That’s right… I said Sevara Nazarkhan - a pop singer from Uzbekistan. I found a free copy of her latest album in the office the other day, and I’m delighted. I didn’t do a Web search until after I had given it a chance. And, hey, I recognize the cover of her first album… I wonder if I own a copy of that one. I know that I was tempted to buy it once, but it’s hard to remember a name like Sevara Nazarkhan if you don’t think about it for a while. Well… it was for me.
When I saw the first Sevara Nazarkhan record, I probably thought it was Yungchen Lhamo, who is also on Real World Records. My guess is that I was disappointed when it wasn’t. That’s too bad. But in some sense, because I trust the label, it was probably just a matter of time before I investigated further.
Posted in music | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:56:00 GMT
Music is an emotional subject. All sorts of people get excited about their identification with a form of music. We invest emotionally in music, and it stands in as marker of our identity to others.
But a lot of that is just marketing. Companies selling us back the identity that was already ours - albeit in a non-standardized form. It’s a little like a dairy farmer buying homogenized milk from the grocery store.
But despite all that, I would agree that millions - potentially billions - of people feel completely comfortable adapting to musical styles and in turn making those styles undeniably their own. It is like fashion in this respect: Fashion for the mind. In fact, often enough musical tastes are reinforced with fashion - could you have punk music without the torn fabric, dyed hair, and safety pins?
Major demographic shifts in the 20th century are reflected in changing musical tastes. One major shift is from Rural to Urban: That is how we lose Folk and Country but gain Soul, Rock, and further mutations like Punk, Metal, Rap, House, Electronica, etc.. Country music doesn’t die out entirely, though… The feel of the musical traditions we have flow into the creation of new music in an almost Darwinian way: Successful new styles are what listeners can accept - Generation after generation of small changes (or even punctuated equilibrium) in song styles that have to pass the test of popularity (even if only for a particular niche), and then become embedded in the consciousness of the listeners. Something similar happens as immigrants arrive - another great shift in our recent history. (I’m listening to Flamenco at the moment…)
Industrial scale reproduction of music puts the whole process into overdrive. Just as screws and other hardware were standardized, the whole concept of genre depends in part on the necessity of affixing a label and flooding the market. There is a real basis for the labels, and if a musician wants to market anything novel or hybrid, trouble arises - sometimes the work is thereby doomed to failure.
Go one step further and you find that even audiences tend toward standardization - for the reason I discussed earlier: People identify emotionally with music. The music a person will or will not listen to appears to be a matter of musical genre. Fashion follows from genre. Genres can be linked to attitude, clothing, or even skin color. Play that funky music, white boy. Nothing says we can’t all enjoy our own bizarre deviations from the musical norm. Renaissance music on period instruments? Or perhaps some Nobukazu Takemura anyone? I could go on and on.
Musicians are listeners, too: They gravitate toward musical genres as they learn their craft partly because they begin to hear in genres at an early age. They seek psychic comfort in identity too.
So please don’t get upset with me if you happen to enjoy Country Music…
I consider Country Music moribund. It is presented as a shiny new thing with a fashion to match, but I think all the signifiers are artificial: Repurposed; Expropriated; A Sham. Somebody out there in America is not a rancher - but they are wearing a cowboy hat anyway. I could say similar things about running shoes and basketball shorts.
I think Country Music is a cynical ploy to capture a subset of the pop music audience that was mildly uncomfortable with the offerings - a real business opportunity, if you will. These people were not well served by the closest mismatch. Someone will no doubt suggest (if anybody actually reads this…) that I am only expressing my prejudice for style. But, maybe my point is larger than just Country Music. Maybe if I try hard enough, I can unravel the entire music industry. It pushes people to buy in to an identity as a prerequisite for the acceptance of others. That’s one of the reasons music gets along with fashion so well.
Country music is a fact, as much as my personal prejudices might indeed make me wish it would just go away. But I also think that as an identity, Country Music represents a deep-seated disaffection with reality; A conservative barrier to new thinking. The past gives us a lot of rich tradition, but I wouldn’t want us to go back there.
