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  <a href="/blogs/blog/3017052/is-dumber-smarter">Is Dumber Smarter?</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message">In my kindergarten class picture, there is one kid wearing a white dress-shirt and tie.Guess who?<br><br>This wasn't actually just because I thought it was such a formal occasion. A major part of my motivation was an excuse to dress up like the coolest guys on TV – Steve McGarret from Hawaii 5-O, and, er, Maxwell Smart from Get Smart.<br>At the age of 4, I didn't really understand much of what was going on in 5-O (Get Smart was generally followable for a toddler, I'm sorry to say), but there were two things I certainly understood about the show: Jack Lord's McGarrett was infinitely cool, and the show's theme music/opening credits excited me royally. The tempo and energy of the groove energized me, and the melody and chord changes whisked me away to exciting mindscapes. Perhaps it was an early, addictive high from this natural drug we call music.<br>Zooming ahead forty years, I was idly wiki-ing Hawaii 5-O (in this internet age, the question “what ever happened to...” is now so easily and thoroughly answered...), and I read that the newly-re-made series not only resurrected the original show's theme music, but it re-created the Honolulu montage, all fast-cuts, zooms and iconic images.<br>I had to check this out. Cue Youtube.<br>So the opening credits were now squeezed down to one minute from the original two (no repeat-with-key-change – gotta save that valuable time for commercials), but they kept the hula dancer, the jet engine, the speeding motorcycle, the fly-in to the penthouse where McGarrett is introduced, adding a slightly cheesy 'high-tech' gunsight targeting graphic to the visual mix...and the music?<br>The melody remained, now re-orchestrated with a fuzzy electric guitar in unison with the winds...but the inventive chord changes?<br>Gone.<br>The whole thing is played over one chord now. You could play it on the bagpipes (perhaps if there's an 'Edinburgh 5-O spin-off?). Nothing against bagpipes, but even their greatest adherents would admit the Pipes are a bit harmonically limited, what with four drones maintaining the same chord from beginning to end of all songs...but I digress.<br><br>I picked up this month's issue of “Classic Rock”, which makes a consistent effort to introduce its readers to new acts in addition to the obligatory articles on Cream, Zeppelin, Humble Pie, et al. This month's issue came with a couple of sample CD's of new music, which I was quick to check out.<br>Holy hackneyed harmonies, Batman! Every 'new' act seemed to be working from the same cookbook: Start with one pentatonic riff, guitar, repeat; layer with second guitar before introducing one-item-on-menu rhythm section. Vocalist then shouts angrily and curses pentatonically about abuse he has suffered and his toughness. Add sing-along chorus in similar vein, repeat and finish with a decisive stomp. No fade-out's here.<br>Coincidentally, Classic Rock's editor was crowing this month about how his magazine is now the second-best-selling monthly music periodical in the UK, overtaking Q and Uncut.<br>I certainly don't begrudge Classic Rock its success – it's a well-written, well-researched publication that actually does provide a lot of variety (this month's features including Jack Bruce, the Pixies, Kiss, Metallica, the Temperance Movement) with plenty of flair...but I was struck hard by the deeply formulaic, conservative nature of the 'new' music sampler. Is the cross-section of new rock acts so limited, or did the editor simply choose acts that fit into an extremely narrow set of parameters? And...does it matter?<br>Walk into any dance club, coffee shop or fashion outlet these days, and the canned background music will likely have either the simplest, minimal chord changes or (the closer you get to modern dance music) none at all – one chord for the whole song, like bagpipes. Orchestrations often show imagination these days, and catchy melodies ('though still pretty simple) are in evidence – but everything else built for public consumption seems designed to avoid provoking any higher brain function.<br>The question is: does the public generally prefer simpler musical structures, or is the simple stuff just produced in much greater quantity or pedalled more aggressively by cynical record labels?<br>I'm certainly aware that a sure way of putting an audience to sleep is playing over their heads. I don't believe in musical complexity for the sake of it, and prefer songs that can do innovative (or at least imaginative) things with the harmony, melody or rhythms without alerting the average listener to anything but distinctiveness. Ironically, that's why I still have abiding respect and affection for the original theme from Hawaii 5-O – to my ear, it took the listener to imaginative places without tipping off the listener to anything but good toe-tapping going on. Hey, if it could fire up non-musically-trained toddlers, you couldn't fairly call it intellectually demanding.<br>Now I know there are plenty of musicians out there who understand harmony/chord changes better than I ('though I suspect most of them would be jazz musicians). The simplification trend isn't likely due to a dearth of capable composers. My tentative and somewhat disturbing conclusion is that nifty turns of harmonic phrase are simply out of fashion at this time, in the same way imaginative vocabulary, sound sentence structure and even accurate spelling are bordering on dowdy. It's literally all too cool for school.<br>From this point in time, two very different things could happen. Fashions in music and speech will continue as they are – increasingly less original and less challenging - or the pendulum will swing back the other way. There is certainly plenty of cause to believe either scenario. Folks who made their names and fortunes songwriting in the '40's lamented the relatively brain-dead rock and roll of the '50's and '60's*– and a typical dance hit today is hardly more inventive than, say, “Wooly Bully” (1965). Still, there have been waves of fashionable inventiveness, from the Beatles' '60's to the prog/improv rock of the '70's, the '80's songsmithing of the Police, the Squeeze and Crowded House, and even the way-outside-the-box of plenty of grunge bands of the '90's. The general public might not like being intellectually challenged, but they do like a fresh change every so often. Meanwhile, 'though I'm happy to see a magazine like Classic Rock outsell magazines about current club hits, I'd hope Classic Rock remembers what made rock classic – in the day, it was subversive, challenging, edgy, a little disturbing. Circulation couldn't be hurt by sampler CDs full of music that takes you somewhere new...or at least Honolulu.<br><br>*There is a story that shortly before his death in 1955, jazz god Charlie Parker came to hear a friend's gig. The friend was attuned to the winds of commercial change, playing saxophone in a newfangled rock and roll band. During a set-break, the guy noticed his saxophone had gone missing. Rushing out the exit to catch the thief, he found Charlie Parker playing the horn as he sauntered down the alley. “Sorry, man”, Parker explained, “I just wanted to see if it could play more than one note.” </div>
