May 15ths

5/15/1997

Open Letter to Songwriters

Fellow Songwriters:

As a songwriter, I find it to be immensely important to write compelling music--music that is exciting. I will admit that controversy is indeed exciting. To be on the cutting edge of art is exciting--this is where the music industry wants to be (and needs to be--the music industry is in a serious slump). But is it really "music", and is it really "art"? (See my "Music or Musing" post on the songwriting newsgroup for my thoughts about coining a new term to describe post-1990 art. 

I got into a serious discussion a few days ago with a friend, and I was giving him my thoughts about music and art. I had come to some tentative conclusions that "good music" is not necessarily "good art", and was trying to articulate' my hypothesis. A piece of music can be well crafted, but in the context of current musical tastes, can be deemed "bad art" because it fails to consider what the current American cultural psyche is. As an exercise, I threw out some words that I think describe our current pop psyche: trash, kill, rape, rip-off, blood, worthless, death, deceit, corrupt, die, slash, deconstruction, destroy. (Given what I have been hearing people laugh at in movie theaters these days, I think this is a pretty good list.) Jimmy Iovine of the bete noir record label, Interscope (recently dumped by Time Warner because of the murder of Tupak Shakur, among other things) described rap as "food"--when people don't get it they get cranky. Jimmy's credo is to excite their patrons, and they are excited indeed. (The company, only 6 years old, recently had 5 releases in the Billboard's No. 1 album spot.) He also thinks that the conservative tirade is crap. It probably is, but there are still liberals who think something is awry, and that blatant violence in art may be the culprit. In any event, the art is a formidable phenomenon, and I reel in what the implications might be. One is the time period in which we live: At the end of the 19th century, the term "fin de siecle" was used to describe the "decadent" art that was being produced at that time. Rap is decidedly "fin de siecle". (It is also interesting to note that centuries and millennia only came about by the firm establishment of our current calendar. This created a state of mind associating a number with an event. The whole concept of millennialism is basically psychological.) Generally speaking, rap is primarily made up of "outside" elements, i.e. social commentary, fashion statements, "art is a mirror" philosophies. The "inside" elements, i.e. melody, harmony, structure, arrangement are almost nonexistent. The only inside element is that it has a rhythm and a tempo. But still, the word "music" is often used with rap, sometimes "good music". Even Jimmy Iovine, who has worked with Lennon, Springsteen, Patti Smith, among others, thinks that the notorious figure Suge Knight and the Death Row label make "great music". It might be great measuring with a 1997 yardstick, but it is certainly not music in any traditional sense. I like to call it "musing" instead of music--musing simply uses more outside elements. And outside elements are what it takes to make cutting edge art. There's a certain spirit, or abandonment that makes "musing" so exciting. But like a stampede at a soccer game, it's not easy to expel oneself from a riotous crowd. The "fin de siecle" art of the late 19th century did have these elements, but "fin de siecle" a hundred years later is somehow not the same.

Something IS awry when pain and death come into the picture, and we don't know how to stop it. 
In sum, songwriters have to let the muse direct our creative efforts. But at the same time, we have to write and produce compelling works of art--and this means that we have to think deeply about what "good art" is, and do it in a responsible manner.  

LLM: "Discuss musing versus music" 

Musing vs. Music: Understanding the Two Hemispheres of Creativity  

5/15/1998

Hot and humid, 88 degrees. Early summer—odd.

[The late 90s was when I started noticing a change in weather. Now it’s normal in Chicago to have summer weather in mid-May, when the frost season used to end].

Frank Sinatra died at 82.

Web-based music is really becoming an industry. It's the perfect milieu for generative music. I also like the “sound font” idea, so that you can orchestrate pieces and have them play back with the same sound every time. 

[5/15/2025: So much of the early web was saturated with all the potentialities for collaboration in the arts. The beginning of any new technology is all "blue-sky", then you realize that "weather" exists. Napster was the "storm" that rolled in. The internet is now the musical instrument replacing the recording studio as an instrument, just as the internet is now the new TV].    

