As a general rule, any song containing the word "world" sucks. This is the exception that proves that.
Anyhow, for some reason, reading about the Battle of Midway provoked this song.
Given that I learned to play guitar in a charismatic church, and in fact provided background music for all sorts of purported violations of the laws of nature (healings, prophecies, speaking in tongues, etc.), it actually surprises me that I haven't written more things like this. . .
As usual, my ability to get a decent timbre in the recording is completely undermined by high frequency hearing loss and Van Gogh level tinnitus in my right ear. I mean, I can still hear underlying melodies, but that's about it. But, as usual with me and Emily's stuff, if (big if) you can get past the timbre it's actually an O.K. tune.
One final note: People are often weirdly embarrassed for you when you share creative eructations. I actually think most readers of this blog have experienced this with respect to some media, e.g. songs, poems, paintings, theatrical reinterpretations, novels, Dungeons and Dragons modules, ideas for philosophy books, uncharitably read articles, etc. etc. etc.
But here is the main irony. The phenomenology of creative activity is so passive that the humiliation from people who find our endeavors embarrassing never really registers. This is true for me and I think all of my wonderful weird friends who sustain me with analogous crap that goes far over and above the coffee spoon tasks that house and feed them (Neal Hebert, Mark Silcox, Graham Harman, Chris Bateman, Emily love of my life, Levi Bryant, Derrick Huff, Eric Ward, etc. etc. etc. . . .).
I mean, Kant was wrong about all that stuff about determining one's own teleology. Kerouac's weirdos are just not responsible for very much. If you don't like what we're up to, file your complaint with the muse.
I missed THIS ESSAY when it came out a few years ago.
While I tend to have respect for anyone who can write catchy melodies as Joel can, Rosenbaum is really on to something with this:
I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.
Then Rosenbaum goes through hit after hit illustrating the thesis.
A couple of observations:
Graham Harman has written about the "sneer from nowhere" that ironic Gen ex hipsters perfected pre-internet and that came to characterize an awful lot of the early blogosphere. I think Rosenbaum's "unearned contempt" is pretty much the same thing.
Academic philosophers give in to unearned contempt much more than people in other fields. For some reason, we feel justified saying nasty things about thinkers and movements we don't know very much about. This is probably worst with analytic and continentals who view the distinction in Baby Boomer culture war terms (not to say only Baby Boomers do this). I think this comes from a kind of anxiety in philosophy that if other people are right about certain things, then your life work might be worthless. I mean, you can't get started on a project unless you presuppose an awful lot. But if those presuppositions are kicked out, then there's no point to what you've been doing.
Incidentally, I think this bit about presuppositions is why orthodox Heideggerians don't make time for Harman. What is overwhelmingly offensive to them is not Harman's critique of correlationism, nor his neo-Aristotelian views, but rather his claim that most of Heidegger's work is just a repetitious restatement of of the tool/broken tool dichotomy. If Harman is correct about this (and he gives arguments, e.g. the discussion of time in Tool Being) then thousands and thousands of books and articles by orthodox Heideggerians might end up being beside the point. This kind of thing is pretty terrifying if you are on the receiving end of it.
Anyhow, the Billy Joel article is really interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.
Being within fifty years of a folk musical culture rooted in catchy melodies where most people who can play instruments do play instruments.
Being within fifty years of a time when copyright was not enforced well.
A social milieu where it is not utterly irrational to collectively hope for things to get better.
Of course none of these things any longer hold in the United States (see the third post above for the argument).
Thus it seems to me that all of us former footsoldiers in Rock's Army really need to be asking ourselves the following empirical question. Are any parts of the world that do satisfy all three of these conditions?
My guess is that the best options are Brazil, Turkey, recent Arab Spring states (if things go well), and those sub-saharan African contries that have had really good decades (this never makes it in the American news). Possibly Indonesia as well?