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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2867069/critique-of-criticism">Critique of Criticism</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message">I can think of very few of my acquaintances who could walk up to, say, a Vermeer, a Renoir or a Pollock and confidently criticize it for better or worse. Perhaps a few might form an opinion on whether they like what they see, but it's unlikely they would definitively link that feeling with a belief of the artistic worth of the painting (well...the Pollock might be borderline there, to be fair). Ballet, modern dance, sculpture – probably accepted or dismissed as an entire art form by the layman rather than any one work being evaluated for its merits. Literature? The attention required tends to weed out the more impulsive, less experienced would-be judges. Music? Suddenly we're in hyper-democratic territory...Where music is concerned, it's probably an exaggeration to say everyone's a critic, but certainly a lot are, despite “I like everything” being by far the most common declaration about music I hear. This doesn't just apply to “pop” music, which, by definition, is accessible, anti-elitist, democratically-generated ('though many would argue, market-driven). From Bach to Beatles, there are a lot of lay people out there who feel intuitive enough to judge the worth of a work. The only other art form I can think of that begs such unqualified criticism is drama – whether on stage or screen – and probably not by coincidence.<br><br>Today's toddler might not have any exposure to modern sculpture or ballet, but you can bet the child has seen television and heard music – often together. While such a kid probably can't articulate much difference between a van Gogh and a Norman Rockwell, the difference between Chopin and Cheap Trick is immediately apparent to even toddler ears. We amass a lot of experience with music early on, and it makes us comfortable with it...and comfortable rendering judgement.<br>Is this a bad thing? I find the degree of evil in it directly proportional to the degree of ignorance. If you prefer Bieber to Brahms, I know you're not alone and (I tell myself) it's not a moral failing...but if you tell me Bieber is a master and Brahms is a wanker, and that anyone who thinks differently is deluded – well, you and I will have a very frank exchange of views then and there. That's just taking democracy a little too far, in my book.<br>Why should I feel I have empiricism on my side in this dispute? Well, I'm a musician, I'm a qualified music teacher with a Music degree and years of experience playing, writing and studying music. I can articulate the differences between these disparate B's as a mechanical engineer could point out the differences between a Porsche and a child's red wagon. There's not even any sport in it.<br>Things get a lot stickier when it comes to comparing pop versus pop. Is a song that sells a million copies necessarily better than a song that sells a dozen? Is a song that uses twenty different chords and modulations of both harmony and rhythm better or worse than a song that uses two chords and one drum pattern? Does it matter if the singer sings out of tune or can hit a high C? If the song annoys you because it keeps playing in your head? If you liked it so much that you played it until you grew completely sick of it? If it has tons of personality but no originality? Vice versa?<br>A lot of would-be critics might use a few of these parameters to justify their opinion of a song, but the truth is there are a ton of inter-related factors at play that determine a pop song's perceived value - from cultural context to frequency of airplay (perceived popularity, or value to others), and of course that elusive balance between originality and familiarity. I also have a sneaky suspicion that most folks – professional music critics included – often don't really know why they like or don't like a song – but they're willing to take a guess. Why was Sultans of Swing a hit in the height of Disco? How could a song with essentially a two-pitch melody, downer lyrical theme and no bass become a hit in 1984?* Why is Justin Bieber? Who put the bomp in the bomp bah-bomp bah-bomp?<br>The kicker is that I, too, suffer that cockiness of the self-assured music critic – 'though I've mellowed a bit over the years. As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, I'm much harder to musically please and impress than I've ever been, but I'm also a little less likely to get a serious hate-on for a piece of music. Still, I've grown dispassionately dismissive. This brings me to an impasse where musical colleagues are concerned.<br>I can't count the number of times I've listened to a live local artist and thought, “these guys could be so much better if only they'd do A, B and C.” Occasionally, I've considered telling the artist this very thing, but always thought better of it. After all, in that artist's eyes, who the hell am I? If the artist is doing as well or better than I at drawing a crowd, why should they care what I think they could improve upon? If I'm asked for my opinion, I'll do my best to speak helpfully, frankly and encouragingly – but otherwise, I've learned to just comment on what I liked. At the very least, if I say I like your guitar tone, you know I'm not blowing smoke up your knickers. I genuinely like your guitar tone. I might even nick a few ideas from your rig.<br>Perhaps ironically, feedback could probably be most useful from peers and venue managers. I've certainly played a number of gigs where crowd response was excellent but the club owner never returned my calls afterwards; where friends have been positive about a show but crowd response was flat; or when I've had a packed, enthusiastic room one night followed by an empty floor at our next local show. Gigs often do leave a few unanswered questions regarding what went wrong or right. If a good soundman told me 'man, I like your sound, but you guys have got to smile and jump around more', or a venue manager said 'just focus on the music, don't bother mugging for the crowd', I'd entertain those and many other suggestions if none mean compromising the spirit of the music. I also know most in-demand gigging musicians keep a 'if-you-can't-say-something nice...' policy in the interests of career survival, as artists can be rather thin-skinned. Certainly, criticism itself probably has about the same consistency in quality as the art itself – one must always choose wisely. The difference is that there's just so little feedback to choose from.<br>Neil Peart's evaluation criteria for art has always stuck with me: “what is the artist trying to say, and how successful is he/she in conveying it?”. I think it's most definitely in the artist's interest to stow the ego and welcome feedback – and evaluate the quality of the criticism with a cool head.