Archive for the 'Music' Category
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials, because the revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.
There will be no pictures of you and Willie May pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run, or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32 or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay. There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving For just the proper occasion.
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and women will not care if Dick finally gets down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
I am highly ambivalent about the discourse that posit “open-source” as a way to save the music business. This is because on the one hand I am excited at the prospect of fans feeling more engaged and part of the process of making a bands success, beyond their already existing capacity to sell out shows and purchase tour merchandise. On the other hand though, the strategies offered here appear to be expropriating common fan activities: there is a direct effort to harness the creative and cognitive capacities of fans and translate these into monetary gain for the band. For example.
The first is to put open distribution and community at the heart of the band, and to use these elements as catalysts to build growth, awareness and expose the benefits of what I am referring to as the Open Band approach. (emphasis added)
It seems to me that community is something that develops alongside and through association with a band. As a fan practice, this is nothing new. What is new is the explicit attempt to craft this as a strategy in response to major labels backing down from providing distribution and touring support. Much like what is happening generally under neoliberal ideology, a forced entrepreneurialism raises its head in two ways: 1) the band is more or less compelled to take responsibility for what the label used to do (though really, the large majority of professional musicians have always had to do this, so this alone is nothing new) 2) fans’ traditional (pleasure seeking) activities are discursively situated as assisting in honing the band’s competitive edge. Being a fan now takes on an instrumental logic.
Indeed, this logic, and the language of the market are reinforced further here
In a recording industry environment that is widely regarded as ineffective, if we provide a solid example of a band that provides free access to content (which significantly lowers the barrier to attract fans) and empowers those fans with a community, this results in a wider fanbase that feels a closer sense of commitment to supporting their favorite bands. Of course, the same approach could be applied to other creative endeavors: publishing, art, video and more. My goal is to make Severed Fifth a successful and repeatable template. (emphasis added)
It appears right out of the corporate-speak dictionary. Fans have always proven capable of autonomously producing, maintaining, and (importantly) dismantling communities, and have proved similarly adept at showing their commitment to their favourite artists and to helping promote them (e.g. in my hometown, there is a rail bridge that has, since the 1970s, been emblazoned with gigantic (and fading) graffiti declaring “LED ZEPPELIN”). The difference now is that such organic, autonomous fan tactics are now facing expropriation. Those seeking to profit from their musical endeavours appear to internalise neoliberal ideology in an attempt to colonise and extract value from the common. And it is dressed, as always, in the language of empowerment.
That said, I do wish Severed Fifth musical success and empathise with the “we’ll try anything” approach to getting their music out there.
Via Bachelor’s Degree. I think I might spend some time going through these.
- David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve: David Byrne is so cool he could power a room full of cryogenic pods just by staring at them. Here, he channels his impressive experiences playing everywhere from CBGB and Tootsie’s to Carnegie Hall and Disney Hall to discuss the impact that architecture held over his compositions. Everything had to be written to suit the challenges of a specific space, and Byrne broadens his observations to encompass the whole of music history. He even points out similarities between this phenomenon and similar concepts found in nature, using sparrows and tanagers as an example.
- Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music video: Emerging technologies and social media have changed the face of music forever, and bands such as OK Go discovered creative ways to yield the internet as a promotional tool. Even those who don’t much enjoy their music still appreciate the imagination and painstaking detail that goes into their viral videos. “This Too Shall Pass” charmed audiences in early 2010 for its immensely clever, highly competent use of Rube Goldberg-inspired engineering — and, as intended, quickly went viral. In this illuminating TED Talk, the man behind the plan reveals the methods behind designing and building the wondrous machinery that became a massive online hit.
- Eric Whitacre: A choir as big as the internet: Another excellent video demonstrating the increasingly more intimate relationship between the internet and music, this time showing off an impressive understanding and utilization of both. 185 participants hailing from 12 countries submitted videos and audio files of themselves singing the individual parts of conductor and composer Eric Whitacre’s original choral arrangement “Lux Aurumque.” A showstopping virtual choir results, with everyone’s submission carefully, passionately pieced together into one video. It especially warrants viewing by music students and aficionados with a particular interest in how art can blend with technology in new and exciting ways.
- Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with music: Music fans looking for a little stimulation on a time crunch should check out this amazing talk by 10-time Grammy winner Bobby McFerrin, famous for the ubiquitous “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” In only three minutes, he uses audience participation to illustrate the pentatonic scale and points out some stunning facts lurking behind it. With only a small amount of hinting, he’s able to conduct a spontaneous, improvised choir capable of following his musical commands. How this phenomenon works is not exactly explained — scientists themselves might also find it baffling — but it definitely highlights the wonderful mysteries inherent in the human mind and its relationship with established musical patterns.
Musicians usually show up at rallies to protest labour rights but it is very rare for that protest to be at a guitar show! If you own a Cort, Fender, or Ibanez guitar you will want to read about labour relations at their Korean factory.
Embarrassingly, I have never thought about labour conditions in Asian guitar factories. I reflected a little on this after hearing about this action. I think I can boil it down to a blind-spot: because it is music, there couldn’t be anything truly negative surrounding it” I mean guitar making, what could be more pure a pursuit than that? But of course there are always material conditions associated with the creation of things, and thus why should large scale industrialised guitar making be any different than shoes? I own one custom made instrument, I know the maker personally, and I saw the guitar emerge from pieces of raw lumber to become the instrument I now play. I also own an excellent Korean made guitar, a G&L “Tribute” Series. I have now learned that this guitar was very likely manufactured in a Cort facility, I now find this embarrassing. I also now have to question all of the other guitar accessories I own. One thing is for sure, I can use the guitar as an entry point into discussions of labour conditions in guitar factories, commodity fetishism, ideology, and labour more generally — as I pull it out of the case, or if someone remarks on it, for example. In this way, perhaps the workers can speak through the instrument? I dunno.
There has always been a highly racialised discourse about the supposed superior quality of American made instruments over their Asian made counterparts. This is part of a far reaching discourse that characterises the American labourer as a craftsperson, working with his/her hands to extract a beautiful instrument from a block of carefully chosen wood. This is contrasted with the common perception (and realistic) of the Asian factory, with all its attendant “Toyotaisation” (just in time shipping, hyper-Taylorist factory organisation, etc.), and the suggestion that it is impossible for anything truly beautiful to come from such a technologically sophisticated organisational paradigm. Perhaps this perception of the Asian factory has aided in dehumanising the labour process. But it turns out that there are still actual people at the end of that line, working to bring instruments to aspiring and accomplished musicians alike. We need to think beyond the commodity fetish and acknowledge the chain of events and human actions that bring us our products, perhaps we need to do this even more so for things like instruments, to which we attach such mythologies of purity and beauty that further mystify the material conditions of their makers.
What you can do: http://axisofjustice.net/how-to-support-the-cort-workers-namm/
@paaitken