Don Diego on the tediousness of courtship

[koganbot]

"I trust there will be no undue nonsense. Either the lady wants me and will have me, or she will not. Will I change her mind if I play a guitar beneath her window, or hold her hand when I may, or put my hand over my heart and sigh?"

Comments

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Didja get the link I sent you?

Also, I've got a new question for you!

How do you feel your listening to music has shifted over the last few years? Presumably new technology has changed the way you listened to music -- assuming that's true, what do you think the consequences of those changes are?

[koganbot]

Just listening to the Carly Patterson single right now. Generic singer-songwriter "find myself" clichés, but I like it, I think; rich voice, warm, the song itself is just OK but I like the voice enough that I'd be interested in hearing more from her.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

The gymnast?

[koganbot]

That's what I'm told.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VEzBqSN_bk

[koganbot]

As for the technology question, Mark and I had a a related convo over on poptimists a few days ago. See what I wrote here and Mark's and my further discussion here. I think in asking questions about how some X has changed music (X can be technology, marketing, governmental action, booms or recessions, war, or anything else), one should first ask oneself "Why do I listen to music? What do I care most about music? Is the sort of thing I'm loving now similar to or different from the sort of thing I used to love?" and so on. If the answers to the first two questions haven't changed, and the answer to the third is "similar," then the answer to the question is "Neither X nor anything else has changed music, at least not in a way that I give a shit about." If the answers to the first two questions have changed, and the answer to the third is "different," then the next question would be, "OK, what does X have to do with the changes?" The answer might still be, "Not a whole lot," and that's actually the answer I'm going to give you. Which is to say that whether I listen to music on computer or stereo and whether the music is on mp3 or CD or cassette or vinyl makes little difference to me - well, obviously, there might be a difference between hearing through headphones vs. hearing through a speaker with someone else in the room with you, and hearing in a home vs. hearing on a dance floor, and so on, but the basic choice of, say, boombox vs. headphones and so on, isn't going to be driven by technology, even if technology these days is making it easier to choose headphones than it had in times past. And though surely these days it's easier for a producer to find a pretty girl singer and smooth out her flaws electronically rather than being forced either to get someone else maybe not quite as pretty or get the girl to figure out how to turn the flaws into virtues. And it's a bit easier for people like you and me to find each other via the Internets than it would have been back in the day when my written conversation depended on letters and xerox machines. And it's easier to immediately hear what somoene else is excited about, e.g. by going to YouTube or MySpace or stealing the music online. And it's correspondingly easier to limit your listening to everything in your and your friends' common listening niches - if that's what you want - at the expense of hearing it on the radio or some other public space where the music you're after has to rub shoulders with sounds and genres you hadn't set out to hear. But has any of this substantially had an effect on the form and content of music or on how I use it? I'd be having the same sort of written/spoken conversations with or without the World Wide Web, since I've been asking the same questions for the last 40 years or so, and where my taste has changed (if you time-traveled the teenage me from 1968 to 2008 I doubt that he'd be spending much time on Boney M or Celine Dion (not that Boney M is particularly 2008, but they're the sort of old thing I pay attention to now that I'd have paid a lot less attention to had they existed in 1968; might have listened to their equivalents a lot in 1962, however), and he might be running back to old Stones and Sex Pistols and Stooges and Courtneys to get his dose of teen nihilism, but he probably would be paying attention to the pretty-girl Ashlees and Parises and Kellys nowadays because when you come down to it the pretty girls have got a lot in common with the scary boys from the Sixties whom I was listening to back then, though unlike the scary boys they're not being dangerous or promising and threatening some sort of convulsive countercultural constructive/destructive tumult.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Well, let me ask this: Do you think someone like Greg Gills (and I don't know your opinions on Girl Talk, so this may be barking up the wrong tree) could've existed 10 years ago?