<br>I'm often reminded of the lead singer crisis Yes suffered in the early 80's: Longtime lead singer and co-founder Jon Anderson left the band, and was replaced by Buggles (of “Video Killed the Radio Star” fame) alumnus Trevor Horn. Horn rolled up his sleeves and co-wrote the 'Drama' album with Yes, taking the band in a bold, new direction. He toured successfully with the band in the US, singing a ridiculously demanding repertoire (Anderson is that rarity of rarity among singers – a male alto, a.k.a. born with a freakishly high singing voice. Horn has a good male high-range, but Anderson's tunes are centred higher still - more in a comfortable female vocal range), but suffered vocal fatigue and hostile audiences in Europe. The Yes management angrily gave Horn the boot, suggesting he should go produce records instead of singing on them.<br>Horn's response? Not only did he become a producer – he became arguably the world's most successful producer, at the helm for, ironically and among many others, the next Yes album, which remains their biggest commercial success and source of their only number 1 hit (with Anderson back on vocals). Horn suffered a lot of stinging criticism around the time of his stint as lead singer for Yes, but he put some of that criticism to extremely good use – and the rest is history.<br>Tempted to offer a little well-meaning feedback to a local artist? Consider what the artist is trying to say (and if you can't tell, asking is a great ice-breaker) and their success in saying it. Consider whether the artist is mature enough to take the criticism as intended; and if so, speak your mind. I dare you. Even if the artist in question is me.<br>The worst that can happen is I'll become a producer.<br><br>*Have you figured out the artist and song on your way to the footnote?<br>“When Doves Cry” by Prince.<br><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm"> </p></div>
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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2792903/where-the-hell-are-we">Where the Hell Are We?</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">If I say “the 'Seventies”, whether you were alive or not during that decade, you'll probably get a fairly specific set of images in your mind: disco and its fashion, long, shaggy hair, big, bloated cars, Trudeau (Sr.), Nixon and Carter, bell-bottom blue jeans, patches and VW vans. If I specify music of that time, you'd likely think of disco, hard guitar-driven, blues-based rock, AM-flavoured light-rock and left-leaning Country. You might also think of Fusion if you like a sprinkling of Jazz. For better or worse, the decade has a pretty quick shorthand of images that clearly define it.Most other decades have the same shorthand images for pop culture, political events and music – even decades for which virtually none of us were yet present. From the Flappers, Dixieland and rum-runners of the '20's to the unkempt, grunge-laden, angst-ridden dot-com '90's, it's easy to draw a caricature of each decade of the last century.<br><br>This century, however, seems to be a different story.<br>How about those 'Noughties? The preceding decade might be remembered for 9/11 the 'War on Terror', the Wall Street crash and bail-out and the Americans' election of its first black president, but how about the music? The fashion? The general vibe and look?<br><br>That's a toughie, isn't it? From my perspective, there is no major musical or cultural movement that defines the decade. Sure, there were laptops, i-gadgets (phones, pods, pads), and woundedly-introspective acoustic folk as background music for TV and hipster playlists, but that hardly seems defining. Speaking of TV, there was lots of CSI, Dr. House and Dr. Who (which actually began in the '60's, I needn't point out), and the rise of doctrinaire current-events shows ranging from Jon Stewart to Fox “News”...and are any of these things enough to define a decade? Will most North Americans look back on the previous decade and see Glenn Beck, Hugh Laurie or Dick Fuld? Dave Matthews or Lady Gaga? George Dubya and Tony Blair? Kanye West and Eminem? Somehow, I can't picture cover bands of the future hearing many calls from the audience to 'play some Kanye!'.<br><br>Meanwhile, we're a third of the way through the current decade – is there anything by which we might all remember it? Nothing seems big enough so far – and in the case of Ukraine, that's probably a good thing. Musically – Gangnam Style? The Biebs? Skrillex? The gods help us...<br><br>So why have the more recent decades proven difficult to sum up, let alone look back upon with any fondness? Perhaps the dust hasn't settled enough, perhaps we just happened to live in a time with fewer defining moments, but I think there's more to the story here – two factors that are somewhat related.<br><br>The first is technology: the 'noughties were the first decade in which a very small number of broadcasters were no longer gate-keeping broadcast content, thanks to the internet. From radio and TV throughout the Twentieth Century, trends became nation-wide relatively easily because there was not a crowded field of competition for your attention. You had only two or three spigots from which to pour. Baby boomers so often refer to the Beatles' TV performance on the Ed Sullivan show as a galvanizing moment for their generation. One television broadcast for a whole generation. Sure, there are viral videos aplenty today, but that's just it - there are so, so many. Can the current generation of youth point to one YouTube clip and say “I remember where I was when I first saw that clip. That clip changed my life.” I don't think so. Maybe many clips, maybe none – but not one. There may have been a dozen bands as imaginatively catchy and original as the Beatles making TV appearances in the 'noughties, but who'd know? The field is too crowded for a critical mass of audience to develop.<br><br>Ironically, the other factor at work that has prevented the 'Noughties from having its own cultural fingerprint has been the reduced number of players running the record business. While it is theoretically possible today to reach the whole world from the comfort of your home (impossible until this century), the number of major-label record companies has shrunk from dozens to three over the last thirty years, and radio has been scooped into two or three giant pairs of hands as well. These Big Three are actually Massive, Bloated, Completely Un-maneuverable Three due to their size, their resulting overriding priority of Stockholder Perpetual Happiness and indifference to long-term results or musical quality. They take no risks, and put their considerable promotions resources behind only that which has already proven itself a commercial success. How can today's generation define itself culturally when radio and record labels are still putting most of their promotion money behind the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and the most recent Backstreet Boys lookalikes? Weirdly, there may be many whose most vivid cultural memories of the 'noughties include Aerosmith, U2, Kiss, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney or Tony Bennett concerts. Hey, they put on great shows and their records still sell. Are you okay with remembering the 'noughties with leftovers from the 'sixties and 'seventies?