Aram Squalls

Radio scan of the night John Lennon died

John Lennon died 29 years ago today. Here's a scan of NYC radio programming from that night (12/8/80).

SF Police Seizing DJs' Laptops -- Why Am I Not Surprised?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports that the SFPD has begun routinely seizing DJs laptops at house parties. Like the ACTA treaty our federal government is currently pursuing, it's representative of a disturbing new trend in law enforcement -- one in which our digital civil liberties, or "e-speech," are not accorded the same protections that they would be in our physical lives or traditional communications media.

However, there's also something very familiar about this story. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Mashed Up, musical practices and technologies have always been subjected to government regulation, often at gunpoint, from ancient times to the present. This is because music acts as a kind of social and psychological blueprint, and new musical ideas nearly always carry with them new social ideas, which threaten established institutions.

In the case of DJ- and laptop-based music, the new musical ideas are sufficiently threatening to destabilize all of today's modern institutions -- in the government, the marketplace, and even houses of worship. No small wonder, then, that the police would begin to confiscate and criminalize these devices. 

Of course, the flip side of regulation is resistance. Even history's most dispossessed peoples (e.g. slaves in the antebellum South) have responded to musical subjugation with innovative and canny countermeasures. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how the SF DJ scene starts to hide its contraband...

My radio interview on Beatles Rock Band

Today I spent an hour on MPR's "Midmorning" (along with Daniel Radosh and Jason Della Rocca) discussing the soon-to-launch Beatles Rock Band, and some of its bigger-picture implications for the media industry and society at large. We also responded to a lot of listener questions. Altogether, it was a nice, freewheeling conversation, aided by host Kerri Miller's terrific moderation.

Here's the stream of the show:

If Terry Riley and Kutiman had a baby

Bassist and composer Darren Solomon very cleverly married Terry Riley's "In C" with Kutiman's Through-You, and added interactivity, producing a hypnotic, finite-yet-infinite YouTube mash-up site called "In B Flat."

It's delectably simple, yet wonderfully compelling. Kind of like a sonic chocolate-chip cookie.

Thriller flashmobs

Michael Jackson is dead, and America the world is celebrating the man who more or less invented the music video by getting together for impromptu Thriller flashmobs, then uploading the video to YouTube. It's kind of cool that we can collectively preserve the his cultural memory from the ground up, rather than relying on the dainty official hagiographies we're bound to see on MTV and network news.

I was lucky enough to walk into one of those flashmobs tonight. Here's my video. Rest in peace, oh gloved one. You rocked a lot of worlds.

Previously: Indian Thriller: Hooray for Hybridization!

In defense of Songsmith

For the last week or so, there's been a little tizzy in a teapot among the music nerd informatosphere about Microsoft's brilliantly/awfully-marketed Songsmith software (see trailer below), which essentially "composes" on-the-fly, karaoke-style accompaniment to any song you sing into your computer mic.

Most of the commentary has followed Valleywag's excoriation, proclaiming Songsmith the final death knell for human culture, etc. etc.

I respectfully disagree.

First of all, you can't kill something that's dead already. What universe do you have to live in to believe that Songsmith poses a credible threat to "legitimate" music production? The radio, television, internet, and every public space are currently awash in a cacophony of computer-generated, market-researched, auto-tuned, HSS-approved, virtually identical songs, produced by the same handful of engineers, for an ostensibly diverse group of artists, genres and programming formats. Everything is already compressed to hell, as well, adding dynamic flatness to the aesthetic sameness. So I fail to see how this meager intervention by Microsoft could really make things any worse, sonically.

Second of all, despite all of the factors I mentioned above, music isn't dead -- in fact, it's thriving. Never in the history of industrialized society has there been such a broad range of sonic material available at our beck and call, and never in the history of the modern music industry have musicians had so many opportunities to share their work with potential listeners. In fact, some of the most interesting work being made and shared today begins with the insipid songs and tools I have mentioned, and uses them in unintended, unofficial, critical, and resistant ways. This includes lo-fi goofing around, such as creative karaoke, as well as an efflorescence of mash-ups, remixes, glitch and the like. Valleywag untintentionally cops to this in its post, by sharing a bunch of videos in which people have run a capella versions of much-loved pop songs through Songsmith, and paired the result with the original video for the song (The Police's Roxanne, brilliantly songsmithed, is embedded below). In other words, Songsmith may be evil, but its evil may be used for good.

Finally, I am always wary of people who react to any democratizing technology by bemoaning loss of standards and quality; they sound a bit too much like Habermas bitching about the public sphere. Far too many erstwhile defenders of goodness and beauty are slaveowners in liberators' garb, too busy saving us from ourselves to give us the room to save ourselves. The truth is that most people these days don't know how to make music with instruments. It's a damnable shame, but that's how it is, and we can blame everyone -- the government, the schools, the recording industry -- except the people themselves. Clearly, a great many people remain very interested in producing their own life soundtracks rather than buying them ready-made, and I say more power to them. Any tool that helps them move towards this goal is a good tool. And if Songsmith isn't up to the challenge, someone else will come along and offer a better tool (unless Microsoft owns so many patents they effectively chill innovation).

Anwyay, that's my rant. Take a look at the videos below. Buy the software or download a hack, and play with it. Decide for yourself before you start writing society's epitaph.


