I promise this becomes music related.
I work in a bad neighborhood. Some past mayor must have appointed his mentally challenged brother in-law as city planner. Warehouses and industrial buildings winding like a river through the area divide pockets of run down houses into shitty neighborhoods. People into those neighborhoods have no choice. It is mostly illegals with a minority of legal citizens way down on there luck. Who wants to live surrounded by salvage yards, carpet warehouses and pallet making operations the occasion that often go up in flames.
The thing is it has gotten hot but there are more street people than ever. And by street people I don’t mean just homeless. I include prostitutes, drunks, tweakers and other assorted sorry losers. Normally the heat thins there numbers dramatically. Normally there are not some many people outside. Normally not as many whores in thrift store prom dresses people outside and tweakers zooming around on bicycles over loaded with crap. The dive bar up the street must be bursting. People always in and out. You see a cluster of drunks when the door swings open. I love dives but this ain’t that kind of place. It not a place hipster hang out because Charles Bukowski drank there decades ago before the neighborhood was gentrified. This is the kind of place that sells fortified wine by the shot and you wish it smelled like stale beer. Twice I have seen a drunks stroll outside to piss on the side of the bar next to a long line of cars in the Taco Hell drive through next door. Not exactly an appetizer. Business I imagine most likely has surpassed the facilities.
Some of the things I see are in that neighborhood are better economic indicators than the clueless economist at the Fed will ever see. There seems to be a palatable sense of desperation in the air. You can breathe in the downturn. Even outside of that neighborhood people seem down. To steal a line from a famous peanut farmer there seems to be, “A Crisis of Confidence.” A kind of war that kind of has no end in sight, a credit crunch, a burst bubble, a disconnect between the American Dream and America and terms popping up not spoken since the era of my birth like stagflation. It seems like it one big bummer. You don’t need to be a pollster to know people aren’t feeling too great about things at the moment. It seems like people are cynical and tired. But It makes me feel more motivated about being creative. That malaise & desperation seems to inspire me more than when things are more warm and fuzzy and completely lacking that “Crisis of Confidence.” Smog makes me want to make art more than a rainbow.
It is really not that strange. Bad times in bad places make for good art. I am not claiming to be Barry Gordy Jr., Wayne Kramer, Iggy Pop or the Belleville Three but they serve as examples. When things got the most “interesting” in Detroit you got the birth of Motown, Punk Rock and Techno. The former murder capital has had made some damn good music. There are other examples like the summers of ‘76 in Manchester or ‘67 in San Francisco. Maybe if burst bubbles have silver linings it is these bad times will make better music. Whether we want to think about our problems or forget them the soundtrack might be better.
This idea reminds of the Harry Lime speech from The Third Man(it is at the end of the end of the clip.) It maybe more a about bloodshed but it still fits to my mind.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. -Orson Welles from The Third Man
I can not mention The Third Man is with out bringing up the Anton Karas zither score. Maybe there has never been a better meld of music and film. The bouncing zither score would not have work so well with out the back drop of a battle scared Vienna that was that was suffering from very real post war fatigue. Great Art from bad times.
FIN
Worst of Music Making Tech or Keytars and Bad Software
The Internet seems to really be good for a few things. Besides porn and bad homemade videos it seems to be good for lists. I used to love ‘em, list that is, but all the Internet lists seem to have burned me out of lists. So, I have resisted as long as I could making a list but a discussion of the worst music making technology overwhelmed me and I just have to make this list. I refuse to number them though tyhe are generally in order.
The Keytar Mostly Harmless
I am all for innovation. Taking an old idea and making new again is a wonderful thing. Except in the case of the keytar. People had been generally sitting and facing keyboard instrument for centuries and it seemed to be the most natural way to do it. It was conducive to playing well but when plastic and the microchip made keyboards light enough to sling around the neck someone just could not resist. The only reason that seems to make sense is aesthetics. The keytar would allow the keyboard player to jump around strange like the rest of the band and look cool. Of course this was a horrible flawed idea. Jumping around with a keytar slung around you amid big poofy hair and a laser light shows of the 80’s made you look like an ass. They should have known. Mozart, Fats Waller, Jerry Lee Lewis, Glen Gould, Kraftwerk etc, etc, were cool enough sitting behind the keyboard. And there have been many keyboard players able to give quite a psychical interesting performance with out every worry about a miss step on stage leading to laser induced blindness. As cheesy as the Keytar is it never really caught on so it is not that terrible. I ‘ll rate it using the words of Douglas Adams, “Mostly Harmless.”
Antares Auto-Tune Unintended Purposes Gone Awry
This of course is had to be on the list four for letters C-H-E-R. That damn song. It may have not even been Auto-Tune on Cher’s Believe but it spawned countless auto-tune imitators. I can see the point of the software. It has to be a god sent for the overworked studio engineer. But it potential for abuse is great so it has to make the list. This is one of the those effects that can easily be gimmicky rather than musical. Even if used they way it is supposed to, you have to question the need for perfect. Imperfection adds charm, character and humanity to music. I will take a few wayward notes that move me any day.
Vocoder The Robot Takeover
I happen to like the vocoder but like Auto-Tune they have a huge potential for abuse. The rate higher on the list than Auto-Tune because they have less real practical value. You can use Auto-tune or a vocoder for similar effect so this is just a guilty. They can be an amazing effect like in the case of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn but are over abused and gimmicky (see T-Pain.)
Vocal Synthesis Software Not Fooling Anyone
Vocal synthesis can be cool it a retro robotic way like DECtalk Stephen Hawking or Commodore 64 8-bit kind of way. It does not sound real but that is cool. The problem is when it is meant to sound real. String, wind and brass instruments have been far form mastered by any synthesis so an instrument with even more articulations than those instruments, the human voice, attempts at realistic synthesis have been laughable. We can hear a person mood, age, or whether they are telling the truth even if they are speaking in a foreign language and out of site. Human voice is the sound we hear first and listen the most. Software like Cantor and Vocaliod have fallen far short of convincing. It is a questionable endeavour to replace the one instrument most of us already have in the first place and unlikely man can improve on nature.
The Mastering Plugin the Death of Dynamics
In truth the Loudness Wars (you can check out my thoughts on The Loudness Wars) started even before there were such plugins but the made it much worst. Dynamics are dead and it was a death by convenience. It is just too easy to slap on a plugin with maximizer in the name and squeeze all the dynamics out of it. I imagine some was watching television and heard one of those used car dealerships commercials that seem twice as loud as anything else for 30 unrelenting seconds and thought wouldn’t be great to do this to music. That person did us no favors. The software is affordable and easy enough to use for anyone to use and abuse. Resulting in most music today having the life squeezed out of it.
The Music Video-Video Killed the Radio Star
The Bungles were prophets. The video has to be the single worst technology for music making. No other technology has done as much to remove the focus of music away from music. The Music Business has always been Show Business so image always has been a component but post MTV image became the only components of in some cases. I can’t image the talented but ugly artist I never got to hear because of the video. I hold the music video responsible for the Boy Bands, the Britney Spears types, hair metal, commercial rap, 4th generation gunge and a thousand of other music travesties. It is great homogenizer of genres. It is the reason lyrics are not important as how much Ice is on your necklace. It is the reason that is more important to look the part than be the part. It is the central cog in the PR machine manufacturing celebrities set to music rather than musicians. The influence of the music video is so corruptive that even MTV (music television) barely has music on an mainly broadcast “lifestyle programing.” Music Television is not even about music anymore.