<br><br>Add to that the small matter of demographics. In sheer numbers, in concentration of wealth and in attitude, the Baby Boomers still hold sway. Advertisers and media target them, and their tastes remain the be-all and end-all. The Stones can sell out stadium tours with very pricey tickets for a reason, and it's not because teenagers are hot for Ron Wood (his wife excepted) or the song “Has Anybody Seen My Baby?”. The Boomers still demand Satisfaction.<br><br>I should provide one last detail that is as much caveat as reinforcement to my argument: I no longer watch TV. I haven't subscribed to cable in a couple of years, and for the decades before that, I watched very few shows (the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, House, Stewart/Colbert, CBC News...little else). While this does disconnect me from the tides of pop culture, it's also as much an indicator that TV is no longer a major source of pop culture. As a kid, I watched a lot of TV – probably too much – and my home only received two stations, Canadian at that. I knew what songs, what clothes, shows and cars were “hot” (though my opinion invariably differed). These days, it took a week for me to discover that my elementary students were not, in fact, listening to someone named “Squirrelex”. Sure, age has a way of easing you slowly out of the cultural mainstream, and further back from its leading edge...but I'm not hallucinating all these teenagers wearing Beatles, Neil Young, Nirvana, Pink Floyd and even Kiss T-shirts (well...I suppose it could be early dementia...). I certainly never saw any of my teenage contemporaries wearing Glenn Miller or Guy Lombardo logos back in the early 'eighties. The times, they are a-changing, 'cause we're not letting go of the past the way we used to. Although I treasure my '70's-'80's-centric music collection, I'd dearly love to fall in love with heaps of current music as I did back in the day. Vain hope, perhaps – but unlike the Boomers, I aspire to higher hopes than mere “Satisfaction”. </p>
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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2711851/to-cover-or-not-to-cover">To Cover Or Not To Cover</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p>It's no secret that people respond better to music they've heard than to music they've never heard. Even if it's a piece of music for which one doesn't have a ton of affection, the familiarity gives the music an edge with an audience. Have you ever danced to a piece of music you knew but weren't crazy about? How about a piece completely new to you (if you don't dance, we'll count tapping your toe)? I'm guessing you'd have a higher total in column A than in column B.<br>For this reason, if you'd like to make a living as a musician, the path of least resistance is to form or join a cover band (i.e.: a band that plays current hits, none of which are written by the cover band itself) or classic repertoire orchestra. There's more work available for such acts, it pays better, you can usually play close to home, and it's a fraction of the work. After all, you don't have to go through the bother of writing music and competing with the billions of other songs currently available. Beyond a little promotional material, you don't need to record music, film videos, tour (unless the gig pays extremely well) or put much thought into originality – your job is to copy, after all.<br><br>Now, I might get an argument about this from cover bands. The good ones do work hard, no question. Playing covers well often requires great flexibility and versatility. As a former cover-band guitarist/vocalist, I've often played gigs where I've had to sound like Freddie Mercury and Brian May simultaneously in one song, Van Morrison and Eric Gale in the next, followed by anything from Fastball to Dion and the Belmonts to Led Zeppelin. The gig does have its challenges.<br>This is not to say that you have to play covers note-for-note, in spitting-image. It's actually been my experience that audiences tend to appreciate a band that can infuse cover tunes with a bit of their own personality. Exactly how much personality seems to depend on how liberal the audience happens to be – and the band's self-possession...<br><br>Back in the Blizzard of '96/'97, I had a very well-paying gig lined up to play an Italian Cultural Centre New Years' gig somewhere on Vancouver Island. I was coming from a visit at my folks' house in the Okanagan and travelling 300 miles (500 km) to the meet up with my band on Vancouver Island just as the blizzard first struck – so the eight-hour trip ended up taking three days and two hotel stays. I'd probably eaten into much of the revenue I would have made from the gig right there, but I didn't want to let my bandmates down on the payday to come. On the day of the gig, our drummer baled, saying his wife forbade his travel on the roads as they were (which were, by then,...wet. Not headline news for Vancouver Island). We quickly found a new drummer (we'd never played with before) and soldiered on. We'd prepared, by specific request, a repertoire to please everybody – from Italian folk songs to the Macarena. I'd assembled a band of stellar musicians, and – it was all for naught. Once the old folks heard the Italian faves, they got nasty when we played current hits; and if we went back to the oldies, the young folks yelled 'what is this?!'. Meanwhile, an older gentleman took our saxophonist aside and told him that if we'd played 'Volare' like that in the old country, we'd have been shot (we'd kept that tune instrumental, so they couldn't complain about my Italian – but maybe that was the problem). Ironically, we were playing exactly what we'd been asked to play – '50's/'60's hits, with a smattering of current chart-toppers and Italian folk favourites. Ironically, this was our mistake. Each member of the audience came to see us as their jukebox, and reacted to us as you would to any machine that deviates from its expected performance - there just happened to be many differing expectations in that crowd. I suspect that if we'd dumped the Macarena and That's Amore and kept our '60's vibe unapologetically, the crowd would have acclimatized quickly and settled in for a fun community New Year's event. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.<br><br>I'm happy to say that that gig was, all told, singularly bad and hugely atypical of the hundreds of cover gigs I've played over the years. Most have been fun, and most, ironically, were far less work to prepare. The shows that tended to get the best audience response were usually pretty loose from the musicians' perspective, but where the musicians in question had the chops to make even songs that weren't completely nailed-down spirited and artful. Perhaps this is the environment that brings a good live musician's skills to the fore – unfamiliar enough to force all players to listen and focus, but comfortable enough to keep the players enjoying themselves and avoiding musical train-wrecks. Certainly an audience responds to how present the musicians appear to be, and perhaps such a setting keeps everybody pleasurably on edge.