collage barrage

Been a busy cut-n-paste beaver lately…in addition to my “Revolution 9” homage collage (see what I did there?), I made my second contribution to my friend Rex’s faboo 39-40 project (third, if you count that he covered one of my songs earlier), this time a structural cover of Saint Etienne’s “This Is Radio Saint Etienne.” (What do I mean by a “structural cover”? Read on…)

Rex is covering the entire Foxbase Alpha album—or rather, he and friends are covering the entire album—and he asked me to contribute. At first I was reluctant for reasons of time, but he pointed out that the album has a couple of short little instrumental interludes which would make for fairly quick work…so I committed to the shortest one, the opening track of the album.

My reaction to that track is that I don’t think its specific musical materials are really to the point; the track’s purpose is primarily to establish an effect, set up an atmosphere, introducing the rest of the album. So instead of covering its actual music, I merely sought to trace over its general outlines with something sonically similar even if musically dissimilar. (If you follow the link to Rex’s site above, you can hear the original.)

So, we have an opening with some chatter and some environmental noise, followed by music that sounds taglike: music to identify a product, program, etc. That’s interrupted midway through by more voices, the music resumes, and it ends.

Among the loose bits and pieces hanging around my hard drive in the wake of the “Grasses” project was a fragment (from the invaluable ubuweb site) from a 1921 piece by Italian noise pioneer Antonio Russolo, Corale and Serenata. (Ubuweb’s 1924 recording is also the sole surviving recording to feature the intonarumori.) I didn’t use it in “Grasses Are Longer Than Hair,” but I thought that bit fit the bill of being a sort of epigrammatic fragment, the sort of thing a political program in the 1920s might use. I ran the fragment in reverse (for no better reason than to sound different from the original), and then added some new parts for a cheesy organ and a fake cello section.

At this point, the piece became a little scene from a sound-movie: there’s some sort of large outdoor gathering, a political meeting perhaps, and the whole thing’s being broadcast by radio controlled by that political party. Italian futurist politics being not all that terribly pleasant and humane, a somewhat foreboding air was in order. I babbled in a made-up, vaguely Slavic “language” at the opening, announced the radio station’s name in the break in the middle (it’s actually intended to say “This is Radio 39-40” in homage to Rex’s project), and a brief few words at the end.

I treated the two new musical parts first by filtering them as if on an old radio and then added an “old 78 record” effect (which I should have done only once…wasn’t thinking and did it for both parts…so it’s a very scratchy 78).

But it wasn’t quite complete in my mind…So I put a blunt cut at the beginning and the end (conveniently obscuring my iffy ability to keep close time with the entrance of the sound file’s orchestra…which seems to have a rather unsteady tempo to begin with), and added the initial “click” sound (it’s actually from a sound effect of a Xerox machine…) and the closing brief fanfare fragment – which was also cut off dead, since I intended it to jumpcut directly to the next track on the album.

Monkey Typing Pool “This Is Radio Etienne” (Saint Etienne “cover” – for Rex Broome’s 39-40 project)

 

retyped

As part of his “39-40” yearlong daily covers project, my friend Rex has just covered Monkey Typing Pool’s obscure b-side “(Here’s One I Bet You Wouldn’t Want to Meet) In the Wild.” (Original version is here.) Granted, they’re all obscure b-sides – and granted, since he’s in an all-request format these days, it just so happened that the Monkey-in-Chief was the requestor – but hey: we can thank and blame the gods of fate that it actually happened, since it was chosen at random from among that day’s requests.

This is the first time I’ve heard anyone else play any of my music – and it’s gratifying to hear the song fleshed out in a way that, I think, makes it work quite well. So thanks, Rex.

Also: Because this site is included among Rex’s links, and because I updated the entry for the original track the other day (I found a typo or two to correct), that song was already twice-linked from Rex’s site. Now, with this entry linking back to Rex’s site, and also including a link to the original song – and with this entry soon to be auto-linked among Rex’s own links – I expect our mutual Google rankings to be reaching stratospheric, feedback-induced heights at any moment.

a free market in idiocy

I can’t recall which Michael Moore movie it was wherein he made an argument, which seemed quite sound and likely to be persuasive even to people who weren’t on the left, that taking care of other people was also a matter of self-interest, rather in the way that we rely on fire departments. We do not have to pay on a per-fire basis for their services, nor are their services up for bidding.

At least not for most of us: apparently, the folks in Obion County, Kentucky are in the grip of some serious Tea Party madness. Yep: someone didn’t pay the fire department fee, and the fire department simply let his house burn to the ground. Here, in the USA, the pinnacle of civilization.

I suppose some free-marketeers are going to argue, well, that’s too bad, but after all, the guy did make the choice to not pay that fee – and so, of course the fire department was under no obligation to put out the fire at his house. Aside from the rather incredible moral obtuseness of such a position – fortunately, it appears, no one was harmed in this fire appallingly, the firefighters just sat by and let the family’s pets die a horrific death – this simply makes no kind of logical sense. (It’s also, as my friend Brian points out, dubious whether this would actually be a “choice” for poorer citizens.)

