Brian Wilson, the Voyeur of Surf and Sun

Rob Tannenbaum in the NY Times:

Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.

And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

And this, a point I have tried to make here many times:

Brian, a classic “indoor kid,” wrote about those adventures from a position of voyeurism. In a 1965 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned “our West Coast sound, which we pioneered.” The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. “We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.” He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.

A songwriter doesn’t need to have firsthand experience with his subject matter, only an inquisitive imagination, an emotional link to a topic and an eye for detail. As an observer, Wilson could write exuberant songs about teenage frolic. 

But he wasn't a frolicsome teenager and never had been; he was the sad son of an abusive father and struggled with depression all his life, rarely even setting foot on a beach.

In art, "authenticity" is baloney. No actual surfer ever wrote a song about surfing as good as Wilson's, and, to quote the Hagakure, "this understanding extends to all things." The best art about poverty and oppression was not created by poor, oppressed people. The best art about war was not all created by soldiers. The whole notion that art draws from deep personal experience is – well, not exactly wrong, just a lot more complicated than much of the world wants to believe. People say, "You can tell that's he's been there," but you can't tell that at all. Maybe he has and maybe he hasn't, and if he has, it was not that experience that made him an artist. Art is sideways to real experience.

Shakespeare was not a soldier, a courtier, or a woman, although thousands of people have insisted he must have been, because he conveyed those experiences so well. He was just very, very good at putting experience into words.

Brian Wilson never surfed and never enjoyed the kind of life he sang about. He saw it, and then from other parts of himself, the artistic parts, the parts that are so weird that people used to insist that they didn't come from inside us at all, but from the muses or the gods, summoned the magic to put that vision into song.

Désenchantée

So YouTube randomly offered me a French pop song, "Désenchantée" by Mylène Farmer. Curious, I listened. It's an ok song, and Farmer is obviously a star-level performer. The choreographer of the dancers, is, alas, truly horrendous, some real Eurovision-level tripe. 

The video is shot in a stadium full of screaming fans. Farmer sings the song once, then walks out into the audience and has them sing it back to her; thousands of these people know the song by heart.

I can read French, sort of, but my oral comprehension is terrible. So I looked up the lyrics. As you would expect from a song called "Disenchanted," they are pretty grim. 

Swimming in the troubled waters of tomorrows
Waiting here for the end
Floating in the air too heavy
Of almost nothing
Who can I reach out to?

If I have to fall from a great height
May my fall be slow
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well

Everything is chaos next to it
All my ideals: damaged words
I am looking for a soul who can help me
I am from a disenchanted, disenchanted generation

There is a second verse, then he chorus again, and then 

Chaos, chaos, chaos
Chaos, chaos, chaos

But, look around the stadium at the people belting out these words; does anybody look sad? No, they look like this is at least the best day of the month for them, if not the whole year.

It struck that this one of the themes of modern culture: nothing makes people feel as good as singing along with up tempo songs about the collapse of civilization and the misery of existence.

Looking Back at the Streaming Revolution

At the NY Times, musician Elizabeth Nelson reviews a documentary, co-produced by Eminem, that hails the original online music pirates as the heroes of a wonderful revolution. Nelson is unconvinced, and offers these two possible takes:

The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever.

I may be speaking as a working musician here, but from my perspective — the perspective, I think, of almost any nonmogul with a stake in the industry — this is an obviously insane interpretation of events. The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.

I have long considered online music piracy to be the just comeuppance of an industry that refused either to sell the public what they wanted or price what they were selling anywhere near what people wanted to pay. Back in 1990, if you heard a song on the radio by an artist who intrigued you, the only thing you could do was to go out and pay $18 for a cd that, as often as not, had only one good song, the one you had already heard. I did this at least ten times, and I resented it. I remember reading critics at the time who said that people were begging for singles, not albums, but the industry mostly refused to sell them and when they did they charged $5-7. I understood that downloading was theft, but, again, I had zero sympathy for anyone in the music industry.

I think the amount of money non-famous artists used to make from album sales is often exaggerated these days. Other than the biggest stars, only cranky hermits could really earn a living just off sales. Touring was always how musicians made it, and it still is. Live music is bigger than ever before. Many musicians regard their appearances on Spotify more as free ads for their live shows than as a meaningful revenue stream.

