I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:
Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".
Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:
The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.
And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?
Stepping aside for the moment from the discussion of Sprechstimme that seems to be developing in the comments on my last post, let's take a moment to look at a developing discussion in the pop music area.
The notion of "authenticity" comes up now and then in regard to music. Sometimes classical musicians are criticized for not being "authentic" the way popular musicians are, imagining pop musicians to be a supposed "working class" category of artist, out there sweating every night, exposing their individual struggles with life and love to the audience. While classical musicians are coddled elitists all dressed up in white tie, singing and playing music written by someone else.
Of course Richard Taruskin had a wonderful time blowing up this whole notion of authenticity used as a marketing tool by the early music folks. See his collection of essays, Text & Act.
Still, there is a meaning of authenticity that comes from knowing who you are and being who you are irrespective of the needs of marketing. Some performers stand out for this quality: Jascha Heifetz, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. But this kind of performer is less and less part of the contemporary scene where how you appear is far more important than who you are.
So we have an interesting analysis by Fil from Wings of Pegasus of performances by Taylor Swift:
That seems to show quite conclusively that Taylor Swift is miming singing to prerecorded tracks instead of actually singing. The audience are paying, as Fil says, to watch her move around on stage. She is essentially impersonating herself singing her songs. Seems a bit light in the authentic department.
UPDATE: Or rather, afterthought. It seems to me that we live in a time with an astonishing amount of sheer fakery: musician's biographies are a list of half-truths, recordings are "heavily edited" which means phony, the narrative in the mass media is a farrago of outright lies and I don't even want to mention political campaigns! Everywhere you turn you encounter the exaggerated, the malicious distortion, the artificial, the misrepresented. Maybe we should bring back the sixties, at least they tried to be the real deal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fil from Wings of Pegasus probably deserves some kind of medal. Here is one of his most passionate videos exposing a really shocking bit of outright fakery:
Pop concerts have become such over-weening extravaganzas that the artists themselves are overshadowed by the production with enormous stages and lighting set-ups, pyrotechnics and echelons of dancers. And then you go home, at least Taylor Swift does, with billions of dollars. Can you believe that when I was a rock guitarist there were NO billionaire musicians? Not even Paul McCartney.
So if we want to get a sense of what this generation of pop stars are actually like, it is better to see them in a smaller, more personal setting. For this the Tiny Desk concerts at NPR are ideal.
Let's start with Olivia Rodrigo's set:
Well, that was carefully played, though more rambunctious towards the end. Wasn't interested in hearing the second song because, frankly, Olivia Rodrigo has all the heaven-storming passion of someone baking muffins. Time for music's next mega-mogul, Taylor Swift:
Taylor Swift claims her membership in today's victim culture by pretending to be a sufferer from the "double standard" that always values men higher than women. Honey, there is no musician on earth, or in history, that has a net worth anywhere near what yours will be at the end of your tour. Y'all ain't no victim!
Billie Eilish did an NPR Tiny Desk concert during the COVID lockdown and it was, as you might expect, an exercise in depressive lethargy:
I'm pretty sure popular music used to be better than this...
Williams’s radiant sound and adventitious origins have made her a key figure in a diverse dawn for the solo guitar. Long dominated by much-mythologized white men like John Fahey, the form’s demographic is slowly broadening to include those who have often been omitted, including women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color. These musicians are paying little mind to the traditional godheads. They are, instead, expanding the fundamental influences within solo guitar, incorporating idioms sometimes deemed verboten in what was once a homogenized scene.
Let me first of all outline what I am not doing here: I have absolutely nothing against this kind of music--like all musical genres it contains more interesting and less interesting examples. I also have nothing against any of the artists talked about. My attitude is more power to them and let a hundred flowers bloom. But what I do find irritating is the little threads of ideology that seem to be required to be woven in--and to actually be the basic stimulus behind the article. Are white men like John Fahey "much-mythologized" or simply fine musicians of an earlier generation? Have musicians of color "been omitted" and if so by whom and with what means? It seems to me that great black guitarists like B. B. King and Jimi Hendrix loom very large in the guitar's recent history. Also, what idioms were "deemed verboten"? I don't even know what that means. Also, again, deemed by whom?
As this music moves beyond the realm of obscure collectors, its audience and attention have grown, prompted by the possibilities of players who sound as different as they look.