First, given that in such emergencies time is a very valuable quantity, even for folks who’ve paid their fees, the delay inherent in needing to verify whether they’ve done so could well mean the difference between life and death.

More to the point, fires neither know nor care who’s paid and who hasn’t, and are likely to spread from one house to the next. A fire department that refuses to put out a non-subscriber’s fire is all but guaranteeing that the subscribing neighbor’s house will catch fire.

Another irony is that the “capitalist” government of Obion County, Kentucky, will surely lose more from the removal by fire of this house from its property tax rolls than it would have cost it to put out the fire even in the absence of the required fees. So there’s plenty of stupid to go around here.

And in the long run, the notion that it’s somehow a better exemplification of a free market to disband “socialist” fire departments and let every homeowner buy fire service is defeated by the very logic of the free market. “Property rights” and property values are, after all, a common rallying cry of the free-marketeers…but what do you think happens to the property value of a house adjacent to the home of a non-subscriber? It diminishes, of course – just as it would if the adjacent property were a crack house, decrepit, or otherwise unsightly or unappealing. People have been sued over failure to maintain property, often on grounds that such failure reduces neighbors’ property values…so of course, it would make perfect sense for the non-subscriber’s neighbors to sue him for decreasing their own property values.

But wait a minute: now these folks are going into the court system to defend their own property rights by demanding that someone else subscribe to the fire service? Goddamned socialistic court system – in fact, what’s all this about property values being influenced by someone else’s property? I’m an individual: my property’s worth what it’s worth without regard to anyone else’s property values! Or could it be that the housing market is…socialist? Must be – if by “socialist” we mean that the actions and values of others have impact on our own, which seems to be what your Tea Party types mean by the term.

In his review for Harper’s (October 2010) of the late Tony Judt’s most recent book Ill Fares the Land, Terry Eagleton notes that the obscene extent of market-valued “material self-interest” has, in the last thirty years or so, utterly overtaken the previously common, relatively benign view of collective action (including that of government), even among administrations typically regarded as conservative. And that is because, Eagleton implies, even they were smart enough to recognize that the market itself depends upon a degree of collective social engagement:

Market societies are at risk of destroying the very resources they need for their own reproduction. By measuring everything by the yardstick of profit, they neglect some of the human needs and capacities they must nurture in order to stay in business. Economic life, for example, depends on trust, which in such social orders is likely to be in short supply. Men and women need to feel valued if they are to be productive, which is scarcely the case with those at the bottom of the heap. They are unlikely to flourish without some sense of stable identity and robust community, both of which are continually under threat in the volatile world of advanced capitalism. Once the state hands over its functions of care (social benefits, unemployment pay, and so on) to private agencies, nothing remains to bind the citizen to the state but the fear of authority….

The upshot of all this is that market societies are plunged sooner or later into a crisis of legitimation. Authority and obedience, as Edmund Burke [of all people] warned long ago, are too fragile a bond to hold social orders together for very long. We may fear the law, but we do not love it…. [O]nce we abandon the public for the private, there is scant reason why we should value law (“the public good par excellence”) over force. The problem with market societies is that they…rely…on the self-interest of their subjects. But self-interest is a notoriously faithless, fickle affair. It may inspire you to kick someone in the teeth as much as vote him into power.

Or to let someone’s house burn to the ground, just because he hasn’t paid $75 a year. The article on this fire notes that some fighting broke out between the non-subscribers’ neighbors and the firefighter: no surprise there (the neighbors seem to understand that fires tend not to localize). Expect worse, of course: expect well-armed homeowners (Second Amendment, y’all) to respond to firefighters’ refusal to extinguish their fires to fight firefighters with firearms; expect reprisals in the form of arson; expect blackmail and other illicit shenanigans on threat of increased payment; etc. What’s to stop them? Simple human decency? Pretty obviously, if a firefighter can stand there and watch someone’s house burn down due to the lack of a $75 annual fee, that’s not a factor anymore.

Hurrah capitalism. All hail the free market. Sometimes “free” is a synonym for “worthless.”

blessed monkey piping tool

My friend Rex has been indulging in an incredibly ambitious (and largely successful) project: every day between his 39th and 40th birthdays (he’s a little more than two months in right now), Rex records a randomly chosen cover song. If you haven’t discovered his 39-40 blog yet, please do check it out.

Along the way, Rex asked for collaborators. I volunteered…and rather than get a mostly finished song to which I could add backing vocals or keyboards, etc., I merely got the original song and a note from Rex saying “do what you want with this.”

I was a bit intimidated to discover that the song was Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.” No obscure little number for me; no, I end up with a very well-known song, one that’s been covered many times over. Plus, it’s jazz…and I can’t play jazz for doodly. What to do?