<br><br>The upside to having played so many covers gigs is that it got me in front of a lot more audiences than original music was likely to do. Especially in a little town like Victoria, where I lived for 25 years, there's far more work available for a cover band than an original act of equal quality. Any live musician desperately requires that live experience in order to get to a consistently good performance level, and all players work toward that level at their own rate. I certainly wouldn't trade away all that live experience. But...<br><br>I slowly came to realize over the last few years that all that time spent readying cover tunes and playing weekend nights was time taken away from my original music. While I do sometimes miss parading those instantly-recognized favourites in front of partying audiences, the more frequent work and the small compensations (which have declined for musicians over the last 40 years – not just in factoring in inflation and expenses, but actually declined), I eventually came to realize that an originals act requires every available minute of every week. The years that I was busiest with cover bands in Victoria were the years in which I produced very little original music. I had to choose one or the other. I teach music by day, so I don't need what relatively paltry returns the cover gigs tend to bring.<br><br>However – my sidemen have made a go of it. Lucky for me, Curtis and Jason are high-calibre musicians and a pleasure to work with – which means that a) they've been able to pick up better cover gigs for themselves, and b) they're busy! The days of the whole band sharing an apartment and/or a tour van, casting their lot for the vision of this one band breaking to the next level – those days happen in your teens or twenties, if ever. Meanwhile, with the music business in such a disadvantageous state for most artists, who would give up the relatively lucrative cover work for a gamble that offers poverty even for its winners? There is, of course, a trade-off. Sting, John Bonham and Robin Zander (who I just saw in concert last week, and, I'm happy to say – is as stellar as ever) all had to be lured away from comfortable, relatively lucrative and secure cover gigs in order to take the big gamble on original acts the Police, Led Zeppelin and Cheap Trick respectively...but of course, we will never hear about the untold numbers of musicians who take the same leap of courage and ultimately go nowhere. Like a lottery, you have no chance if you don't buy a ticket, but that doesn't mean your chances are much better than none if you do. Me, I eventually bought a ticket and turned my back on the dubious glories of cover bands. For as long as I enjoy making my own music, I'm at peace with the purchase.</p>
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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2544693/song-idea-some-assembly-required">Song Idea. Some Assembly Required. </a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">The problem with the best songs is that they sound as though they took no effort to write.The kicker is that it's occasionally true.<br><br>Certainly, if a melody sounds belaboured, too cleverly crafted or too complex, it's automatically disqualified from the 'good' category.<br>Not that simplicity is any de facto indicator of quality, let alone originality. When you really only have twelve notes to work with (five of which need to be used very sparingly), your chances of repeating a significant chunk of someone else's work are surprisingly high. The bulls-eye is a melody and harmonic structure so simple it seems anyone could think of it, everyone feels affinity toward it – yet no one has created it until today.<br>Pondering such ideas brings me closer to believing that songs are not so much written but discovered; a songwriter simply picks a song out of the ether and polishes it down to its true essence. The best songwriters are most keenly attuned to the school of songs swimming in the psychic sea around us.<br>As legend has it, the song “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream; he spent minutes after waking firming up the details and lyrics of the piece, but weeks trying to ascertain whether he hadn't inadvertently heard someone else's piece and simply re-played it in his dream.<br>There you are, Sir Paul – one complete, classic pop-song, fully-formed and presented gift-wrapped in a dream. I suspect even J.S. Bach would be jealous of composition so effortless.<br>Such a smooth, inspired process avoids that awkward first pitfall of songwriting: the feast/famine stage.<br>If someone is writing out of obligation – feeling they must come up with a song today – they'll usually suffer the Famine. Ordering your imagination to come up with a specified idea seems to be an excellent way to make it freeze solid and inert, or produce only cliches. Alternatively, if you're sitting around with a musical instrument and letting the ideas flow freely, unbound by expectations, the Feast overwhelms. Trying to piece together a song from the myriad ideas, variations and potential directions is sometimes the proverbial herding of cats. Which melodic idea is the best? Which will ultimately connect best with other ideas to form a song? When should one stop generating ideas and start marshaling them into some semblance of a song? You can only take your best guess, or be overwhelmed by the choices. Lately, I've been more inclined to pick the ideas that simply intrigue me the most, practicality be damned. If it's fresh to my ears at such an early stage, it stands a better chance of not outstaying its welcome after many hours on the workbench.<br>The next stage is sometimes the closest thing to musical drudgery – forming the ideas into a structure. While this process can be hugely inspiring to complete, I suspect it demands a lot of my mental processing power. I have literally fallen asleep on more than one occasion programming the drum machine for the initial demo or strumming chord after chord, running through scenarios until I find one I like. Sometimes this is like locating one last ingredient for the mortar, sometimes it's filling in all the mortar and a few bricks, and sometimes it might as well be building the whole frigging wall...perhaps repeatedly.<br>From this point on, things tend to get quite fun. Arrangement ideas, choosing tones, recording instrumental and vocal parts onto the demo – here the ideas are welcome to flow freely, but the existing structure keeps the choices from getting too overwhelming in number and diversity. By now, the basic song has probably developed enough personality to be enjoyable to play and explore. The beauty and curse of playing in a three-piece band like MLB is that I can't get too carried away with arrangements – no keyboards, one backing vocal part, and very economic use of the guitar. The wall of power chords is not an option (and it's usually not to my taste anyway). Still, virtually everybody cheats at this stage – including me. Sure, my band only has one guitarist, but nobody has ever complained that the 'studio' version of any given song has a layer of acoustic guitar under the electrics, or that there seems to be an extra backing vocalist (whose voice sound's suspiciously like mine) on the track. Hey, if you like a more 'authentic' recorded version, buy our live album. I'll keep you posted on the release date.