Neil Peart 1952-2020

The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect
So hard to earn, so easily burned
In the fullness of time
A garden to nurture and protect
-- Rush, The Garden

I remember the first time I heard Rush very clearly. It was 1981, and I was a 14-year-old snot-nosed punk who had "discovered" Frank Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti and Black Sabbath's Paranoid just a year or so prior, introducing me to completely different noises to what I had been used to (basically country, AM pop, and '70s soul). I had that feeling you have when you're young and think you've got the inside track on something, like no one else was hip to it. That's part of the fun of being a teenager -- you have no clue yet just how clueless you really are about everything.

Anyway, so I had an older "cool" cousin who lived at the top of the wellhouse on my grandparents' dairy. He helped with milking the herd in exchange for room and board, and occasionally liked to head into town to tie one on and look for strange. He had an unfortunate knack for getting caught heading back home from the bar, and after a few repeat performances the county decided to provide him room and board for a few months.

So I asked him if I could borrow a few of his records while he was away, as I had gotten a new JC Penney stereo for Christmas, but had nothing to play on it, nor a job to buy records. (The following school year, as a sophomore, I began making money at school, selling term papers and skimming off a football pool I ran. Capitalism!)

I borrowed maybe eight records, paying special attention to the double live sets he had. Of those, three were soon to be permanently seared into my brain:  Rush's All the World's a Stage, Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same movie soundtrack, and Jethro Tull's Live Bursting Out. Each of these albums expanded my listening horizons in various ways, opening my ears to new musical ideas.

At the Movies

More movies, some spoilers.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? -- I was skeptical of this one going into it, but the outstanding performances across the board won me over. By now you probably know the premise -- bestselling biographer falls on hard times, can't crack the changing marketplace, not getting any help from her agent or publisher, and so turns to the rather esoteric niche market of forging art collectibles.

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant do most of the heavy lifting as Lee Israel and, um, Jack Hock, respectively. I strongly believe that comedians and comic actors tend to make excellent dramatic actors, and McCarthy reinforces that theory with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of Israel, who wore an unpleasant, almost hermit-like demeanor as a defense mechanism, both from the world at large and from herself. Jane Curtin(!) is a nice surprise as Israel's agent, and the rest of the small supporting cast are wonderful as well.

The subject and scope of the story are indeed very niche-oriented, and might not hold everyone for the full stretch, but again this is a finely-tuned portrayal of the artist's contentious relationship with the world of commerce, and the fleeting caprices of talent and love.

Grade:  A-

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The Sisters Brothers -- The western genre hasn't traditionally lent itself to much introspection, but it seems that that has changed at least since The Unforgiven or perhaps Tombstone. Still, the western mostly depends on some sort of ending climax of saving the town from the bad guys or what-have-you. The Sisters Brothers takes these reliable plot devices and tweaks or ignores them altogether, preferring to concentrate on the inner motivations of its anti-heroes.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix portray the titular brothers with the unusual surname, contract killers who have never really done anything else. Reilly, as elder brother Eli, muses about their future after time eventually catches up with them, while Phoenix (Charlie), the more impulsive of the pair, lives in the here and now, moving across a violent landscape with nothing more on his mind than booze and whatever task his paymaster (Rutger Hauer, unfortunately unseen until the very end, and then as a corpse in a coffin) has set before him.

The brothers' mission this time is to track down a chemist who may have discovered a formula for finding surface and river gold, without having to pan or mine for it. As they near closer to their quarry, tracking through Oregon and California gold country, they begin questioning their purposes and motives, and what kind of men they want to be, and be remembered as. When it all goes bad, as these things inevitably do, the brothers come full circle to confront the origins of their violent lives.

Reilly and Phoenix are both quirky but versatile actors; here they play it straight, and it pays off with strong performances for both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are also strong in key supporting roles. An interesting side note (for me, as a lifelong Californian who has been to every part of the state many times) is that the exterior location shooting was done primarily in Spain and France, and it sure as hell looked like California gold country to me. This is a terrific movie, directed with care and patience, belying the violent narrative throughout.

Grade:  A

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Bohemian Rhapsody -- This is a movie where you simply have to manage your expectations going into it. For one thing, it had been in various stages up production since 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen originally cast to play Freddie Mercury, and ultimately departing the project for a variety of reasons. Several screenwriters and directors later, and recasting Mr. Robot star Rami Malek as Mercury, this is what you have -- a well-meaning but ultimately muddled Star Is Born template of excess, redemption, and tragedy.

Growing up in the late 1970s with parents that mostly listened to country or AM pop, bands like Queen helped me make a critical jump outside those relatively narrow parameters. There was especially heavy airplay around the Jazz and News of the World albums, culminating in The Game's smash hit success across the board. Just in those three albums, you can hear them successfully experimenting in multiple genres -- hard rock, arena anthems, cheeky pop confections like Bicycle Race, disco, and even rockabilly gems like Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But of course they had much more to offer throughout their career.

If you eschew the usual path of listening to one of the greatest-hit collections, and just go back through the catalog, you can hear and appreciate how truly fearless they were musically. Naturally the movie makes a huge deal of that with the conception and production of the title track, but A Night at the Opera was their fifth album, and they had been doing adventurous outings similar to Bohemian Rhapsody all along.

Hell, check out side two of Queen II, and imagine the guts it took to get something as intricately crafted and flat-out weird as The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke onto vinyl. And then to have that song segue into Nevermore, a schmaltzy ballad which packs more passion and sorrow into seventy-eight seconds than you'll find in the entire catalogs of your Mariah Carey and Celine Dion types.

Most people have never heard either of those songs; most Queen fans are unfamiliar with them. They were never played in concert or on the radio. Sheer Heart Attack has a bunch of hidden gems as well; Flick of the Wrist and Stone Cold Crazy are much better than Killer Queen, which is pretty damned good to begin with. The radio hits were just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.

What Queen really did was take the chamber-pop aspirations of late-period Brian Wilson and Beatles, and put them in a prog-rock context, and then turned around and made those orchestrations accessible across a wide variety of musical genres. That's way more interesting (to me, anyway) than Freddie Mercury's conflicted personal life, although seeing Queen drove the point home much more than hearing them did, and it should be appreciated as well, Mercury unabashedly strutting and preening in unitards in giant arenas in front of traditionally homophobic hard rock fans, defying them to make the connection of people they were conditioned to hate making music that they loved.

Anyway, the movie and its expectations. If you watch it as a straight-up biopic, you'll be disappointed, not only because the musical chronography is botched (to cite just one example, Fat Bottomed Girls was released in 1978 and was a concert staple for years after; there is no way they could have toured with that song in 1973-74), but because it eschews real introspection for cliché.

There's an interesting situation with Mercury, clearly in love with his girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), not sexually attracted to her but wanting "everything else," and so keeping her in the mansion next door to his own. It's a dilemma of generosity and selfishness that is never adequately explored, just accepted after a while, as Mary gets a boyfriend and starts her own family, all while still inhabiting the house that Freddie bought. She clearly cares about him as well, but there is always that impasse, and she never fully moves on from being his muse/curator in the gilded cage.

One minor humorous note in the first half of the movie is the cameo appearance of a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers as EMI Records exec Ray Foster, shit-talking Bohemian Rhapsody when the band presented it to him, and thereby turning the scene into an extended Wayne's World meta-reference. It's an interesting move, but again brushes over what, considering the band's earlier output, had to have been a much more complex discussion between the band and the record company. But we need the simplified Hero's Journey trope of Standing Up For Exalted Principles And Integrity, so that's where it lands here.