I don't know enough about the ecosystem of folk music in Arab countries or Indonesia. One thing I think that might hinder rock there is that Muslim worship does not use music like Christian (especially evangelical and charismatic) worship does. I may be biased here, because I learned to play guitar myself in a charismatic church (as a child I actually provided background music to several violations of the laws of nature, and probably would not have become a philosopher had I not reacted as a child so strongly against the serial hypocrisy of Christian conservatives). But it is just true. So much of the blues and early rock had a symbiotic relationship with American Christian churches, for example Jerry Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are first cousins and in fact learned to play piano together both at church and at honkytonk bars they'd sneak out to as teenagers.
This being said, several people have told me that Constantinople has perhaps the most exciting music scene in the world today, with what people are doing with traditional Turkish folk tunes in the manner that early rock took from the blues and Appalachian music (actually blues and Appalachian and Cajun music were all influencing each other long before recordings), and some of the music from Tahrir, Tunisia, and Libya was pretty amazing.
Who knows how all this will turn out? But just as it gives me great joy to know that it is not impossible that there is some planet in the universe with creatures like us, but not nearly so flawed, it gives me great joy to know that Rock may be being reincarnated as I speak in entirely different cultural millieus.
Post mortems of cultural movements are not like real autopsies, which are preferably done while the body is fresh. With culture sometimes it is easier the more time has passed.
Well, enough time has passed. I know now not only that rock is dead but why it died.
Rock and roll has two essential properties: (1) catchy melodies rooted in folk forms (blues, dance hall routines, popular piano sheet music people played at home) that predominated before the advent of mass reproduction of recorded music, (2) the promise of some kind of liberation as part of a broader cultural milieu, whether this is explicitly political or something more inward; this kind of thing is best captured in anthemic music, which was always a part of the beating heart of rock.
Listen to non-oldies radio today and you just don't hear any decent rock. Instead, 99% of it is just aural wall paper for people who have no taste but still have pretensions to style that are themselves hangovers from the age of rock. The melodies are atrocious to non-existent and to the extent that any kind of liberation is promised, it's an absolute parody of what great rock bands (including "grunge" artists) routinely delivered.
Yes there are still a few great rockers, just like there are still people programming text adventure games really well. But bands like the White Stripes truly are the exception that proves the rule, because they would not have been nearly so exceptional in the 1970s (though no less great for that), and other recent great bands such as second through fourth album era Marylin Manson are to some extent minstrelsy (though no less great for that), and other exceptions (to the universal inabilitiy of current bands to write songs that (a) have good melodies, and (b) are meaningfully liberatory) like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Brothers of the Head, are literally minstrelsy. Note that by the end of the Bush administration, none of these bands were even still together.
What brought this about? How did rock die? Who killed it?
First, The victory of recorded over live music. This killed rock in two ways. (a) You used to have to play music to hear it. This created an incredible overabundance of musicians from which a John Lennon could emerge. This created audiences with good ears for melody that would recognize the genius of a Lennon/McCartney, or even, near the end of the era, a David Bowie (before, album after album, producer Tony Visconti allowed him to show up to the studio with bags of cocaine and no written material). Every decade since the advent of the radio, the percentage of people who play competently has decreased. This has been a disaster both in terms of creating a pool of artists, and in terms of creating competent listeners. (b) The copyright regime of the recorded music industry. Even the very best of the originally recorded folkies (Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie) shamelessly plagariazed *and refined* everything they could get their ears on, but as more and more stuff got recorded under the new copyright regime there has been more and more melodies out there that you cannot use and adapt.
Second, the Rousseauan ideal of the 60's rightfully died at Alamount, and communism rightfully so thirty years later. But then what replaced them was just as dishonest and at least far more destructive than the dimbulb liberation of Peace Bear and his little sidekick Hippy Pants, and it is possible that history will end up being less kind to neo-liberalism than to communism.
I'm a little bummed I have a record of so little of my own music from before my thirtieth birthday, but for most of that stuff it's for the best. I think all of the bands mentioned in yesterday's post (such as Steel Fury, to right) actually went into studios with professionals to record their work.