This brings us back to what really bothers me: this story is really about how a group of musicians look more than how they sound, because, to my ears, there is a whole lot less of interest here than is promised. I find this over and over in the way popular music is covered in the mass media: articles are written that wildly rave about what is fairly ordinary music.
I keep coming back to that headline: The Face of Solo Guitar. But it is a misnomer. This is all about the face of the performer, not the instrument. As long as that face is non-binary, female or of a person of color, then the music is somehow sacralized by this. If a young white, Jewish male guitarist were to come along, I guess that's just tough luck for him! Too bad dude, you just are not "diverse" in the right way.
Here is a track from the article: "Urban Driftwood" by Yasmin Williams:
I know that I owe you the rest of my analysis of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich and, believe me, it's coming. But in the meantime I had something I wanted to share. You know how I like to compare things: different performances, different pieces and so on. Today I would like to compare two recent pop artists, both new on the scene and both quite young.
First, Billie Eilish age eighteen, who won all the Grammy awards this year. Ok, not all, just Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year plus one more that I can't locate--Hair of the Year?
And second, Towa Bird, age twenty-one who is so new on the scene she doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry yet. Taking her pseudonym from the name of a bird and the name of a demon from the Demon Realm. All we know about her is that her middle name is Vergara and she is probably from England based on her accent but she may have been born in Hong Kong.
Let's listen first. Just to keep things relatively on the same level, here is a live performance by Billie Eilish and her brother:
Uh, moving right along, here is Towa Bird, all by herself (with backing tracks, of course):
Ok, well honestly, the Billie Eilish stuff is pretty hard for me to sit through--without actually contemplating suicide that is! It is hard to achieve that level of profound depressive dreariness without drugs, but she manages it. Sure, there are less desolate songs, but there are probably more desolate ones as well. I remember the depths of black depression when I was eighteen, but it never occurred to me to want others to suffer along with me. But lots of people seem to like this. The Tiny Desk concert has over three and a half million views and other videos of hers have close to a billion views--with a 'b'.
Mind you, Towa Bird is doing pretty good too, for a, what, near-amateur? The clip I posted has a quarter of a million views and she has several others. You might protest that she isn't doing that much and is really just a mediocre guitarist. Not too bad, actually, have a look at this clip, just under 1.2 million views:
So how good a singer is Billie Eilish? A better singer than Towa Bird is a guitarist? Let's hear the argument or the evidence or something. One thing I know for sure is that I actually enjoy Towa Bird's clips and I am incapable of listening to one of Billie Eilish's all the way through.
Is it just me? Let's check out another Billie Eilish song:
Oh yeah, that's nice and cheerful...
I don't actually think that this is Billie Eilish's fault. The Zeitgeist just seems to be Weltschmerz all the way down. Thank god we have Towa Bird as a palate cleanser.
I just ran across a Rick Beato clip about classic rock music, from the 50s to the late 90s, and more recent music which he describes as "perfect." Yes, he's correct, in technical terms, anyone with Pro Tools can now create "perfect" music, that is, music where all the beats and subdivisions are perfectly placed (that's a feature called quantization), all the notes are perfectly in tune (that's a feature called autotune), the tempo never varies and all the phrases are exactly eight (or perhaps twelve) measures long. Oh, promised land, how sweet are your fruits and flowers! Rick doesn't quite work out the implications of what he is saying and mixes two separate issues together, but his points about music production are accurate.
Reminds me of a science fiction short story that doesn't end well. I've been saying for a long time now that the problem with current popular music is that it is an industrial product, mechanically rolling off assembly lines. What makes it, theoretically, an aesthetic product is that after the perfectly crafted musical machine is assembled, the individual artist/diva then slobbers soap opera level emotion all over it to make it seem "real." And that's pretty much it, isn't it?
Lots of exceptions of course. There is lots of pop music I like, but while it may use some of these techniques, it is still music and not just an industrial product. Kanye West is a pretty good example. There are older artists like the Rolling Stones still cranking out imperfect music with actual feeling.
Several months ago I got quite interested in GarageBand, the Apple app that is a do-it-yourself song generator, but I soon realized that the first thing I would have to do is learn how to defeat all the defaults and it hardly seemed worth the trouble.
What I want to do as a composer is elicit and platform the aesthetic expressivity of real musicians. I always think of the dumbest thing that George Martin ever said when he was talking about Ringo and said that while Ringo wasn't a perfect drummer, he always seemed to wobble the beat in just the right places. Oh duh!