The rest of the band, played by unknowns, fall into the usual trite templates:  Brian May is the brainy astrophysicist who occasionally takes his head out of the stars to write some songs and play some solos; Roger Taylor is the pussyhound drummer who wanted to be a dentist; John Deacon is the quiet one, as all bassists other than Paul McCartney are. Who knew that Deacon was actually an electrical engineer who designed and built a custom amplifier for May's idiosyncratic guitar orchestrations? It's all second fiddle to whatever drama Freddie's cooking up at the moment.

The movie does succeed on its own terms in the final act, as Live Aid becomes the focal point of the band reuniting for Freddie's triumphant return, before becoming too ill to perform anymore. They did manage to record another studio album (Innuendo), and a very good one at that, but that's never even mentioned. (Although The Show Must Go On, from that album, does play over the final credits.) Basically they perform at Live Aid, and six years later Freddie dies, the end.

However. Malek is outstanding in his performance (especially the Live Aid performance at the end), despite the distracting prosthetic teeth, and the music....well, it's Queen. They could have just run two straight hours of music and that would have been great. This one gets two grades, one for the music and one for the movie.

Grades:  A+ (music); C (movie)

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Triple Frontier -- Another project that had been in the works for years, going through rounds of scripts and writers and directors and recasting, finally landing on Netflix and premiering last month. As action/heist movies go, the premise isn't half bad:  former black-op mercs, left high and dry by the gubmints they quietly did wetwork for, decide to rob a narco chieftain deep in the jungle near the convergence of the Amazon headwaters of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia (not to be confused with the Iguacu Falls intersection of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay).

The casting is solid enough, featuring Charlie Hunnam as the ringleader, and Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, and Ben Affleck accompanying him on the heist. (Affleck pulled out of the project for a year to hit rehab, then returning for what seems like a fairly subdued performance, considering the premise.) And there are some nice action set pieces here and there, particularly in the opening scenes, but it ends strong as well.

The plot does make some use of the remoteness and lawlessness of the locale (although the movie was filmed in Oahu), but in the end, this sort of thing has been explored in movies ranging from A Simple Plan to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the theme of greed getting the better of people.

Still, it's well-made and the cast is very good. It's an old theme but a good one, and the action moves along fairly tightly. There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours.

Grade:  B+

It Came from the '90s

When it comes to music, it will probably not surprise you to know that:

1. On the rare occasions I listen to radio, I am seriously bad about pushing buttons, like in the first three notes. I do not fuck around. I can smell Red Hot Chili Peppers a split-second after they start, like a sonic fart from the worst taco truck in town.
2. I don't care much for '90s rock.

That said, I'll give a prime example where I -- get this -- changed my mind about something. For years, Toadies' Possum Kingdom was a Z-Rock staple, and the repetitive "Do you wanna die?" line never failed to get me to change the station. No, asshole, I don't wanna die.

Sometimes these things happen serendipitously, weirdly, for no reason or event at all. They simply occur. But (and again, many years ago; it is an old song by now) after some number of half-listens some years ago, I finally listened more closely to the lyrics. And I watched the video. And it all still holds up quite well.

He's enticing some chick away from a party so he can kill her. He's a fucking serial killer.

I don't know. Maybe that's what the lyrics really mean, maybe not. They're purposely vague, like most good lyrics. But the video certainly reinforces that impression.

But that's not what's cool about the video. It's the little things:  the snare drum wobbling between the legs of the drummer, the duct tape on the horn of the "lead" guitarist's black Strat. The weird green mic the singer uses. That frayed orange light bulb from the '50s swaying back and forth to the beat.

Mostly, it's just a great fucking groove. The bass player and the drummer are locked in, and it's a great ride. This is what they're talking about when they talk about the backbone.

Most people who have heard of Chico probably don't know that, during the Cold War, it was designated as an "alternative" state capital in the event that the Soviets nuked Sacramento. So with Beale AFB about an hour south, several Titan I missile silos were installed north of town, and basically shut down and abandoned, all during the Sixties.

By the time me and my degenerate friends came along in the Eighties, the silos were basically the Forbidden Party Spot -- geographically distant enough to where the cops were not a problem, but you needed to be sure that you had all your alcohol on hand for the evening, because a trip back in to town would just be a huge pain in the ass.

We only went there a few times, because even as drunken teenage assholes, we understood that this was a dangerous place. There were hazards all around, and no one nearby to help if you got hurt. This was a period of time where I regularly rode dirt bikes and went cliff-diving in Feather River Canyon, and yet it was in the silos where I felt legitimately concerned for my physical safety.

All I recall, thirty years later, is tunnels and catwalks, and a darkness you could practically touch. We all had decent Maglites, and still you could barely see more than a few feet in front of you at a time. Someone accidentally dropped something (flashlight maybe) over the catwalk railing, and a couple seconds later we heard a splash that was distant enough to be worrisome. We came out a tunnel at one point and looked down at about a forty-foot drop to a concrete ramp below, not much in between, bearing in mind that we were a bunch of eighteen-year-old punks trying to impress our girls on a dark Friday night, in a place we knew nothing about.

But the tunnels, because of the extreme darkness, the odd echoes, mostly of our shoes on the metal catwalks, gave a sense of claustrophobia, and I am not particularly claustrophobic. Strange, oddly exhilarating, and a bit unnerving.

Which brings me to some of those long camera shots in the Possum Kingdom video, that room they're all in, packed like sardines, the band on a postage stamp, the crowd asshole-to-elbow jumping in near unison to that frog's-ass-tight groove. I don't know why, perhaps because the silos are the closest I've ever been to being in a cave, but that particular shot in that particular video takes me right back to that particular place. Every time, if only for an instant.

Which -- even and perhaps especially if it's all bullshit -- is kinda the point.

Honorable mention: Spacehog, In the Meantime. Yes, the video is weird and has all manner of odd ducks. But once again, we have an immutable groove, a masterful bass line, and the song itself evokes the Seventies glory of Bowie.

In Other News

I still miss Lemmy. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

In Other News

It seems that everyone had the same bright idea after seeing the Bidens' summer playlist, to create a proper Onion Diamond Joe Biden playlist. Fuckin' A.

Here's what I like about the real Joe Biden:  I feel like he is probably aware of his Diamond Joe doppelgänger, and he thinks it's funny.

Size Matters

Let's talk about music (rock and metal music, anyway), especially the media on which it's produced now. This is a point I've made pretty consistently over the years, more so since things have shifted so drastically to a la carte digital -- the traditional cycle of a 50-60-minute album, usually containing at least 25% "filler" tracks, supported by a tour of 9-12 months in duration, is (or should be) dead and buried. The only reason it persists is because most bands (that is, bands who are not at The Top, whatever that means these days) spend at least some of their touring season at festivals, where the costs are more scalable and the crowds are much larger (even though you're competing against dozens of other bands for their attention).

The paradigm shift of the past decade in particular points (at least to me) in the direction of shorter, tighter "album" sets, supported by shorter tours, peppered with "special" releases of one or two "bonus" tracks in the middle of the season.

At the Movies

As a palate cleanser from all things Drumpf/Miller, let's touch on a few flicks of recent (and distant) vintage:

Jurassic World -- Solid, tight, clean direction, uses John Williams' classic score instead of the usual action movie classic-hit nonsense. I don't watch many action movies, and when I do, it's usually because it's a slow weekend afternoon and nothing else is on, and something comes up on HBO. (Stay thirsty my friends!). Also, I go into this sort of movie with low expectations -- keep the action rolling, the actors should be having fun, that sort of thing. Anyone watching an action movie that expects art is either an idiot or an asshole, probably both.

