January 28ths

Antipode: July 28ths 

1/28/2004
            
In today’s art world, anyone who can click a mouse can call themselves an artist, which is something Microsoft has been pandering to and appealing to the knee-jerk responses of Americans who now think they can easily click their way to creativity and artistry.
           
[1/28/2025: It’s easy to call yourself an artist if it’s made easy to make. Now it just takes a bit of copy and paste of some words and a few mouse clicks to generate songs. The etymology of “art” is “to make”. Every time I look at ancient art I don’t see “easy”. It might have been something that took days to make, like an intricately filigreed vase–but it wasn’t for the enjoyment of the process, it was a nice luxury object made for the wealthy. Artisans were probably slaves, and to some degree we are still slaves to our own definitions (or ideals) of what art now may mean in a social media landscape. The real Artistes are those not with an “eye”, but those who are more in the public eye, or public “I” or persona].

1/28/2005

Listening to 70s music on the radio. Most of the songs evoke the album on which they appeared—for example Home At Last which was on Steely Dan’s Aja album. It’s a synecdoche--the part stands for the whole. Generations all developed certain expectations for media. Songs are part of albums an hour-long, TV commercials are 30 seconds, and so on. A 20 year-old might like the Steely Dan song Babylon Sisters but won’t care that it was on the Gaucho album. The concept of the album has temporarily devolved from the music pantheon . Prediction that it will come back. Note to year 2020: Did it ever come back?

[1/28/2025: It has come back for me in the form of video albums, which simulate the experience of looking at (mostly static) visuals while you’re listening to the album--not just individual songs, which might just be singles not attached to any larger concept. It seems inconceivable in 2025 that people will sit down and listen to an album as they did in 1975, but they do binge-watch shows and even long films.]

1/28/2007

Watched Rikki Lee Jones concert on PBS. She’s a musician that has totally embraced her own quirkiness and gets up in front of an audience with no shame at all about who she is. She did a little banter/lecture about being concerned about what other people think can stop us from fulfilling our dreams.

1/28/2020            

What if Mozart played blues? Composers must have discovered blue notes by accident, but dismissed them as dissonant or wrong. Major 7th chords were dissonant in the sense that the 7th degree resolved to the tonic. The tritone in the baroque and classical periods was always an interval that required a resolution to a more stable chord. But pianists must have found it and used it on its own as a standalone sonority, and it wasn’t until be-bop and heavy metal that it was used as a riff. What if there were ‘riffs’ or ‘licks’ as we understand them now, that had existed during the classical period? Jimi Hendrix established that sound with the now eponymous “Hendrix Chord”. Composers might have used it as a leitmotif for an evil character or specter in an opera, but by 1968, or by the time Hendrix released Foxy Lady, society would have inculcated (reinvented) it as the sound of the time.
            
Mozart probably heard blues, but quickly rejected it. I would presume that in other parts of the world at that time young musicians were playing on lutes in “pubs” and finding that sound. 
            
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One would think that people don’t study music theory anymore, but if you look at YouTube, Rick Beato has over a million followers, rivaling some of the presidential candidates-—just for music theory! But are they really learning anything? 

1/28/2024

I was watching an interview with Peter Cetera taken 10 or 15 years ago and he was talking about his split from Chicago and the launch of his solo career. The interviewer asked him about the Chicago 18 album, which didn’t have him on it, yet sounded like he was. The popular songwriter tends to dominate the sound of a band, so the best pop music is done by strong songwriters. Band songs tend to become popular because people like the popularity of the band—they’re not looking at the popularity of one of the members. If Geddy Lee does another solo album it won’t sound like Rush; it will sound like Geddy Lee and then if Rush reunites and he does most of the songwriting, any album that Rush or he releases is going to sound like him, even inadvertently—like Chicago 18 sounded like a Peter Cetera record, not Chicago.

1/28/2025