I’m already moving on to a new argument: We have painted ourselves into a corner in this society. A lot of the problems you read about in the news are a gradually increasing mass psychosis caused by the wrong kind of incentives. And I won’t apologize for thinking that Country Music is not a helpful device for assisting us in the future.
Oh well, I guess this is what it looks like when I publish first drafts of half-formulated ideas…
Posted in music, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:07:00 GMT
No silly, it’s Rock Band the Video Game.
One of the bars in my neighborhood has installed the video game and lets people play on Tuesday nights. It used to be karaoke. People got tired of karaoke, the staff more than anyone, I’m guessing. Two things worry me about this game.
First, it’s similar to the nostalgic exercise of playing old ‘hit’ songs to evoke a golden past. Just as with karaoke, you align yourself with the pleasant memory and live vicariously through the cultural product of the recorded song. Not all of this is a bad thing. But, I’m beginning to sense the pathos of it: People taking excessive association with a life they never lived, instead of doing something new, creative, and possibly just as fun. By this method we abdicate. The future is less rich. I don’t worry too much though - I imagine future teenage rebellions to invigorate culture in our wake. This is another wave of the stultifying effects of reproduction on our relationship to the works of art.
Second, and more disturbing is the bad feeling I get from all of the members of this video game family: “Dance, Dance Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” have been popular in Japan first. The games had to be ‘localized’ for American shores by stocking them with the pop songs from our charts. Every one of these games operates on the same basic principle: Simon Says. When I was a kid, we had the electronic Simon game with the four big buttons that lit up in a sequence that you had to repeat… In my mind, all the fancy guitar and drum controllers and the silly rock avatars playing on their virtual stage on the monitor do not change the basic principle at work here: You do what the machine tells you. Your score quantifies how well you obey. Is this the future? People sure look like they’re having fun doing it. “The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect world - Where everyone would be happy…”
And, the funny thing about the songs themselves: They’re not all necessarily popular hits - they’re specifically considered ‘hard rock’. This makes sense with the Black Sabbath or Soundgarden. But then you get to the grey areas - Weezer makes some sense, but R.E.M.? I could go on. We all have our personal favorites. I suspect there is some interest in crushing this out of us, though. Marketing is certainly much easier if we all like the same stuff for the same reasons.
Well, I’ve never played. My friends have tried to push me into it. It probably is fun, I won’t doubt that. Most nights when I’ve seen it, I get a real serious craving to go home and play my real guitar. I’ve even said it out loud. My reclusive habits are not the issue. It would be fun to jam with some people on other real instruments. I’m just not sure I know many people who do play. The game has levels you can set individually for the four players. It simplifies the task by presenting more or less decimated ‘fake-book’ sequences you have to match. The microphone checks your pitch and ‘gate times’ to score. There are bonuses for improv in clearly marked sections.
Posted in music, ontology, bar-scene, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:53:00 GMT
Half Asleep To NPR
It’s Memorial Day today. I had to work nevertheless. This morning my alarm clock went off at 5:30, just like normal, and I listened to NPR for an hour while I debated how early I needed to arrive at work.
To my surprise, the radio program - Morning Edition - transitioned with a track from the new Kaki King record that I am obsessed with “Air And Kilometers”. I have all four of her records now: I wish this didn’t sound like a criticism, but the records are not getting ‘better’. They’re all quite good, but if you insist that each new record be better than the last, you’re really missing the point. I’ve been a fan of many bands that I thought went stale after years of producing records and gaining in popularity. I don’t get the impression that Kaki is getting any more popular, so that’s not an issue for me.
I should report that the album format has not impressed me lately. And I say this as someone who buys whole CDs, not downloads single tracks. It’s an old argument, indeed: The album packed with filler to gird up one catchy single. I even remember my father expressing delight at an artist whose records didn’t attempt this maneuver. As if it were unheard of. I guess it was.