5/15/2001

Hot, 90 degrees

To MCA for Christian Marclay Exhibit. Guitar Drag—gallows humor.

Interesting show on This American Life about setting a date for your death in 6 months, and seeing how it changes your experience of life. Kevin Kelly cried and got very emotional once he passed death and felt like he got his life back. Interesting: how you could be so disciplined to keep a fictitious date, and schedule your life accordingly. That’s like saying “on such a date I will be a multi-billionaire”, and making plans for it. It’s mostly delusional. But if it changes your long-term outlook what harm is done? 

5/15/2003

Interesting article in New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, Connecting the Dots on the intelligence failures preceding 9/11. The more information you get, the grayer it becomes, i.e. you fail to see shades and bits of information in different context changes the meaning. This reminds me again of the book The User Illusion. Once the brain creates “exformation” it naturally sorts out common information. Sometimes you want to see and examine common information to see the finer shades of gray. In music, instead of twelve tones to the octave, you can have an infinite number. But humans will always be able to see such minor differences. 

5/15/2010

Red Shirt protests in Bangkok out of control. A failed coup d'etat.

You Tube turns five years old. It's very mature for its age.

[5/15/2025: Astonishing how far it has come. But 2012 was its inflection point where it truly became (ad supported) TV with the use of algorithms. The big wish in the beginning of the web was streaming video. It was already using the film metaphor with elaborate Flash intro pages that were like opening sequences in films].

5/15/2022 

Reading Man Ray’s writings on art. What I like about books of correspondence is to marvel at how much people wrote to each other—in long-form, not just in little text messages.  He thought painting was dead but still did it “to convince himself of its inanity”. “Painting is dead, finished”; You will perish if you are not abreast of [ the latest art developments]. The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.”

[5/15/2025: Very true. Artists need to be on the cutting edge, now with AI. At the same time you have to explore other edges in the past–the geological strata. If you painted in the past, you should still make paintings, like I still work in music notation. It’s important not to dismiss new technology out of hand. If artists aren’t finding interesting things in new technologies then you just scratch the surface. It’s like the aeropainting style that emerged out of Italian fascism. It didn’t stop artists in their tracks. It was grist for new work].   
 

5/15/2024

Another Keith Haring entry and song idea. 

5/15/1977: "We're on our way to Sacramento in a '62 Chrysler with a dome dash and plastic slipcovers. It's a really neat car. Also, he is blind in one eye and has a cataract in the other and the radio doesn't work right 'cause he spilled a glass of Coke down the front of the dash a few years ago. But we'll get there..." Alternate titles: "Really Neat Car," "Getting There".

When I think about AI now in comparison to music technologies in the mid and late 80s, I see it as being provisional and experimental, and interesting in that way. When I got my first cassette 4-track in 1988 it was basically a way to experiment. In 2024 I think it’s still in that phase. People who are using it now are how I used it then, such as turning the tape over, using different tape speeds, recording found objects and sounds. It was all about experimentation, yet in the flow of other more “serious” things, or where the experiments turned into something traditionally usable.

If LLMs existed in 1988 people would be experimenting as they would with tape, and would be very popular and everyone would be making mixtapes and sharing them around. There would be millions and millions of cassette tapes and it would be overwhelming—huge mountains of cassettes of people experimenting with the new technology. It’s a good thing that the mountains are now digital.    

5/15/2025

If AI-generated music was set up so you'd see the artists whose samples are in the data set, you'd have to pay dearly for them. Would you pay $25 to generate a song with a guitar riff by David Gilmour? Many people probably would. Or there will be different tiers--generate a song using unknown samples: 0.005 BTC. And those songs will be churned by influencers. After algorithms, how could it be any different? This is where it's going I think if the industry (machine) prevails. It will also create other Napsters (and countercultures).