As for corporate sameness, well, that is pretty much the top lament of our cultural era. My experience, however, has been completely different. Thanks to YouTube I have discovered more new music over the past five years than any comparable period of my life. Viz., all the Nordic Ambient music I have discovered, artists like Waldruna and Sigur Ros. How would I have discovered this music in 1990? How would I have stumbled onto Eivor, singing in Faroese? I can't imagine. As I recall, the way it worked was that you had to have a friend who was a music obsessive who spent 20 percent of his income on obscure albums he ordered from catalogs. Absent such a friend who happened to be plugged in, you were out of luck. (Whatever Elizabeth Nelson thinks, a record store was absolutely not a space where you could interact with music without corporate gatekeepers.)

It is true that the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify are mostly useless, to a degree that baffles me; given all the money there to be made by a service that really made good recommendations, why can't anyone make it work? But only a small amount of reading and exploration is enough to find some names of artists and bands who sound interesting, and rather than having to plunk down $18 to find out what they sound like you can just pop online and listen.

From my perspective, this is the greatest era ever to be a lover of music.

"Now and Then," by "The Beatles"

Some time in the early 1990s, Yoko Ono provided Paul McCartney with a cassette tape that John Lennon had recorded in their NY apartment in the late 1970s. In 1995 the three surviving Beatles went to work with the tape and produced two new songs, "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love," adding backing vocals and instrumentation to the recording of John's voice. These were released as by "The Beatles" as part of  the Anthology project.

But the third song on the tape, "Now and Then," was a mess; the vocal was mixed up with a badly recorded piano and in 1995 it was judged not usable. But technology kept getting better, and Peter Jackson's team of audio engineers eventually figured out how to extract a remarkably clear track of John's voice. So Paul called Ringo and they got together and worked on the song, adding vocals and their own instrumentation, and then a guitar solo "in the style of" George, and then strings.

You can hear the resulting song here; there is also a video about the project that is interesting but is mainly a 12-minute justification.

Does the project need justification? Is this kind of amazing? Or is it instead a creepy pointer toward a future in which living musicians have to complete with the remastered, AI-processed, digitally recreated recordings of dead stars?

I can see the danger, but I can't get particularly upset about this project. It's so obviously a nostalgia trip, two old men and their aging fans trying to recreate their glory days; I can't imagine it will make much of a splash musically. It's a pretty ho-hum song, and the recovered vocal doesn't sound particularly good. And John really did record this, so his actual voice is there behind the final product in some form.

Deepfaking is a worrying thing for the future, but this project is very much about the past.

More on the End of Progress in Style and Art

At the NY Times, Jason Farago goes on at length about the end of the modernist project, the artistic command to "make it new."

To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright. Susan Sontag could write in 1965, with breezy confidence, that new styles of art, cinema, music and dance “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare.” Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. . . . Have you tried to furnish an apartment lately? Whether you are at Restoration Hardware or on Alibaba, what you are probably buying are replicas of European antiques: “contemporary” designs first seen in Milan in the 1970s or Weimar in the 1920s. Harry Styles is rocking in the ’80s; Silk Sonic is jamming in the ’70s; somehow “Frasier” has been revived and they barely had to update the wardrobes. . . . 

We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.

This is not at all a new sentiment; back in 2012 I wrote about an article that noted how paltry were the stylistic changes between 2012 and 1992 compared to those between 1992 and 1972, 1972 and 1952, 1952 and 1932, and so on. I mention this essay because Farago has an interesting theory about what is behind this: digital modes of distribution. 

The idea is that art and style changed rapidly through the modern period because there was a "hot" in group that established the trends, and people worked hard to keep up with those changing trends because that made you a hipster plugged into what was happening. If you didn't keep up, you were a hopeless square. So the rapid change happened because these avant garde circles had the power to drag everyone else along with them.

Much of the power of those in groups came because they were able to dominate the very limited channels of distribution: the radio, the key galleries, the big city symphonies, the very small world of cutting edge film. But the digital world has unlimited power of distribution, which nullifies the power of those channels and thus the power of the avant garde. Without needing to keep up with the ultra-cool trendsetters, they is no incentive for stylistic or artistic change.

