thru his front yard
You know he thinks he's got it so good
and there's a woman, in the kitchen
Cleanin' up the evening slop
He looks at her and says "Hey darling,
I remember when you could stop a clock"
This imagery is very simple, and it is very powerful too, in its own way, but what I think is so fascinating about it is that, even though this exact scene is still playing out across the nation today, you will never , ever see a lyric like this in modern songs. And it is not just because of race, not at all really, but rather just because both the characters in the songs, simply don't seem to be doing much. Or, at least, they just aren't doing enough as far as these great holy modern people are concerned. The black man, for example, one imagines him just sitting in a lawn chair on a hot day, looking out at the highway, and the woman, well, what on Earth is she doing, the modern person wonders? Cleaning up evening slop? What on earth? Do people really do that anymore, in the year 2017? Does "slop" even still exist in 2017? And does anyone actually have to clean it anymore? For that matter, does anyone grow old anymore, like this woman in the song clearly has?
Well, taking a look at the modern hits of today, written by young people (because don't forget Mellencamp wrote this when he was young, and it was a hit) one would almost be led to believe that nothing about the verse ever happens at all in the World of today, because nobody in the world of today seems like they remember any of that stuff anymore. It is a tired complaint I guess, but the truth is that almost all of the songs of now don't just endlessly discuss riches and luxuries that no one has...they also do something else that is even more curious: They blatantly ignore the reality of the world right in front of their audience. Not just the bad parts of it either, like many might think. They also completely ignore the good parts as well. I find it quite sad, I think, speaking as a songwriter, but the thing that strikes me about the great modern world and its songs is that, for as liberated as it claims to be, it seems that it has chosen to forsake, if not outright banish, three quarters of the World from its pretty little home.
Think, for example, of a modern song in these new genres, that would ever dare speak about something like, say, crickets chirping, dogs howling, or even something like "the smell of diesel fuel". Imagine a modern hip song where the singer would open up saying "the crickets were chirping, and I saw Maggie pass by in the dark light..." It's almost unfathomable. Of course, in the world of old songs, all of that stuff is very commonplace. In the "oldies", people talk about things like crickets, dogs, gravel roads, tractor trailers, the smell of the bayou, cooking bacon in a pan, burning coffee, ...the list goes on and on, in a way that you would never hear them do in modern songs. And again, this wouldn't be so weird, until of course you sit back and think for a second, and you remember that literally none of these things have gone anywhere. They're all still with us. I'm listening to crickets chirp right now as I write this. I just got done burning coffee on a stove. The smell of diesel is everywhere. Dogs still howl. So, if all of this stuff is still around...why then, one wonders, have people ceased to write about it? And what on Earth have they found to write of in its place? What has replaced it?
Years ago I don't think I ever thought of it much, and it never occurred to me that someone in the modern day singing about "frying bacon in a pan" would probably get pigeon holed as "trying to sound old". Now, however, as I myself get a little older and my senses more attuned, I have begun to realize that I was wrong to ever consider such a line as that as something that seemed "old". For it is not old, and it can never actually be old, unless of course frying bacon in a pan becomes impossible. But we all know that this has yet to happen. Like I said, people still do this -- the only difference is that now they no longer think it's acceptable to write of it in their technological songs. So what is it really? What is the problem? Here is what I think it is, and I myself admit that I fall prey to it: Our modern time has now become so cluttered and filled with technology, with gadgets, with strange new drugs, and with fantasy too, in terms of TV etc, that we have now reached a point, it would seem, where many simple things about the environment and atmosphere right around us ...no longer stand out the way they once did to people, even just 20 years ago. So, basically, though there is still a woman cleaning up the evening slop in the kitchens, people no longer notice her, or see her, like they did back in the 80's. That woman has now, one could say, faded out into the darkness . No one sings of her now; she is left to clean that evening slop alone. People perhaps look up for a moment and see her, and then o fcourse they look right back to their cell phone. They also probably don't have to hear her, because they have their headphones in. So even the sounds of the lady have now faded out. Just like, of course, the sounds of the crickets have faded out as well.
I'm not necessarily saying this is the worst thing to ever happen, but I do think it's certainly a bit strange, and I suppose the only word I can really think of it for it is to say that reality has become "augmented" to such a degree that, again, the atmosphere around you fades right out. For example, one thing that has always struck me about listening to the old blues songs from the 40s or 50s, and watching some of the videos where an artist like Skip James can be seen performing, is that so much about the old "ghettos" doesn't really seem all that different from the modern ghettos of today to me. In fact,there is a great deal that looks frighteningly familiar to me in many of the old black and white blues videos. They look exactly like the ghettos I used to often drive on delivery routes in my truck. And yet, if you were to completely forget the atmosphere and only focus on the music itself being made, you would think that the ghetto has undergone titanic changes in absolutely every department. You would be led to believe that the houses have changed,that the furniture has changed, that the beds have changed, the bureaus, the baths, everything. In reality of course, the only thing that has changed is the automobile and the fashion, and now there's a fancy TV. The ghetto outside still looks just as unsightly and scary to me, just as disorganized and unclean, and the small towns too, look just as "plain" as they ever did, and yet... all of this uncleanness, and all of this plainness -- it is as removed as can be from the modern song landscape. Nothing about the outside atmoshpere is reflected in these modern songs. Because atmosphere has been effectively banished. Even the big modern aspects of atmosphere have been banished from these new songs. People are just as unlikely to mention a nice new highway bridge in these fancy new songs, as they are the crickets chirping, or the bacon in a pan. It's simply unheard of to focus on a bridge anymore, or how nice looking or not it is , or how it may or may not make you feel. No one looks at bridges in a modern song the way they once did years ago. You could probably listen to about 500 of them that have been released within the last two years, and you won't hear so much as a single reference.
This is because songs today are all about solely emotions that one feels inside somewhere, and never about anything happening outside. Modern songwriters will write endlessly about the ticking in their heart, or the chill up the spine, the ring of their cell phone, how they're dressed, what shoes they are wearing, their car, or of course their hair - but they will not write about what anyone else in the world is doing, aside from them. Interactions, in my opinion, very rarely happen in modern songs. In old songs it was fairly commonplace to have interactions between characters -- some hits from the old days, like Dylans "Hurricane", even feature a sort of novel-esque type dialogue between characters. Modern songs can't do this: Nobody cares about what anyone else is saying anymore. It's all about them, now, and them alone. They'll tell you what they are saying - but they'll never tell you what anyone else is saying, because does anyone else even exist? Of course not. Just like no atmosphere exists, aside from maybe a night club with fancy strobe lights that flash , or a highway with headlights that flash -- but that seemingly never has anything else on it.
And again, when it comes to this discussion of just how far songwriting has descended in this respect ,of banishing every topic besides the night club, you must remember that all those obscure songs you like, that might talk of this stuff at times, just don't count --- because we are talking about HITS here, and once upon a time, HIT songs, even the most popular ones, even the ones people danced to, actually had interesting lyrics that went beyond the tick of the heart or the flash of a strobe light. Hit songs actually once had good lyrics that reflected on a wider reality. The song "Hurricane" by Dyaln tells an incredibly long winded tale and features writing that looks like it came from a book as I say, rather than a song --- and that was a hit! Mellencamps song from earlier : it was also a hit. There is an idea today where musicians and fans often seem to think that "hit songs were always terrible"; but this isn't true. Were they ever the absolute best? No probably not. But they did once have at least some depth to them. Some HUMANITY. And in my opinion this humanity is indeed largely gone. Many people say autotune is the main problem , things like this. They blame the "sounds" of the modern songs for why they seem so odd. But it isn't the sounds, in my opinion, so much as it is the lyricism. People have become terrified, I think, of writing "typical scenes" in their songs. Because they no longer believe there is passion in anything typical.
-- NOTES
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Piano thoughts
I have been playing a lot of piano lately, and I really can't quite believe just how significantly it seems to have altered my songwriting. It has caused me to have an "attack of song" like I feel I have not had in many years now; and one big reason that the songs the piano has been sending me have been particularly interesting is because they all seem to be far more in line with my prose, than anything I used to/still typically write on my guitar.
So I took a few notes on my iPhone yesterday trying to discuss exactly why this is, and the one idea I kept coming to over and over again, it seemed, was because the guitar seems to feel like an instrument that represents a "genre" (rock and roll) whereas the piano just feels like....well, an instrument. And as a result of this fact concerning the piano ,I tend to write much more interesting, and wide, tales upon it. Yesterday, for example, I wrote a song about mafia men over my piano, and it was as I wrote this particular tune that I think I realized just how different the instrument really is. For the truth is that, as an Italian-American, I have been interested in the tales of the mafia men since I was 12, but I never quite felt like I could write about them on my guitar. Sure, I use the same chords for both the guitar and the piano -- but on the guitar, something always felt weird trying to bring those types of characters in. Most of the time, they simply did not arrive. And it is because the guitar is this "Genre" instrument as I am saying. Especially the style guitar that I often write my songs with, which is an acoustic guitar.
I have tried to write before about my grievances when it comes to the "stereotype" that exists behind the acoustic guitar, and I am seeing now that it is really even more severe than I initially thought. The instrument is essentially so caught between two worlds -- one, the world of folksy singer-songwriting and two, the world of country twang -- that writing of any subject besides those two almost seems downright impossible. Again, it is almost not viewed just as an instrument but rather some sort of cultural symbol that represents a very specific set of people, and as wonderful as those people might be, this has absolutely ruined the reach of the instrument, and it has caused it to lose favor with much of the modern crowd. And when it comes to the electric guitar, I don't think its really that much better than the acoustic, in terms of this stereotype. If anything, it's almost seen as being even more trapped by these bonds of genre. It is seen as a childs instrument , as something representative of youthful enthusiasm, of a Jimi Hendrix type psychedelia and, even when it comes down to going as far back as the Elvis generation, there is still a significant idea of the electric guitar as a childish instrument. You would think that, because Elvis made his debut all the way back in March of 1956, that this idea of the guitar as childish or representative of a youthful subculture would have worn off by now. But in many ways it almost still has not. We are, in many ways, living in a time now where the guitar has actually been abandoned by many of the modern youths- but is somehow still being read as youthful. Does that make sense?
Basically it works like this, I think: Many modern young people coming up look back at the music of the past and stereotype much of it as music that was "too innocent" and "too silly". They have good reason to believe this: A lot of the songs that are the major hits, even for artists that have gone on to pen very mature work, are often ridiculously corny sounding songs to modern ears. One would not think, for example, that it was the same Bruce Springsteen who penned a song like "Dancing in the Dark", which probably sounds rather hokey to modern ears, and then another song like "Galveston Bay", which tells a dead serious story about a Vietnamese refugee almost being killed by the KKK in Texas. One also might not think that someone like John Mellencamp, who sang "Small Town", yet another rather hokey song to modern ears, was the same fellow to now, in his older age, scribble a tune like "Rural Route", which tells the tale of a young girl being kidnapped, raped, and murdered, in some un-named southern state. The list goes on for days of confusion like this, and basically what it means to say is that , as is always the case, people sample the hits that are thrown at them -- in this case hits from over 20 years ago -- and they automatically assume "this is the entirety of the genre". They never have a chance to see that good dark gold. They never have a chance to see how mature this stuff can be. This is often not just the case for kids but even for the actual people from Springsteens or Mellencamps generation.
As a result of this, the genre and, as I am saying, the guitar itself, has come to stand for this innocence in many peoples eyes. It is almost as though, to the modern people, even so much as being seen with a guitar automatically means you are removed from the darkness of "modern reality". This perhaps wouldn't be so confusing, until of course you realize that, first, the piano actually doesn't seem to fall in with this much of the time, and secondly, neither does the hip hop genre. In fact, the irony about the hip hop genre is that, though it looks like the most absurd genre on Earth to the actual middle aged adults of this time period, the idea that the young people have of it , is that it is, in many ways, a mature genre, a genre capable of telling a "real dark story", a genre that knows the "grittiness" of the city, and of course modern reality. The main reason for this is obvious: many of the stories told within the hip hop world are extremely adult oriented. People are vulgar within the songs. People speak of murder. The beats often sound very dark. The tales are also often rather long winded. They are also not often "polished" in the same way a guitar style song is. Listen to some of the late 90s hip hop, like Mobb Deep, for example, and you are introduced to a music that seems to have gone directly from the street to your stereo. There *seems* to have been no pit stop in between. This is not the case with rock so much: typically you are not only reminded of the studio when you hear a rock song, but you are celebrating it. Many of the best rock songs are all about studio tricks. Especially with an artist like Jimi Hendrix, who used an assortment of pedals and weird amplifiers and was always reversing his solos, et cetera.
And I suppose that what is particularly ironic about all of this now is that, essentially, the same complaint that the old people of Jimi Hendrix's time would have made about his music .. is now very much also the exact reason why the young people of today don't like it either! For the old people of Hendrix's time were very much a crowd listening to artists like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole -- rather mature artists, in a certain regard, singing of mature topics -- and the idea that songs ought to be for "young people" or "silliness"- exclusively for them -- was an idea that no one had ever really had, in many respects. Songs between the 1900s and 1940s, before Elvis, basically occupied two distinct realms: they were either for serious adults , or they were completely for very little children, ala nursery rhymes. Teenagers and also the obsession over your "twenties" did not really exist, in a certain respect, back in the pre-Elvis days. You turned 14 and sort of just walked straight into the reality of whatever the World was. You were automatically prepared for whatever it was going to throw at you, it would seem, and this was reflected in the songs of the time. Frank Sinatra seems so adult to us now for this exact reason: Even when he was a teenager, he was not ever really performing for teenagers. He quite literally spent the entirety of his life performing for adults, for men, for grown women, etc. No other style of song or "idea' even existed for him. It was all something that had yet to be created , and in fact, when it did get created, Sinatra was utterly bewildered by it.
The legends of his and Dean Martins insults for Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones are very famous. They thought the bands looked like absolute fools, with their silly costumes and their long hair, their youthful appearance, and their strange songs about , well, "being young". Did Sinatra celebrate being young at times? Absolutely. But did he celebrate it like the rockers did? No. Sinatra aged alongside his music quite well. He never looks too old, really, or too odd, performing -- mostly because Sinatra was never allowed to be what we now think of as young. He was, after all, in a dark black suit from beginning to end. Look at Mick Jagger, however, or even at Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp and so on, and people are often beginning to wonder. of their aging: What, exactly, is going on here?
There is a very real idea when going to see the Rolling Stones or Springsteen and so forth that one is going to a "nostalgia show", the general hope being that the artist in question will, hopefully, do nothing but perform all the youthful songs that everyone remembers from their 20's and so on. No one likes it when they pull out this new stuff, it often seems, that is so clearly penned from an adult perspective. No one likes it because it is very much a style of music and songwriting that, again, back in the 60s,70s, and 80s, was being steadfastly rejected. The conflict that an artist like Madonna has, for example, when it comes to serious songwriting,sends my mind reeling every time I think of it. Why? Because , just like Elvis,the sharpness of the original knife that Madonna pulled on society all revolved around youthful rudeness, around celebrating being young, and about rejecting the chains of the miserable adult world. In the past, being happy, being innocent, and being "weird", like so many artists were, before gangster rap came around, was something that was actually rebellious. Again: just start comparing and contrasting the look of Sinatra in his dark black suit, which he was made to wear for life, and then look at the Rolling Stones, once they tore the suits off, and you'll understand why these artists were so excited about wearing costumes, beads, scarves, rings, and other such accessories. The entire mission for these earlier artists often very much revolved around fashion: They were trying to help break society out of that ghastly uniform of the suit. They succeeded...in many respects. But now, it seems, society has decided that a whole new challenge is upon us: The songs of the hippie eras and even the 80s, as I am writing, now seem too happy to people, and the costumes now all seem too ridiculous. So now we are back again, with a whole new mission in mind. I call it the "FUSE" -- and I think that it has yet to happen in a large way.
