July 13ths

7/13/2016

David Bowie wasn’t poisoned by cynicism or sour grapes, even when he knew he was dying. Arguably his last experimental works were not as finely experimental as, say, Outside. But that is not the point.

*** 

This song, written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, was recorded at RCA Victor Studio B in Hollywood on July 25, 1966. Can’t get any more “summer” than this. (Sondheim using the summer season) 

7/13/2021

Back in the early aughts I had this idea that was called “Video 45s” because very often I would go see films and there would be certain scenes that I really liked and my idea was that instead of watching the movie over and over again in its entirety, we’d watch scenes as “singles”. When you played the single or “watched the single” it would remind you of the entire film so it would save you time from watching the entire film again. That was almost 30 years ago and now we have Shorts...

[7/2024: What’s interesting about creating music that is exactly 45 seconds or 60 seconds long is whether the performance of it will match clock time. You can calculate the number of beats required for 45 seconds at a certain tempo, but can it be performed precisely each time to be exactly 45 seconds? It’s easy to do with a click track, but more difficult to do manually].   

7/13/2022

Forced consumption of classical music will do nothing to the way your brain is working. To the extent that it is a function of signaling that you are intelligent and cultured, also will have no effect other than to inflate the ego.

Listening to (or playing) any kind of music will serve the function of widening your knowledge generally, primarily through the pattern and logic inherent in music.     
 

 

A Songday for 7/13

If rock is in fact ‘dead’, will it have a revival at some point in the future? Arguably, the quality of music in the traditional sense has been declining since the 60s, and yet music written in the two decades following, was still reverent of musical history, and directly influenced by it.

Every 20 years or so you get generational effects, which determine how music history is interpreted. 60s musicians were innovating on musically fertile ground; Now I’m not so sure. If David Bowie and The Who were writing songs today would they be as good? Probably not, as the parentage is altogether different. Moreover, having David Bowie as an influence doesn’t automatically inherit his very eclectic influences. You’d have to go back and listen to what he was listening to in order to make a Revival.

The bigger question is if the musicianship and zeitgeist are there. You’d need both.

7/13/2017

***

7/13/2024: This was a response to a Quora question. If you've ever been on it, there are perhaps thousands of "is ____ dead" questions. As someone once said, “Painting might be dead--but it just won’t lie down”. As long as artists are inspired by other generations of artists in all mediums, none can ever really die. If young artists are inspired by a trip to an art museum, as I was when I was a teenager, you'd be copying the things you thought were interesting, regardless of age. The problem in 2024 is that people aren't looking for what intrinsically interests them, it's what might might trend or perform well on social media. Certainly, David Bowie never did that, and when he did, it was in collaboration with musicians and producers who would achieve some artistic vision. What's dead in July 2024 are those kinds of visions, as everything seems to have to be generated by AI. The problem might be forced revivals emerging from nostalgia, which is different from a metamodernist revival, or a "neo" something.