It fascinates me that as far as music goes, there is essentially no generation gap between me and my children. The things they like that I don't span the decades from Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra to The Mountain Goats. Farago notes that the number one single of 2022 was actually released in 2020 but took more than a year to go viral on TikTok. That is because today's music, says Farago, consumer pays no attention to what is "hot" at the moment but cruises thorugh the decades as whim or taste requires. 

So, in this telling, rapid cultural change was created by the ability of a small, innovative avant garde to seize control of the key distribution nodes and force everyone to go along with them or be square, and the freedom the internet gives us to see or hear whatever we want, whenever we want, destroys their power and puts us back in a situation where changing a whole immense culture is very difficult.

Ye (the Artist Fomerly Known as Kanye West), Fandom, and My Attitude Toward the Universe

Kanye West  is the latest artist to raise uncomfortable questions about whether you can separate the person from the creation: anti-semitic rants, incoherently paranoid interviews, stalking his ex-wife, "slavery is a choice," etc. If you love his music, what are you supposed to do? (And note that Ye has probably made his biggest contribution as a producer, so just not listening to his own songs won't get you clear of him.)

What if we try to separate Ye’s art from his misbehavior? What if we say we are going to put Ye and his bigotry aside and focus purely on the music he gave the world? That’s a stance many of his fans are already comfortable taking. Ye has been so publicly outrageous for so long that plenty of people are used to disliking Ye the man and focusing all their attention on Ye the musician or Ye the fashion icon. Choosing to denounce Ye’s hate speech and still appreciate his music might not feel all that different from saying he was wrong for storming the stage at the VMAs but knowing you’re still going to buy his next album.

In the case of West, attitudes are complicated by his mental illness. He has been diagnosed as bipolar and has said on a couple of occasions, after incidents, "sometimes I forget to take my meds." So if you condemn his outbursts, are you being insensitive to the mentally ill?

That attitude is offensive to all the people with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses who don’t spend their days going on long antisemitic rants (to be clear, that’s most of them). Being bipolar can make a person paranoid and prone to conspiratorial thinking, but it does not make a person a bigot. It is possible, and indeed preferable, to separate Ye’s bigotry from his mental health problems when talking about his recent outbursts.

But some people who dumped on Britney Spears during her very public downward spiral into insanity, which led to the legal conservatorship and all that conflict, feel bad about it now and don't want to do it again. 

I no longer have any trouble with this sort of question. As far as I am concerned, all important artists fall into two categories: those whose horrible behavior we know about, and those whose horrible behavior we don't know about because it hasn't been revealed yet.

I don't mean that literally; I am sure there are great artists and other celebrities who are not horrible. But I refuse to get invested in admiring them, because I think that on average celebrities are horrible people, and that horribleness is one of the things that makes people celebrities. (Narcissism, in particular, seems to infect nearly all of them.) I have seen grown men looking heartbroken when it turns out that some athlete they have worshipped beats his wife and cheats on his taxes. Me, I decline to take the risk. In general I simply refuse to learn about their off-field or off-stage lives, and when it does happen I file it under, "huh, interesting." When is the next book due out?

True, some celebrities are worse than others. Some are criminals, and they should go to jail; I don't support any legal lenience for people just because they have legions of fans. But I enjoy art by criminals, too: Caravaggio, for example. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Hero-worship is not one of my vices; in fact I find it to be one of the most mysterious behaviors of my fellow humans. We're all human, and the evidence suggests that all humans are deeply flawed. Whether we're talking about prophets, saints, kings, generals, politicians, painters, writers, film-makers, whatever; they are all horribly flawed. (I suppose this is why I have a certain interest in the "take down the statues" crowd.) Given my historicals interests, I am often most curious about people who lived in other eras, times and places with moral ideas very different from our own. It strikes me as a waste of time to ask about the ethics and politics of the people who made, say, the Standard of Ur, the Iliad, or Stonehenge. When we get closer to our own time we have a lot more information, but I am still not much invested in "character." I have written, for example, about the different gay sexualities of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but while I find that interesting it doesn't have any impact on how much I like their art. 

T.S. Eliot was a racist, sexist, antisemitic lover of empire and desipser of the lower classes who treated his long-term mistress abominably, by our standards probably morally worse than Kanye West. But "The Waste Land" is still a great poem. If you don't like that, you are probably uncomfortable with the cruel randomness of our whole existence in this universe.