I remember very clearly that my high school friends were very excited about Fugazi records when they came out. Naturally, the success of other local bands provided some impetus for our own. But I was troubled. I only liked about half of the songs. No doubt I was a misfit, but I was even a misfit with this crowd. Fugazi is like a force of nature. Those guys just never stop. They provide the shibboleth for a counterculture: Fans revel in the negative, also. Hipsters like to keep something for themselves; Something that the squares don’t know about. And I was troubled because in so many things people demanded you be ‘in’ or ‘out’. I was riding the fence. And I assumed - I feared - that the in-crowd credibility of liking this signature act would blind every potential adherent to their faults. Fanaticism is just that: A feedback process whereby the doubts are silenced. That isn’t me.
The Kaki King records all have some rambling quality to them. With each record I notice it more. It can be as technically brilliant as classical music, but boring anyway. I can respect the pieces adamantly, but prefer to enjoy something else. Albums are not necessarily easy to craft, even given a list of good songs. You can disagree with the order all you want - now in a digital player, you can shuffle to your heart’s content. In a real sense, though, these rambles are what she does best. I can’t expect every tract to pop. Common sense would tell you that only a choice few will. And that’s “Air And Kilometers”. It snuck up on me: At first listen, it is maybe too happy. But the progression is an amazing little music machine. The same little rhythm guitar and a lap steel swooping in with a melody I mistook for a bowed instrument like viola. Each precisely fitted section is like a restatement of the theme. Each time through I realize the undercurrent of melancholy to the cheerful notes. The song works like a math proof, every step carefully introducing a new bit of insight. The lap steel gets a little more spacious with reverb, unless it’s just my imagination.
But back up a minute: in the order presented, the songs sometimes sound different. They inform each other. On one album, there is a song that is not to my mind particularly good, “My Insect Life” - but coming as it is, a slow rising chord progression, and the first time we hear her sing at all, right after a furiously technical slug-fest of ax grinding, it is like grace; like some sublime forgiveness. Or I’m wrong - isn’t she asking me sweetly for MY forgiveness after I held on to the ride that came before? I don’t think I would care much for the song on its own - it functions so well following the other. They would be movements in a symphony, were it not for record companies and 45 minute LPs. And, neither of these are the little ditties that charm me throughout her work, as does “Air And Kilometers”.
I get the impression - and maybe I’m just being snobbish - that the kids producing the music segments on Morning Edition do not experience the music the same way that I do: It’s nice music for an incidental gap-filler between stories. And it worked just fine. But the problem here is that I have attended to some of the songs they play with my full attention. And once in a while, one of those songs has crumpled my heart like a paper cup and then timidly handed it back to me like a gift. “Here you go. Enjoy”. I guess I take it too seriously - and it can be downright incongruous to hear such a song stuck in as ‘filler’. When I look down, dreamlike, at that crushed heart, I know something I didn’t know before; I comprehend, even thought I can’t explain. It actually IS a gift.
See… I really do take it too seriously.
Posted in music | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 26 May 2008 19:39:00 GMT
Today has been deemed “Record Store Day” by somebody. I’m not all that sure how such a thing is agreed upon or becomes official. It’s intended to celebrate independent music retailers, and it draws heavily on the fact that most successful musicians grew up going to independent record stores, since chain retailers and internet downloads are a comparatively recent phenomenon.
Some time later I’ll rehash my troubles with this concept. I work for one of those retailers, so I have the instinct to protect the breed. And, furthermore, I find small businesses more interesting - I even think that enormous projects are better off done with joint ventures and contracting out a lot of heavy lifting to keep the vision together in one place. But another part of me worries that this is all just misplaced nostalgia: Of course I wish I could go back to a time of funky little record stores, book stores, or coffee shops, but the forces threatening to destroy these businesses are built upon other things that people want more. And, because we usually fail to see the big picture as a society - or how the big trends emerge from the small actions of many individuals, we don’t point the blame at ourselves.
Despite the hot weather today, I was planning to go down to the Dupont Olsson’s this afternoon to check out the three bands scheduled to play. I like to see what kind of attendance these things draw.