<br>There are certainly songwriters who have an easier time of it than this, or a harder, more trial-and-error experience, or just different. Chances are, if the songwriter has been at it for many years, he or she will have gone through different stages; sometimes it's easy, sometimes it ain't, and occasionally it seems impossible. In the latter instance, I find it best ('though still difficult, after many years) to deliberately write garbage. To paraphrase a suggestion of Natalie Goldberg in 'Writing Down the Bones', set out to write the worst crap you can. Does it work? Well, let me put it this way: sometimes you meet your objective, and often you don't...so how can you lose?<br>As for songs you might typically hear at a Mike Luno Band performance, the pedigree varies widely. The lyrics to 'Get Inside', for example, poured out like a faucet, and in fact I ended up with a couple of extra, unused verses; but hammering the thing into a coherent, structured song took several attempts over many weeks. 'Row Boat' just spilled out of me one afternoon when I was stumped halfway through 'Villains Anonymous'. 'Heart Beat Up' was quick and easy (inspired by a 2-bar phrase in Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'); 'Free Fall' took quite a few false starts before I found my footing. 'Pretty Good Joke', 'Turn' and 'Caesar's Palace' originated from jamming with Curtis, which is usually a fun and inspiring process; and 'Mistress Mona' (and to a lesser degree, 'Rugburn') was an attempt to write silly crap...which the band, live audiences and I ended up really liking. The operation was a failure but we saved the patient. Although my memory is sketchy regarding the specific genesis of most of my other tunes, they tended to be mid-difficulty – great moments of inspiration mixed with grim determination and spells of near-hopelessness. I suppose if it were all a walk through the woods, it wouldn't be such a kick to reach the end of the process, hear the playback and think: hot damn, this actually turned out better than I'd hoped! Somehow, moments like that keep me going back for more, even if my songwriting income couldn't yet buy a decent used car. Most songwriters I know are in the same boat – and like me, they wouldn't consider trading back the time spent for an instant. Like any other gambling – sometimes it's easy – and that pays for all.</p>
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<h2 class="heading-secondary heading-blog alt-font">
  <a href="/blogs/blog/2412688/returning-to-the-scene-of-the-perfect-crime">Returning to the Scene of the Perfect Crime</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message">Sometimes I'm nostalgic for the days when pop culture was a lot less nostalgic.This is not to say I don't enjoy a fond whiff of yesterday myself occasionally, 'though a lot less so now than when I was in my teens. In other words, I cared more about the past when I had less of it.<br><br>Perhaps ironically, or maybe not surprisingly, pop culture of the yesteryear is more easily accessible now than it ever was, thanks to Youtube and myriad internet communities that bring common interests, no matter how obscure, together. Been missing that Juicy Fruit TV ad you last saw in '77, or want to see if Galactica '80 is as bad as you remember? It's all seconds away at your fingertips.<br>Bands, like pop culture in general, evolve (to put it charitably) over time. All my favourite bands went through major personnel changes during my teens, and it all seemed like there would be no going back in any instance. This isn't to say I always disliked the changes I witnessed, but it all looked pretty permanent in any case.<br>Of course, if someone had told me virtually all these changes would be reversed within the next thirty years, albeit temporarily in most cases, it would still seem as good as permanent. Thirty years? That's an unendurable span of time.<br>My first taste of all these band personnel changes was an unlikely cover of People Magazine from the Summer of 1980. It was Kiss posing in their disco-era costumes...but without Peter Criss. They had some new guy with a vaguely fox-themed persona, whose name, we learned, was Eric Carr.<br>A baby-boomer might have felt something similar to my reaction if the Abbey Road cover had shown some unknown guy in place of Ringo striding over that famous crosswalk along with George, John and Paul. For a die-hard fan like me, the universe had come unglued.<br>It was a feeling of dislocation yet fascination – probably the same effect screenwriters hope to create with audiences when they kill off beloved characters or radically change settings.<br>The next few years brought plenty of changes elsewhere – AC/DC soldiered on without the late Bon Scott (no chance of an earthly reunion there, unfortunately), Zeppelin collapsed following the death of John Bonham (ditto – but with a twist), Cheap Trick changed bassists, Boston dumped all but the core two members, Van Halen became Van Hagar, the Police became Sting, Yes swapped out half the band twice, Supertramp lost Roger Hodgson, Roger Waters left Pink Floyd, and the list goes on. A shorter list might consist of bands that actually kept their lineups intact between '79 and '85...and there was certainly never an indicator that the original lineups would ever re-form.<br>And the musical results?<br>Fair to poor.<br>Most bands survived, a couple (AC/DC, Van Halen, Marillion, Floyd) thrived, at least temporarily, but most lost the magic of the original if they didn't transform completely (like the 90125-era Yes). Don't agree? Look what happened when these bands (where possible) reunited their original players. The Police, the Eagles, Kiss and Van Halen, Aerosmith and a handful of others did huge business on reunion tours or one-off performances. Some were an especially pleasant surprise, as years of warring in the press and/or the courts (e.g.: Floyd vs. Waters, Van Halen vs. David Lee Roth) had made reunion seem highly unlikely and especially fascinating to observe.<br>And the musical results?<br>As Concrete Blonde said, you can never go back to the scene of the perfect crime...and I suspect there are too many variable conditions to bring back the original magic, even with the original lineup.<br>Ironically, I still love the idea of reunions, and I always approach them with optimism and a will to like them. When Zeppelin reunited in '07 for a one-off concert (with John Bonham's son Jason on drums), I snapped the DVD off the store shelf and hurried it home, even though I hadn't heard anything I liked from the surviving members in a very long time. Jason Bonham did himself proud, and I loved the song choices – but these are guys who haven't had to prove themselves to anyone in decades, and it showed. It was cohesive and well-rehearsed, but the improvisational brilliance and vocal panache of the original version are as gone as the 'seventies. After Floyd's reunion at Live 8, Roger Waters was offered obscene (even by Floyd standards) amounts of money to tour with Gilmour, Wright and Mason again (this time Gilmour demurred). Audiences will pay hugely for the hope of the old magic, even if the likely result is a pale shadow of the band everyone remembers.