Name:
Email:
Email:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Sorry . . . December 29th, 2005 -- No post this week. I think it's probably not terribly fun to read someone's post about being sick, which I am. So I'll spare you the details. Whatever time you would have spent reading this post, use it playing Bookworm. You'll be glad you did. Keith |
| Hype December 20th, 2005 -- I heard a guy (who was, at one time, a very successful rock musician) say a while back that the key to making fans was to have an air of mystery around your band. Don't tell your fans that you live with your parents, that you went to technical school for drafting, or that you had to save money for a month from your job at the dry cleaners in order to buy the leather pants that you're currently wearing. Make everyone think that you're from another planet, a rock and roll planet, that you live and breathe the rock and roll lifestyle and that you always have, that you emerged from your mother's womb in a cloud of smoke amongst quickly flashing strobe lights, with a middle finger raised on one hand and the horns on the other. And possibly a beer or a joint in your third, soon-to-be-amputed hand. The less people know about your real life, the better. This is probably why guys with names like Gordon, David, Saul, and Paul, become, as rock stars, Sting, The Edge, Slash, and Bono. It's also why guys with names which disclose their nationality or ethnicity, names like Bolotin, Gorelick, Horovitz, and Deutschendorf, get changed to Bolton, "G", "roc", and Denver. This is the whole blank slate idea in rock that I've written about elsewhere, that, in order to be an idol, you have to appeal to the thing that we in modern times really worship, which is, namely, ourselves. Pigeonhole yourself, and you lose the ability for the audience to identify with you. To be successful in rock, you have to be an everyman, but you have to be more than everyman is. You have to be what everyman wants himself to be. Unfortunately, very few people are exactly what everyman aspires to be, so we have to fake it and pretend that we could be that kind of person, but we're not going to let you see enough of us to actually know. For instance, Bono (and Bill and Melinda Gates) just won Time magazine's "Persons of the Year" award. His band is quite possibly the biggest in the world, and he's an international superstar. But, did you know that he's been married since 1982 and he has four kids? I imagine that, unless you're a very big fan, you probably didn't know that. Doesn't that seem strange? Don't think that it was an accident. By the way, do you know what U2's original name was? The Hype. Keith |
| Doing Things Creatively/Poorly December 14th, 2005 -- I linked to an article a while back which linked creativity with schizophrenia. Basically, the way it works is that schizophrenics have a debilitatingly low amount of inhibition when it comes to the ideas that come into their heads. It turns out that ideas flow continuously from our brains, but we discard the vast majority of them on a subconscious level. Essentially, we all get ideas, but if one of those ideas is "there's a dragon in the living room", we dismiss it so quickly that we don't even remember having the thought. Schizophrenics don't have this, and this tends to make them go, well, crazy. We all get crazy ideas, but only the good ones become conscious ideas. This fact, by the way, adds weight to the theory that the government has secretly been shipping off all schizophrenics to Hollywood for the last few years. But, this all recently came back to me when I noticed that, in the last couple of months, I started struggling a little more than usual with coming up with song ideas. But I suddenly stopped struggling one day, and I couldn't figure out why. I've always thought it interesting that some artists, writers, and musicians smoke pot or drink or do other sorts of drugs to "enhance" their creativity. If they're only creative because of drugs, does that mean they're actually creative? But, I'm starting to think that they were on to something, although I think they went about it in the wrong way. I've also read about people that are on cocaine acting in a completely insane manner, basically because, since they're hopped up, they end up staying awake for days at a time. After you've been awake for days at a time, one of those things that tends to go down is that same inhibition that keeps you from seeing dragons in the living room. The longer you're awake, the lower the inhibition. This made me realize that, the week or so before my creative juices came back, I had gotten very, very little sleep, thanks to a certain two-year old in our house who insisted on waking up and crying for several hours every night (yeah, "the Doctor" said she had a severe cold, but what does he know?). I've always stayed up late and gotten a disturbingly small amount of sleep, but, these past few months, thanks to a job where I can easily wake up around 2:30 in the afternoon and still "get to work" (ie, my living room), I've been getting tons o' sleep. And as soon as I started getting that sleep, suddenly the doubting started. If