As it turned out, the ghost of Billie Holiday dragged me off to a Detroit garage and threatened to kick my ass unless I messed her song around but good. You don’t argue with Billie Holiday’s ghost. Anyway: first thing I had to do was de-jazzify the chords. Actually, for a jazz standard the changes are fairly pop: lots of major sevenths and nothing too complex, harmonically. But still: who ever heard of a major seventh chord in a garage-rock number? And the turnaround back to the root chord on the chorus: way too jazz-pop for garage rock… So I bashed away for a while, simplifying things while still trying to preserve some flavor of the original chord sequence. At one point I had a sort of cool sequence of ninth chords (C-shaped and traveling up the neck) but…too tricksy for the garage, I thought.

At this point I e-mailed Rex saying that I had some ideas…things were evolving a bit, and while I started solely in the garage, some other flavors started seeming compatible – and I remember saying to Rex that I was sort of thinking of the MC5 meets the Byrds (because if nothing else, I wanted to give rock critics a nice hook to hang themselves on). I also mentioned saying it’d be nice if Rex added an electric 12-string solo, since I didn’t have such an instrument. While Rex says he doesn’t remember my MC5/Byrds comment, in fact, what he ultimately came up with (at his blog, here) is pretty much what I was thinking of when I made that comment.

Of course, after I made that remark, I kind of forgot about it…and the sunny drive down Laurel Canyon to Sunset to the Troubadour kind of left my head, and I proceeded to smear motor oil and grease all over the track. Naturally, even after I sent off the not-quite-complete track to Rex (a big space for a solo, which he indeed did fill with an electric 12-string), I kept having ideas…and they all had to do with louder and distorteder and noisier. And what to do with that space for the solo? Cheap organ – with (yes!) distortion!

So now there are two versions of my cover of “God Bless the Child.” There’s the version featuring Rex’s guitars, vocals, and production, and then there’s my version. You could call them the LA Mix and the Rust Belt Mix, if you’d like.

A couple items of note about this recording (and my contributions to Rex’s): on this recording I discovered Logic Express’s “amp modeling” feature…which is really nice, in that it all but obviates any need on my part to own an electric guitar or bass. (The guitars you hear are just my humble li’l acoustic, and the bass is a keyboard…but I tried, in both cases, to get an authentically nasty electric guitar/electric bass noise from them.) And then there’s the vocal: Another ghost showed up, in this case that of Elvis, who said to me, “Son, you know a bathroom makes a mighty fine vocal recording booth,” and so I set up my lonely little mic a good three feet from me in our bathroom with its stone tile floors and large glass shower enclosure…and then I shouted my way through the vocal. I’ve never tried singing like that before, and in case it wasn’t noisy enough, I then slathered some more distortion on top, getting a nice “Captain Beefheart blowing out the microphone” effect at a couple of points. It ain’t pretty or nice, and audio engineers are probably having heart attacks hearing it – but I think it does the job.

For some reason I ended up quoting not one but two classic late-seventies/early-eighties British bands’ basslines…the parts originally were just a bit close, and then I said, to hell with it, and quoted directly. You may spot a bit of bassline nicked from “Party Girl” by Elvis Costello & the Attractions, and another part cribbed from “Millions” by XTC. And then, after the whole thing was done, I realized that, amusingly, there’d been a subconscious influence from a nearly completely different universe: the chord sequence leading in to the solo, and the modulation of the solo itself, is the same as in “Over the Hills and Far Away” by Led Zeppelin…and listening to the rhythm guitar part, I can tell now that part of my brain was thinking of that similarity…

Also cool to note that without really thinking that hard about it, I found a way in to the lyric: I wouldn’t have thought, beforehand, that the lyrics lent themselves so well to a garage-rock song…but you know what? They do.

Monkey Typing Pool feat. Rex Broome “God Bless the Child” LA Mix (at Rex’s 39-40 blog)

Monkey Typing Pool “God Bless the Child” Rust Belt Mix

three-chord meme vamp

So, amused by the “archaic rap” meme featuring eccentric 18th-century self-portraitist Joseph Ducreux, I found myself wondering…what if “Louie Louie” had been a sonnet instead of a ’50s R&B number by Richard Berry and made famous by barely competent frat-rockers The Kingsmen?

I think it might have gone something sorta like this…(large, baby, is just a click away, click away…):

rock paper byte

Here’s an intriguing article, essentially addressing the question, “What makes a style distinctive?” How is it, for example, that trained musicians can often recognize the work of a particular player upon hearing only a few notes – or even, in some cases, a single note? How can experienced readers recognize a particular writer’s style, even when the writer might be pretending to affect a different voice? Students in writing classes often fail to recognize the distinctiveness of their own voice as writers, to their peril if they try to get away with plagiarizing someone else’s words: most skilled teachers can immediately recognize that the grafted prose is not their student’s work.