There is nothing more unmusical, inhuman and boring than technically perfect "music." Even the classical world, when it elevates mere virtuosity over expression, can fall prey to this aesthetic misconception. Art is always about expression and thinking expression can be "perfect" is really just a category error. Expression is something that flows from the complexities and imperfections of human beings and their dreams, fears, hopes, desires and visions. It's always imperfect because it is an expression, not a material product.
I admire an artist like Grigory Sokolov because, while he has all the tools of virtuosity, the true perfection he strives for is musical, aesthetic and expressive, not technical perfection. Listen closely to this performance. Listen to how the notes of the melody are all "placed" for their expressive value, both dynamically and rhythmically. Imagine the horror if this performance were quantized (where every note is fixed exactly in relationship to the beat).
I'm out of town for the weekend and I wasn't going to do any posting, but I ran across this: Why is Modern Popular Music So Awful? Neo is a thoughtful blogger and she has a lot of thoughtful commentators, so be sure to read the comments. Neo just posts this video and let's the commentators go to work:
Rick Beato did a video about this topic a while back and if memory serves he mentioned the 3 notes that this guy does as being present in an unbelievably high percentage of current popular music and by contrast the Beatles had exactly one song using these three notes and that is one reason why their songs remain so fresh and catch people’s attention after 50 years.
Another major issue that this guy alludes to is the advent of ProTools recording equipment about 20 years ago. Now everything is run through ProTools and ‘fixed’. What this does is take out that little human touch where maybe the drummer is a little out of time or the bassist missed a note or whatever that makes the song sound ‘real’ even if we don’t realize it when we listen.
And lyrically is probably the most obvious. In the past the most popular acts also were great lyricists and could write songs that were deep or moving. Take a couple of examples; the guy in the video mention ‘Sgt Pepper’ and listen to a song on that album ‘She’s Leaving Home’ written by McCartney and told from the vantage point of the young woman and from her parents in an extremely moving and mature way and then throw in the melody and Lennon’s response of ‘bye, bye’ it’s a brilliant song and McCartney was 25 when he wrote it. Another is ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ by the Rolling Stones which it’s impossible to imagine any top flight act today having the knowledge base to write.
Music I think is the one popular art form that has definitely declined over time in my opinion.
I believe I actually posted that same video some time ago, so I am really directing you to the Neo comments.
The thing is that I occasionally run into interesting pop music (a few years ago an Australian song-writer and banjo player, and Kanye West, for a couple of examples) but they are usually artists out of step with the mainstream (I think Kanye is the exception that proves the rule). I honestly have not fixed a priori biases. If something is interesting, I don't care about the genre. But this is not how most people listen. They tend to respond to something that is at least vaguely familiar. And soothing, which the familiar provides.
Around here popular music often gets criticized for being too commercial because, well it is. But not all pop music is primarily oriented toward commercial success. Sometimes it just happens because it can. The best example I can think of is the odd group called the Traveling Wilburys. Sadly, due to the untimely death of Roy Orbison, the group was short-lived. Along with Orbison the members were George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. The whole thing seems like it just fell off a truck by accident. They recorded in Bob Dylan's garage in Malibu and wrote the songs the day before. Musicians this talented and experienced can, if the chemistry is right, just do whatever they want. The result was some of the most relaxed music you will ever hear. Here is the song "Handle With Care."
This is the next stage beyond slick professionalism. Lovely music and while it did sell a lot of records, I don't think that possibility even crossed their minds when they were working on this.
Max Martin and Dr. Luke, between them, are responsible for writing the majority of hit pop songs recorded by a host of different artists, which does rather explain why they mostly sound the same. And Steve Jobs, whom we revere, normally? Well, he came up with the iPod which put thousands of songs at people's fingertips and ultimately resulted in the risk-avoidance of the modern music business. Go watch the video, which is well-argued.
I could make a lot of criticisms of it, from an aesthetic point of view. For example, the mere fact of the reduction of timbral variety need not have any aesthetic implications. Take Steve Reich's Drumming for example. It reduced every possible kind of musical variety down to the absolute minimum, which I think makes it one of the most important musical works of the 20th century. Not everyone agrees, of course.
But the creator of the video critique, known as "Thoughty2" makes a lot of good points. The only thing that really drives modern pop is dollars. And, if he is correct about the marketing, it is the dollars that drive the popular acceptance of the music. Rather a vicious circle.