What is the fuse? It is simple: It is the hope that the artists will soon be able to actually represent all shades of the mood spectrum, instead of just a small part of it. It is the hope that the same artist will be able to successfully sing dark songs, mature songs, childish songs, and happy songs all in the same set. You might think this is currently the case; but I can't stress enough that it is not. Someone like Madonna, like I said, is basically now trapped singing of youth and this happy, joyous mood, someone like the Grateful Dead is expected to permanently sing about the "wonders of nature", and then a gangster rapper must sing about the grittiness of the city -- for life -- even when they are no longer in it, at all. People in our own time cannot imagine that someone who performs gangster rap could also possibly perform guitar songs or piano songs, even though it is the case, already, for many people. This limitation, I can guarantee my reader, is going to all be looked at unusually absurd and stupid, by the people of the future. They're not going to understand why these certain acts insisted on only representing one mood, literally all of the time. They're also probably not going to understand why an instrument like the guitar , in our own time, is so linked up with the idea of youthfulness, or innocence. To the people of the future, this instrument will , and in some respects already is, just going to be seen as another instrument. Which, to now get back to where I was in the beginning of this piece, the piano is already joyously experiencing.
--NOTES
So I took a few notes on my iPhone yesterday trying to discuss exactly why this is, and the one idea I kept coming to over and over again, it seemed, was because the guitar seems to feel like an instrument that represents a "genre" (rock and roll) whereas the piano just feels like....well, an instrument. And as a result of this fact concerning the piano ,I tend to write much more interesting, and wide, tales upon it. Yesterday, for example, I wrote a song about mafia men over my piano, and it was as I wrote this particular tune that I think I realized just how different the instrument really is. For the truth is that, as an Italian-American, I have been interested in the tales of the mafia men since I was 12, but I never quite felt like I could write about them on my guitar. Sure, I use the same chords for both the guitar and the piano -- but on the guitar, something always felt weird trying to bring those types of characters in. Most of the time, they simply did not arrive. And it is because the guitar is this "Genre" instrument as I am saying. Especially the style guitar that I often write my songs with, which is an acoustic guitar.
I have tried to write before about my grievances when it comes to the "stereotype" that exists behind the acoustic guitar, and I am seeing now that it is really even more severe than I initially thought. The instrument is essentially so caught between two worlds -- one, the world of folksy singer-songwriting and two, the world of country twang -- that writing of any subject besides those two almost seems downright impossible. Again, it is almost not viewed just as an instrument but rather some sort of cultural symbol that represents a very specific set of people, and as wonderful as those people might be, this has absolutely ruined the reach of the instrument, and it has caused it to lose favor with much of the modern crowd. And when it comes to the electric guitar, I don't think its really that much better than the acoustic, in terms of this stereotype. If anything, it's almost seen as being even more trapped by these bonds of genre. It is seen as a childs instrument , as something representative of youthful enthusiasm, of a Jimi Hendrix type psychedelia and, even when it comes down to going as far back as the Elvis generation, there is still a significant idea of the electric guitar as a childish instrument. You would think that, because Elvis made his debut all the way back in March of 1956, that this idea of the guitar as childish or representative of a youthful subculture would have worn off by now. But in many ways it almost still has not. We are, in many ways, living in a time now where the guitar has actually been abandoned by many of the modern youths- but is somehow still being read as youthful. Does that make sense?
Basically it works like this, I think: Many modern young people coming up look back at the music of the past and stereotype much of it as music that was "too innocent" and "too silly". They have good reason to believe this: A lot of the songs that are the major hits, even for artists that have gone on to pen very mature work, are often ridiculously corny sounding songs to modern ears. One would not think, for example, that it was the same Bruce Springsteen who penned a song like "Dancing in the Dark", which probably sounds rather hokey to modern ears, and then another song like "Galveston Bay", which tells a dead serious story about a Vietnamese refugee almost being killed by the KKK in Texas. One also might not think that someone like John Mellencamp, who sang "Small Town", yet another rather hokey song to modern ears, was the same fellow to now, in his older age, scribble a tune like "Rural Route", which tells the tale of a young girl being kidnapped, raped, and murdered, in some un-named southern state. The list goes on for days of confusion like this, and basically what it means to say is that , as is always the case, people sample the hits that are thrown at them -- in this case hits from over 20 years ago -- and they automatically assume "this is the entirety of the genre". They never have a chance to see that good dark gold. They never have a chance to see how mature this stuff can be. This is often not just the case for kids but even for the actual people from Springsteens or Mellencamps generation.
As a result of this, the genre and, as I am saying, the guitar itself, has come to stand for this innocence in many peoples eyes. It is almost as though, to the modern people, even so much as being seen with a guitar automatically means you are removed from the darkness of "modern reality". This perhaps wouldn't be so confusing, until of course you realize that, first, the piano actually doesn't seem to fall in with this much of the time, and secondly, neither does the hip hop genre. In fact, the irony about the hip hop genre is that, though it looks like the most absurd genre on Earth to the actual middle aged adults of this time period, the idea that the young people have of it , is that it is, in many ways, a mature genre, a genre capable of telling a "real dark story", a genre that knows the "grittiness" of the city, and of course modern reality. The main reason for this is obvious: many of the stories told within the hip hop world are extremely adult oriented. People are vulgar within the songs. People speak of murder. The beats often sound very dark. The tales are also often rather long winded. They are also not often "polished" in the same way a guitar style song is. Listen to some of the late 90s hip hop, like Mobb Deep, for example, and you are introduced to a music that seems to have gone directly from the street to your stereo. There *seems* to have been no pit stop in between. This is not the case with rock so much: typically you are not only reminded of the studio when you hear a rock song, but you are celebrating it. Many of the best rock songs are all about studio tricks. Especially with an artist like Jimi Hendrix, who used an assortment of pedals and weird amplifiers and was always reversing his solos, et cetera.
And I suppose that what is particularly ironic about all of this now is that, essentially, the same complaint that the old people of Jimi Hendrix's time would have made about his music .. is now very much also the exact reason why the young people of today don't like it either! For the old people of Hendrix's time were very much a crowd listening to artists like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole -- rather mature artists, in a certain regard, singing of mature topics -- and the idea that songs ought to be for "young people" or "silliness"- exclusively for them -- was an idea that no one had ever really had, in many respects. Songs between the 1900s and 1940s, before Elvis, basically occupied two distinct realms: they were either for serious adults , or they were completely for very little children, ala nursery rhymes. Teenagers and also the obsession over your "twenties" did not really exist, in a certain respect, back in the pre-Elvis days. You turned 14 and sort of just walked straight into the reality of whatever the World was. You were automatically prepared for whatever it was going to throw at you, it would seem, and this was reflected in the songs of the time. Frank Sinatra seems so adult to us now for this exact reason: Even when he was a teenager, he was not ever really performing for teenagers. He quite literally spent the entirety of his life performing for adults, for men, for grown women, etc. No other style of song or "idea' even existed for him. It was all something that had yet to be created , and in fact, when it did get created, Sinatra was utterly bewildered by it.
The legends of his and Dean Martins insults for Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones are very famous. They thought the bands looked like absolute fools, with their silly costumes and their long hair, their youthful appearance, and their strange songs about , well, "being young". Did Sinatra celebrate being young at times? Absolutely. But did he celebrate it like the rockers did? No. Sinatra aged alongside his music quite well. He never looks too old, really, or too odd, performing -- mostly because Sinatra was never allowed to be what we now think of as young. He was, after all, in a dark black suit from beginning to end. Look at Mick Jagger, however, or even at Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp and so on, and people are often beginning to wonder. of their aging: What, exactly, is going on here?
There is a very real idea when going to see the Rolling Stones or Springsteen and so forth that one is going to a "nostalgia show", the general hope being that the artist in question will, hopefully, do nothing but perform all the youthful songs that everyone remembers from their 20's and so on. No one likes it when they pull out this new stuff, it often seems, that is so clearly penned from an adult perspective. No one likes it because it is very much a style of music and songwriting that, again, back in the 60s,70s, and 80s, was being steadfastly rejected. The conflict that an artist like Madonna has, for example, when it comes to serious songwriting,sends my mind reeling every time I think of it. Why? Because , just like Elvis,the sharpness of the original knife that Madonna pulled on society all revolved around youthful rudeness, around celebrating being young, and about rejecting the chains of the miserable adult world. In the past, being happy, being innocent, and being "weird", like so many artists were, before gangster rap came around, was something that was actually rebellious. Again: just start comparing and contrasting the look of Sinatra in his dark black suit, which he was made to wear for life, and then look at the Rolling Stones, once they tore the suits off, and you'll understand why these artists were so excited about wearing costumes, beads, scarves, rings, and other such accessories. The entire mission for these earlier artists often very much revolved around fashion: They were trying to help break society out of that ghastly uniform of the suit. They succeeded...in many respects. But now, it seems, society has decided that a whole new challenge is upon us: The songs of the hippie eras and even the 80s, as I am writing, now seem too happy to people, and the costumes now all seem too ridiculous. So now we are back again, with a whole new mission in mind. I call it the "FUSE" -- and I think that it has yet to happen in a large way.
What is the fuse? It is simple: It is the hope that the artists will soon be able to actually represent all shades of the mood spectrum, instead of just a small part of it. It is the hope that the same artist will be able to successfully sing dark songs, mature songs, childish songs, and happy songs all in the same set. You might think this is currently the case; but I can't stress enough that it is not. Someone like Madonna, like I said, is basically now trapped singing of youth and this happy, joyous mood, someone like the Grateful Dead is expected to permanently sing about the "wonders of nature", and then a gangster rapper must sing about the grittiness of the city -- for life -- even when they are no longer in it, at all. People in our own time cannot imagine that someone who performs gangster rap could also possibly perform guitar songs or piano songs, even though it is the case, already, for many people. This limitation, I can guarantee my reader, is going to all be looked at unusually absurd and stupid, by the people of the future. They're not going to understand why these certain acts insisted on only representing one mood, literally all of the time. They're also probably not going to understand why an instrument like the guitar , in our own time, is so linked up with the idea of youthfulness, or innocence. To the people of the future, this instrument will , and in some respects already is, just going to be seen as another instrument. Which, to now get back to where I was in the beginning of this piece, the piano is already joyously experiencing.
--NOTES
Monday, August 21, 2017
metal heads
LETTERS FROM MUSIC LAND:
I was never all that into metal either. It depends where you look. Some of the old stuff from the 80s, like Dio or this band "Blind Guardian" I listen to a lot. Most guitarists I would meet here in north are all metal heads. Pantera, Metallica, "Hatebreed" - these were all the big bands for the handful of white kids I knew growing up who also played guitar. I find it very sad how insturments are often no longer present in the modern black communities and i will admit that I blame conservative politics for the lack of instruments in that modern community and it is something I may one day speak about on a video...
. Unfortunately it's hard to find anyone who is into acoustic guitar music or really any music like that at all here because acoustic guitars and mandolins etc are immediately written off as "country", so theguys who actually play guitar here alll ike metal, and then everyon else just doing the rap as I said to ya another time I think. It's literally like an acoustic guitar is a lost relic to these people up here lol. Some instrument from ancient times that no one ever sees anymore. The blues and all this stuff, the deeper origins of it it is all great stuff I only found years later when I start doing searches on the Net and everything, and I came to learn about how much more interseting the American music scene is in the South , or of course in the West, like Cali and Arizona and stuff, Chicago etc. I was very surprised by it all when I came to find it.
Of course as much as i love acoustic guitars, I do have some grievances with "straight country music" because the lyrics can be limiting, and i have made another video speaking of it I might publish. The way this all ties in with Jack White is because in Detroit I feel he was in a similar situation that I was in: It was probably either metal or hip hop and he didn't wanna do either. He connected with this old stuff instead. So he found this interesting middle ground where he put these "modern dark ideas" about the weird goth stuff into these bluesy songs, which is actually fascinating because it never happened before. The Tedeschi Trucks band I referenced for a reason, because they only play, like, SRV type blues .. "sky is crying" "key to the highway" songs about stuff like that. Great songs. But the modern young people want twists. I don't believe people who merely listen choose music so much by chord progressions or sounds.
Metal head are obsessed with complex solos and fireworks guitars. If I tried out for a metal band , I would be rejcted immediately. In my opinion, most people don't care about that flash though . They just want the lyrics. It's all about the lyrics I think. So if you look at Jack Whites songs, you see many of them he is not doing much that is complex. But he did write some really different lyrics, espeically on the early songs as he was rising. Some of his most memorable songs that were also very weird are "Blue Orchid" (which has a very bizarre, theatrical video), "Seven Nation Army" as mentioned in vid, "Icky Thump", "Little Cream Soda" , "Red Rain" ... I will write another thing explaining Jack White i gues lol Hope i didnt write too mcuh -- i get carried away
I was never all that into metal either. It depends where you look. Some of the old stuff from the 80s, like Dio or this band "Blind Guardian" I listen to a lot. Most guitarists I would meet here in north are all metal heads. Pantera, Metallica, "Hatebreed" - these were all the big bands for the handful of white kids I knew growing up who also played guitar. I find it very sad how insturments are often no longer present in the modern black communities and i will admit that I blame conservative politics for the lack of instruments in that modern community and it is something I may one day speak about on a video...
. Unfortunately it's hard to find anyone who is into acoustic guitar music or really any music like that at all here because acoustic guitars and mandolins etc are immediately written off as "country", so theguys who actually play guitar here alll ike metal, and then everyon else just doing the rap as I said to ya another time I think. It's literally like an acoustic guitar is a lost relic to these people up here lol. Some instrument from ancient times that no one ever sees anymore. The blues and all this stuff, the deeper origins of it it is all great stuff I only found years later when I start doing searches on the Net and everything, and I came to learn about how much more interseting the American music scene is in the South , or of course in the West, like Cali and Arizona and stuff, Chicago etc. I was very surprised by it all when I came to find it.
Of course as much as i love acoustic guitars, I do have some grievances with "straight country music" because the lyrics can be limiting, and i have made another video speaking of it I might publish. The way this all ties in with Jack White is because in Detroit I feel he was in a similar situation that I was in: It was probably either metal or hip hop and he didn't wanna do either. He connected with this old stuff instead. So he found this interesting middle ground where he put these "modern dark ideas" about the weird goth stuff into these bluesy songs, which is actually fascinating because it never happened before. The Tedeschi Trucks band I referenced for a reason, because they only play, like, SRV type blues .. "sky is crying" "key to the highway" songs about stuff like that. Great songs. But the modern young people want twists. I don't believe people who merely listen choose music so much by chord progressions or sounds.