Songsmith commercial:

"Roxanne," Songsmithed:

Satie, Electrified

Saturday night, I played a set of Erik Satie's Furniture Music with my good friend Ben Harbert and some other excellent musicians at a club in Brooklyn called Goodbye Blue Monday. It was a last minute kind of thing, but I think it came out great. Here are some video clips (I've got higher quality MP3s too -- if you're interested, email me.)

(the first clip begins loud and distorted because there was no sound check, but it's corrected within a few seconds, so bear with it, or just mute until it gets to 0:15)

Rock Band trumps iTunes for Beatles rights

News has been percolating for a few days, but EMI just put the official word out: The Beatles are coming to Rock Band. More specifically, Harmonix/MTV Games will be releasing a new title based around the Beatles' music catalog.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First of all, this is the Beatles' first major foray into digital territory. An iTunes deal has been rumored for years, but has never materialized. That the Beatles' rights-holders would choose to license to a game manufacturer before it licenses to the single largest music retailer in the world proves a point I've been making for a while -- that the industry is in the process of a massive shift away from retail revenues, and toward licensing revenues. The EMI press release doesn't say what kind of fees Viacom is paying for the privilege, but you can bet it's a HUGE advance against HUGE royalties. I'd be surprised if there's much upside left for the game publisher when all is said and done; more likely, it's a break-even scenario even at blockbuster sales volumes, whose primary strategic benefit is bragging rights and cementing the Rock Band brand and technology (just think how many millions more non-Beatles Rock Band titles will be sold because of this deal).

It's also interesting to see the Beatles' aesthetic legacy at work here. Along with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's album was considered to be a watershed moment in the advancement of musical aesthetics and in their relationship to recording technologies. With the surround-sound, DVD-based Love album a few years back, the Beatles (driven by producer George Martin and his son, Giles) again represented a smaller music-tech-aesthetic milestone: the mainstreaming of the remix aesthetic. This game title, which is being produced musically by Giles Martin, has the capacity to represent another innovative step. Maybe it'll just be another Rock Band title, where you can tap out Ringo's beats and twang away at George's solos, but somehow I'm guessing there'll be a bit more reinvention than that. The Beatles' music is so well-known, well-loved, and synonymous with mainstream integration of avant-garde techniques and aesthetics, it's become the perfect catalog for projects such as these (when someone can afford to foot the bill).

The final point I'll make is that, unlike an iTunes deal, this project may give equal footing to the Beatles' visual legacy as to their musical one. It's important to remember that the Beatles were, from the beginning, TV, newsreel and movie personalities, and that their music has always been an element of a larger, cross-platform integrated marketing and art project. Given this fact, a video game is a much more sensible platform for their work than a digital audio file.

Anyway, I don't mean to sound like too much of a fanboy; the project could suck. But I, for one, am looking forward to playing with my brother Dan, not to mention Dunia and Simon.

It's like Milli Vanilli all over again...

The New York Times is reporting that Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old girl who sang solo during the Olympics' opening ceremonies, was fakin' it. Not only was she lip synching, she was lip synching to the voice of 7-year-old Yang Peiyi.

I'm guessing the photo above explains why they decided to use Miaoke instead of Peiyi in front of the cameras.

The interesting thing to me is not the quest for "perfection" that led the Chinese Olympic Committee/Government/Communist Party to mash up one girl's image and another's vocals. After all, if you've got a billion people tuning in, you want to get everything absolutely right.

The interesting thing is that, decades after Milli Vanilli's unmasking, in an age where even the most heartfelt, "authentic" twangs and yodels the music industry can offer bear the unmistakable mark of ProTools pitch correction, anybody gives a damn.

It's absurd to ask people to NOT to use these powerful media production technologies we've created. What makes much more sense is to accept this kind of stuff as normative, and change our expectations to suit it. In fact, some of the most pioneering pop musicians are already doing that, embracing the "autotune" sound consciously, rather than trying to hide it from the kids (there was a good New Yorker article on this a few months back).

Sweet and sticky remix: Badu's "Honey" video

I'm hardly the first to blog about it, but the video for Erykah Badu's new single, Honey, is worth taking a look at if you haven't seen it. Badu has always worn her aesthetic influences on her sleeve, but in this video, the metaphor is stretched a bit -- she wears them on record sleeves.

The video filters R&B nostalgia through a configurable lens, featuring Badu lip synching to her song on a variety of classic album cover remakes from a broad range of artists -- De La Soul, Chaka Khan, The Beatles, and Nas, to name a few. I don't think I've ever seen a more perfect visual metaphor for her (compelling) schtick -- the sonic fusion of Afrodiasporic musics, old and new, into a forceful and fluid oral cultural history, aided and abetted by configurable technologies.

Lest I sound too much like an academic geek, let me also say that this is a dope track, with a bumpin' bass and a sweet, melismatic melody. Like much of her work, it's equally at home with on the dance floor or in the boudoir. I'm definitely going to be spending some time with this album.

If you're one to trace sources -- Which album cover was that one!?!? -- check out Soulbounce's side-by-side comparisons of the original album covers and the Honey mock-ups.

Also note that, counter to the spirit of creative reappropriation and homage that characterizes the song and video, Universal Music Group has (as usual) disabled embedding of their official YouTube release of the track. What that's supposed to achieve, other than pissing off bloggers, I'm not sure. It was very easy for me to find another version to embed, so they haven't thwarted my piratical intentions. Also, I'm gonna bet that UMG didn't get permission/pay fees to use all the LP artwork -- they'd probably argue (correctly) that it constitutes parody. (shakes head, murmuring 'tsk, tsk!')

Thanks for the link, Marissa!