I suspect that the main reason I like Kanye West's music is that he does in fact "write" his own songs and he certainly produces his own videos. Remember "Famous"? Blogger won't embed that one either:
Even though I have been a classical musician for, oh, a long, long time, I did start out as a popular musician and I have a continued interest in and enjoyment of popular music. Wandering around the web, I ran across the top ten songs from Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Here are the top ten from that list:
Does anyone else think that the list is a bit weird? Other than me? Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone," sure, that could be #1, certainly in the top ten. And maybe "Satisfaction." But isn't "Gimme Shelter" or "Sympathy for the Devil" a much better choice from the Stones? As for "Imagine" c'mon! That isn't even in the top ten songs by John Lennon! "A Day in the Life," "Come Together," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "All You Need Is Love," and even "Nobody Told Me" are all better songs than "Imagine" though that one might be more popular. "Hey Jude" you could make an argument for, but I would vote for a different McCartney song like "Yesterday" or "Got to Get You Into My Life." The Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" is a good choice as is "Johnny B. Goode" and "Respect." But I would really like to see B. B. King's "The Thrill is Gone" in there. Instead of Nirvana, who aren't aging well in my book, why not "Enter Sandman" by Metallica? I wouldn't mind seeing something by the Talking Heads or David Bowie or The Police in there as well. Heck, if I got a vote, I might opt for "We're Going Wrong" from the reunion concerts that Cream gave in 2005. Now that was something special:
Now, sure, this is about 50% just to provoke some reactions. Let's hear what you have to say!
My title is a take-off on a headline that I saw long enough ago that I can't recall where. I do associate it with New York however. Google tells me that "The Way We Live Now" is both the title of a novel by Anthony Trollope from 1875 and a New Yorker piece by Susan Sontag from 1986, so I guess that will have to do. I associate the phrase with various items in perhaps The New Yorker or the New York Times chronicling the current cultural landscape. More and more I see these kinds of things as shaping the cultural landscape as in telling us how we should be living or appreciating. This is what is important now, they are always telling us.
I'm reading, finally, Michael Lewis' book The Big Short about how wildly things went wrong in the sub-prime mortgage market about ten years ago to the point that some very big players like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns simply went bankrupt and other very big names lost tens of billions of dollars. Why? Essentially because, as the Zen koan goes, they mistook the map for the territory, their models for reality. The whole of the established players on Wall Street, from Goldman Sachs to Deutsche Bank were simply delusional.
I have had a contrarian temperament for most of my life, part of which I attribute to my father and part to my own intellectual tendencies. I really do not put much faith in authority: by their fruits ye shall judge them. And their fruits are a rather mixed bag, are they not? A great deal of the way things are organized is simply to make life easier for those who are in positions of power. Yes, there can be accountability, but often it is simply one power nexus taking temporary advantage of another. This is how I understand the conviction of Martha Stewart, the impeachment of Richard Nixon and the current battle between Donald Trump and his own Department of Justice. Power in society is rarely monolithic.
All this is to lead up to a couple of items this week that seem to me to illustrate another kind of widespread delusion, this time an aesthetic one. The first item is the awarding of a Pulitzer prize in music to Kendrick Lamar. You can read about it here:
Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize win is the latest sign of the growing recognition of hip-hop—this time from one of America’s highest-profile cultural institutions.
The rapper, who won for his album “DAMN.,” is the first winner who isn’t a classical or jazz artist since the first Pulitzer for music was issued in 1943. Aside from previous award winners Wynton Marsalis, Henry Threadgill and Ornette Coleman, it has largely been a prize for classical composers.
Hip-hop fans cheered Mr. Lamar’s win and what it says about the artistic importance of the rap genre.
Or, more accurately perhaps, the shifting of culture away from things of artistic importance to ones of commercial importance? Let's have a listen to something from the aforementioned album. Just listen to the first cut, "Blood":
"Blood" is a little two-minute vignette that starts with some Manhattan Transfer-like harmony over a really inoffensive smooth background. This is followed by a recitation of astonishing banality. This is followed by a brief segment of what sounds like captured dialogue about police brutality. And that's it. Now there could be a lot more interesting stuff later on, but this first bit pretty much used up my boredom quotient. The next track is "DNA." Yes, the major creative advance here seems to be the random use of the period. The musical accompaniment to "DNA." is so dull that it nicely sets off the extremely annoying sneering, trite vocal recitation. For me this is way beyond just unlistenable.