We are all, as I see it, thrown without our asking for it into a world we cannot understand, a world filled with terrible tragedy, where every beautiful creation seems to rest on a foundation of sin and crime. We can spend all our time moaning about that. Or, we can try to lift ourselves out of the muddy maelstrom by admiring the beauty, kindness, and cleverness of which the world is also full. We can marvel at the sumblime wonder of destructive storms, indulge ourselves, from our peaceful desks, in the intellectual fascination of war. We can be swept away by the fierceness of life's struggle against itself: the perfection of a tiger's killing machinery, the chemically choreographed precision of an ant army on the march. And we can enjoy the creative gifts of people clinging to sanity with a grip even weaker than our own, while also feeling thankful that it is not us who have to suffer that such wonders should be brought to light.

Ted Gioia Ponders Our Cultural Stagnation

Music critic Ted Gioia worries that even though our gigantic culture industry invests billions every year searching for market share, the whole arts world seems to be stagnating:

The latest news comes today from market research outfit Luminate, who tell us that the share of new music continues to shrink in the face of competition from old songs. I wrote about this a few months ago, and the numbers were already ugly back then.

But they have gotten worse.

The latest report shows that the consumption of old music grew another 14% during the first half of 2022, while demand for new music declined an additional 1.4%. These old tunes now represent a staggering 72% of the market.

And it’s likely to get worse when the full year numbers are released—because we are still in the midst of the Kate Bush/Metallica phenomenon spurred by the showcasing of their old songs on Stranger Things.

Things may be even worse in the movies:

A number of recent articles on Hollywood have announced that we are living in the Golden Age of the Aging Actor. Harrison Ford, who turns 80 this week, may be the most prominent example. As the public face of several major brand franchises, he is still in demand, and will soon show up in another Indiana Jones movie, a kind of Raiders of the Lost AARP Card affair. But this aging Ford assembly line is hardly an isolated example—the graying actor is everywhere. Top Gun is the biggest box office success of the year, and it features Tom Cruise reprising a role he last played in 1986. I fully expect to see a septuagenarian Superman or Batman in the future.

The Ringer recently did the math and found the average age of male leads has risen from around 37 in 2000 to over 45 in 2021. 

I’d like to be amused by all this, or maybe even applaud these senior citizens who have somehow extended their careers beyond normal limits. But the larger picture is disturbing.

Just follow the dollars. Every big budget movie this year is either a reboot, sequel, prequel, remake, or brand extension. Every last one of them. The largest investments in music are the acquisition of old publishing catalogs, while almost nothing is spent developing new artists. . . .

Nobody wants to take a chance on something new and different. It’s just too risky. You could even get fired for that.

Does this matter? Gioia thinks it does:    

But when cultures stop innovating, they soon lose the essential skills they need for their survival. I’m reminded of the Arch of Constantine built by order of the Roman Senate between the years 312 and 315 AD—when the Empire, for all its military might, had forgotten how to create impressive artistic works. As a result, the builders of this monument had to steal parts from older structures.

Decline of empires, etc., etc.

I am not much of a doomster myself, but I share this sense that there isn't much new happening in music, film or television. It has been years since the last time I eagerly awaited a new movie, a new cd, or the new season of a tv show. I am not sure how much of this is a change in me, and how much of that change is caused by cultural malaise. I certainly feel less involved in new cultural products than I used to. Some of that may be aging, but I don't think that's all of it, since my children feel pretty much the same way. I often find myself laughing out loud about the old songs they find to get into. 

I don't know what's going on, but it doesn't feel right.

RIP Paddy Moloney

The Chieftains have been a phenomenon. For nearly 50 year they toured more, recorded more, and collaborated with more other musicians than any other band I can think of. In fact I often wondered what their lives were like, since they seemed to be so constantly on the move around the world. They did more to preserve and spread traditional Irish music than anyone else ever has. Paddy Moloney was their founder and guiding spirit, so I toast his memory.  Here are some of the tracts they recorded with famous collaborators:

The Long Black Veil with Mick Jagger

Have I Told You Lately with Van Morrison

Mo Ghile Mear with Sting

The Foggy Dew with Sinead O'Connor (that's Moloney on the pipes)

Raglan Road with Joan Osborne

Down the Old Plank Road with John Hiatt

Dark as a Dungeon with Vince Gill

Lily of the West with Mark Knopfler

Lukey's Boat with Great Big Sea. (If you compare this version to one Great Big Sea recorded on their own, you see what The Chieftains brought to their collaborators: this one is ten times more lively, fun, and beautiful)

And an instrumental number, O'Sullivan's March

The Internet

Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything, all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime.
Anything and everything, all of the time.