[koganbot]

Ha. I've never heard Girl Talk, though skyecaptain seems to be a nonfan. I had no name recognition of the name Greg Gills. (For a second I thought you were referring to Girlicious, which got me excited.) But reading Wiki, and to answer your basic question, assuming that you're referring to the fact that Greg Gills does mashups, yes Grandmaster Flash and Cool Herc and DJ Afrika Bambaataa could have existed more than ten years ago, in fact they did, and musicians even could pull things off like that live to some extent, running parts of one song into another (called "medleys") and even playing parts of different songs on top of one another. But obviously digital sampling and such has made this sort of stuff a lot easier and more prevalent. And I quite like some of the things I've heard by The Hood Internet. The point isn't that technology makes no difference, but that this particular change (mashups and similar stuff) is culture driven, not technology driven. And more important, you should ask yourself if the most important thing about (for instance) the Sugababes' "Freak Like Me" is the fact it's a mashup, as opposed to how it sounds and the stories the lyrics tell and how people use the music in their lives, etc. I say this just because when I first heard it I had no idea it sampled* a Gary Numan riff, and when I did learn, this made absolutely no difference to how I experienced the song. And if the most interesting thing about Greg Gills' music is that it was constructed by mashups, then that's a sign that his music isn't any good, that people can't think of anything else that's more compelling about the music.

*Actually, I don't know if they sampled from Adina Howard and Gary Numan or played the arts themselves (obviously it's the Sugababes and not Adina Howard on the vocals), and I don't see the big ontological difference between playing the music or copying it. Two other interpolations from more recently that I managed not to notice even though I heard and liked the songs was Rihanna's use of New Order's "Blue Monday" on "Shut And Drive" and Girls Aloud's use of Nazareth's "Hair Of The Dog" in "Sexy! No No No" - which aren't strictly speaking mashups, just songs that interpolate something major from an already existing record. Again, the point isn't that the fact of their using samples is of no import whatsoever - I think katstevens specifically disliked "Shut Up And Drive" because the sample was used so obviously (as I said, I managed not to even notice that it used the "Blue Monday" riff until I read Kat complaining about it) - but that the fact isn't close to what matters most about those songs, why I would like or dislike them.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Two things that occur to me;
1) Let's say it is cultural and not technological. What do you feel has shifted culturally?
2) And maybe this is technological/cultural, but what do you feel about filesharing? Artist/listeners certainly have much, much more they can more easily listen to. Don't you think the existence of filesharing makes a difference for someone like Girl Talk (who references maybe hundreds of songs ovr the course of one album)?

[koganbot]

Sorry I've been so recalcitrant; reason is that journalism and academia have a genius for systematically missing the point when it comes to popular music. Let's take Girl Talk as an example. OK, here's someone who's supposedly doing something new, changing the ground under our feet as we walk on it and (1) So what? Even if it's true, why should I or anyone listen to it, or for that matter, why does anyone listen to it? In other words, what matters about it? and (2) In fact, it's not particularly different from what's been done scads and scads of times before, starting with disco and hip-hop in the '70s - I don't know if Gillis is even claiming that he's doing anything drastically different from those late '70s disco bootleg mixes or (a few years later) the hip-hop mashups by Steinski et al. Back in the '80s you got posturing leftists quoting Lautréamont and bragging about breaking copyright law, whoopee.* I remember a couple of dreadful singles by Culturcide. Whatever the ultimate impacts of filesharing turn out to be, they're not going to be "Oh, now people can make mixes and mashups." And speaking of mixes etc. I'd say that hip-hop mixtapes as promo tool, keeping your hand in the game, an alternative source of income is far more important than someone like Gillis, but again I'd assume they'd exist file-sharing or no file-sharing. What they do actually is go back to the early rappers, guys who were rapping over the breakbeats from funk records of the time, while DJs were mixing those records into each other. So this'd be a phenomenon that would exist file-sharing or no file-sharing. But the point here would be what was the content of all this, mixtapes now, house parties then, what are the rappers saying, what does the music sound like, what are the dancers doing?

*Found this on YouTube in regard to Girl Talk: "Professor Matthew Soar at Concordia University in Montréal, as a contribution to the Open Source Cinema Project, teamed with his students and spent what he describes as 'three very intensive weeks rotoscoping a concert video' of Girl Talk. They were, he says, inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and by Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, a textbook used for his communications course." (Sarcastically I'd say that the students all got an A PLUS in subversion, though for all I know the class was quite good. The description sure runs close to what I was calling "PBS" back in the day.)

[koganbot]

I'd say that hip-hop mixtapes as promo tool, keeping your hand in the game, an alternative source of income is far more important than someone like Gillis, but again I'd assume they'd exist file-sharing or no file-sharing.

Er, didn't say that very well. How about:

I'd say that hip-hop mixtapes - as promo tool and an alternative source of income and a way of keeping your hand in the game- are far more important than someone like Gillis, but again I'd assume such mixtapes would exist whether there was file-sharing or no file-sharing.