And these are the more restrained tributes! Ok, let's have a look. Here is a clip of the opening:
UPDATE: My original choice got taken down, but this seems to be the same material.
That's not quite the most annoying seven minutes I have ever experienced, but it's close. It combines the refined subtlety of a college football marching band with an interminable fashion show catwalk with the kind of semi-religious mass celebration that was popular in the early days of the French Revolution. What it does not seem to be, to any significant extent, is a musical experience.
Now I have always been a pompous, pretentious little git, but I have refined it a bit over the years and when I look at the two biggest musical events this week, I think that we really must be in the grip of a delusion as massive as that which preceded the mortgage credit meltdown ten years ago.
Do we really want to claim that either of these "musical" events had anything to do with serious music? In any way? Now I can very much sympathize with Duke Ellington who was denied any recognition by the Pulitzer Prize board in 1965.
In 1965, the jury unanimously decided that no major work was worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. In lieu they recommended a special citation be given to Duke Ellington in recognition of the body of his work, but the Pulitzer Board refused and therefore no award was given that year.[3] Ellington responded: "Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young." (He was then sixty-seven years old.)[4] Despite this joke, Nat Hentoff reported that when he spoke to Ellington about the subject, he was "angrier than I'd ever seen him before," and Ellington said, "I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based music—classical music, if you will—is the only really respectable kind."[5] --from the Wikipedia article on the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
The Pulitzer Prize is an American award, of course and there is a very good argument to be made for including jazz musicians even if that was not how it was originally conceived. My personal view is that these kinds of awards should be reserved for pieces, forms and genres that are NOT widely popular to both promote the kind of aesthetic activity that is not commercially successful and to acquaint audiences with that sort of music. Under these terms, jazz would qualify while hip-hop would not. Perhaps the solution is to carve out three prizes in music: one for "European-based music" though that is a bad characterization, one for jazz and one for popular music.
The one new musical profession that I have never quite been able to wrap my head around is that of DJ. It is a niche that comes entirely out of the automation of music. The first stage was the ability to record sounds which has evolved from wax cylinders over a hundred years ago to digital flash drives now. The ability to manipulate these recorded sounds has evolved in even more complex ways. In the beginning the early vinyl 78s had just a few minutes per side and there was no option for editing. One take, cross your fingers and hope for the best! The longer-playing LPs (hence the name) made use of the 20 to 30 minute playing time per side and the development of magnetic recording tape around the Second World War enabled simple audio editing. Basically you cut the tape at an angle with a razor blade and tape it back together. It worked pretty well--one of my first recordings used this kind of editing. Then in the 80s digital audio tape and digital editing was available and this led to the kind of sophisticated processing of recorded sound we have today.
Once you have a take in the can what you can do with it is almost unlimited. The analogy is to word-processing. Once you have typed in (or even scanned in) some text, you can manipulate that text in a host of ways. You can change the formatting to bold or italic or ALL CAPS. You can format the paragraphs
like
this.
You can use differentfonts or sizes. But the ways of processing sound are much more extensive. You can add various kinds of reverberation to mimic the echo of different kinds of concert halls, even ones that don't exist. You can alter the strength of different frequencies, called equalization, that change the timbre of the sound. You can alter the tuning with software called Auto-Tune, you can re-align the beats to a fixed click-track, you can compress the amplitude, making all the sounds loud and a host of other kinds of effects. Particularly important has been the use of drum machines and sequencers that enable you to pre-program a percussion track. This, along with the use of synthesized sounds has led to the existence of an entirely new kind of musical profession, that of the DJ.
"DJ" stands for "disc jockey" or someone who originally spun discs, vinyl records, on turntables. The ability to manually manipulate them or "scratch" was an early kind of synthesized music. This was followed by the use of completely synthesized musical sounds by people like Walter/Wendy Carlos in the 1970s. Another variety of artificial sounds was created by "sampling" the sounds of actual instruments and then manipulating them with computers. The musical software I use for composing, for example, is able to "perform" the compositions, even ones for orchestra, using its library of sampled orchestral instrument sounds. I can even add dynamics, different accents and ritardandi.
The profession of DJ, making sophisticated use of the whole array of synthesized sounds and sequencers to control them, has become a hugely professional and profitable business. The Daily Mail has a piece on the new Forbes list of highest paid DJs which is topped by one Calvin Harris, who made $48.5 million dollars over the last year. This level of income is only topped by the big pop groups. This past year U2 earned $195 million and Bon Jovi $125 million, followed by Elton John at $100 million and Lady Gaga at $90 million.