Like every other green-screen extravaganza, this is strictly standard Hero's Journey fare, and you should be able to predict the mosasaur-vs.-tyrannosaur finale an hour before it occurs, but it's all done with a fairly high degree of conviction. Chris Pratt manages to try convincingly to channel a Gary Cooper type, though you can almost hear him squinting at times, and they put Bryce Dallas Howard in enough athletic tank tops to almost make you think she's A-list hawt, though Scarlett Johansson would have thrust those bad girls right in your fucking face. I stayed awake all the way through it, so that's most of the challenge right there. Grade:  B+

99 Homes -- This is a small, under-the-radar movie about a very unsexy subject -- the foreclosures of the so-called Great Recession, and the people who profited from the misery -- but is a quite effective portrait of a specific time and community of economic peril. It all comes a bit unglued in the third act, but getting there is immensely rewarding, due in no small part to strong performances by (seriously) Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon, the latter of whom, I humbly predict, will win an Oscar within the next five to seven years. Shannon and Garfield play off each other amazingly well throughout, and while the subject of this movie is depressing, the execution of it is anything but. Grade:  A-

 The Witch -- If Terence Malick made an early-America horror movie, it would look much like this. Writer-director Robert Eggers takes a period, folkloric tale and captures its essence. Rather than a high-falutin costume drama with buckle-hats and such, Eggers utilizes epistolary dialogue from early seventeenth-century Massachusetts and handmade period clothing to establish a setting for what becomes a truly suspenseful story.

The movie stars Game of Thrones alumni Ralph Ineson (Finchy from the British Office) and Kate Dickey as the devoutly religious parents of five young children, from teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) to infant Sam. The puritanism of William (Ineson) causes the family to self-exile from their already-small village to an even more remote area bordering the then-untamed wilderness. This is where Eggers' direction shines, in the patient, lush exterior shots showing both the vastness of the family's location and the haunting closeness of it. The period dialogue can be difficult to understand at times, but ultimately lends well to the overall atmosphere of remoteness.

Anyone who's ever been in a forest, especially in the afternoon, as the setting sun dapples through the trees, slowly augmenting the coming of night and mystery, knows the vestigial feeling one gets in the gut at such a time and place. The Witch showcases that limbic instinct again and again, to great effect. It's too bad, but no surprise at all, that this movie didn't go anywhere on its release; 'murkins need either "found footage" guff or superhero mashup bullshit to get them by between their hourly infusions of fat and high-fructose corn syrup and processed sawdust. But if you have the patience (and it's only 90 minutes, but no green screens), this is a wondrously-shot small-scale tale of dread and isolation. Grade: A-

Purple Rain -- When Prince passed away last month, it was tempting to jump on the internets bandwagon and make sure you all knew what a transformative figure he was in my life, just like everyone else made sure to do. But that wouldn't have been entirely true; while I certainly regarded him as a fine guitarist and songwriter, it just didn't seem right to grab that particular wheel at that particular time.

But the wife and I have gone back and listened to several of Prince's albums since his untimely demise, and it seemed like an opportunity to introduce our daughter to what was undeniably a major shift in music and video of the Eighties. Sure enough, the "movie" part of it is absolutely a product of its time -- poofy hair, cheesy acting, half-assed cinematography, an overly personalized plotline.

And yet on watching this relic for the first time in thirty years (in my case), there's no getting around the fact that the music holds up amazingly well, not only in the concert sequences, but in the exterior shots. The motorcycle scene during Take Me With U is beautifully shot, sun shining down on the road through fall leaves as Prince takes Apollonia to the lake for her impromptu skinny-dip. Pretty much every scene with musical accompaniment is superior to the rest of it, though there's no small amount of brownie points won in having Clarence Williams III as Prince's abusive dad.

One of the major differences between the "soundtrack" album and the movie is that the title track ends the album, which is especially poignant now, while the movie closes with I Would Die 4 U and Baby I'm A Star after Purple Rain, which has a more triumphant feel. It turned out to be surprisingly rewarding to do both, to listen to the album and to watch the movie, to see the innocence and potential of what (who) was arguably one of the most influential musicians of the last generation. Grade: B+

Rebels Without Pause

After a year punctuated more and more by health scares and cancelled shows, Lemmy has died. The seemingly indestructible icon passed just a couple of days after turning 70 on Christmas Eve, and just two weeks after ending the most recent leg of their world tour.

I only got to see Motörhead in concert once, back in 2001, but it was one of the most memorable shows out of the dozens I've been to over the years. For one, the venue in Chico, then known as the Brick Works, was small, maybe 500 in capacity but probably more like 300. For another, the band had arrived several hours before the show and headed straight for the all-day bar (Panama's) next door. A friend of mine called me at work at about 4:00, saying, "Guess who's sitting at the bar at Panama's?". I broke off early and headed over, and of course Lemmy was still sitting there, by himself, as the bar didn't usually pick up until 6:00 or so.

Some people are afraid to meet their idols, too intimidated, don't know what they'd say, whatever. I'm not one of those people; not that I know what to say, but those opportunities are rare and you shouldn't pass them up when they come along.

Something for the Ladies

Although most of my musical tastes tend to revolve around various shades of metal, with a bit of classical and Beatles/Beach Boys pop once in a while, I grew up on old-school R&B, and still have a soft spot for it. And this is a great rendition of a newer song that harks back to those classics. Just amazing. And almost poignant, stripped of the production doodads of the original.

Fuck You got billed as something of a novelty hit by a can't-miss auteur, but it's exposed here as a truly sharp, bitter cri de Coeur. Anyone who was ever sixteen years old and had an unrequited crush can relate to this. It's every bit as legit as anything Marvin Gaye or Al Green did.

So Light Yet Endless, From a Leaden Sky

Rush, the band people either love or loathe, has somehow gotten into Rolling Stone's good graces over the last few years, after being exiled in Jann Wenner's doghouse for decades. Whatever the case, it's good to see them get some long-deserved recognition in a magazine that seems to have largely forgotten about what music is really about, which is fun and connection and meaning, even more so than just being lucky enough to prognosticate the next inexplicably popular trend among bored, spoiled mallrats.

The latest effort in getting Rush in the magazine's virtual pages is an extensive cover feature on the band, written by a shameless fanboy, which is fine, as the band is most likely on its last or next-to-last tour, with maybe one more studio album to be made.

Of the surviving old lions of rock, I'll take Geddy Lee every day of the week over the likes of Gene Simmons or Steven Tyler or even the Stones, though that last one is admittedly close. It seems simple now, and there have certainly been missteps along the way, but Rush have pushed boundaries over the years in ways that other bands wouldn't and didn't. A song like Tom Sawyer seems like a rock cliché at this point, but no one else could have done that in 1981, with the pungent, acrid smells of the corpses of disco and punk still in the air, preparing to metastasize into new wave.

The Sound and the Fury

So I'm reading de Boer's exegesis (and going down the rabbit hole of associated links) of how critics and fanboys have perhaps drunk too much of their own haterade, and can only defend "their" music by disparaging other genres and those fans.

I'll admit right up front that I have no clue how the average music fan consumes their musical product these days, but I suspect it is nothing like it was -- wait for it -- back in the day. It was easier to become an obsessive back then, and therefore either a more astute appreciator of music, or inspired to learn an instrument and start writing your own material. There were fewer toys and things to distract from the listening experience, and fewer choices and distribution outlets for material.

In other words, accumulating a significant collection of music to have on hand for repeated listening involved waiting for payday, figuring out how much discretionary income was available for whatever was being promoted that was worth taking a shot on, and then driving to the nearest record store. Now you can pull up a download site and start pulling, it's up to you whether you want to be an honest broker and pay for it. You can literally accumulate a library of music faster than you can listen to it.