I've never done that, but have just messed around with cheap DIY four track recorders and the digitigal equivalent today In high school I actually daisy chained two-two track recorders, weirdly, some of that stuff I have on old cassettes sounds better than what I can get with Sonar and Mixcraft in the rare time Emily and I have to noodle around since graduate school (most of the results of which are in the Devil in my Pocket links to the far right, including the fun youtube videos). You can tell whenever you listen to any of it that the levels and compression and whatnot are messed up. Even people who have loved any of those bands live have found the recordings almost uniformly unpleasant.
From this life's experience, here's my advice to any new bands. Make demos with your DIY stuff, but even if you have Garage Band, Sonar, Pro Tools, or Mixcraft or whatever- still try to scrounge up the money and time to go into an actual studio to record the final versions you want to share with people.
When you listen to your own recorded stuff you can hear the melodies through it, and this ends up being a tremendous hindrance to your ability to get a good timbre (even if you are antecedently gifted in that way). In addition to timbre it's really, really, really hard to get a recording where the levels continue to be proportional through so many different media: e.g. headphones in the studio, in a car stereo, in some audio-phile's system, condensed down to mp3 format on someone's iphone, over the radio, etc. etc. etc.. This is really, really hard stuff. The ability to write good melodies and perform good live does not predict it at all (in fact the hearing loss and tinitus from live performances, as in my case, usually makes it a lot worse).
And the phenomenology is weird. You may like the way it sounds, but other people won't. Even people who will pay to come see your band will have no interest in listening to something incompetently recorded and mastered. This is of course, unless you are a sui generis timbre genius like Jack White or Jimmy Page, probably the only two people who were both great live performers and whose mastery of studio recordings matches Rick Rubin's. Rubin for that matter, is probably alone in both his ability to capture perfect timbre and recognize good melody. Of the records he produces, the best ones (Danzig, Johny Cash, early Red Hot Chili Peppers, that recent Neal Diamond LP) are where he dictatorially makes the band write fifty or so songs and then crafts the album by picking some of them and combining others. His worst ones are where he is too scared of the band (AC/DC),or doesn't care enough about the band (lots of stuff), to put them through that wrenching process.
At right is a live performance from a great Austin band of my college era, Lusting After Mary. It's their second best song (the Joe of the song is their guitarist, one of the kindest people I've ever known). The keyboard player is philosopher Mike Einhaus, and I used to jam with him and philosophers John Heil and Jim Hankinson (Heil and Einhaus were grad students at U.T. then, I was an undergraduate, and Hankinson was and still is faculty there) and less often other assorted members of Mary.
Einhaus is also an incredible accordian player. Sadly, Mary's best song, Ice Capades, is not on youtube.
There singer wasn't that charismatic, but that's is a little unfair of me to point out. It's actually pretty hard to get up in front of a lot of people and sing. For singers, guitarists, and keyboard players, unless you're gifted with a particular kind of glamour and grace, it's almost impossible to know what to do with your body so that you don't look like an idiot. If I do anything other than just stand there and do my job while playing music, I look so ludicrous that people laugh (this is no exaggeration).
The eponymous Joe (the guitarist at left) actually had enough innate rock charisma/glamour for the rest of the band. He moved gracefully too. You can see him jumping up and down at the beginning here and get a sense of it. Einhaus was also fun to watch in an Olympic athlete way too, because the music was so piano based and the guy focused everything on providing the bottom for everyone else. I mean, watching anybody focused so much on doing their best, and delivering on it is aesthetically pleasing.
But the camaraperson here is focused on the singer dude, which wasn't really the phenomenology of one of their shows. It would be like filming an AC/DC concert and just following Brian Johnson around.
For the record, I should note that Jim Hankinson is actually a hell of a blues singer (and rhytm guitarist, for that matter). He has this song called "Slow Blues" that will make you weep. At the philosophy parties we also regularly played the Beatles' "Why Don't we Do It in the Road," Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up," and whatever the rest of us came up with on the spot.