Forbes doesn't seem to do a list of highest-paid classical musicians--too embarrassing?--so we have to turn to an old Guardian piece by Tom Service to do some comparisons:
Great article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, on the almost football-player- level of salaries that the conductors and administrators of the big American orchestras receive. OK, so we're not talking – quite – John Terry or Cristiano Ronaldo figures here, but $2.2m (£1.4m) isn't bad for Lorin Maazel's job at the helm of the New York Philharmonic in 2006-7 (the last year for which figures are publicly available), and neither is Deborah Borda's $1.2m for her duties as CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There is still a ridiculous iniquity in the way classical musicians are paid. Stellar conductors can earn a fortune, soloists can charge between $30,000-$70,000 in the States [that's per concert], while the average wage for an average player in the grandest bands in the US is just over $100,000.
Classical superstars like Herbert von Karajan or Luciano Pavarotti were rumored to earn up to $6 million a year, which is like a rounding error compared to popular music earnings.
Let's listen to a little of the musical production of Calvin Harris, topping this year's list of highest-paid DJs. I have to preface this by noting that a few years ago EDM DJs like deadmau5 were showing up for gigs and then basically hitting the space bar on their laptops, launching a pre-programmed musical set that just played itself out. But now there is a convergence between the DJs and the pop stars. This song, "Feels" enjoys a full-blown video production, uses pop singers and rappers (Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry and Big Sean) and actual musical instruments (Calvin Harris is seen in the background playing an electric bass). It feels a lot like a standard pop song, but there is no "band" as such as all the tracks are created separately and united with a click track. So the foundational aesthetic sensibility, if I can call it that, is based on EDM (electronic dance music). Let's call it electronic pop music. For some weird reason, Blogger won't embed, so just follow the link:
For years now, the Kennedy Center Honors have been devolving from an event that recognizes stellar achievement across a diverse and rich tradition of American arts into an entertainment-driven event that rewards star power and pop-culture cachet. Representatives of the wide range of traditional arts, including classical music, opera and ballet, have been slowly edged out until, it seemed, they were lucky to have a single medal among the five given out each year. This year even that toehold looks precarious. Of the five artists to receive the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, only dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade falls into the tradition of the arts on which the Kennedy Center was founded and built its reputation. The other honorees — television producer Norman Lear, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan, music mogul Lionel Richie and hip-hop star LL Cool J — are all great talents, but belong to a commercial entertainment culture that has no need of the Kennedy Center, or the honors that bear its name, to establish and maintain a connection with their enormous audiences.
Yep. We are moving in a direction that, while it seems inevitable, is one that also seems to be wrong.
Sam Shepard died this week without ever achieving the favor won in recent years by the Eagles, David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey. Not one artist who has taken up the legacy of Aaron Copland or Tennessee Williams or Virgil Thomson (all honored in the early years of the Kennedy Center) is included. Majors figures in American musical life, such as composers Philip Glass and John Adams, still await Honors, as do opera stars Kathleen Battle, Samuel Ramey and Frederica von Stade. For a cultural center built around an opera house and symphony hall, it’s depressing that this year not one classical musician has made the list and that again, this year, none of the musicians who have made America a force in pioneering the early instruments movement were included.
I can't help thinking that this is the foregone result of relativism. After all, if there are no objective aesthetic criteria and everyone's aesthetic taste is equally good, then the most popular artists are the best artists. I think it likely that a lot of the people involved in these choices actually know how shallow they are, so this is all an exercise in political cynicism.
The Honors have always included a range of what is often called high and popular culture, but they have never been so slavishly focused on mass entertainment, and they have never entirely forsaken the arts that were foundational to the creation of the institution. Audiences who seek a rich diet of culture — not just corporate entertainment product — should be alarmed and must become vocal about maintaining the center’s commitment to true diversity in the arts.
More power to the writer of the piece, Philip Kennicott, and I hope he doesn't get fired for expressing an incorrect view.
I'm not sure if this tactic would be at all effective, but if any classical musicians in the future are tapped for an award I suggest they decline. And perhaps all the ones already honored might simply return them. After all, if symbolism is important, then symbolism is important.
In the pop music world a "cover" is when another artist performs their version of a song originally written/recorded by a different artist. Jose Feliciano doing "Light My Fire" by The Doors, for example. We don't really have this in classical music because the composer is usually not the performer. So here goes, my list of the most inappropriate covers, some of which have actually happened!