(And we won't even get into the social phenomenon of music; I assume that for those of us who enjoy listening on our headphones, it's completely different stuff than we would listen to with other people in a social situation. On weekends, my wife and I like to have a nice breakfast together, and I Bluetooth my laptop library through the sound bar, essentially a jukebox. I find the things we both like; I know she doesn't want to listen to Orange Goblin and Coroner and Mastodon, not that that's breakfast music anyway. But it's the moments by ourselves when we are most open to the different and new, while in social situations the inclination is to put something on you figure everyone is familiar with and will like.)

Having more options and distractions of every type pushes music to the side. It is no longer the transcendental experience it used to be, when the sounds and arrangements were fresh and new. Social media has furthered the impulse to quick, brainless pronunciamentos, corralling of hivemind, rather than honest attempts to be objective about an inherently subjective area.

Personally, I think music critics should know how to play an instrument or several, should be conversant with the history and context of the genre of music they review. Playing something, even poorly, forces you to listen to music differently. To learn to play someone else's song is to train your ears and brain to disassemble it, and your fingers and ears to reassemble it. Even though I've been playing guitar for a full thirty years now, I played bass for a few years prior, and drums for a few years before that. That trains you to pick each instrument out of the mix, and as you listen to a song multiple times, you start cycling through the various instruments with your ears.

I can't think of any critic or magazine or site that I turn to regularly for reviews; there's just no point to it anymore. Occasionally if I encounter a review of an off-the-beaten-path album that I've already listened to, I'll check it out to see what the reviewer thinks. But -- and this is important to note, apparently -- I am neither gratified by a review that agrees with my impression, nor offended by a review that dismisses something I like. The best you can hope for is something that is well-written, entertaining, and perhaps catches some insight you missed. It seems to be more about being part of an event or trend though, than in sharing useful and informed observations.

Critiques against "rockism," or against a young black musician who plays metal differentiating himself from cultural assumptions by asserting his distaste for the preponderance of simple arrangements, nonexistent melodies, and bullshit lyrics of most rap and hip-hop, smack of mere contrarianism. The urge to smack readers upside the head with the cold fish of "betcher surprised I took this stance" is already old, in a young and still evolving medium.

They seem to be worried, these critics, about catching the Next Big Thing before someone else does, or about finding a Hidden Gem that's been cleverly in plain sight all along. Or they have a sociopolitical axe to grind. Trust me, when I say that the Black Eyed Peas' music is a steaming, runny dump into the collective ears of America, I give less than a red-hot monkey-fuck about the cultural, racial, or political implications of the musical content. I am simply saying that they are lazy, careless, derivative hacks who, in a rational world, would not be let anywhere near devices that create sound, where hapless human beings would have to hear their sonic mess. That's all.

"Rockism" is nothing more nor less than an insistence (however unrealistic) of authenticity, at least how the rock fan understands that term. Ideally, the band or musician should write and play at least the majority of the material that is released under their name. This is an expectation the pop fan simply doesn't comprehend or care about, but it is core to the rock fan's ability to identify with and support the musician, if not the music itself.

Being a clear diehard rockist, I never thought I'd say this, but both sides have valid points. The rock fan dismisses the likes of disco and Mariah Carey because they are transparent marketing ploys; since Carey and many of the various disco divas tended to be more the face of the product than the true creative force behind it, it's easy for the rock fan to assert that virtually anyone can cut a doctored track written by committee, so there's no point in giving any of these individuals any adulation.

But what the pop fan gets that frequently escapes the rock fan is a much simpler tenet -- that a good song is a good song, regardless of who made it or how. There are no concerns about "authenticity" or "integrity," at least until the performer gains a fan base. The pop fan is also okay with the ephemeral nature of the music, a burnout of the song in six weeks or so of heavy rotation, after which the song is played out and only occasionally revisited, sometimes ironically, but eventually with some brief, thin nostalgia.

Rock and metal fans are much more attached to the musicians and the music. There is much more of a sense of permanence. People have put in work, perhaps thousands of hours and many years of practicing, rehearsing, touring, writing, developing a whole host of skills that a spoiled pop brat just hires people to do for them with a snap of the fingers. There is a definite working-class ethos behind that philosophy, but again, it can come at the expense of missing out on songs that, while not monumental achievements, are still valuable pop confections.

I remember when I graduated high school and went to college for a year, my first experience in a dorm setting, was a real eye-opener. At that point, I had gotten into a rather unfortunate preference for what might best be characterized as "hobbit rock":  the pretentious, bombastic, early-70s prog wankerings of groups such as Yes, ELP, and Jethro Tull. Being raised mostly on AM pop, R&B, and country music, the virtuosity and ambition of these musicians excited my imagination, and some of it still does to this day. Some of the other dorm rats were from Los Angeles, and turned me on to early hair-metal bands like Dokken, harder metal bands like Iron Maiden, and punk bands like Dead Kennedys and MDC.

But when you're 18 and in college, your mission is to Get Laid. And even then I knew that that was not going to happen by bringing the girlies over and playing them Tarkus or Thick as a Brick. They weren't even ready for Dokken and Maiden at that point. This was 1985-86, so you either learned to put up with Madonna and Tears for Fears and all that hairspray synth-pop, or you were going to spend your weekends with Rosie Palm and her five sisters.

It takes some seasoning and maturity to get over oneself and one's prejudices, the need to assert your likes by shitting on someone else's. This doesn't mean you can't talk some neck about a band you don't like; when I say that I think the Black Guy Pees' music is lazy, hacky shit, I am not kidding. That is not schtick. But by the same token, if someone came up in comments saying, "Hey, I loves me some Fergie!", I'm not going to get into a flame war over it. Chacun à son gout and all that.

Still, the one core value of the rock fan that I think is worth paying attention to and upholding is that of the self-directed creator, the musician writing and performing their own songs. That doesn't at all mean that sampling, electronic instruments, and even song doctors can't be used to create something new and cool. But if everyone sampled, who would create new things to sample? You can see the almost Dickian level of internal recursion here.

Perhaps instead of hewing to a metric of "good" and "bad" it might be more useful for critics and fans to look at whether something is interesting or not.

Musical Chairs

This song came out last summer, but I just heard it today for the first time (yes, I make little effort to keep up with what the kids are listening to), and quite liked it:




A cursory glance at the Google informs me that Nothing More is a Christian band, but whatever. Either a song is good or it isn't. (And for this sort of "bro-metal" style of music, somewhere between Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold, and Tool, it's done quite well. But I get why many people do not like that sort of music in general.) I like the song, the musicianship, the message. I like Spock's Beard, too. I liked Kansas when I was a kid. Hell, I revere J.S. Bach, whose output was mostly devotional. If that makes me a bad atheist, well, I've been called worse. But this really is a scathing look at modern American culture.

(Of course, the irony is not lost that the band just signed a large deal with Eleven Seven Music Group, which isn't Warner Bros., but it ain't selling shitty cassettes out of the trunk of the bassist's mom's Buick, either.)

Anyhoo, I offer that as a palate cleanser to the musical topic I really want to look at, which was apparently the only musical news this week -- that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke got stuck with a mammoth fine for plagiarizing Marvin Gaye. I think any genuine fan of music in general, and certainly every musician, should be wary of that decision, but also consider all sides of this.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I can take or leave the song in question; it neither offends my sensibilities nor gets my dick hard. It's bland, inoffensive, and unchallenging, like most music, popular and otherwise. It tries to conceal its deficiencies in that regard with the hugely popular video, featuring some amazingly hot chicks and Thicke's smug countenance emceeing the proceedings. I grew up on a steady diet of soul and R&B as a kid, and it is at least a competent, if uninspired, iteration of the style. I would hate to imagine what Williams and/or Thicke would sound like outside a studio, with nothing but an instrument and natural voice, but then apparently Thicke got a piano into the courtroom and played some variations of his song and Gaye's song, so he has to have at least some musical talent there.