[koganbot]

But to take a stab at your question:

(1) What is happening in music now that I care about? (Not "what has shifted culturally?" given that I don't think much has between 2000 and now (compare to the changes that occurred between 1960 and 1968). Well, there's the Hoar-pop of Danity Kane and Girlicious, though I think the hoar stuff is the least interesting thing about them and their image of the "bad girl" is quite ancient. Would be interesting if they bragged about having children and abandoning them, rather than ducking the issue of actual badness by just being slutty and saying "When the red light comes on I transform." What's interesting isn't that they need the red light to express their sexual desire but that they use it as a pretext for polyphony and harmony. It's the darting voices and the sudden blobs of harmonic beauty that make me love the music. Other things I like in the musical nowadays: that Aly & A.J. went from rock confessional to dance confessional without missing a beat (in fact gained some beats). But again, it's not that they sang "confessional," but what they sang, the slow gorgeousness of "Blush" while Aly agonizingly worked through the rules she was setting up so that she could ask someone to touch her, and the release and joy of "Potential Breakup Song," the whole liberated dance of potentially being free (and the hope that they can have their dance and not be free of the guy, the hope that they don't have to break up). Maybe there's a demographic spread of the confessional - the romantic search for self - into teenpop via Michelle and Nelly F. and Pink and the slew that followed, and into mainstream country by way of Taylor Swift and Michelle once again (but I really don't know enough about country to say how much of the confessional and the search for self were already there: I have to check out more of the career of Deana Carter). But I wouldn't say that the confessionals and the searches now are different in kind from the confessionals and searches of ten, twenty, or forty years ago, except the teen and dance confessionals are maybe less pretentious (and the pretentious confessionals are on a comeback too, if you want to count all the quirky post-Tashbed and Amy types now making a run at the charts).

Hip-hop is going dance and minimalist and maximalist and lots of hip-hop lovers are griping about it, but then hip-hop is always going dance and minimalist and maximalist and people are always griping about it, in fact the Eminem and Trick Daddy and Juvenile and Timbo-Missy-Jay-Z dances at the turn of the decade were as interesting as the ones we've got now.

[koganbot]

(2) File-sharing, ease of listening, can find Velvet Underground or Dyke & The Blazers in a push of a seach-engine button rather than mailing overseas for 'em or searching used record stores for years. There's a cultural change here, too, though that change was basically consolidated back in the '70s (when I was searching record stores for out-of-print Velvets and Dyke and Ronettes LPs) and put on CD in the '80s, which is that adults went from discarding to venerating the pop-culture past. But how is this affecting music, that so much is available, and quickly? Would Aly Michalka's complicated passion be different if all this music weren't so readily available? Would the Danity women (who co-wrote a lot of the music) and their producers (Danja the one who produced the best stuff) be finding different strategies to their polyphony and harmony?

The big difference caused in music by file sharing - and I would include in this the practice of legally downloading and paying a small amount for individual tracks... er, what is the big difference? On the one hand, I assume it's pushing the business ever more towards secondary rights, meaning the song isn't the main thing being merchandised, just one of the things, so performers try to get hooked up with ads and different products. But I couldn't tell you about this. Another thing might be the concentration on consumers who will pay for the music, the ones who are less likely to be willing to steal or to know how (so, pre-teens and country, and maybe some adult contemporary middle-of-the road, though that audience tends not to buy a lot). These trends help Disney but tended to cut the demographic ground out from under the Ashlees and Lindsays who were making better music. But they'd have lost their audience anyway.

[koganbot]

Rihanna's use of New Order's "Blue Monday" on "Shut Up And Drive"

proofing

[koganbot]

played the parts, that is, and the big ontological difference between sampling the music and copying it.

[koganbot]

Don't know if that answer was a help to you. A lot of what happens to be exciting me about this year's music - female r&b-and-pop-derived group-vocal polyphonic knockabouts and sudden harmonies in an r&b and/or hip-hop rhythmic space (Danity Kane would be my prime example) also shows up in partial form on solo tracks like Rihanna's "Disturbia" (though that's more club than hip-hop), Jordan Pruitt's "I'm Gone," and even a bit in Vanessa Hudgen's "Amazed" - is easier to pull off with current technology than it would have been in the '60s through '80s, but it most certainly would have been doable then through overdubs or tape splices or, you know, backup singers. So it seems aesthetically driven rather than technology-driven.

I guess going back to a basic question, if you asked me what's more important to music in the early '50s, Chuck and Elvis et al. or the invention of the LP, I'd say "Chuck and Elvis et al." in an instant.