<br>I bring this up because the reunion issue has popped into view for me on a few occasions lately. Firstly, MLB drummer Curtis Leippi has been moonlighting in a Heart tribute band called Barracuda. This act does the old Heart material so much justice that it has often attracted a special guest to the stage: original Heart guitarist Roger Fisher, who left Heart in 1980. I've seen him perform with Barracuda on a couple of occasions, and he certainly brings firepower to an already incendiary lineup. To top it off, Heart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, and reunited (somewhat reluctantly, according to recent interviews) the original band, including Fisher. Did it bring back the old magic? Perhaps – but the Wilson sisters aren't entertaining any further reunions.<br>Meanwhile, this year's Hall of Fame inductees include, ironically, Kiss. Here's a band that has fired its original drummer three times (and suffered his threats of quitting on over a dozen occasions), had its original lead guitarist walk away twice, seen a current and a former member die, and has had a total of ten members for a four-piece band. Despite a lake of accumulated bad blood, it sounds like the original band will re-unite (at least once more) for the induction ceremony. Do I care? Actually, yes. While I'd guess that all four guys have had their souls (and musicianship and songwriting instincts) significantly eaten away by a lifetime in the excesses of show business, this would likely be the first time in nearly forty years that all four members will be onstage together without chemical influence – or perhaps the pressure to make a financial killing in the near future (which would be Mr. Simmons' drug, I suspect). It probably won't be a stellar performance, but I doubt it will be bad – or dull.<br>On a more personal level, I had the chance over the last year to jam a couple of times with they guys in my very first band. We played together in high school, and hadn't reunited in any capacity (not even over beers) since – and it was a thoroughly enjoyable get-together. Musically, we'd all moved off in different directions since 1985, so there was no question of re-forming for any new artistic statement – but it was gratifying to re-visit our old musical common ground, talk gear with the guys who discovered gear with me so long ago, and juxtapose fond yesterdays with today. Perhaps that's the key to the popularity of band reunions – like any game of chance, there's a possibility that bringing yesterday's formula forward to today can produce as much magic as it did before – even if it's a different flavour of magic. It's always tempting to roll the dice, because there's not much to lose, but time – like any enduring casino – lets few customers come out ahead. Time wears and scrambles all the factors that went into a band's magic heyday, just as each pull of the handle drains away a few more coins. You can't go back to the scene of the perfect crime, and it's better to devote one's energies to finding new inspiration than trying to re-create old. Of course, if I'm proven wrong a few times on this, I doubt I'd be at all disappointed...<br>...but I might look back on this blog with a certain nostalgia...  <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm"> </p></div>
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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2284688/guest-vocalist-c3po">Guest Vocalist: C3PO</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, for seventeen years and counting, I've had the pleasure of working with drummer Curtis Leippi, a musician of great technical skill, musicality and curiosity. Despite all his musical capabilities, however, there is one skill he has often demonstrated in several of his other ensembles, yet has never used in Mike Luno Band; in fact, he may never use it in this outfit.<br><br>Curtis is an ace at accompanying sequencers, whether live or in studio.<br>For those unfamiliar with the term, this means the ability to play drums convincingly to pre-recorded or computer-generated music tracks.<br>Speaking as someone with some rudimentary drum kit skills, I can tell you this is a challenge to do, and devilishly difficult to do well. Staying locked into a computer-generated tempo at all times throughout a song is not easy; and making it sound as though the computer is following the drummer rather than vice-versa is an exercise in extreme precision masquerading as spontaneity. Still, I've seen Curtis do it often enough, and in fact played in a couple of sequence-heavy cover bands with the man. He's got it mastered. The band follows the drummer, but the drummer, through headphones, follows the computer or electronic music player.<br>Sequencing is usually used to fill out a band's orchestrations, especially in a live setting. If you have a three-person band, but you'd like to play a few tunes that call for four-part vocal harmonies and two keyboard parts in addition to guitar, bass and drums, a sequencer can cover your keyboard and backing-vocal duties. Or, if your lead singer would rather concentrate on her dancing as she “sings” her song, sequencing allows her to lip-sync instead. Voila – perfect vocal performance, and stellar dance routine.<br>That is, when it all works properly.<br>Katy Perry would seem to be the most recent victim of a high-profile sequenced performance-gone-wrong. In a European TV special last week, her number was cut short by the host of the show as her mouth movements were completely unrelated to the audio performance – to which she seemed completely unaware (the monitor feed in her ear-pieces was probably different from what was reaching the audience through the main speakers) . To her credit, she re-started the song and sang it completely live, dance moves and all. While her voice hugely lacked the polish and ease of the studio version she'd tried to lip-sync to earlier, it was far from a disastrous performance. This Empress indeed has real clothes, even if showing off the originals was not her first choice.<br>Technical glitches and human error are certainly a major pitfall of sequenced songs. In the days when Curtis and I played in a couple of Victoria-based cover bands that relied hugely on sequenced tracks, nearly every show had some sort of malfunction, from wrong songs cuing up to the whole system suddenly shutting down due to a Windows Update. Considering all that could go wrong in each show, our techie/lead singer performed a herculean task in constructing and operating all the sequences we used. Still – it has its drawbacks.<br>Granted, I was done with that band by around 2007, and the technology was improving during and since those days. Technical glitches are far less of an issue these days, but there's another aspect that bothers me about the practice.