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