Metal head are obsessed with complex solos and fireworks guitars. If I tried out for a metal band , I would be rejcted immediately. In my opinion, most people don't care about that flash though . They just want the lyrics. It's all about the lyrics I think. So if you look at Jack Whites songs, you see many of them he is not doing much that is complex. But he did write some really different lyrics, espeically on the early songs as he was rising. Some of his most memorable songs that were also very weird are "Blue Orchid" (which has a very bizarre, theatrical video), "Seven Nation Army" as mentioned in vid, "Icky Thump", "Little Cream Soda" , "Red Rain" ... I will write another thing explaining Jack White i gues lol Hope i didnt write too mcuh -- i get carried away
Sunday, August 20, 2017
2 types of Artist
It is really strange, and annoying, how these periods of inspiration seem to work for me. About two years ago I vowed that I would, like a "real" author, actually sit down and write, bare minimum, 1-2,000 words daily. For the most part, I have managed to keep my goal, and I have indeed written that amount every day. Some days -- about half let's say -- I have managed to actually go far beyond that, and get 5,000 daily.
And yet, there still always seems to come a week or two, where suddenly, no matter how inspired I think I am, everything just cuts out, in the worst of ways, and goes blank. I have noticed that it often seems to happen after the most intensely inspiring periods. For example, as July was winding down, I was flying wildly between 3 or 4 different horror/fantasy stories I was writing, averaging about 6-7 K words a day. This went on for basically all of July, even. Yet the moment August opened, boom. I just went dry. My pen died. The ink... faded. I passed the first week of August with hardly anything, and I took strong note of it. Well, I said, I'll get it next week. The following week came; I scribbled a little, but still nothing in comparison to the mad outpouring of the month previous. The third week of August -- last week -- I spent lost mostly in a haze of songwriting ( my great distracting black swan) - and now here I am, August 20th, looking back and wondering...what in the hell happened? I passed almost the entire month not really writing anything truly significant. God damn't.
Of course I know my distractions and I know them well, and the shame of my particular distractions are that they are all other creative ventures. Like songwriting, or like turning on my little Webcam microphone here and talking into it to YouTube about ... stuff like this. And I get frightfully distracted with these other two things -- the songwriting and the Youtube talking--but the thing I wonder is .... is it a pollution? Or is it good? Is it a bad thing that I try to simultaneously still pursue songwriting as I try to write? I don't want to believe it is; but sometimes I cannot tell.
Last year for instance I did make a sort of defined effort to utterly avoid my guitar, and my piano (the piano got buried in the back of the cellar, and the guitar locked in its case thrown deep in the closet) and it did seem to help me. I wrote a significant amount, and most times when I did get an urge to go play my instruments and sing, I would find myself lacking interest. Music bored me throughout the year 2016. For sure. I hardly even listened to anything aside from ambient tracks of werewolves howling. But now suddenly I find the music bug has bitten again, and what is strange is that now it seems all the songs that come out of me are decidedly better than they ever were before. Not musically speaking, of course. Musically I am still the same as I have been (maybe a wee bit improved on the piano). No I am referring to lyrics here. For it seems that all of my reading throughout 2015 and 2016, and then too all of my studious writing of PROSE, has definitely changed my songs in the most incredible of ways. And I think I am kind of in shock with it. So now I am getting all swept up with songs again, because the originals that I am writing are ...significantly improved. Like little prosaic stories, but in a song....
For example, prior to my big prose period, I often used to get "jittery" when I would try to just sit down and write rhyming poetry in silence. I was always able to write prose without getting distracted, and Bukowski type poetry too, but when I would try to actually write song lyrics and follow some "deep tale" within a song, I would just get jittery and bored and always want to start singing, immediately. This, as you can imagine, made it very difficult to actually write a song, and so what happened was that most of my tunes would come out as rather Sublime-esque absurdist freestyles, just "jamming". I would take my trusty Aminor and C chords, pull off a reggae beat, or maybe do a G and C country sort of thing, and just freestyle song after song that way...since I have always been able to dream up rhymes very quickly. But of course, none of my songs seemed, to me, to mean anything profound. They were not "deeply poetic". You could tell they were not written. Or at least I could. Yet no matter how much I tried to studiously write them, I could not do it. I don't know how it sounds to people who don't write music; but trying to write down, say, 15 verses for a song, in silence, is very strange. And it's even more strange once you try to sing them after you're finished writing them. In fact, lyrics that I wrote beforehand would always sound extremely strange once I would sing them -- which was another major problem for me. It was almost as though I was trying to tear them out of their natural habitat or something. "No!" the words would scream, "we are just a silent poem for the page! We do not want to be a SONG! Don't make us a SONG!" And of course I am there screaming back at them ... "but that is why I wrote you in the first place! To make you a song to sing! I hate you as silent words, you hags. Why don't you know I never would have written you at all, just to be silent words? How I hate silent rhymes!"
And I can't stress enough how often this would happen, and how often the pre-written lyrics would sound so ..."fake" and "unnatural" once they were put over song. A lot of the problem, of course, I always suspected, was really just in my head. For the truth is that most times when I am freestyling lyrics I've never written...y'all people out there think I have written them anyways. So to the people "outside" none of this makes any difference...but to me, as the performer, it's always been enormous, and it ruins my own pleasure I guess. 'Cause I just can't express how much fun I really do get , out of freestyling random lyrics and just jumping around like a maniac. In fact, often the very best lyrics come out that way ... (and then they look awful once written , in reverse!).
So I don't know. I'm horrifically torn I guess. Being two types of artist is a fucking difficult thing yuh know?? But it is still a very beautiful thing and I suspect I shall go on with it and see where it brings me...... for there are worse things that I can think of....
And yet, there still always seems to come a week or two, where suddenly, no matter how inspired I think I am, everything just cuts out, in the worst of ways, and goes blank. I have noticed that it often seems to happen after the most intensely inspiring periods. For example, as July was winding down, I was flying wildly between 3 or 4 different horror/fantasy stories I was writing, averaging about 6-7 K words a day. This went on for basically all of July, even. Yet the moment August opened, boom. I just went dry. My pen died. The ink... faded. I passed the first week of August with hardly anything, and I took strong note of it. Well, I said, I'll get it next week. The following week came; I scribbled a little, but still nothing in comparison to the mad outpouring of the month previous. The third week of August -- last week -- I spent lost mostly in a haze of songwriting ( my great distracting black swan) - and now here I am, August 20th, looking back and wondering...what in the hell happened? I passed almost the entire month not really writing anything truly significant. God damn't.
Of course I know my distractions and I know them well, and the shame of my particular distractions are that they are all other creative ventures. Like songwriting, or like turning on my little Webcam microphone here and talking into it to YouTube about ... stuff like this. And I get frightfully distracted with these other two things -- the songwriting and the Youtube talking--but the thing I wonder is .... is it a pollution? Or is it good? Is it a bad thing that I try to simultaneously still pursue songwriting as I try to write? I don't want to believe it is; but sometimes I cannot tell.
Last year for instance I did make a sort of defined effort to utterly avoid my guitar, and my piano (the piano got buried in the back of the cellar, and the guitar locked in its case thrown deep in the closet) and it did seem to help me. I wrote a significant amount, and most times when I did get an urge to go play my instruments and sing, I would find myself lacking interest. Music bored me throughout the year 2016. For sure. I hardly even listened to anything aside from ambient tracks of werewolves howling. But now suddenly I find the music bug has bitten again, and what is strange is that now it seems all the songs that come out of me are decidedly better than they ever were before. Not musically speaking, of course. Musically I am still the same as I have been (maybe a wee bit improved on the piano). No I am referring to lyrics here. For it seems that all of my reading throughout 2015 and 2016, and then too all of my studious writing of PROSE, has definitely changed my songs in the most incredible of ways. And I think I am kind of in shock with it. So now I am getting all swept up with songs again, because the originals that I am writing are ...significantly improved. Like little prosaic stories, but in a song....
For example, prior to my big prose period, I often used to get "jittery" when I would try to just sit down and write rhyming poetry in silence. I was always able to write prose without getting distracted, and Bukowski type poetry too, but when I would try to actually write song lyrics and follow some "deep tale" within a song, I would just get jittery and bored and always want to start singing, immediately. This, as you can imagine, made it very difficult to actually write a song, and so what happened was that most of my tunes would come out as rather Sublime-esque absurdist freestyles, just "jamming". I would take my trusty Aminor and C chords, pull off a reggae beat, or maybe do a G and C country sort of thing, and just freestyle song after song that way...since I have always been able to dream up rhymes very quickly. But of course, none of my songs seemed, to me, to mean anything profound. They were not "deeply poetic". You could tell they were not written. Or at least I could. Yet no matter how much I tried to studiously write them, I could not do it. I don't know how it sounds to people who don't write music; but trying to write down, say, 15 verses for a song, in silence, is very strange. And it's even more strange once you try to sing them after you're finished writing them. In fact, lyrics that I wrote beforehand would always sound extremely strange once I would sing them -- which was another major problem for me. It was almost as though I was trying to tear them out of their natural habitat or something. "No!" the words would scream, "we are just a silent poem for the page! We do not want to be a SONG! Don't make us a SONG!" And of course I am there screaming back at them ... "but that is why I wrote you in the first place! To make you a song to sing! I hate you as silent words, you hags. Why don't you know I never would have written you at all, just to be silent words? How I hate silent rhymes!"
And I can't stress enough how often this would happen, and how often the pre-written lyrics would sound so ..."fake" and "unnatural" once they were put over song. A lot of the problem, of course, I always suspected, was really just in my head. For the truth is that most times when I am freestyling lyrics I've never written...y'all people out there think I have written them anyways. So to the people "outside" none of this makes any difference...but to me, as the performer, it's always been enormous, and it ruins my own pleasure I guess. 'Cause I just can't express how much fun I really do get , out of freestyling random lyrics and just jumping around like a maniac. In fact, often the very best lyrics come out that way ... (and then they look awful once written , in reverse!).
So I don't know. I'm horrifically torn I guess. Being two types of artist is a fucking difficult thing yuh know?? But it is still a very beautiful thing and I suspect I shall go on with it and see where it brings me...... for there are worse things that I can think of....
Saturday, August 19, 2017
HBO's Confederate
I have just gotten done reading Ta'nahesi Coates August 4th article, in the Atlantic, about HBO's "proposed" new TV show, Confederate. And I must say I am absolutely disgusted. Not at Coates, hell no. At HBO. I literally cannot even believe that something such as this show would even so much as "shine" for a second on a platform that is as mainstream and as popular as that. I honestly cannot even believe that the idea behind the show --- "what if the white South had won the Civil War and slavery never ended?" --- could even pass, at all, for the idea of what the next hit show might be on this popular channel. But then, I remind myself, I am in the great nation of Fools, so why am I really that surprised? These people in the USA, it seems, are like the people you meet in bad dreams that just never end: they just love pouring SALT on old wounds. They cannot , it would seem, do anything else.
Of course, I already know all of the cries that the defenders of the Confederate show will come out with, because a little red bird tells me that they will sound very similar to the cries people make when black folks shoot out complaints about, well, anything: "Don't they ever stop complaining?" one imagines them saying, "Can't they ever just, like, be happy? And accept things? No...they always must complain!" Well, yes ,in fact, when it comes to something like this -- to white folks fantasizing about what if the South had won and slavery never ended -- one imagines that black people will complain. One should not blame them for complaining, either. And yet I can't help but wonder if, even with the lament of Ta'nahesi Coates, who is literally the biggest African-American intellectual currently around in the States, if these complaints will be heard. Or if they will, instead, just be shrugged off, ignored, and degraded, with that usual smug and arrogant air of "listen ,just let us whit folks do our thing, and the blacks will eventually come around to seeing it made sense in the end...it was better in the end...yuh know?"
No I do not know, and I am very sick of trying to know. I am sick of this idea that white people seem to think it's OK to collectively shrug off the complaints of, literally, the entire black population, no matter what it is you're talking about. For this "shrugging off" is also the same exact thing that tends to happen when one discusses conservative politics, and the Republican party, with white Americans as well. For example, I can still remember a few years ago, when I first got into politics, and it came to my attention that literally next to no blacks vote Republican, and haven't for a "hundred years".
Right away, I knew something was horrifically wrong with the party: How on earth could it even be that they have lost the entire black vote? How could it be that they are that despised by blacks? Certainly, I said to myself, there's something wrong here -- and it is not with black people, but with the Republicans! Friends of mine of course, who sympathize wth the Republicans, and of course old miserable uncles, quickly explained it to me, whenever it was brought up: "Well the blacks just don't get it, you see? They don't understand. We Republicans want to help them, and we will. They just have to wait and see. They complain too much, you see? They just complain. And their complaints have no basis, you know? But they're...." They're ...what? Ah, they are too stupid, is it? To understand what the holy white man Republican wants for them.... so on and so forth. "They'll come around. They need to stop complaining." Nah. I don't think so, Jack. What I think is the Republicans need to lend their ear to what the blacks are saying. That's what I think. I think it's the case that, as Louis CK highlights in some joke he does, if someone calls you an asshole, or a whole room of people calls you an asshole, you don't get to just shrug that off and say "well, they're wrong." No. You have to take that into acount. You are an asshole if a whole room of people says you are. You don't get to say you are not. In fact, saying that and denying that...makes you even more of an asshole...!
And so this, you see, is the exact case with this putrid, disgusting show Confederate: White folk want to experiment artistically, it seems, and they want the license to do that. They want to play around with "risque ideas" and "offensive art". Ah, that is wonderful. But guess what? Do it with your own white shit. Don't involve blacks in your little experiment. For, it would seem to me, they do not want to be involved, and Ta'nahesi Coates is asking nicely enough--don't you think? And don't forget: He is the main Afro-American intellectual currently around. His opinion is to be fucking heeded. Unless, of course, you're an asshole.
Of course, I already know all of the cries that the defenders of the Confederate show will come out with, because a little red bird tells me that they will sound very similar to the cries people make when black folks shoot out complaints about, well, anything: "Don't they ever stop complaining?" one imagines them saying, "Can't they ever just, like, be happy? And accept things? No...they always must complain!" Well, yes ,in fact, when it comes to something like this -- to white folks fantasizing about what if the South had won and slavery never ended -- one imagines that black people will complain. One should not blame them for complaining, either. And yet I can't help but wonder if, even with the lament of Ta'nahesi Coates, who is literally the biggest African-American intellectual currently around in the States, if these complaints will be heard. Or if they will, instead, just be shrugged off, ignored, and degraded, with that usual smug and arrogant air of "listen ,just let us whit folks do our thing, and the blacks will eventually come around to seeing it made sense in the end...it was better in the end...yuh know?"
No I do not know, and I am very sick of trying to know. I am sick of this idea that white people seem to think it's OK to collectively shrug off the complaints of, literally, the entire black population, no matter what it is you're talking about. For this "shrugging off" is also the same exact thing that tends to happen when one discusses conservative politics, and the Republican party, with white Americans as well. For example, I can still remember a few years ago, when I first got into politics, and it came to my attention that literally next to no blacks vote Republican, and haven't for a "hundred years".