The article cites a particular verbal quirk exhibited by a character in a novel. For what it’s worth, that phrase was what led me to the article (I was originally wondering why people often double up on conjunctions, prefacing “yet” with “and” or “but,” as if “yet” wasn’t itself a conjunction…and in fact, the usage cited in this story begins to explain that phenomenon), but the author points out that, conceivably, a single word, or a single instance of a distinctive phrase, could provide a strong sense of identity for a writer. One would think that that would be more likely true with rarer words or distinctive phrases…and yet the cited case makes do with two of the commonest words in the language, and in a phrase that is commonly spoken (in fact, my overhearing the phrase is what spurred my search).

The link to the David Lodge story is a bit amusing: I suppose, first, in the quaintness of the story’s conceit that some future society would still rely on (presumably magnetic) tape to store data (and hey: thirty years from now we’ll laugh at current data storage, I’m sure), but more in the way that the fictitious author seems stymied by awareness of his own quirks. You’d think he’d be aware of them to begin with, really, and you think he’d have enough other quirks to allow the pointed-out quirks to blend in unsuspected among the others.

The anti-technological bias the excerpt exhibits seems to interface with an anti-intellectual bias just below the surface: ’tis bad to know how things work, it says; and if you learn, you will no longer be able to do. You can see this in some of the more antinomian moments of sixties art, I think; in the praise of the untrained “primitive”; in the critic’s wielding of the term “pretentious” as a club (the writer is entitled to judge the extent to which the artist can presume, which of course in itself presumes awareness of the presumption: you can’t diss a musician for alluding to Nabokov in his song lyrics if you don’t know who Nabokov is)…and even in the rock musician’s disdain for knowing too much traditional musical craft, such as reading music. (Amusingly, extensive knowledge of gear is apparently exempt from this rule…)

I’ve never understood this view. Analysis enhances and enriches rather than deadens: knowing how you do what you do enables you to stop doing it, rather than forcing you to awareness of what you can do no other than. (Unless you’re crap, of course.)

Backing up a bit: I’ve probably mentioned before an article I read way back in probably the late ’70s or early ’80s. I believe it was in Scientific American, and its subject was very similar to the computer analysis Lodge’s stand-in decries (it may even have been that article that inspired Lodge – although I’ve never again found the particular article). The analysts had input huge gobs of text from several well-known authors (I remember Henry James, Faulkner, and Hemingway…I think), and one task they set was to determine at what level “style” emerged. They chopped up the verbal corpus of each writer, and then put it back together again, first one word at a time, essentially in random order…then in two-word chunks, then three, four, etc. (That is, if the phrase “this night wounds time” had occurred, the first run would have most likely separated all four words, the second one could have produced “this night,” “night wounds,” and “wounds time,” while the third would have produced “this night wounds” and “night wounds time.”) The surprising results were that each writer’s distinctive style started to become visible as early as the three-word level…and by the five-word letter, no reader familiar with the writers was likely to misidentify which writer’s work was being reassembled.

And to return to that faux-future magnetic-tape strand: this article in today’s New York Times notes some of the difficulties researchers and archivists are likely to face as literature is increasingly composed on computers from the start, rather than with paper and pen or typewriter. “Manuscript” has largely been an outmoded term (at least if we take etymology seriously) but now even the physical medium is vaporized. One problem is hardware media interfaces: libraries are apparently compelled to keep functioning 5″ floppy readers on hand, and might as well resign themselves to becoming inadvertent museums of outmoded technology as well as information clearinghouses. The software problem is powerful as well, as Neal Stephenson pointed out more than a decade ago: what currently available application opens a MacWrite document?

I’m not sure how to answer the archival issues posed above. I suppose a combination of a very basic binary-level encryption of text, along with an extremely durable storage medium, might solve the problem. Perhaps we should be chiseling 1’s and 0’s into granite…

Geek Odyssey – Parts I and II

1. You may be thinking, hey, with this new 2-disc anthology of Bowie’s Deram years, I can get rid of that Deram Anthology that came out in 1997 (the 27-track version). First, if you are thinking of getting that 2-disc version, and you cannot find it at a friendly local record store, do not order it from US Amazon – it costs $26.99 there, whereas you can order it from British Amazon.co.uk for 8.95 British pounds…even with the shipping, that’s still less. (Note: Amazon.co.uk also has much better service: I ordered this Bowie collection from them the same day as two items from the US store: the Bowie album arrived today, and I’m still waiting on the Amazon.com order.)

Anyway, not so fast. The track listings might make you believe everything on the ’97 is on the new edition (confusingly retitled David Bowie…just like the release known in the US as Space Oddity was also retitled David Bowie: I know the original releases were both self-titled, but that’s bound to cause a bit of confusion – might if we just refer to both albums as “Bruce”?) but that’s not quite the case. First, you may have missed that the “original version” of “Space Oddity” on the ’97 anthology is not the same version as any that appear on the reissued no-longer-eponymous album. The version of “Ching-a-Ling” on the ’97 anthology is a different recording as well…and the alternate version of “When I Live My Dream” (track 26 on the ’97 anthology) is a radically different mix from any version on the new reissue. (The entire anthology is remixed, and in a few cases the sonic character is audibly different…but that’s the most dramatic case.)

