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!
No comments:
Post a Comment