Right away, I knew something was horrifically wrong with the party: How on earth could it even be that they have lost the entire black vote? How could it be that they are that despised by blacks? Certainly, I said to myself, there's something wrong here -- and it is not with black people, but with the Republicans! Friends of mine of course, who sympathize wth the Republicans, and of course old miserable uncles, quickly explained it to me, whenever it was brought up: "Well the blacks just don't get it, you see? They don't understand. We Republicans want to help them, and we will. They just have to wait and see. They complain too much, you see? They just complain. And their complaints have no basis, you know? But they're...." They're ...what? Ah, they are too stupid, is it? To understand what the holy white man Republican wants for them.... so on and so forth. "They'll come around. They need to stop complaining." Nah. I don't think so, Jack. What I think is the Republicans need to lend their ear to what the blacks are saying. That's what I think. I think it's the case that, as Louis CK highlights in some joke he does, if someone calls you an asshole, or a whole room of people calls you an asshole, you don't get to just shrug that off and say "well, they're wrong." No. You have to take that into acount. You are an asshole if a whole room of people says you are. You don't get to say you are not. In fact, saying that and denying that...makes you even more of an asshole...!
And so this, you see, is the exact case with this putrid, disgusting show Confederate: White folk want to experiment artistically, it seems, and they want the license to do that. They want to play around with "risque ideas" and "offensive art". Ah, that is wonderful. But guess what? Do it with your own white shit. Don't involve blacks in your little experiment. For, it would seem to me, they do not want to be involved, and Ta'nahesi Coates is asking nicely enough--don't you think? And don't forget: He is the main Afro-American intellectual currently around. His opinion is to be fucking heeded. Unless, of course, you're an asshole.
Thursday, August 17, 2017
Rock and roll Fantasies
Further thoughts on Jack white and what the White Stripes did:
Here's the first sentence I want to scribble here, and I want to make sure you know that this one sentence is vicious and mean and you must let it stab through your thoughts, and bleed inside of you: When Jack White created the White Stripes , he liberated the blues from an absolutely horrific box that I believe they had been trapped in-- tragically-- for decades.
Why am I saying this? Allow me to explain: When you start to follow the trail of certain famous blues songs, especially the very early songs by artists like Robert Johnson, and you research and listen to how they have been interpreted across the years, generally what I feel you're going to find is that many of the covers that have been done , have basically done two things: 1. They have 'cleaned up' the grittiness of the original Robert Johnson recordings, and made sure you can hear it in a very crisp way (this was Eric Claptons approach when he learned them note for note ) or, on the other hand, they have merely plugged the songs in to an amplifier , and played them loudly. This was what the Rolling Stones did in the 70s, with tracks like "Stop Breaking down" on Exile on Main Street.
Now , when you first look at how Jack White recorded his own version of "Stop Breaking Down" decades later in the early 00s, it almost just seems like maybe it's little more than a whackier version of what the Stones were doing back in the 70s, or even what Eric Clapton and countless other electric blues artists like him are still doing. At first glance it really almost seems like that, but then you look twice and, in my opinion, you see the real magic of what White did, and it's very simple but so meaningful: He essentially unlocked the "tortured spirit" of the songs -- the howl , you could say-- in a manner that the Stones and those other artists clearly have not. White actually got closer to the original vibration and feeling of the song, in my opinion, and created a sort of "parallel" in our own time, of how it perhaps sounded to the people of Johnsons.
For many years I would often look at Whites reworking of blues songs and I would just sort of write them off as poorly performed adaptations. It just sounded childish, I suppose, especially after I really, as an adult, went and dug into the very "neat" way that artists like Clapton and so on do the blues standards. But then one day I had an epiphany about this 'cleaning up' that Clapton and Company had done , and what I realized was that, as important as it was to help "the gentle people" understand the blues, what Clapton did also sort of sterilized the blues, to the point where it became too tame, too nice, too polite, and too predictable. It works for the Vienna Opera House I guess-- where Joe Bonamassa can be seen playing these highly sterilized versions of the blues songs---but it also *ruins* the feeling that was so often there , in the original period of the blues. It makes them seem polite. As though it's the sort of music a nice fellow or lady ought to listening to. And though it might sound hard to believe, even the versions the Stones gave us often leave me with a "too polite" taste in my mouth. For Mick Jägger never really seems angry enough. He's too much of a hippie, one imagines, to play these songs in a ferocious way . He's also, maybe, too English.
This isn't really what happens with Jack Whites rendering of the blues music. It's almost as though, by virtue of being an American, and having come of age in one of modern America's most destroyed and certainly racially conflicted cities , Detroit, Jack somehow managed to really hear the absolute rage in these songs that Clapton and the Stones simply missed. For the truth is that, when you listen to the English artists tell the tale of the songs, often what you wind up hearing are tales about how "depressing" and "deep" and "sad" the blues are. What you never really get, however, is this idea that, though the blues does represent depression and sorrow, it also at times represented a very deep anger, as well as a fear. A fear of being smited by God, or kidnapped by the Devil-- and also of course a fear of being lynched or murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, et cetera. And these two things, I just think, are perhaps difficult for someone whose grown up outside of the American ball game - like the English obviously have--- to understand. Jack White unlocked this anger, this viciousness, and above all this fear and confusion when he played his blues . Now, was he able to tap into an anger that is most certainly as deep as the one a modern black fellow might feel? No, he didn't. But the unfortunate fact is that most black folks are actually not allowed to express a rock and roll style, bluesy anger in their songs, so that's really a whole other topic. The fact is that Jack White was the only one who offered us up the blues in this most recent light, and in my opinion he unlocked it in a way no other post 1960s blues artist really ever has, as a direct result of his initial proximity to this troubled and racially distraught city. I especially began to see that Jack White was a little different than the rest when I realized he had a featuring on Beyonce's most recent Lemonade project, on the song I just so happened to myself like most, "Don't Hurt Yourself". I can guarantee you that next to no other modern rockers would probably even go near Beyonce, for fear that their fanbase -- who knows nothing about the blues or black peoples incredible role in rock -- would abandon them. For Jack, it wasn't a problem: His fans understand....
And of course what's so hilarious about this all is that Jack White isn't even at all respected within blues circles. In fact, he often seems to be despised to me. Why? Well the answer is simple: by the standards of what the genre has now twisted itself into-- the polite standards, the technical standards etc-- Jack White can "hardly play" the blues. Put him up against someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Derek Tedeschi , and White really cannot compete. He does not play long proper solos and it's hard to imagine him on a stage with the Tedeschi Trucks band. His blues are simply too strange to mesh with theirs. They're selling a refined, polished product that is , one imagines, purposely supposed to remind us of the blues at its electric peak . Susan Tedeschi actually knows how to sing properly and Derek Tedeschi can play the old famous solos exactly as they are. The lyrics are more synonymous with the blues as they were in their mature years.
Jack was instead selling something deranged and demented and though he didn't manage to do it in every song, there were times when Whites music did actually sound unusually dark; and, in my opinion, the guy basically connected us back to that good old Satanic thing the blues used to have going for it-- and even the guitar--- which you can now see has been somewhat lost in every genre, save for metal. For the fierceness of the guitar has actually now been very much lost when you look at it from a mainstream angle, and really none of the metal bands, try as they might, have ever been able to truly summon it up. And neither were bands like Pearl Jam or Nirvana able to either, for all of their songs don't really ever seem to go anywhere truly dark. They get mad-- but they never make you think Satan might come snatch you. The lyrics with most modern rock bands never seem all that serious, I feel, and a big reason why is because many of those bands weren't very interested in American myth , in the manner that Jack White was. For that matter, they weren't even very interested in anything Biblical either. So you never wind up with the sort of lyrics White would sing, when he said something like "...I'm going to Wichita, far from this opera forevermore ....I'm gonna work the straw, make the sweat drip out of every pore...." In addition , you'd also never get any of those joyous references to things like "the hounds of hell" (mentioned in the same song) that are so obviously pulled straight from blues lore, and Robert Johnsons "Hellhounds on my Trail". These bands were only pulling from a musical vault that started in the 1950s--- maybe even just the 1960s. Jack White was so revolutionary because he went further back, just like the original rockers had done, but he saw it all from a wildly new perspective that, as I wrote, the original rockers missed, mostly due to society just not being ready.
So now it comes to the next stop of the train, and the question now becomes "what can it be next?" and "can it go beyond where Jack White has brought it?" Well, I have been pondering this question in recent days as I have been fiddling around with my piano again, and what I have realized is , in fact, yes...of course....it can not only go beyond where Jack brought it--- it can actually go far beyond. But in what way you ask? It is simple: If rock wants to start having an appeal for people again, then I think what it needs to do is to realize that people did actually like Jack White --- in an era whne they liked almosr no other rockers --- and they need to understand that the main reason why was because he didn't just play hard and free , but he also wrote these very superstitious and strange sounding songs, and he looked, in his costumes, very theatrical (as I mentioned elsewhere) . He summoned up this old "evil spirit" of rocks weird, twisted origins and brought it to life as much as he could in the early 2000s. He actually brought back a certain fantasy world that the Bible gave us which has now been all but abandoned in our mostly secular society. Therefore, when I sit down at my piano and I think to write in a Jack White inspired style, I tend to just go straight back and I try to think: what might an incredibly superstitious religious person believe about the World? Especially someone from the deep past? What might be some of the things they're convinced are real? Ghosts, demons, Angels, hell hounds, God..Satan, crucifixions...et cetera. All of these things which are at once so commonly known--- but also, you'll see, hardly at work in the actual modern rock songs. For I don't know about you--but I am hard pressed to find a rock song that has a character , say, being chased by hell hounds, through Louisiana or Kansas , or some such place. I'm hard pressed to find a song where the singer is screaming in fear about someone they love, some girl named Ellie Mae, perhaps, being crucified and burnt at the stake for being a witch....,
This type of imagery , as I've gone over in previous writings of mine, is simply no longer at work -- and actually never really was--- in music. It's all something that still, mostly, has yet to happen. Oh it has indeed happened in literature, and as you see it flickered briefly in that old blues world, where men like Robert Johnson probably seriously believed in it all--- but then we never really saw it again. The old superstitious blues songs merely became a short stop in a set list for rock bands that otherwise sang songs about love and jet planes and being rich rock stars. The fantasy fell right out.
I say it's high time to bring it BACK.
Here's the first sentence I want to scribble here, and I want to make sure you know that this one sentence is vicious and mean and you must let it stab through your thoughts, and bleed inside of you: When Jack White created the White Stripes , he liberated the blues from an absolutely horrific box that I believe they had been trapped in-- tragically-- for decades.
Why am I saying this? Allow me to explain: When you start to follow the trail of certain famous blues songs, especially the very early songs by artists like Robert Johnson, and you research and listen to how they have been interpreted across the years, generally what I feel you're going to find is that many of the covers that have been done , have basically done two things: 1. They have 'cleaned up' the grittiness of the original Robert Johnson recordings, and made sure you can hear it in a very crisp way (this was Eric Claptons approach when he learned them note for note ) or, on the other hand, they have merely plugged the songs in to an amplifier , and played them loudly. This was what the Rolling Stones did in the 70s, with tracks like "Stop Breaking down" on Exile on Main Street.
Now , when you first look at how Jack White recorded his own version of "Stop Breaking Down" decades later in the early 00s, it almost just seems like maybe it's little more than a whackier version of what the Stones were doing back in the 70s, or even what Eric Clapton and countless other electric blues artists like him are still doing. At first glance it really almost seems like that, but then you look twice and, in my opinion, you see the real magic of what White did, and it's very simple but so meaningful: He essentially unlocked the "tortured spirit" of the songs -- the howl , you could say-- in a manner that the Stones and those other artists clearly have not. White actually got closer to the original vibration and feeling of the song, in my opinion, and created a sort of "parallel" in our own time, of how it perhaps sounded to the people of Johnsons.
For many years I would often look at Whites reworking of blues songs and I would just sort of write them off as poorly performed adaptations. It just sounded childish, I suppose, especially after I really, as an adult, went and dug into the very "neat" way that artists like Clapton and so on do the blues standards. But then one day I had an epiphany about this 'cleaning up' that Clapton and Company had done , and what I realized was that, as important as it was to help "the gentle people" understand the blues, what Clapton did also sort of sterilized the blues, to the point where it became too tame, too nice, too polite, and too predictable. It works for the Vienna Opera House I guess-- where Joe Bonamassa can be seen playing these highly sterilized versions of the blues songs---but it also *ruins* the feeling that was so often there , in the original period of the blues. It makes them seem polite. As though it's the sort of music a nice fellow or lady ought to listening to. And though it might sound hard to believe, even the versions the Stones gave us often leave me with a "too polite" taste in my mouth. For Mick Jägger never really seems angry enough. He's too much of a hippie, one imagines, to play these songs in a ferocious way . He's also, maybe, too English.
This isn't really what happens with Jack Whites rendering of the blues music. It's almost as though, by virtue of being an American, and having come of age in one of modern America's most destroyed and certainly racially conflicted cities , Detroit, Jack somehow managed to really hear the absolute rage in these songs that Clapton and the Stones simply missed. For the truth is that, when you listen to the English artists tell the tale of the songs, often what you wind up hearing are tales about how "depressing" and "deep" and "sad" the blues are. What you never really get, however, is this idea that, though the blues does represent depression and sorrow, it also at times represented a very deep anger, as well as a fear. A fear of being smited by God, or kidnapped by the Devil-- and also of course a fear of being lynched or murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, et cetera. And these two things, I just think, are perhaps difficult for someone whose grown up outside of the American ball game - like the English obviously have--- to understand. Jack White unlocked this anger, this viciousness, and above all this fear and confusion when he played his blues . Now, was he able to tap into an anger that is most certainly as deep as the one a modern black fellow might feel? No, he didn't. But the unfortunate fact is that most black folks are actually not allowed to express a rock and roll style, bluesy anger in their songs, so that's really a whole other topic. The fact is that Jack White was the only one who offered us up the blues in this most recent light, and in my opinion he unlocked it in a way no other post 1960s blues artist really ever has, as a direct result of his initial proximity to this troubled and racially distraught city. I especially began to see that Jack White was a little different than the rest when I realized he had a featuring on Beyonce's most recent Lemonade project, on the song I just so happened to myself like most, "Don't Hurt Yourself". I can guarantee you that next to no other modern rockers would probably even go near Beyonce, for fear that their fanbase -- who knows nothing about the blues or black peoples incredible role in rock -- would abandon them. For Jack, it wasn't a problem: His fans understand....
And of course what's so hilarious about this all is that Jack White isn't even at all respected within blues circles. In fact, he often seems to be despised to me. Why? Well the answer is simple: by the standards of what the genre has now twisted itself into-- the polite standards, the technical standards etc-- Jack White can "hardly play" the blues. Put him up against someone like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Derek Tedeschi , and White really cannot compete. He does not play long proper solos and it's hard to imagine him on a stage with the Tedeschi Trucks band. His blues are simply too strange to mesh with theirs. They're selling a refined, polished product that is , one imagines, purposely supposed to remind us of the blues at its electric peak . Susan Tedeschi actually knows how to sing properly and Derek Tedeschi can play the old famous solos exactly as they are. The lyrics are more synonymous with the blues as they were in their mature years.