So that 1997 anthology still has its uses. What should have happened (and maybe this is the long-term plan) is that since those songs are all from the Love You Till Tuesday soundtrack to an early, Kenneth Pitt promo film, perhaps that will see its own release someday…

2. This one’s been circulating around for a bit, but…a year or so ago a mathematician used a Fourier Transform (ask your mama, the math genius) on a digital recording of the famous opening chord of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” to try to solve the “mystery” of what notes are in the chord.

He comes up with some rather preposterous notions of what was played. First, the obvious facts, known for years: George Harrison’s playing an electric 12-string guitar, Lennon’s playing a 6-string acoustic (barely audible), McCartney’s playing a bass, and (whoa…super-secret mystery revealed!) George Martin chips in with a chord on the piano. The ridiculousness of Professor Brown’s approach is chiefly that rather than thinking about what he’s hearing both musically (what notes are likely to have been played?) and in terms of the actual instruments used, he uses his computer-generated results to construct a table of “notes” that he assumes were actually played. One problem with the second assumption is that he assigns those notes to instruments nearly at random (judging from the bizarre parts he assigns to Harrison, Lennon, and Martin). Another is that instruments, tuned perhaps not exactly to pitch, played together, particularly when electrically amplified, generate and emphasize overtones and harmonics that are not actually played. So the piano chord that Brown has Martin playing (you can see it in the .pdf file linked from the Wired article) is not something that a trained musician like Martin would have played in a million years, given the basic harmonic outlines of the chord Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney define collectively.

Brown has Martin playing a crazy-school chord consisting of the same D McCartney plays on his bass, the F a minor third above it…and then D two octaves above the bass note, along with a G one fourth above that, and an E (?!?) a major 6th above that. If those higher notes are present on the recording at all (the computer analysis “hears” them), they’re almost certainly harmonic artifacts of the rest of the notes actually played…not anything Martin would play on the piano. Further loony-tunes reasoning by Brown has John Lennon adding a single C, an octave above middle C: why the hell would he have done that? It makes far better sense to characterize that pitch (which I don’t actually hear) as an overtone from the three middle Cs being sounded by two of George’s twelve strings and one of Lennon’s six (the F-A-C-G chord I described at the top).

Harrison said for years that all he was doing, and all Lennon was doing, was to play an F chord on the bottom four strings with a G (two frets up) in place of the usual F (on the first fret) – and indeed, that’s what it sounds like to me, and evidence from videos of live performances suggest that that is exactly what was played. McCartney plays a D of the same pitch as an open D string, which is one key to the distinctive sound of the chord.

If you’ve been following along, we have an interesting hybrid chord. The guitarists began in F, but adding the G introduces some uncertainty. By playing a D, McCartney mixes things up further. We might say we have a Dm7 with an added 4th (or 11th), or it might be a G11 with D in the bass. Furthermore: the D in the bass and the G on top begin to suggest a chord built not from thirds but from fourths…and in fact, the C is the note one fourth above that G (transposed down an octave, to a fifth lower than the G), and the A is the note one fourth below the low D (transposed up an octave).

This article seems much more grounded in reality than Brown’s speculations…and this comment on this article relaying the Brown findings really nails it: “HandsOffMyRickenbacker” points out some salient characteristics of the Rick that Harrison played, and that the Beatles typically tuned slightly lower than A=440 (the pitch standard Brown used).

So what was George Martin playing on that piano? The everything2.com article says it’s a simple three-chord note, an open-fifth G chord with a D bass. That may be…but I’m pretty sure I’m hearing the interval of a major second in the bass register on that chord. It may be an artifact…but I’m guessing Martin picked up on the “fourthness” of the combined chord the Beatles were playing…and responded with D-G-A-D (beginning in the second octave below middle C, just below the lowest note on a guitar in standard tuning). The low D is barely audible…but I’m pretty sure that’s it.

hired hounds at both my wrists

I think I’ve gone on record here as enthusiastically favoring the cover of Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone as album cover of the year for 2009 – or even album cover of the decade (click to enlarge) –

And indeed, Tris McCall kindly quotes me on that nomination in his year-end Critics’ Poll, in which it won best cover. At the same time, he notes that of the voters for this cover, few were women (and of the voters for Case as best singer, a category she also dominated, none were women), and he implies this has something to do with the overwhelming babeness of Ms. Case.