So on the one hand, Blurred Lines is derivative, to say the least. It's not as blatant as some -- remember, even Saint George Harrison got sued for this sort of thing -- but anyone familiar with the original will hear it right away. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that you would not have Blurred Lines if Got to Give It Up did not exist. There's clearly a strong influence.

Now the question here -- musically, ethically, legally -- is, at what point does influence become stealing? It's a question that fans, musicians, musicologists, and random passersby have all attempted to answer, with the best of intentions, and varying levels of success.

You don't need me to tell you the answer, because Nona Gaye told us all -- when it makes money. That is the sole criterion here, just as it's always been. And while I don't see the value necessarily in dumping a pile of money on someone because of something her father did forty years ago, that's kinda the way it works. It's also an unfortunate provision of our archaic copyright law, which was set up to ensure continuing revenue streams for the then-new recording industry.

And the poor record companies, to the extent they still exist, have a rough time extracting pelf from the peasants, when not only do fans no longer pay for recordings, but musicians are able to record, produce, and distribute their own music. The revenue stream is now in live performances and swag, and even then, the only way to make any real money on it is to bundle bands together into huge outdoor festivals with multiple stages.

Music piracy is and should be a real concern, but never doubt that the people who really want to compose and record their own music will always do so regardless of how much money there is to be had. The more pressing concern is what the mass audience perceives and expects from their musical experience, if they're just after another event and another event to record on their iPhones and post to demonstrate their presence, or if they want to seek out and hear sounds and ideas that can genuinely transform the way they perceive their world.

The biggest tragedy out of this lawsuit, I'm sure you'll agree, is that the Black Guy Pees appear to still be intact. This is a sadness that no mere court of law can address.

The Postmortal

*Post title a nod to Drew Magary's enjoyable-if-flawed post-apocalyptic novel. Magary is one of the all-around funniest writers on these entire internets, and I will throw down with anyone who claims otherwise.

So this happened a few days ago -- Esquire magazine takes a break from telling you why you're a soul-raping cultural barnacle for enjoying illicit nekkid fotoz of hot babes, juxtaposed with monkey-spanking American Apparel ads and barely-clothed fotoz of the very same babes, to give us these nuggets of wisdom from schlock 'n' roll grandpa Gene Simmons, as dutifully transcribed by Simmons' son Nick. Apparently Larry King's questions are just too incisive and probing.

NICK SIMMONS: You once said the music business isn't dying — it's dead. What would you say to young musicians and songwriters today trying to navigate this new terrain?
GENE SIMMONS: Don't quit your day job is a good piece of advice. When I was coming up, it was not an insurmountable mountain. Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant when you toured they would give you tour support. There was an entire industry to help the next Beatles, Stones, Prince, Hendrix, to prop them up and support them every step of the way. There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters — the creators — for rock music, for soul, for the blues — it's finally dead.

Rock is finally dead.

I am so sad that the next 15-year-old kid in a garage someplace in Saint Paul, that plugs into his Marshall and wants to turn it up to ten, will not have anywhere near the same opportunity that I did. He will most likely, no matter what he does, fail miserably. There is no industry for that anymore. And who is the culprit? There's always the changing tide of interests — music taste changes with each generation. To blame that is silly. That was always the exciting part, after all: "What's next?" But there's something else. The death of rock was not a natural death. Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered. And the real culprit is that kid's 15-year-old next-door neighbor, probably a friend of his. Maybe even one of the bandmates he's jamming with. The tragedy is that they seem to have no idea that they just killed their own opportunity — they killed the artists they would have loved. Some brilliance, somewhere, was going to be expressed, and now it won't, because it's that much harder to earn a living playing and writing songs. No one will pay you to do it.

The masses do not recognize file-sharing and downloading as stealing because there's a copy left behind for you — it's not that copy that's the problem, it's the other one that someone received but didn't pay for. The problem is that nobody will pay you for the 10,000 hours you put in to create what you created. I can only imagine the frustration of all that work, and having no one value it enough to pay you for it.

This is such a conflation of "somewhat right" and "mostly wrong" that it needs to be disentangled a bit. Let's start with his point about record companies and the music industry in general, that there's this beneficent, moneyed, monolithic industry just waiting to help the next great artiste be all they can be, and so much more.

There was indeed a time when record companies were run by rich men who truly enjoyed the bands that were on their labels. But the Ahmet Erteguns of the world no longer run record companies, unfortunately, and in fact, mostly never did. You know what ruined rock music and record companies in general? Thriller. Yep, I said it. Fucking Michael Jackson.

It wasn't Jacko's fault, not directly. But all the noble muzak industry learned from dumping millions of dollars into ramming every bit of that thing up the world's collective ass was that promotion works, and that there's no such thing as over-promotion. But it takes a lot of promotion to create a monster, and only so much money overall available to tap. Since Jackson was on Columbia, which never exactly had a huge stable of actual rock acts in the first place, there probably weren't many rock bands that got short shrift. But you can bet that that wasn't the case at, say, Atlantic or Warner Bros. All they saw was that over-produced dance music was easy to manufacture and dump into the hype machine.

(It should be duly noted that Simmons' band saw their glory days as the only rock band on a disco label. Hmmm. I wonder if Neil Bogart had any vested interest in making sure that Kiss became successful?)

Simmons is correct that many kids now might just look at the prospect of dedicating thousands of hours to learn to actually play an instrument, and regard it as wasted time. I would suggest in response that whatever one's age, if you are looking at a career in the music bidness as a way to get yourself infinite amounts of fame, money, and pussy, you are wasting your time. You literally would be better off getting a law degree, or going to a vocational school and becoming a really good plumber or swimming pool contractor.

Anyone who says that gaining fame and fortune as a musician hasn't always been a serious crapshoot, literally on a par with buying a lottery ticket, doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. You will definitely meet women playing in a rock band, unless you're a troll and have zero game. But you will meet more and better women driving to the club in the Beemer your partnership at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe got you, than in the beat-up Chevy Express van your indie-pop band flogs from one gig to the next on a shoestring and a prayer. And if you're a noob starting up a band to make a living, I have just one word for you:  Don't.

If rock is dead, it is due more to people's tastes changing than to file-sharing (let's call it what it is -- stealing). The time and effort it takes to really learn and master a musical instrument may simply not be "worth it" to a demographic used to getting things quickly and easily. It was easy for me to put dozens of hours a week into learning guitar back in the '80s, because I had a black-and-white TV that got three channels, and no computer and no internets. There was nothing else to do, I'm an insomniac by nature, and slowly became gratified that my incessant jamming along with Rush and Deep Purple records started sounding more and more like actual music. Life is a series of distractions now, and creating decent music takes time and effort somewhere along the line.

There was a time when you could justifiably say that Gene Simmons and Kiss were very important to the development of rock music. They were probably as big in the mid-'70s as The Beatles had been ten years earlier. More importantly, they helped break a lot of hard rock bands that are still around today. They took Rush out of the Great Lakes region for the first time, they took Def Leppard and Iron Maiden out of England for the first time. The first Van Halen album would not have been made at that time without Gene Simmons' direct involvement. Credit where credit is due and all.

But the fact is, the next Eddie wailing away out there no longer needs a Gene to produce a demo and schlep it around for him. Production, promotion, and distribution  -- much like the product itself -- are all now virtually free, in that they require minimal sunk cost invested, just sweat equity, persistence, and an ability to network. Which are pretty much the requirements of being in a rock band in the first place.