Posted in music, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:47:00 GMT
I’m listening to the new Kaki King CD “Dreaming Of Revenge”, not actually having those dreams myself. It’s rare these days I get excited about music - that I get a change to hear something new and interesting. I still discover interesting old stuff once in a while, but new bands just don’t cut it. Pop music is such a monoculture these days. Even the indie-rock I would hope/expect to find interesting always turns out to be dull. I worry that everyone has gotten together to finally agree on what is good - and I think it sucks. Ah… to be a frustrated music fan. I keep saying that the only way to fight it is to make my own music, so I can say “See - this is good music.” But I fear that I have not acquired the right techniques to make my vision real yet. So at least I know where to start.
“Dreaming…” is the forth Kaki King CD. She has gone from solo guitar to adding other band instruments and even singing(!) I like the result, even though I wish it were still solo guitar. I kept her first two CDs in the car stereo of the Toyota I rented in Texas last summer, so every time I hear them, I think of driving around in Texas.
Posted in music | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:03:00 GMT
I was keeping one of my guitars in the office while my boss was out of town. Since I was doing the “hang around after punching out” routine a lot of days to work on something else and be around to cover emergencies, the guitar was a nice thing to have around.
Next week I’m taking time off, so it seemed like a natural thing to bring the guitar back home last night - it wasn’t raining and I wasn’t trying to carry a lot of other stuff back and forth. But one of my coworkers (Moonshine Tony) who has just started learning guitar recently stopped me on my way out… “Don’t take your guitar away - two more of us are bringing in our guitars tomorrow. We can have a jam session!”
Okay, well if it’s going to be that way… But, as I thought about it, I grew more skeptical. At what point in the day are the three of us going to have time place and opportunity to play guitar? It didn’t seem likely. I put it out of my mind. Now at 6:30, I’m about to leave, we’ve all three been busy or in meetings, I’m past the nine hour mark without a break to speak of, and I’m hot to go home. It sounded like a great idea, but I couldn’t help tempering it with a little realism.
Well, I spoke too soon: By sitting here at my computer complaining, I allowed enough time to pass - as I was packing up to leave, the guys showed up to play. We were a motley crew - My 12-string wasn’t tuned to any real notes, just to itself, so we discovered I was about a half-step flat. They were impressed that I could tune while they were making noise, but it wasn’t all that impressive - I had to keep tweaking it as one chord or another jangled weird with the other guitars.
We had Bill, who’s been playing 40 years. He’s the sort of guitarist who worked hard to learn the songs he wanted to play, claims ignorance on technique and disdains theory. And there was Tony, who recently picked up his guitar. He’s got a laminated fold-out with charts of every chord you can imagine - the sort of thing that amuses the veteran player Bill - and plenty of enthusiasm. Right in the middle was me: Playing 20 years and neglecting it with relish. We traded licks and philosophy for about an hour before we all had to split.
Posted in music, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:28:00 GMT
I was at work again today. I got the “use it or lose it warning” on vacation hours again this week - Sometimes it’s like they don’t talk to each other around here. If my boss weren’t in Australia for three weeks, I’d probably have taken this week off. With a little luck, we will be back to normal on Tuesday. So the chances are good that I will take a little time off soon.
Since it seems like a waste to come to Silver Spring for a five-hour work day, I brought my laptop so I could try getting a few other things done.
If you consider watching clips of MTV from 1983 “getting things done”…
So we had better do a little media criticism, otherwise it’s a colossal waste of time:
In 1983, I was eleven. These videos are apparently from October when I was twelve. The only time I saw MTV that year was at my grandmother’s house outside of Dayton, Ohio. She only had cable for clear reception of the local news. We flipped through the channels to find something more useful to pre-teens, and MTV was the ultimate. Undiluted pop culture. It didn’t matter that we could hear those songs on the radio - that we probably did hear them driving back and forth between Maryland and Ohio. You just can’t turn away from the direct feed. Once you know it’s there, you can’t look away. And an eleven-year-old boy hasn’t developed the self control to walk away from a 24-hour pop video channel. (Does the 36 year-old have it?)
But look again. The production quality! This is raw marketing and promotion. Every voice wants me to be excited. But we had no idea then how slick the marketing messages would eventually become. And judging from my own experience, maybe it’s all the more for the permissiveness: Responsible adults are probably conceding the loss in their war to protect kids from the media onslaught.