Well, I certainly won’t deny that, or that that’s a factor – but for me, what makes this cover exceptional (I mean, if I were just voting for best cover on the basis of babeness, I might have just voted for this one…) is some ineffable something about the combination of the cover’s elements. I’m not sure who or what Case is looking at while wielding that sword (as Tris wonders), and I’m not entirely sure why she’s on the hood of that car (and I’m not sure whether the fact that it’s a Cougar is some sort of meta-joke). The combination of the borrowed advertising vernacular (the car photo) and Case’s sort-of-modelesque pose is amusing…but offset by her intentionally amateurish hand-drawn lettering, and why the whole thing is set in a blank nowhere (which looks as if it might have been made by layering torn strips of paper) – again, I’m not sure. But the overall effect is a lot of things: sexy, sure, but ironized (you’re not going to take the whole “muscle car/Cougar/cougar” thing seriously, are you?); ironic, but not entirely (Case may not really wield a sword, but she’s also clearly not the sort of woman to take a lot of shit from anyone, thank you very much); and somehow rather funny in a way that’s a bit hard to place…but not parodic, either. There seems to be some sort of comment on nature/culture, with the savage huntress riding her “Cougar” – barefoot, even…but of course, her mount is a car, not a wild animal; and you might at first mistake that sword for a javelin, but in fact it looks sorta museum-piece-like; and that’s not a necklace made of teeth around her neck, just a pattern on a top that looks sort of middle-level designerish (not that I’m any sort of expert).

There’s an intriguing blankness about the image: it gestures in the direction of any number of typical images, but doesn’t quite commit to any of them. The worst you could say about it, I suppose, is that it’s just a simple post-modern parody of this sort of thing* – but I think its refusal to overtly parody or editorialize about that sort of image is what makes it more than, and better than, an image that merely encouraged us to laugh at ha-ha the stereotypical swords-and-sorcery fantasy image.

I think the image is successful also because its complexity fits the complexity of the CD it houses: Case’s songs are deceptively direct and simple-sounding, but both structurally and lyrically they’re far harder to puzzle out and reduce to any sort of simplistic image or message.

Plus: hey, it’s not only guys who like the “good-looking woman with a sword” thing: look at the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or before that Xena…lots of female fans for those shows…

* Amusingly, I know this image because I know the woman who modeled for the cover…

better run, better take cover

Here is the score of a conceptual music piece I have composed, “Here Comes EEverybody”:

The piece is scored for any instrument or combination of instruments. The score consists in its entirety of the note E, in any or any combination of octaves, which note may be played any number of times, in rhythms, volume, and articulation to be chosen by the player or players. Other notes may be played, but such notes are not necessary.

An interesting fact about copyright is that under the Copyright Act of 1976, Section 102, copyright is granted, without any requirement of registration, to “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device…”

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sue anyone writing any music that quotes my new piece. (Tonal musicians working in the keys of E-flat are probably safe, however.)

Is that absurd? Yep. But only a little more absurd than the judgment an Australian court rendered against Men at Work for “plagiarizing,” in their huge eighties hit “Down Under,” a children’s song written by schoolteacher Marion Sinclair in 1934 and sung commonly by the Australian equivalent of the Girl Scouts (the Girl Guides), known as “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.” You can hear an a cappella performance of the song at the BBC article linked above.

So what exactly did Men at Work “steal” here? Two bars, a total of ten notes on three different pitches and in a distinctive rhythm (the opening phrase of the “Kookaburra” song), repeated a couple of times in the flute interjections after “Down Under”‘s chorus. That’s it – and for that, the “Kookaburra” song’s composer’s heirs are asking up to 60% of the income from the song. And that is utterly absurd.

First, if the phrase is from the “Kookaburra” song, it’s likely an ad hoc quotation, meant as iconic allusion to something typically Australian (just like most of the lyrics). Musicians have done this sort of quotation for hundreds of years. Second, it is not even a literal quotation: the original song is in a major key, and the phrase in question begins on the fifth degree of the scale (G in C major, say), moves up a whole step after the rapid repetition of the first four notes, then concludes on a repetition of a two-note minor-third descent from the fifth to the major third of the scale. Men at Work’s quotation is in a minor key, beginning also on the fifth degree of the scale but rising only a half step, and the final figure descends a major third (not a minor third) to the third degree of the minor scale. Again: this sort of transformed allusion is the sort of thing musicians have always done: classical music is full of such quotations, from folk songs and from other composers’ work…and jazz would all but cease to exist if such allusions and quotations were banned.

And of course, why did it take twenty-five years for anyone to notice this alleged theft? The composer, it turns out, lived till 1990 – and it’s hard to imagine any Australian not having heard this song. Apparently, either she did not notice the borrowing, or did not care. The only motivation here is financial, obviously: her heirs (or her heirs’ lawyers) happened to hear the song and a little bell went off in their heads. Or more likely, the sound of a cash register (KA-CHINNGG!)

According to this article, the allegedly offending phrase wasn’t even written into the song but was developed from stage improvisations by flute player Greg Ham. The rest of the band weren’t even conscious of the similarity at the time – which might sound like a convenient lie, except that the phrase is so small, so simple and basic, that it could have been from nearly anywhere.