Pope Francis doing a spoken-word cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil"
Keith Richards doing a cover of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl (and I Liked It)"
Hugh Hefner doing a cover of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" (definitive version by Maurice Chevalier)
Scarlett Johansson performing "Who Let the Dogs Out" by the Baha Men on violin
William Shatner "singing" "I'm Too Sexy..." by Right Said Fred
Humphrey Bogart doing "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga
The Beatles doing "Besame Mucho" by Consuelo Velázquez
Of course none of these would actually happen, right? Right? As a matter of fact, four out of the seven I listed above DID actually happen! Would you like to guess which? I'll give you one for free. Here is William Shatner, performing, in his unique way, "I'm Too Sexy":
I promise there will be a substantial post tomorrow, but in the meantime, here is one that just missed the Friday Miscellanea because I didn't see it in time: All 213 Beatles Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best. I only like these kinds of things if they aren't afraid to level some devastating criticism, or quips at least. Here are some excerpts that I enjoyed:
206. “Free As a Bird,” single (1995): This single enraged me, in 1995, when it was released to gin up interest in the first Anthology album. It was a Lennon song from long after he’d left the Beatles; he sounded so vulnerable, and the studio work that had gone into making this distant-sounding, crummily recorded demo sound presentable felt like too big a burden for the martyred star to bear.
204. “She’s Leaving Home,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967): A bathetic lugubrious mess, the nadir of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The call-and-response chorus is labored; the whole thing reeks of having come from a squaresville OffBroadway musical about kids these days. The instrumentation is unusual; there are no actual Beatles playing on the track, but no one cares because the song is so bad.
That was particularly enjoyable because the Wall Street Journal, who can be tone-deaf, just published a laudatory essay on the song by Alan Alda.
194. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): The whimsy will continue until morale improves. Definitely in the top five of Most Irritating Songs Paul McCartney Ever Wrote. It took a long time for the band to get this right in the studio. No one liked it; but it was reportedly Lennon who finally sat down and banged the piano part out appropriately. This is a song that isn’t about anything in the first place; the last two verses are the same except for having Desmond and Molly’s names switched out, but McCartney’s vocal gets more and more excited. Newsflash: No one cares about Desmond and Molly Jones.
I would have put that one a LOT lower.
189. “I’ll Be Back,” A Hard Day’s Night (1964): The least of the lesser songs on the second non-soundtrack side of the A Hard Day’s Night album, and an anticlimactic album closer.
I totally disagree with that one. The major/minor alteration and the vocal harmonies make this one of my favourite early Beatles' songs.
164. “Good Night,” The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968): Lennon’s attempt to write a lullaby for Ringo to sing as an envoi to “The White Album.” It’s lulling, and nothing wrong with that, but it’s also kinda boring.
I rather disagree with this too. In context, following Revolution #9, it is well beyond surreal.
117. “Don’t Let Me Down,” single (1969): Another of the so-so unadorned Lennon songs from the last days of the Beatles. Too many of his songs consist of the title words repeated over and over in the chorus. The case for it is that it’s a naked profession of his love for Ono and a new statement of vulnerability. The band played it on the famous rooftop concert in Let It Be, but it was left off the album. It turned up as the B sideB side of the “Get Back” single.
Maybe it's just me, but I have always loved this song. I captures a special kind of emotional desolation like no other song.
Well, I stopped there because as we work into the better songs, he doesn't have a lot to say.
Skipping to the top songs, numbers one and two are, as they should be A Day in the Life and Strawberry Fields.
Your milage may vary and if it does, tell me about it in the comments.
I admit that my tastes in popular music are eccentric. I tend to tune in and out of popular music--I missed most of the 70s through inattention but paid some attention during the 80s when I enjoyed The Police, Talking Heads and David Bowie. Then I tuned out again. Lady Gaga almost pulled me back in with "Bad Romance" which I still think is a great pop song. But she didn't follow up with anything I found interesting. But these days, we can discover not only the mainstream of pop music, but also some that comes from elsewhere. South Korean pop had a big hit a while back, but let's try and forget about "Gangnam Style"!