–Bo Burnham 

Bluegrass Archaeology

Tyler Childers, "Banded Clovis"

Jenny of Oldstones

High in the halls of the kings who are gone
Jenny would dance with her ghosts
The ones she had lost and the ones she had found
And the ones who had loved her the most
The ones who'd been gone for so very long
She couldn't remember their names
They spun her around on the damp old stones
Spun away all her sorrow and pain
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
They danced through the day
And into the night through the snow that swept through the hall
From winter to summer then winter again
'Til the walls did crumble and fall
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave.

The song was imagined and mentioned by George R.R. Martin in one of the Song of Ice and Fire books. The producers of the Game of Thrones TV series had Ramin Djawadi, who wrote a lot of the show's music, write a tune, and they expanded the lyrical hints provided by Martin into this song.

Version sung by Podrick Payne in the episode "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," which simplifies the tune.

Florence and the Machine version, closer to the way Djawadi wrote it.

Bob Dylan on Paul McCartney

I'm in awe of McCartney. He's about the only one I am in awe of, but I'm in awe of him. He can do it all, and he's never let up. He's got the gift for melody, he's got the gift for rhythm. He can play any instrument, he can scream and shout as good as anybody and sing a ballad as good as anybody. His melodies are, you know, effortless. That's what you have to be in awe of.

–Bob Dylan in this video

Eivør - Trøllabundin

Anyone for some weird, ethereal music sung in Faroese? Then let me introduce you to Eivør. These days she has transcended the Faroes and sings mostly sings in English to broader European audiences, but I like the earlier, weirder stuff better. See also here and here.

Ten Songs for the Times

Ten old favorite songs I have listened to lately and found meaningful in the midst of it all.

The Parting Glass; there are many good versions but right now I prefer this one from the Face Vocal Band

Mummer's Dance, Loreena McKennitt. That's the live version; album version is here.

No Man's Land (the Green Fields of France); another song with many good recordings, but everyone else changes the lyrics so I go with the writer, Eric Bogle

When I Go, Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer

Goin' Back to Harlan, Emmylou Harris

Cold Missouri Waters, James Keelaghan. I sang this to all my babies, until they got old enough to realize that I can't sing and told me to stop.

The Littlest Birds, The Be Good Tanyas

Let it Be, The Beatles. This version has another song in the video but I've always liked this studio video. Album version is here.

Landslide, Fleetwood Mac

I Will Wait, Mumford and Sons. That's the live version; album version is less lively but has better sound.

24 Frames

Jason Isbell and his band make some social distancing music.

RIP John Prine

For a while when I was 18, this was my favorite song.

Billie Eilish Tries to Shock an Unshockable World

It amuses me that Billie Eilish tried to be dark musician who shocks people but found the world impossible to shock. In this Times piece, Eilish tells about how she once dreamed she committed suicide and wrote a song about it called "I had a dream I got everything I wanted":

Recounting this episode, Billie sat cross-legged on the living-room couch at Finneas’s house, mashing her mismatched Air Jordan 1s into the cushions. Her hair was dyed ink-black with a seepage of acid green at the scalp, and she wore an all-black outfit: an oversize bowling shirt printed with an image of two women, wearing crowns, covered in blood and kissing, and cargo pants that, in their stylized profusion of straps and pockets, struck a compromise between goth and SWAT. As she spoke, I could see her left eyebrow twitching — Billie has been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests mainly in facial tics and muscle tensing. . . .

As today’s pop superstars go, Eilish is remarkable for her abiding interest in the grim and the upsetting. She has resuscitated an aesthetic of macabre transgression that has been almost entirely absent from the musical mainstream since the ’90s heyday of rock acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. In her lyrics, narrators murder their friends and liken lovers to hostages. In her music, bright singalong hooks are subsumed by bursts of distortion, and whisper-quiet verses are interrupted by shrieking samples of a dentist drill. In her videos, which she helps to devise and occasionally directs herself, she has cried black tears and released a large spider from her mouth. In one, faceless tormentors burn her with cigarette butts; in another, they jab her with syringes.