Creative people don't need to be told that they need higher motivations than money to do what they do. I'm not talking any highfalutin nonsense about the nobility of the calling or whatever. It's just the cold hard fact that if you try to factor in all that sweat equity of learning and refining your craft, whether it's music or writing or whatever, and figure it as a career or by an hourly wage, you'd give up immediately. And it was even worse when you could go into hock just getting your music recorded, much less promoted.

And Chris Holmes wasn't bullshitting -- touring will take years off your life. Alcohol, drugs, women, fast food, stress, and boredom all combine in a toxic brew that, over extended periods of time, will fuck with your mind and body like nothing else. Getting on stage in front of a great crowd is the closest thing to sex you can have with your clothes on. But that's a few hours a night, in a strange town with nothing else to do the rest of the day, for weeks or months on end.

Anyway, by the time you calculate your practice time as an individual musician, your rehearsal time as a band, splitting the paycheck between the band and manager, gas for the vehicle(s), food, etc., you're probably not making even minimum wage, not until you start playing some real money gigs or selling some songs.

Same with writing -- while a more solitary pursuit and fewer mouths to feed and bad habits from traveling, the time it takes to go through multiple cycles of draft-edit-refine until you have a decent finished product doesn't get recouped for a good long time. The e-book craze has spawned a raft of folks who promise to show you how you can crank out an Amazon bestseller in a couple of hours. And if you're okay with churning out compilations of hastily edited PLR jabber with a GIMP-ed cover from Fiverr, you can. Hell, you can probably sucker a few people into buying it.

But to turn out something of real quality, regardless of genre, it takes time, patience, commitment. There's nothing at all wrong with wanting to make a buck doing what you love, you just have to really love it first, because the odds are against you making a career out of it. Even if you're really good.

The dynamic Gene Simmons laments, before he heads into a weird pseudo-patriotic fugue toward the end of the interview, is the same as it ever was, just a different set of middlemen this time. Last I checked, there is more good rock music out there than ever; it doesn't get on mainstream radio because mainstream radio is run by people who hate music and their listeners. Gene is just pissed because he no longer understands how to turn a buck from it.

Dork by Dork West

I'm not above occasionally checking out some fake hairy Persian titties; it's my Sattiday mawnin' cartoon jam, yo. But what's really hilarious is her idiot old man's self-fellation at the 'roo:

"I ain't going after nobody on the radio," he said, according to The Associated Press. "I'm going after Shakespeare, I'm going after Walt Disney. I'm going after Howard Hughes. I'm going after Genghis Khan. I'm going after Henry Ford..."

Uh-huh. Sure. Check out Shitspeare in all his lyrical glory, just as a f'rxample. Forget the historical incoherence (Romans versus Trojans? At the Battle of Thermopylae? Does he not have people who can Google this shit for him, at least? Do "Spartans" and "Persians" suddenly not rhyme? Should I be ashamed at doing a close reading of a moron like Kanye West?), he just flat fucking sucks as a writer, even by the impossibly low standards of this sort of music.

At the risk of one, stating the obvious, and two, sounding like a cheesy self-help author, one of the essential keys to "greatness" is doing something that most other people cannot do. Read those Black Skinhead words aloud to yourself, if you can do so without giggling. It's pretty standard repetitive junior-high woofing, that literally just about anyone could do. No fresh insight, nothing interesting in the rhyme scheme, none of the things that talented hip-hop artists actually do. It's just awful.

I know, complaining about a jagoff like Kanye West is like complaining about the weather. Soon as his fifteen minutes are up, some other no-talent asshole will take his place. Still, it would be nice to find out for sure, just to watch this dickhead go away, and hopefully take his fucking Autotune machine with him.

Hatesong

Why did I not know about this before? I'm just now discovering Hatesong, and there is something noteworthy about, say, David Lynch despising It's a Small World so much, he won't let the interviewer refer to it by name.

Fortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't encounter most of these awful songs. I mean, I've never heard Katy Perry's Firework, like not a single note. I've never heard more than a few seconds of My Heart Will Go On. I've never heard a Justin Bieber song, again, not so much as a single note or word or melody. Life is too short.

Still, I think we've all had jobs in the past where workplace radio is plopped onto some lowest-common-denominator shit sandwich, endless streams of commercials sandwiching three-song blocks of heavy-rotation dreck. No wonder the American worker is stressed out to the point of a breakdown.

But most of us are certainly familiar enough with some of these songs, so when you turn a fine, observant mind such as Steve Coogan on the aerosol can of cheese The Lady in Red, hijinks are bound to ensue. Yet there are still people who listen to it on purpose, there are nostalgia radio stations that play this sort dreck deliberately.

This makes me sad, really. It makes me think of a person who has been stuck in a basement or a cornfield in Kansas their entire life, with no radio or TV or internet, and so they think that the entire world is a desolate cornfield, because they've never seen anything else. Not that I expect other people to like exactly what I like; far from it.

But there are songs (and Lady in Red is a prime example) where, as Coogan points out, creativity is absent, nothing but trite greeting-card sentiments are listed. It's the musical equivalent of having sex through a hole in a bed sheet, missionary only. To enjoy -- or even to be not offended by -- inert, lifeless crap just seems to be a symptom of missing out on a whole 'nother universe of great stuff.

Most of this stuff is very fish-in-a-barrel; honestly, do you know anyone who likes a floater like Mambo No. 5? But pairing the right person with the right song is just magic in this context, as the legendary Matt Pike demonstrates in his evisceration of the Aerosmith handjob Dude (Looks Like a Lady). Pike hates not just that song, but the band with a level normally reserved for someone who you just watched run over your dog. On purpose. Fun stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

[Update:  Also, too. Certainly a valid point here, in that someone's taste -- or lack of -- doesn't pick anyone else's pocket or break their arm, so why sweat these poor folks on their schmuckery?

Two reasons, says I:  one, it's frequently funny (and some of the commenters in the Hatesong pieces are flat-out hilarious); two, beyond the subjectivity of mere pop-culture aesthetics, the fact is that when these objets de merde are popular, however long that toxic half-life may be, it's tough to get out of range of the smell.

I've never seen so much as an episode of Survivor, American Idol, or really any reality teevee, and yet a certain amount of "informational" oxygen and media space gets taken up with coverage of this sock-drawer-sorting nonsense, so I know way more about these things than I would ever have wanted to. You can only change the channel so fast; you have to read the headline before you can choose to skip past it. This stuff becomes very difficult to completely avoid. The same can be said when it comes to music, for those poor folks who are compelled to share communal space with aficionados of said dreck.

It's one thing to posit that someone who lurves them some Mambo #5 is no worse or better than someone who knows every Beethoven string quartet by number and key; it's quite another to have the mambophile blaring their crap over the cubicle wall every day.]

Kiss of Debt

The band Kiss (or, as The Army would have it, KISS) occupy a rather odd place in my musician's psyche. During their prime, I never really understood the appeal, comic-book splashes of fake fire and fake blood over cheesy chord progressions and thinly veiled cock rock.

Then they fell for the disco schtick, and even produced a poorly-received concept album, well after the whole "concept album" idea was dead and buried. Too bad, so sad. The smart kids had moved on to Rush, who somewhat ironically had gotten their big break as the opening act on one of Kiss' tour legs at their commercial height.

But as I got into actually playing in front of crowds, seeing what they wanted and what they tended to be attuned to, the whole cheesy package started to make more sense. Every band sells out to some degree, and even total sellouts such as Kiss still had points where they wanted to flex nuts and show chops and such.