This is a cool thing about the interwebs, finding old bands you used to jam with. Most haven't survived though, or sometimes someone else got the same name. I know that the current Ducky Boys of Boston have nothing to do with the (much better!) band from Montgomery Alabama with that name. On the other hand, from what I can tell, the Vicious Diplomacy that became a key part of the Carolina hardcore scene probably was a ship of Theseus like descendant of the band I knew (they took the bass player from one of the bands I was in at the time, breaking us up).
Somebody has been putting some of Steel Fury's (not to be confused with the video game of the same name) stuff up on youtube. They were originally from Montgomery and one of my bands shared a warehouse with them. There are lots of stories not safe for the blog from then. . .
Sometimes me and Fury's bassplayer, Tim, would take a break from our respective bands (this when I was playing with Vicious Diplomacys' bass player, who also sang in my band, but then didn't later in Vicious Diplomacy) and I'd play Tim's bass and Tim would play my guitar and sing. It was just a joke, but it rocked out in a weird way. We'd just make stuff up for an hour or so and people would take turns drumming, all the hangers on getting crazier and crazier with the slam-dancing and other forms of delinquency. We actually had a name for our improvisational "band" but I can't remember it, nor can I remember the name of my band that shared the warehouse with Steel Fury (which is sad, because the songs that Dave, of later Vicious Diplomacy bassplaying fame, wrote were actually good).
This is perhaps my one claim to musical fame, or to being a footnote to a footnote of fame (you have to be a pretty big metal geek to still hold a flame for Steel Fury). If I remember right, before Steel Fury moved to Southern California they actually had a singer, and the only time Tim sang was when he was playing my guitar and I was playing his bass. Maybe seeing how well his singing went over with me was part of them ultimately reducing to a three piece and handing the duties over to Tim as in the above video. Also, I think the guitarist's DK (for Dead Kennedy's) sticker might have been influenced by the exact same sticker I had on my guitar. I certainly had the sticker first. Both of these things might be misrememberings though. As noted, I can't even remember the name of the band I was in that shared their upstairs warehouse space (the cover band I was in at the time was called Side Effects; I did a much better job in the punk band).
I also just found a song from the great Austin band, Three Lesbian Folksingers, fronted by Phillip, still up on myspace (unfortunately not their best song, Espanol es la Linua de La Rock and Roll, or their second best, Wee Little Wee, or the other one where at the end Phillip would just scream his head off for a few minutes). My band at the time "Ben Wa Blues" played gigs with them, by his own admission he actually lifted the primal screaming bit from me, which was cool, and makes me a third order footnote at least. The thing is, it was just weird when I did it; it actually worked for them. They were a much better band, and I'm bummed that all I can find is their Jello Lover song.
I'm a much happier person these days, but all that music produced some really good times. I can't wait to teach my kids to play, but they'll probably get in to jazz flute just to rebel against me. That's O.K. though.
I wanted to quote some of the juicy stuff here, but there's so much deep truth in the article I could not figure out where to begin.
And some falsehood. No mention of the Doors even in the discussion of lesser demigods, Grail Marcus' last book notwithstanding. Come on! The singer had about one-half octave range and they still managed to write catchy tunes. It's was miraculous. And no mention of Adam Ant (aka Leslie Stewart Goddard)? Equally preposterous.
I would also like to produce extended meditations on the importance of people defending preposterous claims, but I'm not feeling that creative this evening. In any case, it's a wonderful article and Joe Bob does say to check it out.
The older I get, the more moved I am by G.E. Moore's two universe thought experiment.
One universe contains things of great beauty and the other does not, while neither contains creatures even sapient enough for the beauty or lack thereoff to make any difference. Moore thinks that it is clear that the beauty containing universe is more valuable than the one that does not contain beauty. If I remember right, for Moore this shows that forms of hedonism that entail that the only intrinsic good is pleasure cannot be correct.
There are all sorts of strategies for dismissing possible world type gedankenexperiments, but I don't think they should make us dismiss Moore's conclusion.
