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| Living in the Past April 19th, 2005 -- My ten-year high school reunion is coming up in a few months. I was reminded of this when I heard that today it's been ten years since the Oklahoma City bombing, and I thought "hmm, that happened during my senior year . . . HEY, wait a minute!" And I was able, using my CSI-enhanced deduction skills, to reach the conclusion that our ten-year reunion is around the bend. I didn't really enjoy most of high school. I was a new kid since I had just come from Bob Jones Junior High, where we were taught that gangs roamed the hallways of public high schools and cheerleaders could only get on the squad if they were pregnant. My first few days there I realized that people weren't evil or violent, they were just poorer and more rednecky. Also, the band program was awful. My junior high band was the number one middle school band in the state, and ranked in the top five of all high school bands, but my new high school band was, um, not like that at all. But what was the redeeming value of public schools that I yearned for, the reason I was leaving the superior education of my junior high? NO DRESS CODE. You see, at Bob Jones Academy, where I would have gone to high school, you have to wear dress pants, shoes, and socks, a nice button-up shirt, and A TIE. Ugh. I had my priorities straight, so off to public school I went. Oh, also, my new school had black people. I'm curious as to how all the upper echelon of high school society turned out. I have this fantasy that all of the cool kids have ended up like Uncle Rico and all of the dorks are filthy rich and amazingly important. Most likely I would imagine that the high school trends stayed constant, and that all of the cheerleaders turned out like the one I knew from homeroom, while the dorks were so unsuccessful that I can't even find them on the internets. As for me, I think I've done better than my high school trajectory predicted, and I'm happy with where I am, so that's about all I care about. If I could lose about twenty pounds, that would be cool, too. Maybe I should take the short route and cut off a leg. ***************** In webpage news, I added a search dealy over to the left, so you can check how many times I've said anyway or, alternately, anywho. It's kind of fun to play around with. I've been writing these posts for nearly a year-and-a-half now, so there's a lot of stuff to make fun of. Have a great week, folks, Keith Update: Apparently the search thing wasn't working on Internet Explorer but it did on Firefox, but I've fixed it now. The bigger question is, why are some of you still using Internet Explorer? Do you hate convenience and security? |
| Finding that Middle Road April 12th, 2005 -- I don't know how politicians do it. Not the ethics violations, the selling-of-souls-for-votes, the horrible mismanagement of resources, etc., but the search for popularity. If you wonder why most politicians are bland, boring, personality-free middle-of-the-roaders that never have anything interesting to say, just read this. It's about the music on George W. Bush's ipod. My favorite part is near the end, where a London Times reporter comments that his ipod features "no black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles." Ahem. Excuse me for a moment: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! heh heh. whoo. Alright, back. First, no world music? Is this considered to be a bad thing? Now, just so you don't get the wrong impression, I love some music that comes from other countries. There is great music that comes from every part of the globe. I love European and American music, of course, but there is also great music that comes from Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America, and if there is any music in Antarctica, I'm sure it rocks lots of penguins. BUT, anytime you hear the term "world music", what you're talking about is music that isn't strong enough to stand on its own, music that has to be grouped into a genre and played in the background while you drink coffee and ignore it. It's the non-American version of those horrible "Appalachian Folk Music" CDs that you hear in Kuntry Krap stores (as Annie calls them), ambient music that features a lot of bad dulcimer and recorder playing, music that no person actually from the Appalachians would ever want to play or listen to. Anyway, my point is that there are a ton of people willing to psychoanalyze something as petty as what a guy listens to while he rides his bike simply because he's a politician. Another example would be when English Graphologists "discovered" via a page of doodles written by Tony Blair that he was "struggling to concentrate", "not a natural leader", and "frustrated and tense". Well, the biggest problem is that the doodles were actually from Bill Gates, but besides that, who cares what he doodles during a meeting? In order to be a politician, you have to be all things to all people. You have to be a blank slate where people can project the best (or the worst) of their priorities, hopes and dreams, a human Easter Egg, just