pretty sure my thing on the guitar is not about exploration of sounds or techniques. that happens, sure, but it’s like saying my work is about tuning the guitar. it’s important, and it makes the instrument sound good, but the sounds by themselves are mostly pretty boring (unless the point is that they should be all by themselves).
the part i’d rather focus on is what the sounds do / how they interact with each other, how they interact with other people’s sounds / what meanings are constructed through those interactions (or lack of interactions).
maybe i’m moving in the opposite direction from cage’s idea of letting the sounds be themselves? i want sounds to rub up against each other, argue, fall in love, pretend to be other sounds, direct each other, become estranged, all that shit.
All that skepticism and dismissiveness that I was talking about with outsiders in rap and East Asian music, I def do the same thing with exp music, I think largely because there are so many folks that wanna step in and make stuff that is like Halloween SFX records or whatever? And that is so not what it’s about. So, I understand being guarded about one’s music.
I kind of missed the boat on this Lana Del Rey drama, I’ve mostly been catching people writing about trying to untangle the drama itself, and not so much the music or the persona in a vacuum. So I kind of don’t really understand what this is all about, except that it’s hit a nerve with some people, which is usually something that’s fun and interesting for me to check out.
I just read this piece by Dan Solomon where he ascribes Lana’s critical rejection mostly to sexism and slut-shaming. And I dunno, he’s probably on to something. But he argues that if we’re gonna reject Lana’s stage persona as inauthentic then we should do the same with A$AP Rocky and Skrillex. Which to me is like, well wait, this is not just gender we’re talking about here.
Firstly, no one will disbelieve a story about a young male who likes to party, drink, and smoke weed. These are the stories that are being told to us by A$AP and Skrillex. Completely believable, probably not far from the truth. The dressing up those two dudes receive probably amounts to little more than just that - stylists and fashion consultants or whatever. Business-wise, their personas are about as risky as opening a laundromat.
A sexpot Nancy Sinatra cover is maybe a little more out there. Which is fine! But you gotta remember that this is America we’re dealing with, and if you wanna do the pop thing, you have to find a way of dealing with (our antiquated and kind of silly model of) authenticity.
I’ve seen a couple ways of doing this: 1. Make your persona believable. (e.g. Kurt Cobain, Nicki Minaj, probably most artists that hit the billboard charts); or 2. Make your stories so outlandish that they can’t possibly be your own. To do this, the music has to be really compelling to a lot of people (e.g. Tom Waits, David Bowie, Bob Dylan), or the stories need to play out a lot of people’s fantasies (e.g. Lady Gaga). Or both!
For my money, I think Lana Del Ray’s music is pretty good, but probably won’t become a pop classic, and doesn’t play out enough collective fantasies to really qualify for #2.
…
Kinda the lens that I see this through is the viewpoint of what it’s like for someone to step into someone else’s musical tradition as an outsider. Two examples I can think of are white rappers in America (recently watched a really interesting episode of Dead End Hip Hop, Black Rappers vs. White Rappers) and my own experiences with playing traditional East Asian music (plus reading about people like Simon Barker and Christopher Yohmei Blasdel).
If there’s one conclusion that I can draw from looking at all these different cases, it’s basically that if you want to step into someone else’s music (and I think this is true to an extent for pop music as well, although advertising dollars also play an immense role in what becomes successful in that world), the best path to acceptance is just to practice real hard and be fucking dope at whatever music it is you’re making.
Quote from Kinge in the beginning of that Dead End Hip Hop video: “The question I wanna pose right now is: When you see a white rapper, what are your initial thoughts? Since hip hop has more or less been of the darker persuasion, normally when a white rapper come out, [a lot of people] kinda dismiss him.”
This is all kind of long and rambling and I have to get out of this cafe now, but you should probably check out that Simon Barker video I linked, mostly for Bae Il-Dong’s FUCKING AMAZING vox. In fact here:
My Tumblr Dashboard this evening had a post about that weird Benny Lava youtube video, which reminded me of this totally weird moment I had late night at a hostel in Osaka. I was one of 3 white people in the room, plus maybe 5 or 6 nihonjin? I was making a joke involving a couple different voices, and afterwards someone asked me to do a black accent, which is weird because maybe with enough cultural distance it’s like an innocent enough question but of course to a white American kid that’s like whoa. I think I said something like, “Hello, I am a person of African American descent.” But then this white girl from LA was like Oh I got this and youtube’d that hide ya wife hide ya kids video, talking about how hilarious it was because they talk all funny in it. AWKWARDDDDD. All I could think of to say was “America still has a lot of culture about making fun of black people.”
—-
“My dad … came to America in 1985 and has spent the last 25 years realizing that discrimination in America exists just like it does everywhere else in the world but there are laws against it here so it has to be really subtle. my dad wants to leave America and move to Europe as soon as he can, where he hopes that people there will at least drop the pretense of being post-race.” -David Shapiro
Anyone remember this tune from 2007? I don’t, but I heard it on the stereo here at the loft today and had to look it up. This is kind of a rarity: A four minute hit song with like 7 notes played over maybe 15 seconds. Mostly drums and vox, no melodic or chordal instruments other than voice. Awesome!
Also bonus points for the sudden tempo change when she puts a verse from the b-side into the middle of the song. When the tempo snaps back to normal? Damn!
Also also: How come the principal at my high school never asked me for fashion advice??
This time I’m not playing some crazy nervewracking classical stuff (which was nothing short of amazing!), so this time I get to experience the city a bit, meet some younger-generation artists, etc. I just got in but I already really like the place.
- little exhausted
- mentally
- really happy to be meeting some very nice, fun, smart, talented people
- not taking so many pictures
- partially from normalizing my surroundings, having been here a couple weeks
- but also partially from being a little exhausted
- mentally
- and maybe physically too
gonna I’m bed now, srsly time of my life over here tho, no doubt
Kazue sensei playing an older tune, the name of which escapes me. Lotta days, I’m more into the older stuff - SSSSSSSPPPPPPPPPPAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEE
Chieko sensei mentioned to me the other day that (I *think* I understood this correctly) in the koto’s early days, it was used to play a kind of devotional music. Prayer was her specific word. Apparently you would tune the strings super close to each other (like quarter tones) and play drone music that emphasized difference tones. I bet it sounded really cool.
It’s a trip visiting the place where this instrument grew up.
I think I would be cool with putting in my 10,000 hours on this thing. I would definitely need to get amplification down in the process, and I’m not sure how I’ll navigate the costly testing system. But the instrument, and the music, I think I am pretty into.