In yesterday's post I talked about Greil Marcus' new chapter on the importance of putting something out there into the void. I think that what he has in mind does the same service as Moore's experience, and moreover expresses a norm quite central to the practice of art.
Most art is never really enjoyed by anybody other than the artist. Think of somebody sitting on the back porch playing the blues. Most such performers never get discovered by anybody, they just make our universe a little bit more beautiful. Now clearly, an undiscovered artist doing this considers the unverse to be a better place for being more beautiful.
The obvious response here is that the performer gets pleasure out of the performance, so this does not show that beauty is intrinsically valuable after all. But consider this Euthyphronic problem. To sustain the anti-Moorean point you'd have to say that the act is valuable because it brings pleasure to the performer. But this is phenomenologically wrong. It goes the other way around. The extent to which the performer derives pleasure from the act is largely the extent to which the performer takes the the act to be valuable.
Moreover, the act does not always bring pleasure. Our weird obsessions with trying to make this universe more beautiful can actually diminish pleasure quite a bit (consider the Van Goghs and Gauguins who never become famous).
The moral here of course is that both beauty and pleasure are intrinsic goods. I wish I could say more about the failed Gauguin case, but I don't think I can. With the exception of propositional logic, philosophy provides no algorithms. And with the exception of digital computers, neither does the universe.
You fools! One arose from among you, penning a zombie classic that managed to use both the diminished and augmented fifth chord in the same song without sounding forced or atonal. One from among you presented a song whose Chalmeresque lyrics were not overly obvious and yet also deeply evocative. One of your own sacrificed himself to the vocal art of the "dying-cat" style without once plagiarizing Joni Mitchell. And when he came down from the mountain (or rather the tape recorder in his living room), what did he find? Idolators, worshipping at the feet of derivative bit of wimp folk, just because it made you feel smart.
Well, all I have to say is that you won't have Richard Nixon to push around any more.
This may be heresy on these shores, but by my lights The Damned's first single "New Rose," (promotional video here) is an even better example of how great punk rock is also great rock than the Dead Boy's "Sonic Reducer" (CBGBs performance here).
Thus the Damned's post-punk "goth" move to keyboards (Eloise here, Grimley Fiendish here), is I think just as terrible as Queen's move to keyboards a few years earlier. Bauhaus' guitar driven post-punk "goth" music is infinitely better as far as the music also instantiating the form of Rock (Dark Entries here, Stigmata Martyr here, Bella Lugosi's dead here).
This raises an interesting question. Arguably, jazz guitar would be much better if jazzers used Django Reinhardt as their main inspiration instead of Charlie Christian. Can something similar be said for goth, which seems to have been much more informed by The Damned's keyboard approach than by Bauhaus' rocking out approach?
One would expect the genre of horror-punk to be heavily influenced by Bauhaus, but as far as I can tell it's all a footnote to the Misfits.
How plausible are these conjectures? Moreover, can anyone name any good bands strongly influenced by Bauhaus (as, for example so many good bands are strongly influenced by Bowie, The Velvet Underground, and the Stooges)? If not, why not?
alcohol aliens animals apocalypse beauty centaurs books cities dancing death despair destruction the devil dread drugs elves
evil facism faith god good heaven hell history home horror injustice innocense jesus joy liberty loneliness loss love movies murder neighbors pain pleasure possession powerlessness predators prey prison redemption robots salvation sex sorrow struggle stupidity sublimity suicide tragedy trains ugliness violation violence unicorns werewolves zen zombies
One of the strange things about pop (broadly conceived) music is that listeners have so little ability to seperate narrator from artist. For example, Johnny Cash said that many people he met thought he'd really done hard time in prison.
I guess this happens to novelists who write in first person sometimes as well.
Sometimes artists themselves end up getting confused, I think always to their destruction. If Jack Kerouac had continued to think of On the Road as a fictional great American Novel he might not have drank himself to death. Tupac Shakur's confusion of himself with his character led to his death much quicker.
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