Pretty obviously, Men at Work need to get better attorneys. As I said, this sort of musical borrowing, intentional or not, goes on all the time. Some examples: Frank Zappa quotes probably hundreds of different songs in his music, including “Louie Louie” dozens of times. The opening of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” is most likely an homage to the beginning of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (and their video to “Whip It” borrowed from a 1944 “Soundie“). The melody of “Paint it Black” is very close to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy transposed into a minor key. Approximately one zillion songs (including, oddly, prog-rock band Renaissance’s melodramatic Solzhenitsyn tribute “Mother Russia”) borrow Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” theme. And, this famous Looney Tunes theme shares its first five notes with “Mary Had a Little Lamb”…

A couple of ideas. First, copyright should return to the notion of protecting and encouraging creative rights…not the property rights of publishers in perpetuity (otherwise known as “Mickey Mouse time”: the extension of copyright keeps getting revised…right around the time Disney’s rights in Mickey Mouse are due to fall back into the public domain…). Marion Sinclair’s grandchildren or whoever did not have anything to do with the success of the Men at Work song, nor did the publishers of Sinclair’s song. Frankly, if anything, the Men at Work song might have spurred the children’s song’s popularity, if anyone recognized the quotation. Second, there should be a reasonable notion of fair use in musical works, as there is (or should be: it’s been severely limited in recent years) in written works. Amusingly, in the latest issue of The Nation there’s a review of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent book. The headline for the article is “Telling It Slant” – a re-worked allusion to the famous phrase of Emily Dickinson (“tell all the truth but tell it slant”). Of course (as is typical with such literary allusions) the reference is not explained or credited anywhere in the article: it is left to the reader’s discovery. I rather doubt that Dickinson’s heirs, or any of the publishers of editions of her poetry, is going to sue The Nation for “plagiarism” in referencing, by a transformed quotation, material to which they own certain rights. Reference is not plagiarism, even if it’s indirect or not overtly acknowledged as reference.

The precedent this case might set (at least in Australia) is surely dangerous: it is very hard to write popular music, in that music’s limited tonal vocabulary, without inadvertently quoting or near-quoting short melodic or rhythmic fragments from other works. There’s a huge difference between purposeful or accidental snippets like the flute melody in “Down Under” and wholesale theft: I would argue that something like the non-transformed use of the bass riff in “Ice Ice Baby” (from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”), or even all those songs in the late seventies that blatantly stole the rhythm and riff from “What a Fool Believes” (notably “Steal Away” by Robbie Dupree), much more clearly owe a musical and literal debt to their sources than something like a two-bar flute lick which could be substantially changed without destroying the character of the song.

Resistance is futile!

Jaron Lanier is not on Facebook – or at least, he doesn’t appear to be currently on Facebook. This may explain some of the rather odd notions he has about the site, as expressed in his article in the February issue of Harper’s, an excerpt from his new book You Are Not a Gadget. (Alas, the article is not available online except to subscribers…if you are one, here’s the link.) I wanted to agree with him…and he makes some good points, such as his comments about Microsoft Word’s obnoxious default feature that assumes you want to form numbered lists, etc. – which indicate to Lanier that the design of much software is predicated on the notion that, essentially, computers or the network cloud are or will be smarter than we are.

Somewhere along the line, though, he goes askew. Take this statement, for example: “Wikipedia…works through what I call the ‘oracle illusion,’ in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text super-human validity.” Since everyone knows that Wikipedia is authored by, and editable by, anyone (such knowledge is the root of tedious jokes about the site’s purported unreliability, in fact), that “suppression” seems awfully gestural. Sure, there’s no credits in the articles themselves…but anyone who cares to know can examine an article’s history, and careful examination can even reveal (in some cases) which contributor did what. And insofar as Wikipedia works (I believe it often does, but I’m not going to argue the reasons here), it’s because of human validity: that is, rather than the impersonal alleged authority of, say, The New York Times, whose editorial pages persist in a state of Olympian namelessness (much more “super-human” than Wikipedia), the authority of Wikipedia arises from the ceaseless flow of informed contributors. In this environment (with some circumstances being exceptions), good information drives out the bad, simply because bad information has far less power of persistence than good: an article on quantum physics is likelier to be monitored, and edited, by those knowledgeable about quantum physics than by those who don’t know or care about quantum physics, and therefore, bad information will be corrected by a plurality of potential (and informed) readers, whereas the only power given to assist bad info in persisting is sheer cussedness or idiocy (or ideology, I suppose).

