Sunday, January 18th, 2009 // Paperhouse
Beyoncé. Mary J. Blige. Bono. Garth Brooks. Sheryl Crow. Renee Fleming. Josh Groban. Herbie Hancock. Heather Headley. John Legend. Jennifer Nettles. John Mellencamp. Usher Raymond IV. Shakira. Bruce Springsteen. James Taylor. will.i.am. Jonas Brothers. Stevie Wonder.
Throw in a hundred marching bands, Yo-Yo Ma, and a pheasant in a sour cherry chutney, and you’ve got yourself an inauguration. Slate’s Jack Shafer recently described Barack Obama as “an ocean that refuses no river,” and the smorgasbord of inaugural music seems to confirm that appraisal. Obama’s also been called the first president of the iPod generation, thanks to the eclecticism of his musical taste (first revealed in Rolling Stone last summer) and his popularity among blog darlings like The Arcade Fire and their fans. Don’t doubt the shrewdness of this particular medley, though: Obama is gunning for the pleasure centers of pretty much every demographic except metalheads and noiseniks. My parents will nod approvingly to the crooning of James Taylor and Garth Brooks — Garth Brooks?! — even though it’s likely that my dad wouldn’t know Beyoncé from Blagojevich. “If you liked it [the Ill. Senate seat], then you shoulda put a ring on it [my corrupt gubernatorial finger]!” My sister and I will suffer through Sheryl Crow and Josh Groban for the sake of Mary J. Blige.
A lot of the pundit chatter since Nov. 4 has been speculation about what kind of president Obama will be — liberal? centrist? spendthrift? pragmatist? — much of which has been fueled by supposed discord in the blogosphere regarding his Cabinet choices. With these musical selections, I think we can see yet again that Obama’s initial strategy is to cast his net wide, pitch a rather gigantic tent, and build his coalition big. No red states, no blue states… Ladies and gentlemen, The United Playlist of America!
Perhaps all of this is just inaugural bluster that will dissipate as soon as the president-elect is done high-fiving the Lincoln Bible. We will all retreat to our respective Blogspots and Twitters — Republicans to lick their raw electoral wounds, Democrats to gloat and hope. But for now, I think it’s worth noting that for at least a few days, the Beltway has become the click wheel of the world’s largest iPod: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States … so help me Steve Jobs.”
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 // Paperhouse
I like to believe that I have always been the coolest person I know. Being cool has always meant being the first to do something, so that when everyone else caught up you could tell them, “I’m too cool for that.” I never used training wheels on my bicycle, instead learning the art of balance by rolling down a hill on a banana-seated two-wheeler and into the splintery throes of a wooden fence. My siblings, also insistent on making me cool, exposed me to a variety of “cool” things early on, like how to jump out of moving cars (age 7), smoke Marlboro reds (age 11), and most effectively beat the pulp out of anyone (I’m still not saying sorry to Bobby Cleveland, age 9). My peers eventually learned these skills as well (some, I may say, more effectively than others), but it took them some time to catch on.
It came as a surprise, then, when I was in high school, that no one ever caught on to loving hair metal as much as I had during seventh grade. Eighth grade came and I was slowly getting weaned off hair metal in favor of a more aggressive black metal, and I thought that perhaps it was just too soon for them to get it. But then there was ninth grade, then 10th, and people weren’t wearing their ripped up T-shirts from last night’s big Poison concert. Something was wrong.
I was beginning to feel uncool, a feeling that only worsened when even my well-intentioned siblings tried to tell me I was at least a decade too late. I started breaking out the old T-shirts. I cut my hair into a punk-rock mullet that I teased up with hair spray (a haircut that, minus the hair spray, may or may not still exist today…). I wanted to try again, and I thought that I might have some more success this time as commercial music television broadcasters began airing specials saying all kinds of wonderful things about Cinderella, Winger, Quiet Riot, and Warrent. I could watch the “Sweet Cherry Pie” video after school, and be impressed with myself for “getting it.”
The thing is, though, even with the TV specials and all the “classic rock” radio stations in Philadelphia that would spin the life out of a Boston or Europe (or Kansas or Asia or London) record, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated when I went to see Motley Crue during their “Carnival of Sins” tour in 2006, and none of my classmates were there.
Even with all our technology, I still believe there is no replacement for the face-melting shreds, ballsy bare chests, and blatant creepiness involved in videos like Winger’s “Seventeen.” I’ve been waiting nearly a decade now for hair metal to be in style again, making it nearly two decades since its heyday. Now, I’m not saying you all need to feather your hair, but maybe you should, maybe you would like it. I’m just asking — please, let me be cool again. Listen to more hair metal.
Sunday, November 16th, 2008 // Paperhouse
Some people think that the mixtape died with the advent of the MP3. Now, apparently, all we do is shuffle our libraries, and a coherent musical narrative is not important. The amazing choice of being able to download almost anything, and then being able to listen to whatever you have in whatever way you want, has killed the importance of a track listing, or so conventional wisdom goes.
Of course, this isn’t true. Such vast choice makes the existence of a worthwhile filter on the music we hear more important than ever before, and while artificial intelligence is making some strides (see Pandora, Last.fm, and iTunes Genius), the best filters remain human — musicians, critics, or DJs whose opinions you respect, as well as your friends. And, most often, these filters come in the form of playlists.
Music blogs are the most obvious filters of this kind, and while some may balk at calling them examples of musical narratives, I think it’s totally warranted. Here the narrative isn’t the same as an album, of course, but it is an example of a listener’s path through current or past music. One can hear the development of authors reading through theirarchives or following their blog’s updates. This is the modern analog of asking friends what they’ve been into lately, and MP3 attachments and podcasts extend it to the modern analog of coming over and hearing what’s on his stereo (or borrowing a disc). This is not the traditional kind of narrative, like a mixtape would be, but it’s wildly popular and is an active kind of listening in sharp contrast to shuffle.
The venerable mixtape itself has not died either, of course, though now it’s sometimes not physical. But the main purpose of the mixtape was for a friend to assemble a kind of album and share that listing of tracks with you, in a way that played all of them in sequence, hearing connections between disparate songs that make the playlist more than a sum of its parts. Muxtape (muxtape.com) was a wildly popular service that did just this — it allowed users to upload tracks from their own libraries, arrange them in a clean and simple interface, and then gave them a link they could send friends so they could listen to the whole tape right there on the page.
Of course, this was so wildly popular that the RIAA killed it, but the Internet responded in the way the Internet knows best — by decentralizing it. Opentape (opentape.fm) provides software, free for download, that can exactly replicate Muxtape’s functionality on your own web server.
So we see that meaningful arrangement of music is not at all dying because of the influence of new technology. Rather, new technology is enabling these narrative arcs to travel in novel, more distributed, and more personal ways. The mixtape is not dead.