Enter Vinnie Vincent, one of the more contentious, prickly folks to inject himself into what is (you'll be surprised to find) a rather people-oriented business. As a kid in the early '80s with a voracious appetite for any and all types of music, and a fairly photographic memory for notable quotes and quirky tics, to me Vincent stood out as the sort of person who seemed to be on a mission to make the blustery wunderkind Yngwie Malmsteen look quiet and contemplative.

As you can see from the embedded solo video from the RS article, Vincent's playing falls under the classic proto-shred grouping of jizz-lobbing, monkey-spanking speed dabblers, who had never heard of "taste" and barely bothered with tone, thinking that some distortion and a furious flapping of fingers would compensate for a lack of imagination and musicality. It's the sort of stuff that made This is Spinal Tap so true to life. At least Malmsteen actually had considerable tone, taste, and melodic sensibility to back up his arrogant demeanor.

Hair metal actually progressed pretty quickly along that decade, in terms of musicianship -- on the one hand, you had shredders like Paul Gilbert, Nuno Bettencourt, and Vito Bratta throwing down innovative, technically proficient melodies; on the other, you had "feel" players like Slash and Mick Mars, who were really great players in the mold of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, but overshadowed by the singers they worked with, and the drama of their bands. I can give you a list of great players from that era, makeup and all, but personally, Vincent would not be on that list. He was a dick in interviews, deliberately so, and again his playing was just a random flurry, a buzzing hive of bees.

Still, musical criticism aside, Vincent's story since getting kicked out of Kiss is interesting, weird, sad, almost poignant.

Revenue Model

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson asks a reasonable enough question, one (as he points out) the music industry has been asking ever since Napster changed everything, for them (the music industry) and for us (end users). Thompson also correctly points out that the situation extends beyond the obvious one, of people simply finding download sites to steal music from, now more than ever it's the streaming sites such as Pandora that enable and facilitate this sort of consumption of product.

As any current working musician will tell you, the product (you know, the music) has become secondary, almost peripheral, to the overall process. In the past, technological limitations necessitated that the food chain of production, manufacture, promotion, and distribution of the product were where all your marginal costs existed and could be optimized. Obviously, that is no longer the case; bands now cover their nut by touring and selling swag.

This is somewhat ironic, since those four "food chain" costs that were so central to the old music industry revenue model have all been rendered practically null and void; even a modestly talented, ambitious, and entrepreneurial individual can create, promote, and sell quality product for under a couple grand, where even 20-25 years ago bands racked up six figures in debt creating 45-50 minutes of music that still had to be trucked to record stores across the country. Production and supply chains have altered, and radically in favor of the content creators. This is true not only of music, but of books. (And teevee, of course.)

Of course, lowered barriers to entry also enable purveyors of crap to proliferate in all those media. But that is a subjective, aesthetic decision best left to the fabled market to sort out. Someone who's just peddling shit can certainly make some bank, but when has that not been true? The other side of that coin is that the true artist, whose voice can't or won't be silenced, now has an abundance of affordable venues which he or she can easily access to ply his or her wondrous wares. They don't have to sell their souls to some record company that's going to fuck them over and hose them on recoupable costs anyway. Certainly reasonable people can agree that this simple, clear benefit greatly outweighs the nuisance factor.

There are several dynamics at work here, as far as the music industry goes (we'll get back to books). One is the prevalence of selling single tracks for 99 cents, rather than packaged albums for 12 or 15 bucks (which generally means a built-in pricing cushion. From a marketing standpoint, this constrains the producer's ability to test variances and find a viable price-point equilibrium; that is, if the main pool of consumers come to believe that a "song" is "worth" 99 cents and no more, then you'll have a tough time convincing them to pay 12 bucks for a ten-song "album" running about 45-50 minutes, whose length in the first place was determined by the physical and technological constraints of earlier media such as vinyl records and magnetic cassette tapes.

Another ongoing dynamic is that the trend (insofar as to where the money and activity are gravitating) is content curation rather than creation. This is why blogs, to use one example, are a dying model as far as viability goes -- consumers have been herded past mere consumption, and on to aggregation. I think for someone under the age of 20-25, this would make no sense, but for people who have been around long enough to gain a sense of perspective, it is more clear -- not only has the prevalence of computers and software changed the way we think, perceive, and process data, but the changes themselves are coming at an accelerated rate.

So people's attentions have changed from the singular focus to a band or a song or a news factoid, and to a sidebar clutter of external links, an endless daisy chain of distractions. This is what content curation is all about -- being able to provide the quick eyeball fix that the clicker is looking for, and then having something ready to go on the page that the clicker didn't even know they wanted.

When I graduated from high school in 1985 and entered college for a brief attempt, I took a marketing course in the second semester (in fact, I had a marketing minor for my Biz Ad major). I went in and came out of that course with the cynical (but true!) observation that marketing, at its essence, is simply the art of convincing people to spend money they don't really have on shit they don't really want. I wouldn't claim any special insight to this, except to note that I was all of 18 years old when it occurred to me, and my attentions were otherwise engaged, mostly on beer, guitar, and girls (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps a more nuanced way of putting all that would be to say that a good marketer encourages people to find money for things didn't know they wanted, until the marketing made them aware of those things.

Now, in my second, more recent go-round at the university system, I additionally internalized the rather obvious marketing concept that when someone buys a product -- especially a creative product -- they're not just buying that product, but also the experience of buying the product. It could be the affirmation of finding a great new band that hasn't been popularized and diluted yet, or finding a book that you truly think will get you over some hump in your life. It happens to all of us, it's not foolish at all. Marketers realize this essential truth -- that every one of us (including the marketers themselves) wants something, usually something that will get them laid, make them more money, or make them smarter, but it could be any number of other things. Even if you're happy, there's always something you aspire to or want, whether it's travel, better communication skills, to be more fit, have a larger cock, whatever.

The thing is, these are synaptic sensations that are only bought with time and patience, of reading and internalizing whatever it is you felt like you were missing. So the aggregated content curation model doesn't, by design, really feed that well into that particular dynamic. It's a very ADHD dynamic, and as such, requires not an ability to sustain attention and focus, but the ability to divert or even avoid focus, and simply jump among endless lilypads of external stimuli. While many or most or each of those virtual lilypads might be revisited regularly, they are constantly in flux; the whole point of repeated visits is to tune in and find out what new content has been curated.

I know, you're thinking this is where the "Old Man Yells At Cloud" riff kicks in and the tube amps swell to eleven. Not at all -- I love technology, and more than that I love the way it has democratized the ability to produce music, real music made by real human beings. But that technology has also changed the way those same humans -- or at least the potential audiences for the musicians -- perceive the more easily facilitated creations of wonder emanating from those digital fonts.

And that's the problem here, the impasse that what's left of the music industry has not figured out how to ford. See, ever since Muddy Waters invented electricity and white people figured out how to poach good music from black people, the music industry was predicated on middlemen exacting a certain (generally usurious) percentage from the creators of the product. There is no longer much of a role for said middlemen. This is the sum and essence of the dilemma facing the "music industry."

And yet, as any of us who truly enjoy and love music, who derive pleasure and joy and even the occasional transcendent experience of it know, one of the coolest things about real music is that you can listen to it ten, fifteen, ninety times, and still retain the very real possibility of catching something you haven't caught in prior listens. That's an excitement you don't get with most other forms of media, the notion that a four-minute work can have those possibilities, every single time you experience it.

But how do you experience it? That's yet another issue that the "industry" has been unable to address. The previous model relied heavily on programmed radio to disseminate the product. And look, if moron stunts like this aren't evidence enough of why not only that model is dead, but that it deserved to be killed, I don't know what to tell you. I honestly have no idea what sort of asshole would want to listen to the same song for twenty-four hours straight (bearing in mind that the radio model is predicated on keeping people listening for as long as possible), but I hope never to run into such an individual. It's just too sad to contemplate.