I had an idea, I thought it was bad. My brain's little idea editor was just getting too strict and, strangely enough, the only ideas that made it through the creative vetting process and were greenlighted into becoming conscious ideas were very boring and conventional. It's kind of like movies that have six screenwriters. Anything creative that one brings to the table gets poo-pooed by the other five, and as a result, the only things that survive are generic, boring junk. Creative brains need the goofy ideas, and when the little editors in our brains start cutting too many of them, our creativity goes down. So, it ends up kind of being a double-edged sword. If you use some kind of artificial means of enhancing your creativity, you do end up lowering your inhibitions, but at the same time you're also lowering some of your better higher thought processes, and your art ends up being creative but intellectually bankrupt. It made me realize that you can't manipulate or will your way to being someone who makes high art. You have to have the perfect natural combination of low inhibition and high intelligence, so you can be fully conscious when creating but also be uninhibited enough that you don't suck the life out of your own work. I think this is why, oftentimes, the best composers are not the best performers, and the best performers are not fantastic composers. To be a performer you have to be relentlessly critical of yourself, because performing is, above all, a discipline. To be a writer, it helps to be critical, but you also have to be happy with the heart of your work, you have to be a fan of your own stuff. I'm still not quite sure where I fit in to either one of these. Speaking of which, I used to take these personality tests when I was in college to try to figure out what I should do with myself. I never found them very helpful, but they were always interesting. My personality type, in case you're interested, is ENTP, which means I would make a good inventor, dictator, astronomer, or assassin. Yeah, I can see the logic to that. Keith |
| Melody Maker December 6th, 2005 -- I'm a guitar teacher. As such, I teach a lot of kids (my students are mostly between 11 and 15) songs that they've heard on the radio or have seen on MTV. A lot of times they can't remember who the band is, or what the name of the song is, and they start trying to describe the video. I say "I don't have cable." They say "really? Why?" which then goes into another story entirely. But, when I get done explaining why we're TV luddites, we get back to the song. I say "how does is it go?" and they stare at me blankly, like this:  They can't sing the melody line, they don't know the lyrics, they just know that "it has a really weird video where they're all dressed up like monkeys" or that "it has that funny guitar sound at the beginning and the singer whispers this one part and then he screams." Alrighty . . . so, "do you know Sweet Home Alabama?" The problem, as I see it, is that radio music doesn't focus on melody anymore. It's understandable. Making a great melody is hard. It's like coming up with a million dollar invention. You always think that it would have been easy to have come up with the chip clip. I mean, all it is is a larger version of a clothespin, right? Well, if it's so easy, we'd all be bajillionaires. The hard thing about a melody is that it has to be interesting but simple. Too complex and it's impossible to remember or sing. Too simple and it's lifeless, boring. An amazing melody line, however, can be more complicated. We see this now at Christmastime, listening to some of the most beautiful folk music Western Civ. has ever created. What struck me is that these melody lines don't often fall into "verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus" patterns. They are simply long melody lines which don't comfortably break down into any pattern. Look at one of my favorites, "O Come O Come Emmanuel." It's just one long melody line. Many arrangements turn the "Rejoice, rejoice" part into a chorus, but it doesn't fit that well, partially because of the really weird phrasing. But there you have it, a beautiful melody line that's "weird". It shouldn't be that way. Same kind of thing with "What Child is This." No chorus, just one long melody line. Fortunately, I have good melody-making in my blood. One of the simplest and most famous melody lines in our culture was written by a relative of mine (I have no idea how close of a relative, but he's a relative nonetheless.) His name was Franz Gruber (Gruber=Groover, get it?) and he wrote a song called "Stille Nacht", which is also known as "Silent Night". ***************** In Wind-Ups news, our domain name is now officially hyphen-less. So, if you type in thewindups.com, you'll get to this same page. In other, more important news, we've finally decided that we are going to start playing some shows. We keep going back and forth about this, but we need to play. We want to play. We want to need to play. We need to want to play. Etc. So, if any of you folks out there know of an opportunity, let me know (keith@thewindups.com) and we'll see what we can do. Latah, folkses, Keith |
 |