Jack was instead selling something deranged and demented and though he didn't manage to do it in every song, there were times when Whites music did actually sound unusually dark; and, in my opinion, the guy basically connected us back to that good old Satanic thing the blues used to have going for it-- and even the guitar--- which you can now see has been somewhat lost in every genre, save for metal. For the fierceness of the guitar has actually now been very much lost when you look at it from a mainstream angle, and really none of the metal bands, try as they might, have ever been able to truly summon it up. And neither were bands like Pearl Jam or Nirvana able to either, for all of their songs don't really ever seem to go anywhere truly dark. They get mad-- but they never make you think Satan might come snatch you. The lyrics with most modern rock bands never seem all that serious, I feel, and a big reason why is because many of those bands weren't very interested in American myth , in the manner that Jack White was. For that matter, they weren't even very interested in anything Biblical either. So you never wind up with the sort of lyrics White would sing, when he said something like "...I'm going to Wichita, far from this opera forevermore ....I'm gonna work the straw, make the sweat drip out of every pore...." In addition , you'd also never get any of those joyous references to things like "the hounds of hell" (mentioned in the same song) that are so obviously pulled straight from blues lore, and Robert Johnsons "Hellhounds on my Trail". These bands were only pulling from a musical vault that started in the 1950s--- maybe even just the 1960s. Jack White was so revolutionary because he went further back, just like the original rockers had done, but he saw it all from a wildly new perspective that, as I wrote, the original rockers missed, mostly due to society just not being ready.
So now it comes to the next stop of the train, and the question now becomes "what can it be next?" and "can it go beyond where Jack White has brought it?" Well, I have been pondering this question in recent days as I have been fiddling around with my piano again, and what I have realized is , in fact, yes...of course....it can not only go beyond where Jack brought it--- it can actually go far beyond. But in what way you ask? It is simple: If rock wants to start having an appeal for people again, then I think what it needs to do is to realize that people did actually like Jack White --- in an era whne they liked almosr no other rockers --- and they need to understand that the main reason why was because he didn't just play hard and free , but he also wrote these very superstitious and strange sounding songs, and he looked, in his costumes, very theatrical (as I mentioned elsewhere) . He summoned up this old "evil spirit" of rocks weird, twisted origins and brought it to life as much as he could in the early 2000s. He actually brought back a certain fantasy world that the Bible gave us which has now been all but abandoned in our mostly secular society. Therefore, when I sit down at my piano and I think to write in a Jack White inspired style, I tend to just go straight back and I try to think: what might an incredibly superstitious religious person believe about the World? Especially someone from the deep past? What might be some of the things they're convinced are real? Ghosts, demons, Angels, hell hounds, God..Satan, crucifixions...et cetera. All of these things which are at once so commonly known--- but also, you'll see, hardly at work in the actual modern rock songs. For I don't know about you--but I am hard pressed to find a rock song that has a character , say, being chased by hell hounds, through Louisiana or Kansas , or some such place. I'm hard pressed to find a song where the singer is screaming in fear about someone they love, some girl named Ellie Mae, perhaps, being crucified and burnt at the stake for being a witch....,
This type of imagery , as I've gone over in previous writings of mine, is simply no longer at work -- and actually never really was--- in music. It's all something that still, mostly, has yet to happen. Oh it has indeed happened in literature, and as you see it flickered briefly in that old blues world, where men like Robert Johnson probably seriously believed in it all--- but then we never really saw it again. The old superstitious blues songs merely became a short stop in a set list for rock bands that otherwise sang songs about love and jet planes and being rich rock stars. The fantasy fell right out.
I say it's high time to bring it BACK.
Art, Choices and Sadness
Have modern people become incapable of understanding their own misery? I think it's something I've thought for awhile, based on the many "modern" people I have met: they often seem unusually shocked by just how low their moods can descend - and they also seem frightened by it. Why? Well, I think it might have a lot to do with the very key fact that these folks often have no idea what, exactly, was happening in the PAST. Hence my description of them as "modern". My definition of the word modern here really doesn't mean born on a certain date . It means more "only exposed to certain stuff"...i.e. Modern stuff.
My basic idea here is that someone whose only been exposed to recent art and recent history -- like someone who only watches TV shows and never reads history and only listens to artists from about the 70s onward-- is probsbly completely unaware, somewhere in their brain, of just how infinitely depressing and miserable the entire human story has been now, for a very long time. They have essentially been brought up to believe that life is for "living" and being "happy" and , who knows, "achieving something". I can't say I'm against these values. Certainly not. I find them admirable. However, I also think that the World is and always has been a fairly miserable and violent place. So I'm not that surprised, I don't think, when I start to see all of that erupting somewhere, or even happening in my own brain. It has never occurred to me, for instance, that I ought to take pills to make me happy because , well, in comparison to these blues artists I listen to from the swamps of Louisiana in the 1920s, I seem to be living the life of great cheer.
I do not seem all that miserable in comparison to their stark and bleak misery, and in some way I guess I could be accused of feeding off of their misery -- I suppose some asshole with a PhD might say that---but I prefer to instesd see it as their strength from the past is helping me with my own in the future. For I am not just engaged with the blues artists for a few brief moments in a textbook or some dirty Princeton classroom for a week seminar. I'm actively engaged with these old ghosts daily. They're a major part of my life. Charley Patton is my go to favorite artist in the same way that Britney Spears is for some other individual. And listening to Charley Patton has serious perks, like I said: it puts my life in perspective. It puts my modern time in perspective. It helps me to understand my own reality in relation to his. I actually get a chance, I guess, to see my "white privilege" too. The interesting thing about my journey in this world is I never heard the word whitr privilege a single time, since I never went to college and mostly just kept to myself , but I didn't need to hear it because I was listening to these old blues songs since 16 years old, and so the entire African American tale was put into perspective very quickly for me. Just like other tales were also in perspective for me too, as a result of actively engaging with history and reading of it daily. I can't stress enough how vivid my engagement with history has always been: I don't just read of it . I try to breathe it as deep as I can. I'm not some dirty asshole from Princeton who thinks to be better than the people of history and the past. I don't mock them. I've never thought for one single second that I'm better than any historical character, or that I'm smarter, or anything really. I just think I'm able to see "more" cause I have better "binoculars". I have more tools than them; but tools don't make me a better man or human than them.
I am quite aware of the fact that I would most certainly be the historical character in question, if only I was in their shoes. For some reason I just never thought the dirty people at Princeton and other places had this same idea. They have this idea that they are not only above the history -- but also that they are above even the modern poor folks. It's like these dirty people wholeheartedly believe they would be the same person no matter where they were born. As though they look to some desolate East Texas town and think they would be a book reading liberal still if they had been born there. I doubt it. But this just goes to display how they do lack empathy. And of course so do the conservative imbeciles from the red states lack empathy too, because they can't seem to understand that, if they were black, they'd be pretty pissed and sad as well. Somehow this is all going over their head though--- just like the idea that maybe life isn't about being happy 24 hours a day is too. How come?
Well it goes back to the art intake thing again, reader. People these days don't really have a healthy art intake, in my opinion. I think many of them don't really know how to find art, because what has happened now is that, even though so much art is available, there is this idea that certain people must listen to certain stuff. Art to me actually seems Less diversified than ever before because of how easy it is to make a choice as to what you want to hear or not these days. What do I mean by that? Well, it's simple: artists have actually, to a degree, been somewhat swept off the streets of society, and the normal places of society. How so you ask? Impossible you scream! Oh you are the modern enlightened soul of the New World! How dare I make such a statement. But it's true! There's actually, in many ways, less exposure to real art than ever before .....
For example, in the past, you would have perhaps had the experience of walking into a bar and finding a sad bluesman playing there randomly. You might have experienced an entire "concert" in that way. Now this is all but gone, more or less. Nothing is random now. Now it has all been carefully pre arranged and scheduled for you. So you get tickets to a concert and plan three months in advance for how Madonna will make you feel in January, et cetera. Or of course with the radio, you turn it on and you have pre selected stations that you can always rely on for the sound you're looking for. Wanna feel happy ans boisterous ? Twist to 99.3, where they play loud aggressive rock . Or sad? Switch to Delilahs Sad Hour on 101.9. Wanna feel good and hopeful tonight? Make sure to watch the movie with Scarlett Johansson that is being advertised as the happiest movie of the year! You see what I mean? We are in this weird age of being able to choose our emotions with songs and film and anything really. In the past, it simply wasn't really like this. Everything was yet to be organized. In the age before the radio, you had no choice. You didn't say "I think I'll sit and listen to the blues tonight." No. It was essentially forced upon you. It was all that was around.
Now in my own case I do consider my discovery of the blues to have happened somewhat against my will, and I say this because I believe my own method of finding artists is one that is no longer really practiced by too many of the enlightened modern folks, and this is the method: I don't generally listen to what the radio tells me to listen to, or what the magazines or the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune tells me to listen to . I don't listen, either, to what my pals tell me to listen to. I listen, instead, to what the artists themselves have told me I ought to listen to, after I'm done listening to them. And I have often done this even when I find the artist they've directed me to absolutely awful. So for instance, I came to discover Hank Williams Sr., only after realizing that he had been a vital influence for Bob Dylan, in an interview I watched, and I came to discover someone from the 70s like Eartha Kitt, only after realizing that the new black rapper Azealia Banks was making references to her on Twitter. And I do feel that this method is not being practiced by most people, because something tells me that most people just sort of wander around the radio dial, or they go, again, by those intolerable genres that something like Sirius gives you. And what has happened , as a result of this, is that a genre like the blues has become just a mere "genre", instead of being AMERICAN HISTORY.
The basic point here is that I don't think I've ever listened to Charley Patton in order to listen to somethin "enjoyable" or "pleasurable". I listen to him because I'm remembering the history of the country I'm in. But for most people you can see that they almost don't see him as history --- but rather just someone who was an early practitioner of this music "genre" that Sirius radio now plays on Tuesday nights, when it's time to feel "blue". For me , I think I saw it all as something that I literally *had* to listen to, just like people *have* to accept that a Civil War once happened or someone named John Kennedy was once assassinated. I did not see Charley Patton or Blind Willie McTell as choices. I saw them as artists who had to be heard , if I wanted to understand the emotions of my own country. I saw them in this way because I saw them , again, not as a genre, but as history. Like spokesmen of a certain place. So i almost hesitate to call myself a fan of Blind Willie McTell. To be a fan would imply that I have thoroughly chosen it and enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'd say that. I'm not even sure his music is meant to be "enjoyed". I think it's meant only to be heard and reflected upon...
And of course this "method" still basically applies to modern artists too. For example, to mention Azealia Banks again, I did not "choose" to listen to Azealia Banks. No. What happened was that I came to see Azealia was the modern black female representative of Harlem, New York -- she certainly seems to be one of the most famous black females in the media right now -- and so I essentially forced myself to listen to her music, as well as her various Twitter statements, in order to more deeply understand that specific area of society. Yet still, if I am to make many references to Azealia Banks, the automatic assumption is instantly that I am a great fan of hers, and that I love her music, and that I get great joy out of it , etcetera. But again, I don't really consider myself a "fan" of hers. I am just someone who listened to what she had to say. Why must I automatically be called a fan...? Why is there this obsession with fanhood? Why can't someone just listen to someone , to take something in, in the same way that I listen to the evening news -- whether I like it or not? If I sat researching the assassination of John Kennedy, you would never say I was "a fan of it". Nor would you say that a researcher of World War 2 was a "fan of the war". No. They were merely forced to study it. So how come we refuse to let this happen with music and even ART in general?? Why is music still being seen as this thing that folks must only do for fun??
I think it is ashame. I think music and art deserves much more than that. And this all reaches back to what I was saying initially, about happy pills and stuff, because this all goes to show you that modern people have become so obsessed with this idea of CHOICE...that they now even think they can choose the very mood they're in. So now they're going to go on for a hundred years, one imagines, creating these mood pills... Oh well..
I'll be back here with Charley Patton still yuh know ... "Prayer of Death". ....
My basic idea here is that someone whose only been exposed to recent art and recent history -- like someone who only watches TV shows and never reads history and only listens to artists from about the 70s onward-- is probsbly completely unaware, somewhere in their brain, of just how infinitely depressing and miserable the entire human story has been now, for a very long time. They have essentially been brought up to believe that life is for "living" and being "happy" and , who knows, "achieving something". I can't say I'm against these values. Certainly not. I find them admirable. However, I also think that the World is and always has been a fairly miserable and violent place. So I'm not that surprised, I don't think, when I start to see all of that erupting somewhere, or even happening in my own brain. It has never occurred to me, for instance, that I ought to take pills to make me happy because , well, in comparison to these blues artists I listen to from the swamps of Louisiana in the 1920s, I seem to be living the life of great cheer.
I do not seem all that miserable in comparison to their stark and bleak misery, and in some way I guess I could be accused of feeding off of their misery -- I suppose some asshole with a PhD might say that---but I prefer to instesd see it as their strength from the past is helping me with my own in the future. For I am not just engaged with the blues artists for a few brief moments in a textbook or some dirty Princeton classroom for a week seminar. I'm actively engaged with these old ghosts daily. They're a major part of my life. Charley Patton is my go to favorite artist in the same way that Britney Spears is for some other individual. And listening to Charley Patton has serious perks, like I said: it puts my life in perspective. It puts my modern time in perspective. It helps me to understand my own reality in relation to his. I actually get a chance, I guess, to see my "white privilege" too. The interesting thing about my journey in this world is I never heard the word whitr privilege a single time, since I never went to college and mostly just kept to myself , but I didn't need to hear it because I was listening to these old blues songs since 16 years old, and so the entire African American tale was put into perspective very quickly for me. Just like other tales were also in perspective for me too, as a result of actively engaging with history and reading of it daily. I can't stress enough how vivid my engagement with history has always been: I don't just read of it . I try to breathe it as deep as I can. I'm not some dirty asshole from Princeton who thinks to be better than the people of history and the past. I don't mock them. I've never thought for one single second that I'm better than any historical character, or that I'm smarter, or anything really. I just think I'm able to see "more" cause I have better "binoculars". I have more tools than them; but tools don't make me a better man or human than them.
I am quite aware of the fact that I would most certainly be the historical character in question, if only I was in their shoes. For some reason I just never thought the dirty people at Princeton and other places had this same idea. They have this idea that they are not only above the history -- but also that they are above even the modern poor folks. It's like these dirty people wholeheartedly believe they would be the same person no matter where they were born. As though they look to some desolate East Texas town and think they would be a book reading liberal still if they had been born there. I doubt it. But this just goes to display how they do lack empathy. And of course so do the conservative imbeciles from the red states lack empathy too, because they can't seem to understand that, if they were black, they'd be pretty pissed and sad as well. Somehow this is all going over their head though--- just like the idea that maybe life isn't about being happy 24 hours a day is too. How come?
Well it goes back to the art intake thing again, reader. People these days don't really have a healthy art intake, in my opinion. I think many of them don't really know how to find art, because what has happened now is that, even though so much art is available, there is this idea that certain people must listen to certain stuff. Art to me actually seems Less diversified than ever before because of how easy it is to make a choice as to what you want to hear or not these days. What do I mean by that? Well, it's simple: artists have actually, to a degree, been somewhat swept off the streets of society, and the normal places of society. How so you ask? Impossible you scream! Oh you are the modern enlightened soul of the New World! How dare I make such a statement. But it's true! There's actually, in many ways, less exposure to real art than ever before .....