And for this we gave her half the Grammys and made her very, very rich.

It's really hard to be too dark for America these days.

Which reminds me that for a long time I've been thinking about a post pointing out that by far the most popular site for artists to post their work online is called DeviantArt.

Claire Hastings: Scottish Folk

Scottish "Musical Storyteller" Claire Hastings, the BBC "Young Traditional Musician of the Year" in 2015, had a great album last year, Those Who Roam. I discovered it from Ted Gioia's list of the year's 100 best recordings. Some songs on YouTube:

Come Spend A While Wi' Me
Fair Weather Beggar
The Bothy Lads

Sample lyrics, not entirely clear for Americans, but you can get the gist:

For they’re awfy lads the bothy lads
Gin they get what they’re seekin
They’ll pack a kist an they’ll gang an enlist
An’ leave the lassies greetin

When a wis noo but sweet sixteen
Wi’ beauty just in bloomin
Little little did I ken
At nineteen I’d be greetin

For the plooboy lads are gey braw lads
But they’re fause an deceiving
For they’ll tak a’ an they’ll gang awa
An leave the lassie’s greetin

Ted Gioia on Music, Seduction, and Inputs

Last November Tyler Cowen interviewed music critic Ted Gioia. Gioia was sometimes annoyingly smug and tossed off theories about music and society that I found unconvincing, but he does know a huge amount about music. Some snippets:

GIOIA: Well, I believe, actually, Darwin was right. He thought music was linked to sexual selection, and we use music to attract a mate. . . .

COWEN: Let’s say you were not married, and you’re 27 years old, and you’re having a date over. What music do you put on in 2019 under those conditions?

GIOIA: It’s got to always be Sinatra.

COWEN: Because that is sexier? It’s generally appealing? It’s not going to offend anyone? Why?

GIOIA: I must say up front, I am no expert on seduction, so you’re now getting me out of my main level of expertise. But I would think that if you were a seducer, you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that, and no one was better at these multilayered interpretations of lyrics than Frank Sinatra.

I always call him the Derrida of pop singing because there was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct. And if you are planning for that romantic date, hey, go for Frank.

Based on solely Gioia's cheesy mustache I doubt he knows as little about seduction as he says. I was going to say that other things would work a lot better on me, e.g. Irish folk or Wagner, but since I can't remember the last time somebody tried to seduce me I suppose I really have no idea. More:

COWEN: Is it better to work and read to music? Or should those be separate activities?

GIOIA: It depends. I believe you can make a very strong philosophical case for what I call the New Age philosophy of music. And that philosophy is that music should be integrated into every aspect of your life or can be integrated into every aspect of your life. I believe that.

Now what I have to say is, in practice, the New Age music that did this was lousy and unlistenable. But I still believe very much, in principle, it’s okay to have music integrated in your life. I know it’s very fashionable to say background music is awful, or music should always be in the foreground. But after having done all the research I’ve done in music history, I now see the exact opposite.

And I’ll just give a couple examples. It’s amazing how many surgeons use music while they operate — 60 percent of surgeons will have a song on while they’re cutting you open. We now learn that at the highest level of peak athletic performance, a lot of care is taken to what songs you listen to while you do your athletic work. And I could give you 50 other examples, but the point is there’s nothing wrong with music being integrated into life experiences, and in fact, we should cultivate that.

And finally this:

COWEN: How is it you manage to listen to so much music?

GIOIA: I think the most important skill anyone can develop is time management skills, how you use your day. But there is one principle I want to stress because this is very important to me, and when people ask me for advice — and once again, this cuts across all fields — but this is the advice I give. In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.

But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output. The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consumed.

But I know for a fact, I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.

People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.

This is certainly true for me. I can only blog well when I am reading or seeing interesting things. One of the reasons I keep blogging is that it gives me an added incentive to check out new authors or new web sites, hoping to find something worth writing about.

Vienna Teng at Mountain Stage

I've been a fan of Vienna Teng for years but I just discovered this video today, something quite different from the lovely sound of Blue Caravan or My Medea. 1) this was recorded live; 2) no prerecorded sounds are used, everything is from the looping you see her doing.