There is one Japanese group that are so unusual that I find them interesting. I have mentioned the leader, Genki Sudo, before, but it was a while back and I find they have a bunch of new videos out. The group is called World Order and this is basically electro pop with dance. But it is the dance that is so original. Genki Sudo was, in his earlier life, a mixed martial arts champion. After retiring from that he published books of essays on Buddhism. A few years ago he started writing songs and lyrics and choreographing the videos. Here is a sample:
Unlike most music videos there are no special effects: what you see is simply the group, filmed live in various locations. Here is another, more recent video:
The music is pretty standard stuff, but I believe the elements of the choreography are somewhat unique and come from his background in martial arts. For comparison, here are some highlights of his martial arts career including both clips from various matches as well as his uniquely choreographed entrances to the ring, in costume. Blogger won't embed so click on the link:
None of the usual elements of dance are present in the World Order videos, but there are a host of arm-movements that seem derived from martial arts. The other remarkable element is the strict discipline of the dancers either moving in total unison or in strict sequence. Here is another video with an interesting political subject. That phrase on the sheet of paper at the very end, "we are all one" is from Genki Sudo's Buddhist belief and he often held up a banner to that effect at the end of his matches.
So there you go, another group of artists showing that the world of music and dance has a multitude of houses.
I don't know if this is a "trend" or not, but I have noticed lately a couple of interesting duos that do a lot of covers. They produce videos on YouTube and both are interesting to watch and listen to because of the ingenuity of the arrangements. I always enjoy watching how people achieve musical effects.
These are their older productions where a lot of it is about the video editing. Recently, they have evolved into more of a live act. But I like the older stuff for its unique weirdness. They manage to combine a kind of high-energy geekiness with a flat affect, especially in the singing. Just slightly creepy!
Starting from a similar idea, but with a quite different result is the Brazilian duo Overdriver Duo whose members are Evandro Tiburski and Fabi Terada. The first thing I saw of theirs was a cover of "Somewhere over the Rainbow." Be sure to watch right to the end so you hear his over the top ukulele solo!
They are really talented on various instruments, even if they never learned how to hold the guitar properly (heh!). Here's their version of "Beat It" with a great re-creation of Eddie van Halen's guitar solo:
And here is a Red Hot Chili Peppers tune in which she plays bass AND drums and he plays bass AND guitar and they both sing:
Hey, does this mean that lip-sync is over? Big change from the 60s when all the instrumental tracks of popular groups were laid down by the same list of studio musicians. I like this a lot better!
UPDATE: I put this up last night when I saw the news that Chuck Berry had passed away, age 90. He was a huge figure in the development of popular music after WWII. Jim Fusilli has a good obituary in the Wall Street Journal.
Singer, composer, guitarist and showman Chuck Berry, who died March 18 at age 90, bridged the gaps between blues, country and R&B to become one of the founding fathers of rock ’n’ roll. A dominant talent in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Mr. Berry, unlike many of his contemporaries, never seemed relegated to the distant past. With their wit and vitality—and in no small part due to his guitar playing in tandem with the mighty contributions of pianist Johnnie Johnson—Mr. Berry’s hits remained as engaging in later years as they did when recorded.
In 1956 he recorded "Roll Over Beethoven" (the clip above) and it is eerie how prophetic the lyrics were:
“Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news”
Rock and roll was not only here to stay, but it was, along with pop music generally, going to become so dominant in music that classical music was going to be pushed aside into a economically precarious niche! Back in 1956 this was not evident, but as soon as the Beatles came along...
George Harrison was better at copying Chuck Berry's guitar style than Keith Richards, wasn't he?
UPPERDATE: Somehow this photo seems to capture what was happening. This is Chuck Berry performing at one of the temples of classical music, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1976:
UPPER-UPPERDATE: Ann Althouse has an excellent post on Chuck Berry's lyrics, which might have been even more important than his guitar-playing.
One of the first songs I noticed, as a child, was "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash. I've pretty much always thought of him as a salt-of-the-earth populist musician. But that hardly jibes with the information that he was a voracious reader of, among other things, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We learn this from his son John Carter Cash writing in The Spectator:
He was a scholar, learned in ancient texts, including those of Flavius Josephus and unquestionably of the Bible. He was an ordained minister and could easily hold his own with any theologian. His books on ancient history, such as Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, were annotated, read, reread, and worn, his very soul deeply ingrained into their threadbare pages. I still have some of these books. When I hold them, when I touch the pages, I can sense my father in some ways even more profoundly than in his music.
The whole piece is worth reading.
Our envoi has to be:
What I never noticed before was the mariachi influence in the brass.