For example, in the past, you would have perhaps had the experience of walking into a bar and finding a sad bluesman playing there randomly. You might have experienced an entire "concert" in that way. Now this is all but gone, more or less. Nothing is random now. Now it has all been carefully pre arranged and scheduled for you. So you get tickets to a concert and plan three months in advance for how Madonna will make you feel in January, et cetera. Or of course with the radio, you turn it on and you have pre selected stations that you can always rely on for the sound you're looking for. Wanna feel happy ans boisterous ? Twist to 99.3, where they play loud aggressive rock . Or sad? Switch to Delilahs Sad Hour on 101.9. Wanna feel good and hopeful tonight? Make sure to watch the movie with Scarlett Johansson that is being advertised as the happiest movie of the year! You see what I mean? We are in this weird age of being able to choose our emotions with songs and film and anything really. In the past, it simply wasn't really like this. Everything was yet to be organized. In the age before the radio, you had no choice. You didn't say "I think I'll sit and listen to the blues tonight." No. It was essentially forced upon you. It was all that was around.
Now in my own case I do consider my discovery of the blues to have happened somewhat against my will, and I say this because I believe my own method of finding artists is one that is no longer really practiced by too many of the enlightened modern folks, and this is the method: I don't generally listen to what the radio tells me to listen to, or what the magazines or the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune tells me to listen to . I don't listen, either, to what my pals tell me to listen to. I listen, instead, to what the artists themselves have told me I ought to listen to, after I'm done listening to them. And I have often done this even when I find the artist they've directed me to absolutely awful. So for instance, I came to discover Hank Williams Sr., only after realizing that he had been a vital influence for Bob Dylan, in an interview I watched, and I came to discover someone from the 70s like Eartha Kitt, only after realizing that the new black rapper Azealia Banks was making references to her on Twitter. And I do feel that this method is not being practiced by most people, because something tells me that most people just sort of wander around the radio dial, or they go, again, by those intolerable genres that something like Sirius gives you. And what has happened , as a result of this, is that a genre like the blues has become just a mere "genre", instead of being AMERICAN HISTORY.
The basic point here is that I don't think I've ever listened to Charley Patton in order to listen to somethin "enjoyable" or "pleasurable". I listen to him because I'm remembering the history of the country I'm in. But for most people you can see that they almost don't see him as history --- but rather just someone who was an early practitioner of this music "genre" that Sirius radio now plays on Tuesday nights, when it's time to feel "blue". For me , I think I saw it all as something that I literally *had* to listen to, just like people *have* to accept that a Civil War once happened or someone named John Kennedy was once assassinated. I did not see Charley Patton or Blind Willie McTell as choices. I saw them as artists who had to be heard , if I wanted to understand the emotions of my own country. I saw them in this way because I saw them , again, not as a genre, but as history. Like spokesmen of a certain place. So i almost hesitate to call myself a fan of Blind Willie McTell. To be a fan would imply that I have thoroughly chosen it and enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'd say that. I'm not even sure his music is meant to be "enjoyed". I think it's meant only to be heard and reflected upon...
And of course this "method" still basically applies to modern artists too. For example, to mention Azealia Banks again, I did not "choose" to listen to Azealia Banks. No. What happened was that I came to see Azealia was the modern black female representative of Harlem, New York -- she certainly seems to be one of the most famous black females in the media right now -- and so I essentially forced myself to listen to her music, as well as her various Twitter statements, in order to more deeply understand that specific area of society. Yet still, if I am to make many references to Azealia Banks, the automatic assumption is instantly that I am a great fan of hers, and that I love her music, and that I get great joy out of it , etcetera. But again, I don't really consider myself a "fan" of hers. I am just someone who listened to what she had to say. Why must I automatically be called a fan...? Why is there this obsession with fanhood? Why can't someone just listen to someone , to take something in, in the same way that I listen to the evening news -- whether I like it or not? If I sat researching the assassination of John Kennedy, you would never say I was "a fan of it". Nor would you say that a researcher of World War 2 was a "fan of the war". No. They were merely forced to study it. So how come we refuse to let this happen with music and even ART in general?? Why is music still being seen as this thing that folks must only do for fun??
I think it is ashame. I think music and art deserves much more than that. And this all reaches back to what I was saying initially, about happy pills and stuff, because this all goes to show you that modern people have become so obsessed with this idea of CHOICE...that they now even think they can choose the very mood they're in. So now they're going to go on for a hundred years, one imagines, creating these mood pills... Oh well..
I'll be back here with Charley Patton still yuh know ... "Prayer of Death". ....
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Artists and traveling
When I was a young poet, I used to think that traveling reality would be the only to reach bliss.
My dream visions were all obsessed with escape. I could not wait to high tail it out of my room, my town, my state, my country. My longings were all for the cities of the world, the most famous ones, and certainly the old ones : Paris, Rome, Cairo, Shanghai, the list goes on and on. I was convinced that the only way I could be at all a success as an artist was deep incessant travel. Most of my inspiration for the idea came from the most obvious of places: Rock stars who had toured. They were my biggest inspirations, Jim Morrison being forever my initial "beacon light" into the seashore that is literature , and so I thought ...travel is surely the only way. If I want to render myself an interesting person, travel is surely the only way.
To an extent, I think I was correct: my idea of travel and my curiosity about the world at large that the touring rock stars Initially inspired has definitely helped me. I can speak other languages now because of how obsessed I became with finding a reality distant from my own, and I definitely have never felt too comfortable thinking of myself as a "local" anywhere. Still, something else also happened along the way that has since made me think twice about traveling and the effect I think it sometimes has on artists, and here is the simple truth of it: I think some artists have gone too far with it, actually. And I think they've wasted their time. Especially artists like the rock stars I initially worshipped, who are spending their lives traveling the modern reality --- which is quite easy, but also quite boring, to get around....
Why do I think they are wasting their time, however? I'll tell you: I think it is, in fact, a distraction from art. For the truth about art--- the cold hard and mean truth--- is that, at its core, art is and always has been about a rejection of reality, not an embrace. And therefore it's the case that many of the wide traveling artists , who never stop traveling (you know the sort) tend to stop delivering after enough voyaging has happened for them. I think someone like Rimbaud is maybe the perfect example: He was a great poet right after he left his bedroom , full of inspiration, and arrived to Paris, but then he made, in my opinion, the mistake of getting too curious about the world, and going a step too far: instead of sticking in Paris, he takes off for Africa and, if you read the legend , you'll see he never writes again. He doesn't just go there for a little while. He never return. He becomes obsessed with not just glimpsing Africa but traveling around it as much as he can. So he never writes again....
Why? I think it's simple: Rimbaud ended up getting more interested in reality, and so his art not only suffered--- it actually ended completely. Some of course might find Rimbauds dismissal of poetry once he was a bit older to be fascinating. They might like his story. I do not. I've always found it depressing. I don't like Rimbauds story; in fact, I loathe it. For my goal has always been the same since about 16: I want to produce and leave something behind for each year I am alive, whether it is good or bad. I never want to stop producing. And for the most part I have so far succeeded in this goal....the only thing that has ever really gotten in my way is the proper saving of my own materials. It can sometimes be difficult to make sure everything is saved. Especially when you are unpublished and even in the day of the Internet. Of course, imagine how much harder It would be to save things if I was constsntly traveling!
So now the reader might ask me where do I stand? Do poets and artists need to travel or do they need not worry of it at all? And here is my idea: artists throughout time were correct to think that travel was necessary to create a good artist--- but no one ever seems to have addressed just how much travel was necessary. Well, in my opinion, I guess you could say you ought to fill the cup up halfway-- and not any further. Constant travelers do not make good art...I live by the idea. The people who do are the ones who find a good place after only a minor bit of traveling. So you might be the sort who starts out in Ohio but then winds up in Paris , and I would call that sort of traveling good, and I bet that artist would be good too--- as Rimbaud was in the beginning--- but leave Paris after five nights, or even after just a year, for Cairo, or then Shanghai, and then New York and on and on...and I bet you, too, will gradually lose the whole artistic vision you once had. Because you will become polluted by the world of reality ...and once that happens, I believe an artist actually loses touch with the imaginative core. He or she sees too much. And seeing too much is perhaps an even bigger curse than seeing too little.
When I look back on yesterday and I examine the artists that seem to not just be the most intriguing to me but also the ones who have the most mysterious legacies in general, it always seems like they have a bit of a similar tale: They only seem to have ever traveled so far in reality. For example, look even at someone like William Burroughs, who is considered a sort of Rimbaud who traveled far and wide, but even with Burroughs you will see that he only ever really traveled so deeply: he went to Paris, he went to North Africa, London, South America, and certainly New York, but when you really zoom in, you'll see he spent extended time in each place. He made a home. He did not just stay in the city -- like a rock star does --- for three nights. He was in London for an entire decade, for instance, and the same with New York. When he was in the places, he had a routine, one imagines. He wasn't seeing something new every day. He wasn't a tourist. His imagination, you thus see, did not abandon him. I think he at times came close to losing it--- his production rate is terribly poor for how long he was around, especially how free he was--- but he never lost it completely, because he didn't go that deep. He went to more places than Rimbaud; but Rimbaud was traveling in a time of no cars, and he was, they say, a "constant traveler". In our own time he would be one of these people who spend all of their lives aboard airplanes or trains. Personally, I can think of few things worse and uninspiring.
The guitar player Jack White says that going to New York always leaves him feeling as though "he cannot produce". Why? I'll tell you why: it's because modern 2017 New York is a rather ridiculous city that feels like no where. It's the city of constant travelers, of the intolerable people who are convinced that they have seen everything and now can be impressed by nothing. Not surprisingly , once you cast aside Harlem and the other boroughs -- where real humans live--- no good art of any form has come from New York in decades now. The place is too confused, too polluted, too mad, too fast, too obsessed with reality. Art can no longer be made there. The people who arrive there : they may very well arrive there artists, but the inspiration is probably all drained after a week, traded for the idea that "now you're in New York and that's all you are...."
Smaller cities but also the old world cities, I think, do not really have this issue because most of them are not as well traveled as New York feels. Rome in 2017 feels in some regards like the ends of the earth, and the same can probably be said, to an extent, for a number of French cities that aren't Paris, as well as north Europe, rtc. It can also of course be said for numerous American cities: go to Seattle, Detroit, Dallas, maybe even some demented Deep South city, and you'll probably find more food to eat than you could in NYC at this point. And the reason is simple: an artist needs peace and quiet. They need to feel disconnected. A constant traveler does not have this, because traveling is always loud, filled with new sights, new confusion, new faces, and so on.
Just imagine : what would Shakespeare have been had he ever traveled as obsessively as it seems Rimbaud did? Had he not had his London? He would have been nothing. He would have been too confused by the World. An artist needs that deep understanding of a place, in a way. They need that hate , in fact, that only staying in a place too long brings. An artist needs to feel that sickness and dread that comes with knowing some damn rotten road one month too long. For its that exact kick, I am convinced, that will always send the artist hurtling back down the well of inspiration and creation all over again.
So there you have it , artists. A warning lies scrit here for you: Travel too far and too often, and you will lose it all. Stay put, and you will, like God, create your own new world.
My dream visions were all obsessed with escape. I could not wait to high tail it out of my room, my town, my state, my country. My longings were all for the cities of the world, the most famous ones, and certainly the old ones : Paris, Rome, Cairo, Shanghai, the list goes on and on. I was convinced that the only way I could be at all a success as an artist was deep incessant travel. Most of my inspiration for the idea came from the most obvious of places: Rock stars who had toured. They were my biggest inspirations, Jim Morrison being forever my initial "beacon light" into the seashore that is literature , and so I thought ...travel is surely the only way. If I want to render myself an interesting person, travel is surely the only way.
To an extent, I think I was correct: my idea of travel and my curiosity about the world at large that the touring rock stars Initially inspired has definitely helped me. I can speak other languages now because of how obsessed I became with finding a reality distant from my own, and I definitely have never felt too comfortable thinking of myself as a "local" anywhere. Still, something else also happened along the way that has since made me think twice about traveling and the effect I think it sometimes has on artists, and here is the simple truth of it: I think some artists have gone too far with it, actually. And I think they've wasted their time. Especially artists like the rock stars I initially worshipped, who are spending their lives traveling the modern reality --- which is quite easy, but also quite boring, to get around....
Why do I think they are wasting their time, however? I'll tell you: I think it is, in fact, a distraction from art. For the truth about art--- the cold hard and mean truth--- is that, at its core, art is and always has been about a rejection of reality, not an embrace. And therefore it's the case that many of the wide traveling artists , who never stop traveling (you know the sort) tend to stop delivering after enough voyaging has happened for them. I think someone like Rimbaud is maybe the perfect example: He was a great poet right after he left his bedroom , full of inspiration, and arrived to Paris, but then he made, in my opinion, the mistake of getting too curious about the world, and going a step too far: instead of sticking in Paris, he takes off for Africa and, if you read the legend , you'll see he never writes again. He doesn't just go there for a little while. He never return. He becomes obsessed with not just glimpsing Africa but traveling around it as much as he can. So he never writes again....
Why? I think it's simple: Rimbaud ended up getting more interested in reality, and so his art not only suffered--- it actually ended completely. Some of course might find Rimbauds dismissal of poetry once he was a bit older to be fascinating. They might like his story. I do not. I've always found it depressing. I don't like Rimbauds story; in fact, I loathe it. For my goal has always been the same since about 16: I want to produce and leave something behind for each year I am alive, whether it is good or bad. I never want to stop producing. And for the most part I have so far succeeded in this goal....the only thing that has ever really gotten in my way is the proper saving of my own materials. It can sometimes be difficult to make sure everything is saved. Especially when you are unpublished and even in the day of the Internet. Of course, imagine how much harder It would be to save things if I was constsntly traveling!
So now the reader might ask me where do I stand? Do poets and artists need to travel or do they need not worry of it at all? And here is my idea: artists throughout time were correct to think that travel was necessary to create a good artist--- but no one ever seems to have addressed just how much travel was necessary. Well, in my opinion, I guess you could say you ought to fill the cup up halfway-- and not any further. Constant travelers do not make good art...I live by the idea. The people who do are the ones who find a good place after only a minor bit of traveling. So you might be the sort who starts out in Ohio but then winds up in Paris , and I would call that sort of traveling good, and I bet that artist would be good too--- as Rimbaud was in the beginning--- but leave Paris after five nights, or even after just a year, for Cairo, or then Shanghai, and then New York and on and on...and I bet you, too, will gradually lose the whole artistic vision you once had. Because you will become polluted by the world of reality ...and once that happens, I believe an artist actually loses touch with the imaginative core. He or she sees too much. And seeing too much is perhaps an even bigger curse than seeing too little.