It’s funny to see the members of Stray Cats telling me that MTV is the coolest thing in the solar system (hyperbole!). It’s funny to see the host hawking a Police concert tour, sponsored by a men’s cologne. “We’d like to give everyone MTV in stereo”… call your cable company for the “special hookup”. Precious!
Today I see the desperation. They were desperate to get you to pay attention - and somehow that translated into necessity - somehow it worked. If I were running some global conspiracy to amp up consumer society ever further, I would destroy all record of vintage 1983 MTV. The last thing I would want is for you to have any perspective on the thing - for you to compare the ham-fisted attempts to get you excited from twenty five years ago with what can be done today. If I wanted to sell fashion, I wouldn’t want you to remember that anything came before - I’d want you to forget. And that is where memory is dangerous. Whatever happened to those people dancing in the Huey Lewis video? Are they still dressing that way for a night on the town tonight?
And the actual commercials show their age, too. Some of them are for records (8-Track tapes if you prefer). What’s the problem? What’s lacking? The technology and the techniques have co-evolved over the years, even if the specific forms have not.
There is a flood of specifics. I fear that while I watch I can’t actually make any sense in writing. It’s too much to think about.
I can’t help being suspicious of the whole damned package. Apparently there are people who don’t care - but I’ll never be one of them.
Posted in film-and-TV, music | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:08:00 GMT
Last night was a quiet Thursday at my local bar. I got home from work a bit late after trying to take care of all the loose ends in anticipation of my week off. I went online briefly, had to reboot for some anti-virus updates, and read for a bit. As soon as I knew it, it was 9 o’clock already. The rain had let up and it was one of those misty nights where everything stays wet, and a lot of people have their umbrellas up for no good reason. I guess they just have a lower tolerance for moisture, but then how is an umbrella going to help in those circumstances?
Carina is clearly my favorite bartender of all times. I walked up to find her and Paul, their mountain of a doorman, hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the bar. She was wearing her reading glasses and smoking a cigarette. When she finished, we went inside to compare the books we were reading. She’s been reading a mass-market paperback of “Wicked”. I never got involved with any of the Gregory McGuire books, but it looked charming. She also recommended the books of Christopher Moore, and she made them sound very interesting. So many books, so little time!
I had my copy of “Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture”. Carina asked me what a Simulacrum was. (College graduates are always asking me these questions. If I don’t like you very much, my answer is “How the HELL should I know?!?”, but I’d never say that to my favorite bartender of all times!)
I confessed that I was only just beginning to figure it out myself. It helps me to use “Simulation” as a mnemonic, and conceptually it involves life in a world of broadcasts and reproductions. Beyond that, it’s difficult for me to say. Our world is drenched in ironic commentary that can only be ‘about’ itself. I used the example of owning/consuming CDs of music instead of being forced to see musicians play. I didn’t delve too deeply, but now that I’ve thought about it a little more, I would say that our primary experience of a phenomenon like music is the playback of a recording, and that every encounter with live musicians is tainted by what we expect from those perfect reproductions. Surely this is in the book somewhere, but: “The Original fails to live up to the Copy”. This process feeds back on itself, and can be taken further, to television talk shows, and celebrity debutantes getting in trouble, or any narrative that describes that process and therefore relies upon it for its existence.
Even if I’m wrong about that - I’m certainly close. What I just said is important in its own right, and is somehow related to what people are talking about when they know what they’re talking about. Did that make sense?
Well I realized that this charming anecdote played right into a thought I’ve been having recently. The challenge of explaining the term ‘simulacrum’ resonated for me. How much would I need to know to claim expertise on a subject like Semiotics, Critical Literary Theory, or Postmodernism? For that matter, what about Greek Mythology, Electrical Power Systems, Computer Programming, or Particle Physics? Couldn’t I just look it up on Wikipedia? Maybe I just have to bide my time, learn something that IS there already until the knowledge I seek comes on line.
Posted in music, ontology, bar-scene, photos, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:12:00 GMT
