Category: Current Events

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Primates of Park Avenue: A Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down…

You Can Tune A Piano, When The Heat Is On, But Can You Roll With the Changes, After the Boys of Summer Have Gone?

Back in June, in the run-up to my birthday, I found myself contemplating how much things have changed since I was a kid in the 1970s. Apparently, that sort of pre-birthday nostalgia is a contractual obligation of middle age.

During my formative years, the culture of postmodernity was in its insurgent adolescence (a lot like me). It was steadily chipping away at the hegemony of cultural modernity, but it was not yet the cultural dominant.[1] At least that’s my sense of things now, looking back on it. So the 1970s and the early 1980s existed in a murky transition state, with one foot still on the familiar ground of cultural modernity and the other foot now firmly planted in the exciting possibilities of the postmodern.

Today, things are different. The culture of postmodernity–in all its ironic glory–is fully dominant. And with each passing year, the time-honored roles, categories, and clearly defined conceptual boundaries of cultural modernity (and my youth) have become either residual artifacts of history or hybrid, postmodern jumbles that resemble something familiar from the old days, but seem to mean something different now.[2]

If the culinary metaphor for cultural modernity is a Swanson TV dinner, with each food item placed oh so rationally in its own distinct section on the disposable aluminum tray, the culinary metaphor for cultural postmodernity is a compostable burrito bowl from Chipotle. Or maybe it’s a scoop of rum-infused banana, peanut butter, and chocolate-covered bacon ice cream in an artisanal waffle cone. (“It’s like Bananas Foster on steroids and Elvis Presley’s favorite sandwich all together in a single cone!”)

No more separating things. Now, highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, and no brow all exist on equal footing. For the first rule of cultural postmodernity is this: “Mix it all together, put a big spoonful in your mouth, and savor the weird and wonderful diversity of flavors.”

Curation, as Fredric Jameson has argued, is the highest form of artistic expression in postmodernism,[3] and an embrace of eclectic mixtures has become the ultimate mark of taste and refinement. The person who elegantly creates the most unexpected and far-flung mix of flavors earns the most cultural capital. The remaining capital goes to anyone who enjoys the mix and gets its references and allusions.

As a result, we’ve come to distrust things that feel like the divided sections of that old TV dinner tray. That’s not an interesting mix. It’s hardly a mix at all. It’s a relic from an older and more rigid time and place, an era where cultural relevance filters were typically on the supply-side and cultural elites at the top had disproportionate influence over what sort of stuff made it through the filter and into our ears, eyes, noses, and bellies.

Today, the old supply-side filters feel increasingly like one of those residual artifacts of history I referenced above. They still exist, but they’ve become less and less effective, as we’ve been overloaded with more and more information. This has forced most of us to do a lot more of our own demand-side filtering–quite a wearying experience for many people.

But it has also taught us to question things, like whether fancy job titles and educational attainment really provide the assurances of quality, legitimacy, and relevance that were attributed to them back in the day. For in the age of the Internet, where almost anyone can share their mix of thoughts with everybody, it’s become difficult to predict where meaningful commentary will come from, what it will look like, and who will be offering it. So it pays to take each bite thoughtfully and with an open mind, rather than rushing straight to judgement. Continue reading “Primates of Park Avenue: A Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down…”

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Carl Wilson in Slate: What you can learn about music—and humanity—from the YouTube comments on Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.”

A nice post from Carl Wilson in Slate the other day. You’ll want to check out the whole thing for sure, but here’s a little appetizer:

This is the insight that both Slutsky and Barber have flashed on intuitively, I think, in choosing the comments on songs (out of all the YouTube offerings): that music, because it can be background and foreground, because it is about sculpting time, often insinuates itself into our lives more in the way that people and events do than in the manner of a movie or a painting. It’s a medium of echoes, inherently conversational. The way that we address it, whether coherently or inchoately, is in turn musical.

As an alum of the University of Michigan, I always think of Ann Arbor when I hear Bob Seger (especially “Mainstreet”, but “Night Moves” can do it too). I also think about growing up in Champaign, Ill, another midwestern college town.

Like a number of other artists who hit in the mid 1970s, Seger was over 30 and a grizzled rock vet by the time “Night Moves” finally hit. And while I enjoyed his work during my teenage years, his popular songs from that period (similar to those of groups like Fleetwood Mac) often reflect what I would consider to be the concerns of a people who are now firmly adults (something I’ve realized when I’ve listened to these songs over the last couple of decades).

One of those concerns is undoubtedly the dawning realization that time is not standing still. I don’t know about anyone else, but in my late 20s and early 30s I had my first experience of feeling my youth was starting to slip away. That engendered a pretty heavy wave of nostalgia. Then, that passed. Now, at 50, I realize that 30 was still quite young (and I sometimes have nostalgia waves about that time). I bet my mom, who will soon be 81, feels the same way about being 50.

It’s apropos that somebody would single out Bob Seger and “Night Moves” for this sort of discussion, because it is, of course, a song about nostalgia and the very time sculpting qualities of music that Carl describes above. (“Woke last night to the sound of thunder, how far off I sat and wondered. Starting humming a song from 1962. Ain’t it funny how the night moves. When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose. Strange how the night moves. With autumn closing in…”)

The same is true of many other Seger hits from this period (e.g., “Old Time Rock and Roll”, “Against the Wind”, “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”, “Still the Same”, “Like a Rock”). Unlike his earlier regional hit “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”, which is very much in the present tense (ain’t good lookin’, and you know I ain’t shy…), Seger’s post-Night Moves work is filled with nostalgic paradise lost stories in which music regularly plays a starring role.

On this Thanksgiving morning, I think it’s time to go put some Seger on and think about the good old days.

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Digital Music News: Top TV Producer: “It’s Amazing That We Still Pay Artists Anything for Music…”

Because it’s all about exposure right?

Personally, I find this attitude to be B.S, and I hope people will think twice before falling prey to it. 

That being said, it’s also important to remember the following: If your song gets played on television in a commercial or on a television show, you can still make performance license money from that, even if you don’t receive an upfront licesing fee. I’ve known people who did quite well just of the performance royalties.

So the most prudent approach is to take each licensing opportunity on a case by case basis.

Beyond that, the collapse in master/sync fees also underscores that there is a lot more “good enough” music out there these days. Recording technology is much more available (and affordable) than it was 20-30 years ago. Many more people have learned how to use it. So licensees have more options to choose from.

–from Digital Music News.