When I look back on yesterday and I examine the artists that seem to not just be the most intriguing to me but also the ones who have the most mysterious legacies in general, it always seems like they have a bit of a similar tale: They only seem to have ever traveled so far in reality. For example, look even at someone like William Burroughs, who is considered a sort of Rimbaud who traveled far and wide, but even with Burroughs you will see that he only ever really traveled so deeply: he went to Paris, he went to North Africa, London, South America, and certainly New York, but when you really zoom in, you'll see he spent extended time in each place. He made a home. He did not just stay in the city -- like a rock star does --- for three nights. He was in London for an entire decade, for instance, and the same with New York. When he was in the places, he had a routine, one imagines. He wasn't seeing something new every day. He wasn't a tourist. His imagination, you thus see, did not abandon him. I think he at times came close to losing it--- his production rate is terribly poor for how long he was around, especially how free he was--- but he never lost it completely, because he didn't go that deep. He went to more places than Rimbaud; but Rimbaud was traveling in a time of no cars, and he was, they say, a "constant traveler". In our own time he would be one of these people who spend all of their lives aboard airplanes or trains. Personally, I can think of few things worse and uninspiring.
The guitar player Jack White says that going to New York always leaves him feeling as though "he cannot produce". Why? I'll tell you why: it's because modern 2017 New York is a rather ridiculous city that feels like no where. It's the city of constant travelers, of the intolerable people who are convinced that they have seen everything and now can be impressed by nothing. Not surprisingly , once you cast aside Harlem and the other boroughs -- where real humans live--- no good art of any form has come from New York in decades now. The place is too confused, too polluted, too mad, too fast, too obsessed with reality. Art can no longer be made there. The people who arrive there : they may very well arrive there artists, but the inspiration is probably all drained after a week, traded for the idea that "now you're in New York and that's all you are...."
Smaller cities but also the old world cities, I think, do not really have this issue because most of them are not as well traveled as New York feels. Rome in 2017 feels in some regards like the ends of the earth, and the same can probably be said, to an extent, for a number of French cities that aren't Paris, as well as north Europe, rtc. It can also of course be said for numerous American cities: go to Seattle, Detroit, Dallas, maybe even some demented Deep South city, and you'll probably find more food to eat than you could in NYC at this point. And the reason is simple: an artist needs peace and quiet. They need to feel disconnected. A constant traveler does not have this, because traveling is always loud, filled with new sights, new confusion, new faces, and so on.
Just imagine : what would Shakespeare have been had he ever traveled as obsessively as it seems Rimbaud did? Had he not had his London? He would have been nothing. He would have been too confused by the World. An artist needs that deep understanding of a place, in a way. They need that hate , in fact, that only staying in a place too long brings. An artist needs to feel that sickness and dread that comes with knowing some damn rotten road one month too long. For its that exact kick, I am convinced, that will always send the artist hurtling back down the well of inspiration and creation all over again.
So there you have it , artists. A warning lies scrit here for you: Travel too far and too often, and you will lose it all. Stay put, and you will, like God, create your own new world.
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
The Cheating Wife
I walked out into the backyard to get a breath of fresh air. I had been working hard all morning on code in C and I was tired out as hell from it. The game just wasn’t going to plan; and I was getting to the point ... I just wanted to quit. I had grabbed a can of beer before going out; and I had never expected to see her out there. I thought she was still in Chicago or Miami or wherever the hell it is she goes when she goes.
But there she was, lying down next to the pool,tanning, with the sun beating down upon her. Shehad only a bikini bottom on and her breasts out and bare. A little radio was set up next to her playing that girl she is now obsessed with, Azealia Banks (“the latest big controversy in Silver City”). I sat taking a sip of my Miller Lite just staring at her. Was I angry still...? I dunno. But just as I was about to turn and go back into the castle and just ignore her , she shouted out to me. Evidently she had seen me. “Get your ass over here boy.” she said. I sighed, looking in the window of the house. The dog was staring at me pawing at the glass. Then I turned around. Fuck.
“What do you want ?” I said. “I’m busy.”
“Damn. Really? Like that? First time I see you since middle May and this is the response I get? God damn.”
“I thought you wer still going around with Madeline on your little summer tour.”
“We are still goin around. Just on a little break. Tomorrow I’ll be flying out to Arizona. A big rap concert going on out there, Young Drizzy. But I thought I’d come back for a day ..lay by the pool.” she smiled, and lifted her Dolce sunglasses up over her head. She had put bright white contacts in I could see. “Come sit with me. I’ll give you a massage?”
Apprehensively I walked over and sat down next to her. She turned the radio off. All you could hear was the filter from the pool. She started to dig into my muscles. “So you are still mad at me huh? As though it was even, like, shocking?”
“I guess you’re right, it is no longer shocking that I have a wife who cheats on me whenever she feels like it. I guess it’s not shocking. No. What in hell am I thinking ? It is not shocking.”
She kissed my back digging her fingers into my shoulders. It felt hot and warm like magic. She has always given the best massages..when I was younger I used to live for them...I used to sit there typing code late into the night -- living in a little closet with no working light half the time -- and she would get up, bring me a coffee, make me something, and massage me, watching as I coded.She never cheated then, no way. She was like the perfect girl. She loved me. Then I sold my first game and made bank and....
“You just never to understand that you have a hot fuckin wife.” she said laughing.
“So that means she has to cheat on me?”
“A little. Don’t you think? You would be sick of me if I didn’t cheat.”
“That’s preposterous. Davey’s wife does not cheat. He’s elated with her.”
“Babe, Davey’s wife literally looks like some rat the sewer spit up from Hell.”
“For the love of God, Kate is an incredibly nice person.”
“Because she looks like a pigeon.” she snorted.
“You are a terrifying human being.” I said.
“The Gods created me beautiful, babe. You knew this when you married me. You made a decision to marry a hot bitch. Not my fault. I have been blessed by Aphrodite to be drop dead gorgeous; and so it shall be until...well, the skin gets wrinkly I guess. But you gotta deal, and it’s not like you made it any better. You got money and let me use it to get even more beautiful.”
“So now there is a price to pay.”
“There is.”
I sighed. She leaned over and grabbed a pipe out of her purse, lit it up. The wreak of marijuana fell over us. She coughed; then got back to massaging me and talking.
“It’s the law of the jungle babe.... you feel more attracted to me when I cheat. It’s, like, it’s literally a law.”
“I don’t agree. I think I just get angry. I don’t like thinking of my wife with other men.”
She wet her finger in the pool water and ran it tingling down my spine then began to work on massaging my lower back now occasionally touching my thighs, squeezing.
“Well just let it go and ..how’s this..I won’t cheat for at least .. let’s say until next July now.” She laughed.
“A full year you’ll give me? But no! I don’t believe it! “
“Shaddap. Its true. I’m totally pure and yours for the rest of this summer and...”
“You’re gone for this whole summer with your bitch Madeline.”
“Ok. True.”
“You’ll cheat again this summer.”
“Probably... but how about September, and it’s over? Me and you like in the beginning..until, we’ll say, June. When next summer begins. Come on. All winter babey. I won’t leave once. Madeline will come visit but I won’t leave. Even for Christmas when I usually go to France, I will not leave. I’ll be here and I’ll watch how your new game is coming along. I’ll even help -- if you know what I mean.”
“I make all the money just to get cheated on. I built this entire castle. For what?”
“For an awesome life that we have.”
“Then why do you cheat on me?”
“Because I know you understand.”
“I don’t understand! I hate it! It’s humiliating! ”
“Come on, you don’t really care. You’re still like you were, even worse ... you code all day long. You got rich boy but you’re still the same kid you always were. What do you expect me to do? You’re, like, asexual.”
“What! That isn’t true at all.”
“Babe you request a fuck maybe twice a month. I can’t survive like that. Plus, what the hell, all this money, money you harldy even spend - someone has to enjoy it. And see reality. Instead of that fake world you live in in your games. You’ve been a millionaire for, like, a decade now, and you still haven’t even really seen anything in the world. You just keep making new games. Every year I say ‘babe come to France with me’. You won’t go. You just... ‘I gotta make a new game, I gotta work on Crystal Quest...’”
“That’s my job, it’s what I do. I create wo-”
“And you’re fucking amazing at it. Your games are fucking amazing. I’m just saying: I always thought you’d get rich once Avalon sold and you’d, like, you know, take an interest in reality. I was wrong.” she laughed ,”You just delved even more into games once you were loaded. Cause now the games are better...”
“They’re considerably more immersive, yes, because Scottie and I..”
“Don’t even mention him. You wanna talk about cheating?”
“Ok. I’m done. Let’s not argue. I won’t see you again til September. Let’s not argue.”
She took another hit from the rainbow pipe she had; she offered it to me and I shook my head. I just drink the beer mostly these days - an occasional mushroom trip. Pot became terrifying. She laid back down then bringing the sunglasses over her eyes.
“So,” she said, “I know you’re dying to tell me. What’s the new game you’re making now?”
“You won’t believe it.” I said.
“What?”
“Well it actually has a main character thats a woman.”
“Shut up.”
“No. It’s true. We brought in this , I guess he is some sort of trans writer, I have no idea, Scottie found him somewhere in Michigan or something, living way up north, but he writes these very famous novels for women, and gays, and stuff like that, and he is helping us bring one of his best characters to life...”
“It’s a woman?”
“Yep. Oh yeah. Big time woman.”
“What does she do?”
“Well in his novel ,whcih i sactually very good, I read a great deal of it, she starts out in the 70’s, right, but then, like, some sort of catastrophe happens, where she gets sucked backwards in time in some sort of weird wormhole or something.”
“Uhuh.”
“And then from there she becomes like this magic user and shit..she starts figuring out how to travel through time herself and shit... I don’t know how to describe it to you. The novel is crazy good though, it’s called Amethyst... the New York Times loved it...and those people don’t like anything with fantasy...and, anyways, the game is, like, it’s just extremely different.”
“Is it a multiplayer game?”
“Yea.” I said, looking out at a big bluebird as it flew towards the roof of one of my properties guest houses. “It is multiplayer. Online. Of course. It has 6 continents. But see the lady is, like, the star of it all. I dunno. It’s hard to explain.”
“So is she sort of like Ghennozus was in Avalon?”
I laughed. Ghennozus. She always remembers that character for some reason. I never really think of him anymore. He was one of the first characters I created and actually managed to give life to in a game though. Back when we wer only 19 years old and she still had no implants and no lip work and -- somehow -- not a single tattoo. In Owensborough. That god, god awful town. “I guess you could say that, sure. Avalon’s whole story revolves completely around Ghennozus, and this one around her, so yeah, sure.”
“Whats her name?”
“She’s called Marinella in the novels.”
“How many levels are in the game?”
“100 levels there will be at launch.” I said.
“Wow. In Avalon only 40. Simpler times.”
“Indeed. And the whole quest every player is on revolves entirely around finding Marinella you see...”
“To do what?”
“To help her take back control of the games world, which is called Amethyst like the games title.”
“I see. Who has she lost control of it to?”
“Some evil guy called Miolnor.”
She laughed; I wasn’t facing her but I heard her taking another hit . “So it’s pretty basic. Man versus woman really.”
“I guess. I don’t know how to describe the friggen thing. You gotta see it.”
“Well maybe I’ll come in later to see.” she said, “For now I’m tanning. Tomorrow is gonna be pretty big for me.”
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
YouTube and cover songs
I sometimes can't quite tell what I have been better st over the years: am I more of an impressionist or am I more my own artist? I think in truth that it's a little bit of both.
And I also think that it's really the case for all artists: Many of us start as rather staunch impressionists, and then we wind up developing our own thing. Our own thing of course tends to really just be nothing more than an amalgamation of everything we can throw in- or have been influenced by. So when it comes to Dylan, he begins as an impressionist of Woody Guthrie, with a bit of Leadbelly thrown in; but then he also starts taking cues from Elvis Presley, Artur Rimbaud, and someone like Johnny Cash...and out comes Dylan as we know him: a perfect amalgamation that the people were able to comprehend ...
In a way over the years I've maybe had a little bit too much fun, some friends would say, being an impressionist rather than just trying to be "my own self". I think I had my reasons for doing it though: in the first place, I don't find any shame in doing unapologetic impressions -- I think it's fun-- and the other reason is because the age of the Internet really lends itself to being this type of artist. For example, when it comes to the guitar , I always remember this Bruce Springsteen interview I listened to where he said that one reason he began writing his own songs was because he never had the ear to figure out the songs on the radio , to successfully cover them. A lot of other guitar slingers at that time in Bruce's jersey scene: they were probably playing all sorts of cover songs that they had been forced to figure out by ear from the records. Bruce couldn't do it...so he just started writing his own...the next thing you know...boom.
Well, fast forward to the modern day with the Internet, and the problem Bruce encountered is no longer at all relevant: there now exists literally an entire library on websites like Ultimate Guitar or Country Tabs on how to play the great songs , and all of the tabs are free. In fact, even when I was a kid in the late 90s, I remember a period where I had to go out and buy a book to get the Nirvana chords. Now it's not the case: the tabs are all there....user created...you can find every song imaginable. And, well, I think that this obviously lends itself to the culture now doing what I call a sort of "call back". The catalogue has become so vast now, and so wonderfully organized, that you can play other people's songs all day and never really run out.
A lot of people might immediately find this wildly problematic , and they'll say how , in my own case for example, it clearly "eroded my creativity". I disagree however. In a huge way. I don't think it eroded my creativity; if anything I think it expanded it wildly , and now when I do want to write my own tune, I basically have an infinite number of rather easily accessible avenues of inspiration I can walk down to get started. For example, many artists will certainly tell you one way they get started on writing a new tune might be that they "find it " inside one already written. So I might be sitting there strumming "Strawberry Fields Forever", and then I find my own tune .."Mangalo Strawberry World"...who knows. But I find not just lyrics, I also find the specific stylization of chords et cetera...and I take them and carefully twist them around to make sure you won't ever know it was born from that Beatles song....
The problem with people who really never do covers, however, or who couldn't do them, like Bruce back there in the no internet 70s, is that a lot of the times, you'll start seeing that a lot of their songs endlessly repeat themselves or sound dreadfully similar to the next. This isn't a bad thing and fans often have no clue, but when you're a guitarist and you're actually playing the tunes, you see it very quickly. You can tell what those old bands had access to or didn't have access to when you try to play their catalogue. The Beatles had some classically trained musicians around them out there in London -- like their producer George Martin--- who really shows up in the workings of many of their songs. Also once they're rich and established the songs take a very different and more complex turn/-because they have access to a sort of "internet" of the time period, i.e., they can afford to consult wealthier musicians of the upper class to add little flourishes here and there. This was necessary in their time -- not so much in ours as I said.
At any rate, A lot of the Beatles songs that came from their psychedelic era after they were established tend to have pretty unique and, in my opinion, hard to think up chord sequences. . "Strawberry Fields Forever" is particularly good. This is also the case with songs by the Doors, because the pianist Ray Manzarek was really ingenius, and classically trained , and many Doors songs, you'll notice, are not really oftrn covered, for this exact reason: they're actually too hard for most musicians, and you definitely couldn't figure out many by ear. For the pianist in the Doors, doing the standard blues song -- which was at that time often all many American bands could do--- was like nothing, for his skill level. It's thus the case that the Doors songs are not really widely covered, as I said. I have played almost every Rolling Stones song, Beatles song, Springsteen song, and Dylan one on my guitar or my piano. The doors ...I maybe did 10 songs. It's really a whole different world because of Ray Manzareks presence.