But such instances are also indicators of the accelerating frangibility of music fandom, as it were. I don't mean groupies; like the poor, they will always be with us. I mean the ability of some anonymous person out in the boonies to commune with the sounds they hear and use those sounds to reify their deepest, darkest desires. When their mode of access consists of Morning Zoo gabble and the same half-dozen AutoTuned monstrosities spoon-fed in heavy rotation (and syrup), I suggest that their interaction with those things -- those products, tangible objects that can be marketed -- changes substantially.

And in fact, it has changed. We (as in the majority of the marketplace) no longer commune with the existential spirit and angst of the artiste. We interact with their various efforts incidentally, perhaps using their occasional communal efforts (i.e., live shows) as events by which we can get laid. It's not that this is inherently wrong per se, it's that it inhibits our ability (again, in the aggregate) to effectively partake and participate in a truly vigorous musical culture, as opposed to one that relies on weird endurance-based stunts.

In the end, what this is really about is revenue, and the ability to generate it. And our new ADHD virtual lilypad is predicated less on the old experiential heavy-rotation-on-the-one-station model, and more on the aggregate advertising model. There's a risk that curation eventually turns the content itself into a loss leader, something practically given away in order to upsell something else to the consumer (usually advertising).

The alarums regarding the demise of the industry-based models are true enough, and rightly so. In the old days, record companies functioned much like a bank -- or more accurately, a loan shark, fronting money to broke-ass musicians to cover high but necessary studio costs. But again, the previous barriers to entry have disappeared, the loan sharks and their insiders' club of payola and promotion are no longer needed or even useful.

This should have been a blessing for musicians and listeners alike, and to a great extent it is. But the nature of listening, and the modes and habits of consuming that product, have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Once the product became free and easy to acquire, consumers (as they would with any other product) adjusted their habits and needs accordingly.

The book industry is undergoing those same challenges, and it's good for small, independent authors who might otherwise never get a shot, but the trend has hit established publishing houses and their author list like a ton of bricks. Too many people are opting for the ease and convenience of the Kindle book for around five bucks, stored on a small device that can store thousands more, rather than shelling out twenty bucks for a bulky paperweight that they may not even like.

It's a real gamble, and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out, for music and for books, each of which has specific challenges built in. A full-length (250+ pages) book is a time-consuming process, generally accomplished by a single person, who still needs to eat and earn a living while working on the project. While a song, or several songs, can be composed and recorded more quickly, it's also generally a more collaborative effort, and thus needing to provide a living for several people. These things used to be more scalable, but the ongoing attrition of direct revenue for the content itself may discourage many potential creators, who may see that the easier money can be had on the curation end.

The boutique phrase "post-scarcity" gets thrown about perhaps too loosely, but this is a situation where it is more clearly justified. There are, in fact, people who make a pretty decent living still, and without having to deal with the overhead, bureaucracy, and finger-crossing of the "industry." Take a look at what Joe Konrath is doing, or Barry Eisler. (And hell, read Be the Monkey -- it's fast, funny, thought-provoking, and just 99 cents.)

The model is changing -- like gravity or health care reform, you don't have to like it, but whether or not you believe in it or agree with it, it's happening all the same. And as Konrath and Eisler have shown, again and again and again, piracy isn't ruination, for an independent operator -- in fact, it can easily serve as free advertising. The author or musician has to be willing to give their product away here and there.

But advertising also costs money, and the "industry" model, such as it is, gives no artist or author a majority or even decent royalty rate. Publishers assume that readers only buy so many books per year, and at twenty bucks or so per copy, they're right. The old music industry model was even worse, starting with its accounting and deliberate ruination of many a good band.

And again radio, as a system of promoting and distributing great new music, was always useless, and is now worse than ever at exposing listeners to something new and fresh they haven't heard before. It's simply a slow death by quasi-nostalgic scamboogery, merely a reminder that so many of those songs you haven't heard in years, you really could have lived the rest of your life never hearing again. I don't know about you, but as a lifelong music lover, radio makes me hate music, makes me want to tear the damned thing out of my dashboard and throw it out the fucking window. And they wonder why everyone would rather just tap into Pandora, listen to the music they want to hear, and not a bunch of retreaded shit sandwiched in between endless commercials and "morning zoo" jerkoffs. Really, how much do you spend commando-raiding the Kim Dotcoms of the world at the RIAA's behest? Maybe if they had a better model, they wouldn't have to worry about what really amounts to parasitic loss (or in Biz Ad terms, "the cost of doing business").

It's okay to ask questions and be skeptical, the new model is not going to be fair and/or perfect. But once again as with health care, it's not like the old model was worth a hot turd in the first place. It stifled creativity and innovation, and made its participants virtual serfs because of the high barriers to entry. Those barriers are gone. The old model deserves to be killed off, and never discussed again.

In Other Music News

So apparently Rush got formally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (otherwise known as NAMBLA) tonight, and there's some sort of rift amongst the faithful as to whether they should accept their anointed shit sandwich with a smile. Although, as a longtime fan of the band, I have been of the humble opinion that they should tell NAMBLA to go fuck themselves, I respect the fact that they have chosen to suck it up and accept the much-belated accolade. Congratulations, gents!

Also, too, this is a fun site, and despite its name is not totally Rush-related.

In Music News

They arrive on a sunny day
Offering the residents a better way
Before you know it you're in line
And chanting refrain
They reel you in and then they drown you out -- The Face

Clutch dropped Earth Rocker last month, so I've only listened to it about 20 times so far. I'll keep this review short and sweet -- it's excellent. Best straight-ahead, balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred rawk album of the year so far. You could maybe throw last year in as well.

The usual "all killer, no filler" schtick actually applies here, it's a concise set, clocking in at just under 45 minutes. But powered by Neil Fallon's primal roar, Tim Sult's powerful riffing, and the tragically underrated rhythm section of Dan Maines and Jean-Yves Guster, they make every second count, from the "if it isn't live it doesn't matter" ethos of the title track to the propulsive aggression of Unto the Breach to the pseudocryptic The Wolf Man Kindly Requests, they deliver huge. Fallon is one of rock's better storytellers, and he's in rare form throughout. This is easily Clutch's best album since the epic Blast Tyrant (and I really liked Strange Cousins from the West).

In an earlier, more innocent time, I would have said something to the effect that this would be the album that catapults Clutch into the rock stratosphere. I give up on such assessments; I have no clue what people consider when picking the theme music for banging milfs (or whatever they hell they do for their dining and dancing pleasure). All I know is that I've been rockin' the mike for untold centuries, and this is the real fuckin' deal. Go out and get it yesterday.

Roth and Roll Hero

Absolutely love this Buzzfeed profile of David Lee Roth. I came of age in the "classic" Van Halen era, and Roth was always goofy and weird in the most endearing rock 'n' roll manner possible. Certainly he can be a bit much after a while, but he's a true American original, and has managed to remember after all these years that it's supposed to be fun, that being able to jump up on stage and goof around and get a bunch of strangers -- whether it's twelve or 12,000 -- to get crazy to what you're doing, that's just about the best thing in the world.

Eddie and Alex don't seem like they've been having much fun for quite some time, but then they also seem somewhat more shy and reserved, and it's gotta be hard for even most extroverts to keep up with people like Roth or Hagar. Hopefully they have an album of completely new material to come, but in the meantime, Roth's energy and humor are welcome things in a fractured industry whose current stars are more concerned with brand-building than in the joys of creating and communicating.