add some food coloring and it's whatever you want it to be. Musicians face the same problem, but instead of being plain white eggs, they tend to be of the Fabergé variety, where all of the cliches, fads, and catch-phrases are packed onto every exposed surface, all creating a rococo display of gaudiness that is sure to completely please no one, but probably won't offend them either. The strange thing is that the effect is largely the same. If you put enough different kinds of herbs and spices into your food, you get food that tastes about as exciting as tofu. When a human takes every kind of coloring he can, you don't get something that's colorful, you get something that's bland but kind of seems like it's colorful. This applies mostly to image, but I think it applies to a lesser degree to the music itself. For instance, take My Chemical Romance's big hit I'm Not Okay. Depending on what you want it to be, it's either a cry for help, a song of defiance, or an ironical and detached song about manipulating someone. Those three categories cover pretty much every single 14-19 year old in America, ie. the main CD buying public, which is why it's been a huge hit. But, when you listen to the song itself abstractly from an artistic standpoint, it seems about as compelling and interesting as your average Warrant song. Amazing, isn't it? All things to all people. Keith |
| Generic Excellence April 5th, 2005 -- No artist really wants to be generic. For a musician to be successful financially, his music has to, by definition, be generic, in that it has to relate to an entire group or class of people. But, instead of being generic, the artist will say that he "connects with people" or that "people relate to his work" or possibly that he "has the common touch." But really, I think it's not so much that multi-million sellers connect with people on some deep level as it is that they connect with people just enought that when they go to the record store they can't remember what the name of that band was that they heard on the radio that they thought was really cool, so, crap, what was their name? Weren't they from Switzerland or something? Geez, I don't remember. Well, this enormous cardboard cut-out with flashing lights says that Justin Timberlake just came out with a new CD. He's a good dancer, I guess I'll buy that. A few years ago the record labels started dropping every single act that they had that wasn't generating tons of money, which was pretty much all of them except for the ones at the very very top. They realized that they didn't have to put out a lot of good music, but they could just take fewer acts and make those guys superstars, and they'd make a lot more money. It worked for a while. The Backstreet Boys, NSync, Brittney Spears, J-Lo etc. all got started during this period, and those groups did sell more than anything had in a long time, but unfortunately for the record companies people weren't buying as many records overall. What did they blame? Of course, music piracy. In different terms, imagine if McDonald's stopped selling everything except Sprite and McChicken sandwiches, and they advertised those two products to death. Their sales of Sprite and McChicken sandwiches probably would go up a little bit in the short run, but overall their sales would go waaaay down. Now, imagine if they blamed their lagging sales on the fact that people were coming in and eating just salt and ketchup. Ridiculous, right? But, I digress. In order to be one of those superstars, you have to appeal to an enormous number of people, so you have to appeal to them in a generic way. This is not the same as being generic, since only extraordinary people have the ability to appeal on a large scale to ordinary people. I watched a documentary on Mary Pickford last night. She was one of the first big silent movie stars, on par with Charlie Chaplin. She was the first national "girl next door" type, and she was a much more naturalistic and nuanced actress than most other film actors of the time. The idea of movie superstars hadn't really solidified at that point, so everyone expected her to be their best friend whenever they met her, even though she was America's biggest box office draw and had literally hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. She was very very talented, which is the point. It takes a ton of talent to be generic. The problem with most of us songwriters and such is that our music only appeals to a few people. It may be done well, it may even be perfection itself to our fans, but most people will not relate to it. But, in the same, it doesn't take a lot of talent to make art that your friends and family members love. You know those people so well that you know what appeals to them, and you can customize your art as a result. You could even become their favorite artist in the world, but most likely everyone else will think you suck. It's a sliding scale upwards towards music success, where you affect fewer and fewer people deeply, but you affect more and more on a superficial level. Hard choices. Keith |
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