But, anyways, the thing that tends to happen when you don't bother with covers is that you basically tend to wind up a bit like Green Day or something....which means to say you just sort of write the same song every time. Bruce, for example, uses a lot of the same sequences, but what he does is he switches up the instrumentation to create an illusion of deep change. So he does one song acoustically, the next on piano, the one after that with a big drum set, then the saxophone comes in, rtc. It works. His songs feel wildly different for this even when the same chords are there with similar melodies.
Green Day doesn't do this though, so after a little while they get a bit stale. If not very stale. Literally all that band does is the same intolerable distorted guitar it seems...every single time. With the same power chords and the same 4:4 rhythm. So you can tell Green Day grew up with, first, no internet and no idea how to learn other songs, and secondly, they also then, because of the genre, got robbed of the right to involve any other instruments on the records. What has resulted is a rather bland band....
At any rate, the reason I think this cover stuff is all positive for creativity is because I do think and have written many times about how I feel not just Stories want to be shared, but songs too -- even more so. I don't really dig this culture where we have this idea that cover songs are some horrific thing, or that a certain song needs to be played on a certain instrument, et cetera. I think it's ridiculous, and I think the Internet also thinks it's ridiculous, and that's why these sites have popped up like Ultimate Guitar, that are now trying to kill it...and to spread the song ...to as many voices that want it. What's fascinating to me personally is that, when I was a kid, in the early 00s, I had Ultimate Guitar but did not yet have YouTube. So everyone was on the message boards and we all knew that everyone was playing a song like, say, Weezers "the Sweater Song" on their own guitar ...but we didn't know how it sounded, because no one was yet filming anything like that then. So the songs were really still trapped. Fast forward a few years of course, YouTube breaks out, and now you can type in literaly almost any major song to the engine, and you will find countless covers. A major artist like Adele releases a song ...it'll have 20 covers uploaded within an hour, I bet. And of course the culture itself seems to almost demand the cover be done because, as an artist, guess what? People are typing in the song titles of major artists like Adele and Bruce Springsteen and so on constsntly, so as an artist you know you're more likely to draw people to your channel if you upload these covers --- rather than uploading original songs. So it is actually now , in this sense, quite seriously encouraged to do covers instead...
When I sit down at my piano or To play my guitar, the cover call is always there, because it's like this bait I can't resist. Take a recent major hit like "Despacito" now, which they're saying is the most heard song in all of history-- 2 billion views. I can maybe upload an intriguing cover of that song-- even half assed-- and maybe hope to get hundreds of views within just a week versus an original that'll burn out after maybe 20 views! And the views on my "Despacito" cover video will just keep going on for years and years...ill get steady eyes on it for the next decade, 300 heads a month maybe. If it goes wildly viral -- which such a thing easily could since it's known --- I may even get more. It could rocket me into a sphere as a "relevant YouTuber". For whatever that is worth....
So where is the motivation now to even write originals in a sense? They aren't keywords. This is the problem. I suppose I will admit that is something of a problem but....I don't know. It might just be that we are at a point in time now where it has become more important to share these hits between many voices rather than to keep creating new totally unique material. You could say it's like some sort of weird bonding experience we are all having, as well as a "referential one". See it isn't just about keywords, it is also about links now. The Internet has made following links quite fun. So I upload a rather obscure song like , say, "Crow Jane" by Skip James, and then on the side you get to maybe see, immediately, just where I got it, you get to see who else is also singing it like me, and you get to instantly see just how old or not old it is. In the past you may never even have realized it was a cover song -- which is all another great trick. Back in the 60s, your friend might have played my version of "Crow Jane" for you on the vinyl, you listened, you didn't consult what was weitten in the album jacket, and so you had no clue what it was. You thought it was mine. You thought me more original than I really was. Now you see it blatantly written under the YouTube video: "this is me playing a Skip James song". The Internet has swept away the mystery but also given us a fun game of deep discovery in its place....
Some artists have been rather hilariously 'outed' by this game of hyper linking and keywords the Internet plays, and Bob Dylan himself, that huge whale he is, is one of them. Dylan wrote a book a few years ago called Chronicles, and it seems he was sort of applying this whole cover song theory to the book of prose. He literally went and plucked whole phrases and sentences from Jack London books and Henry Melville and Mark Twain et cetera, and just , like, reworked them ever so slightly in his Chronicles. 30 years ago, with no internet, no one would have known. Now, however, a bunch of people thought a phrase sounded familiar, so they typed it into google, which instantly searches everything, and the phrases Bob plucked out came spewing right out. It also happened to him with a painting, I read in the Times: he did a series of paintings he said were "photos" of his journeys from his tour. I.e. Stuff he had actually seen and then painted. One was a Chinese woman reclining in an opium den with a pipe in her mouth in a pink dress. It was a real cool painting, I would buy it for my home if I had the dough. Some guy used the Internet and found out that it was just a photograph some dude took that Bob painted, however . He never saw it. He just saw it in a photo. A second hand creation. A cover song...
The New York Times seemed enraged about it, I remember. Like it meant Dylan was a fraud and a phony. Me? I don't think so. If anything I was actually all the more interested, because I am very interested in things being reworked and rehatched again and again. I think we are living in that sort of time now, like I said. I think remixes are the next big thing ...some people of course might think remixes have already happened...I disagree. I think most of the great remixes we really have yet to hear....I long for the day when I, for example, can download three full records of Madonna songs mashed in with the Doors mashed in with Led Zeppelon mashed in with Dylan and Adele and on and on. Do I have any idea how it's gonna work? No. But I think it's going to ....and it's gonna be awesome.....
CUT IT ALL UP! FLIP IT ALL IN! NOTHING IS OFF LIMITS! EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED!
And I also think that it's really the case for all artists: Many of us start as rather staunch impressionists, and then we wind up developing our own thing. Our own thing of course tends to really just be nothing more than an amalgamation of everything we can throw in- or have been influenced by. So when it comes to Dylan, he begins as an impressionist of Woody Guthrie, with a bit of Leadbelly thrown in; but then he also starts taking cues from Elvis Presley, Artur Rimbaud, and someone like Johnny Cash...and out comes Dylan as we know him: a perfect amalgamation that the people were able to comprehend ...
In a way over the years I've maybe had a little bit too much fun, some friends would say, being an impressionist rather than just trying to be "my own self". I think I had my reasons for doing it though: in the first place, I don't find any shame in doing unapologetic impressions -- I think it's fun-- and the other reason is because the age of the Internet really lends itself to being this type of artist. For example, when it comes to the guitar , I always remember this Bruce Springsteen interview I listened to where he said that one reason he began writing his own songs was because he never had the ear to figure out the songs on the radio , to successfully cover them. A lot of other guitar slingers at that time in Bruce's jersey scene: they were probably playing all sorts of cover songs that they had been forced to figure out by ear from the records. Bruce couldn't do it...so he just started writing his own...the next thing you know...boom.
Well, fast forward to the modern day with the Internet, and the problem Bruce encountered is no longer at all relevant: there now exists literally an entire library on websites like Ultimate Guitar or Country Tabs on how to play the great songs , and all of the tabs are free. In fact, even when I was a kid in the late 90s, I remember a period where I had to go out and buy a book to get the Nirvana chords. Now it's not the case: the tabs are all there....user created...you can find every song imaginable. And, well, I think that this obviously lends itself to the culture now doing what I call a sort of "call back". The catalogue has become so vast now, and so wonderfully organized, that you can play other people's songs all day and never really run out.
A lot of people might immediately find this wildly problematic , and they'll say how , in my own case for example, it clearly "eroded my creativity". I disagree however. In a huge way. I don't think it eroded my creativity; if anything I think it expanded it wildly , and now when I do want to write my own tune, I basically have an infinite number of rather easily accessible avenues of inspiration I can walk down to get started. For example, many artists will certainly tell you one way they get started on writing a new tune might be that they "find it " inside one already written. So I might be sitting there strumming "Strawberry Fields Forever", and then I find my own tune .."Mangalo Strawberry World"...who knows. But I find not just lyrics, I also find the specific stylization of chords et cetera...and I take them and carefully twist them around to make sure you won't ever know it was born from that Beatles song....
The problem with people who really never do covers, however, or who couldn't do them, like Bruce back there in the no internet 70s, is that a lot of the times, you'll start seeing that a lot of their songs endlessly repeat themselves or sound dreadfully similar to the next. This isn't a bad thing and fans often have no clue, but when you're a guitarist and you're actually playing the tunes, you see it very quickly. You can tell what those old bands had access to or didn't have access to when you try to play their catalogue. The Beatles had some classically trained musicians around them out there in London -- like their producer George Martin--- who really shows up in the workings of many of their songs. Also once they're rich and established the songs take a very different and more complex turn/-because they have access to a sort of "internet" of the time period, i.e., they can afford to consult wealthier musicians of the upper class to add little flourishes here and there. This was necessary in their time -- not so much in ours as I said.
At any rate, A lot of the Beatles songs that came from their psychedelic era after they were established tend to have pretty unique and, in my opinion, hard to think up chord sequences. . "Strawberry Fields Forever" is particularly good. This is also the case with songs by the Doors, because the pianist Ray Manzarek was really ingenius, and classically trained , and many Doors songs, you'll notice, are not really oftrn covered, for this exact reason: they're actually too hard for most musicians, and you definitely couldn't figure out many by ear. For the pianist in the Doors, doing the standard blues song -- which was at that time often all many American bands could do--- was like nothing, for his skill level. It's thus the case that the Doors songs are not really widely covered, as I said. I have played almost every Rolling Stones song, Beatles song, Springsteen song, and Dylan one on my guitar or my piano. The doors ...I maybe did 10 songs. It's really a whole different world because of Ray Manzareks presence.
But, anyways, the thing that tends to happen when you don't bother with covers is that you basically tend to wind up a bit like Green Day or something....which means to say you just sort of write the same song every time. Bruce, for example, uses a lot of the same sequences, but what he does is he switches up the instrumentation to create an illusion of deep change. So he does one song acoustically, the next on piano, the one after that with a big drum set, then the saxophone comes in, rtc. It works. His songs feel wildly different for this even when the same chords are there with similar melodies.
Green Day doesn't do this though, so after a little while they get a bit stale. If not very stale. Literally all that band does is the same intolerable distorted guitar it seems...every single time. With the same power chords and the same 4:4 rhythm. So you can tell Green Day grew up with, first, no internet and no idea how to learn other songs, and secondly, they also then, because of the genre, got robbed of the right to involve any other instruments on the records. What has resulted is a rather bland band....
At any rate, the reason I think this cover stuff is all positive for creativity is because I do think and have written many times about how I feel not just Stories want to be shared, but songs too -- even more so. I don't really dig this culture where we have this idea that cover songs are some horrific thing, or that a certain song needs to be played on a certain instrument, et cetera. I think it's ridiculous, and I think the Internet also thinks it's ridiculous, and that's why these sites have popped up like Ultimate Guitar, that are now trying to kill it...and to spread the song ...to as many voices that want it. What's fascinating to me personally is that, when I was a kid, in the early 00s, I had Ultimate Guitar but did not yet have YouTube. So everyone was on the message boards and we all knew that everyone was playing a song like, say, Weezers "the Sweater Song" on their own guitar ...but we didn't know how it sounded, because no one was yet filming anything like that then. So the songs were really still trapped. Fast forward a few years of course, YouTube breaks out, and now you can type in literaly almost any major song to the engine, and you will find countless covers. A major artist like Adele releases a song ...it'll have 20 covers uploaded within an hour, I bet. And of course the culture itself seems to almost demand the cover be done because, as an artist, guess what? People are typing in the song titles of major artists like Adele and Bruce Springsteen and so on constsntly, so as an artist you know you're more likely to draw people to your channel if you upload these covers --- rather than uploading original songs. So it is actually now , in this sense, quite seriously encouraged to do covers instead...
When I sit down at my piano or To play my guitar, the cover call is always there, because it's like this bait I can't resist. Take a recent major hit like "Despacito" now, which they're saying is the most heard song in all of history-- 2 billion views. I can maybe upload an intriguing cover of that song-- even half assed-- and maybe hope to get hundreds of views within just a week versus an original that'll burn out after maybe 20 views! And the views on my "Despacito" cover video will just keep going on for years and years...ill get steady eyes on it for the next decade, 300 heads a month maybe. If it goes wildly viral -- which such a thing easily could since it's known --- I may even get more. It could rocket me into a sphere as a "relevant YouTuber". For whatever that is worth....
So where is the motivation now to even write originals in a sense? They aren't keywords. This is the problem. I suppose I will admit that is something of a problem but....I don't know. It might just be that we are at a point in time now where it has become more important to share these hits between many voices rather than to keep creating new totally unique material. You could say it's like some sort of weird bonding experience we are all having, as well as a "referential one". See it isn't just about keywords, it is also about links now. The Internet has made following links quite fun. So I upload a rather obscure song like , say, "Crow Jane" by Skip James, and then on the side you get to maybe see, immediately, just where I got it, you get to see who else is also singing it like me, and you get to instantly see just how old or not old it is. In the past you may never even have realized it was a cover song -- which is all another great trick. Back in the 60s, your friend might have played my version of "Crow Jane" for you on the vinyl, you listened, you didn't consult what was weitten in the album jacket, and so you had no clue what it was. You thought it was mine. You thought me more original than I really was. Now you see it blatantly written under the YouTube video: "this is me playing a Skip James song". The Internet has swept away the mystery but also given us a fun game of deep discovery in its place....
Some artists have been rather hilariously 'outed' by this game of hyper linking and keywords the Internet plays, and Bob Dylan himself, that huge whale he is, is one of them. Dylan wrote a book a few years ago called Chronicles, and it seems he was sort of applying this whole cover song theory to the book of prose. He literally went and plucked whole phrases and sentences from Jack London books and Henry Melville and Mark Twain et cetera, and just , like, reworked them ever so slightly in his Chronicles. 30 years ago, with no internet, no one would have known. Now, however, a bunch of people thought a phrase sounded familiar, so they typed it into google, which instantly searches everything, and the phrases Bob plucked out came spewing right out. It also happened to him with a painting, I read in the Times: he did a series of paintings he said were "photos" of his journeys from his tour. I.e. Stuff he had actually seen and then painted. One was a Chinese woman reclining in an opium den with a pipe in her mouth in a pink dress. It was a real cool painting, I would buy it for my home if I had the dough. Some guy used the Internet and found out that it was just a photograph some dude took that Bob painted, however . He never saw it. He just saw it in a photo. A second hand creation. A cover song...
The New York Times seemed enraged about it, I remember. Like it meant Dylan was a fraud and a phony. Me? I don't think so. If anything I was actually all the more interested, because I am very interested in things being reworked and rehatched again and again. I think we are living in that sort of time now, like I said. I think remixes are the next big thing ...some people of course might think remixes have already happened...I disagree. I think most of the great remixes we really have yet to hear....I long for the day when I, for example, can download three full records of Madonna songs mashed in with the Doors mashed in with Led Zeppelon mashed in with Dylan and Adele and on and on. Do I have any idea how it's gonna work? No. But I think it's going to ....and it's gonna be awesome.....
CUT IT ALL UP! FLIP IT ALL IN! NOTHING IS OFF LIMITS! EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED!
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