But where Lanier really goes off the rails is in his description of Facebook. He seems to believe that (1) Facebook’s patrons are identified solely or primarily by items chosen from a multiple-choice database, such as “single” or “married” etc.; (2) “Romantic status” is the first item thought of by Facebook users (at least, it’s the first kind of status Lanier mentions…the first two, actually); (3) Facebook users are unaware of any distinction between their everyday, real-world use of the word friend and the Facebook term “friend,” such that they presumably do not understand the difference between friends (real world) and “friends” (Facebook); and (4) implicitly, that such prefab categories noted in (1) and (2) are the chief means whereby Facebook users seek to accumulate friends (or “friends,” if you’re reality-based). None of these seem correct…and all of them contribute to the impression of the typical Facebook user as some sort of misguided horny teenager. True, the dating status line in Facebook is limited to a handful of options (including a blank, which removes the field from display), but many other fields (such as political and religious beliefs) permit user entries…which is why a sampling of my friends reveals the definite “whiff of the subtle experience of the author” (which Lanier feels is absent from Facebook) in such ad-hoc political or religious affiliations as “religion stops a thinking brain,” “Frank Zappa” (as a “religious view”), or “Constitutional midrashist” (that’s under “political views”). Even if those categories were all prefab, the resulting limited number of options, and the way their display would default to that mere handful of possibilities, would likely mean people would ignore them as meaningful aspects of anyone’s personality.

Lanier, though, seems to think people get on Facebook and immediately do a search for anyone whose “relationship status” is “single” or “in an open relationship.” Lanier also seems to think that most Facebook users are teens or college students…which was of course true several years ago. But as any number of recent media portrayals of Facebook never tire of noting, the site has become exceedingly popular among ever-more-graying segments of the population (such as, uh, your gray-haired correspondent here).

The main issue I have with Lanier’s article is its insistence on pushing its thesis far past the bounds its logic, and its evidence, set for itself. For example, Lanier writes, “The most tiresome claim of the reigning digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than antediluvian paid experts”…and then immediately ditches that prudent “at some things” to argue the straw-man universalization of that principle. A few sentences later, Lanier writes: “If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies” (my emphasis). Suddenly, the reasonable proposition that crowd-sourcing is sometimes the most effective option is turned to a crackpot universal claim that “the crowd” always knows best, in all situations on all subjects. And observe that sniping little “for free”: in the context of Harper’s lefty environs, that’s going to be read as a sort of huzzah for the exploited laborers in the fields of the intellect…but turn to another recent Lanier publication, in the rather-less-worker-friendly Wall Street Journal, and suddenly he’s all about “foster[ing] creativity and intelligence” and denigrating “design…by committee” and implying that there’s something undignified, even denigrating, in giving away for free the fruits of one’s creative labor. (An amusing game is to read each article and check off the number of “left-wing” and “right-wing” talking points each article manages to hit: if nothing else, Lanier is a skilled propagandist, culturing his message to massage the beliefs of his chosen audience.)

And it’s too bad. Because as I said, in some ways I wanted to agree with him. In fact, insofar as complex computerized algorithms guide enormously complicated financial decisions far beyond the zenith of human comprehensibility, we are harmed…particularly when the results don’t pan out as expected. And it’s true that one pole of American idealism is the notion that there’s an easy way to any good answer by way of technology, science, or some formula or other to obviate the need to actually weigh the complicated, nasty, and all-too-human variables. (Another pole is nearly 180 degrees removed: a deep suspicion of any sort of structure other than sheer “horse sense”…by which we mean, I suppose, whether someone’s rheumatic big toe aches at five in the morning one day rather than another, or the anti-rationalism whereby folks willingly deny reason in favor of, say, belief in crystals, or astrology, or UFOs…) But Lanier’s exaggerated depictions of “the hive mind” (which we have to kill) in the Harper’s piece tend to make one suspicious of his other claims…and the transformation of what is nearly an anti-advertising screed (in Harper’s) into a fist-pumping praise of individual genius vs. the collectivized digital regime in the WSJ piece suggests both opportunism and a touch of the crank: there’s quite a bit of old-school technological determinism at work here as well. Even if Facebook wants to market to its users (which of course it does), even if the categories of its identify-defining demographic data would box in those users, the way those things are actually received and used does not necessarily correspond to the way they’re intended. For example: Lanier mentions Google Ads, the links supposedly tailored to reflect people’s interests and predilections as suggested by the content of their e-mails (scanned and digitally analyzed by a computer, not read by any actual person), and implies that they’re somehow regarded as a species of holy writ…when in fact, the only time many people I know refer to them is when they’re used as grist for parody, or ironic commentary on their curious interpretation of the multiple facets of people’s online lives. For example: one Facebook friend of mine once mentioned the band The Dentists…and since then, she’s been besieged with Facebook ads for dentistry and related fields. This same friend also ended up with a Twitter follower blabbling on about “astral projection”…she thinks this is because one of her tweets happened to use the word “lucid” (as in “lucid dreaming,” one of the pet notions beloved of folks inclined to believe in notions like “astral projection”). The “dentistry” thing has become a running joke among her friends…and while the great collective machine lurches on under its misperception that she’s a dentist, it’s certainly not the case that this hive mind has, say, compelled my friend to actually take up dentistry, read about or buy dental equipment…or pretend, for the sake of fitting a procrustean profile, to have done so.