<br>Honesty and genuineness have high standards. If you knew for a fact that only 80% of what I tell you is true, gentle reader, you'd have good reason to pay my words no attention. Once the things I say are tainted by un-truth, my word would be deemed unreliable, compromised. Some of us may even maintain friendships with people who we know lie to us regularly ('though personally – it's more than I could tolerate), but we'd know better than to put any stock in that person's words, whatever our affections might be for that person otherwise. Inauthenticity is a value-killer. It's not like school, where 50% is a pass and 86% gets you top marks. Authenticity requires purity – 100%.<br>So let's say Joe Non-Musician goes out to see a local band. A few songs into the set, Joe notices that he hears keyboards in the band's sound, but sees no keyboardist onstage. Must be pre-recorded, he thinks. He then notices that the backing vocals seem very full and polished...probably pre-recorded too. Joe starts to wonder how much of the performance is real, and the better the various components of the sound, the more suspect they are. Joe goes home feeling that he's witnessed a cheap knock-off of the band rather than the band itself. Decent enough music, but not quite a satisfying experience.<br>Granted, I may be projecting my own prejudices upon ol' Joe. When I go to see a band or artist perform, I go to see that artist in that moment – how he/she interacts musically and otherwise with his or her bandmates, how the vocal and instrumental approach of that performance differs (or not) from the recorded version, what effect the audience has on the artist and vice versa. For an element of that performance to be impervious to 'the moment' because it was created at some other time, I might as well be watching automatons. Am I alone in this? I suspect not, but I may not be in the majority, either. In the days when Curtis and I played in our sequenced-cover-tunes outfit, our frontman was once called away to help out with the music software operating system of an artist performing that night at Victoria's Memorial Arena, by far the biggest room in town. The act? Black Eyed Peas (no, Fergie does not interact with mere mortals, so don't even try). To date, they've played to a few more people than I have.<br>Curtis has often expressed interest in MLB performing with sequenced tracks in order to fill out the backing vocals or add keyboard, and I've done my best to keep an open mind. Frankly, I didn't even like it when the Police brought backing vocalists on tour or how Pink Floyd got into the habit of bringing more than four core musicians onstage, so perhaps my resistance is just something in my genes or my classical background. I never say never, so maybe there will be a MLB + Hal 9000 version of this band sometime in the future – but I wouldn't hold my breath.<br>To breathe is human, after all.</p>
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    <p class="post-info"><span data-time="2013-12-24T13:39:48-08:00" title="December 24, 2013 13:39">12/24/2013</span></p>

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  <a href="/blogs/blog/2231626/calling-all-dukes-and-earls">Calling All Dukes and Earls</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">By modern media standards, failure is dull...unless you fail spectacularly. Then you might have a chance at redemption. Just ask William Hung or Rob Ford.<br><br>Sift through the titles in the Music section in any bookstore (online or in the flesh), for example, and the bio's will consist of people who have “succeeded” - at least for a while. They've risen in their career far enough to be a household word, or at least be associated closely with a household word. The height of their career might be decades or centuries ago – and hopefully during their lifetime (sorry, Schubert and Bizet) – but they enjoyed some notoriety. Nobody's going to buy a bio or watch a movie about a musician who's musical career went nowhere.<br>The result is that virtually 100% of the written and filmed accounts about the lives of musicians denote success.<br>The reality is that a tiny fraction - likely less than 1% -  actually get off the ground. The rest toil with no noteworthy results.<br>I'm not making any opinion statements about the success rate itself. It is what it is for myriad reasons, some bad, some good. I am saying that the public can come away with a rather skewed opinion as to a musician's chance of success. If your only exposure to a musician's life is the Buddy Holly Story and 8-Mile, you may come away thinking a reasonable amount of talent, smarts and luck assures a successful career.<br>I wish that were true – whether or not I considered myself a contender.<br>I can say that there are plenty of musical artists out there that deserve to remain obscure, at least in their present state. I've encountered many musicians who are seduced by the idea of becoming stars, or at least touring musicians, who remain derivative, uninteresting, unimaginative or just “safe”; they put none of their true selves into their music, and rely on self-serving, comic-book versions of their 'best face'. Many don't dig very deeply into 'the craft' of music, from recording to theory to stage presentation, and very few take any musical risks – or even know enough about musical structure to know what a risk is. Success stories in the business almost always centre on someone who obsesses about some or all of the above (obsession can sometimes do the work of self-discipline, with even greater results).<br>Yet – are there artists out there who do make exciting and valid artistic statements, have their music business act together and still spend their entire professional lives in total obscurity and poverty?<br>It is, unfortunately, more the norm than the exception – and it's not getting any better.<br>It's a bit early to tell whether the Age of the Internet will ultimately bring deserving artists their following as well as the financial compensation to avoid the artist's starvation; and it's definitely too early to count out the three remaining major labels. The corporate world will continue to hold some sway, with degree of malevolence directly proportional to the relative size of the corporate entities at work. This brings us to where I'd been aiming this blog from the start:<br>The music business has changed significantly over the centuries; and you'll notice I didn't use the word “evolved”. If you were a classical music composer living in the early 18th Century, for example, your chief source of income would likely have been patronage from a member or two of the landed gentry, plus whatever spare change you could pick up as a music teacher, a church choir director, or an instrumentalist in some orchestra. There were no records to sell, virtually no media to use, no merch booths at performances, no radio airplay, and there often weren't even “audiences” by our definition of the word. A gig might be an evening performance in the private salon of the Margrave of Brandenburg or the Earl of Salisbury or (if you had a hot career) the King of Prussia. You didn't often have to worry about maxing ticket sales.<br>I bring this up because 21st-Century World is starting to resemble 18th-Century Europe. There is a small, very rich Class of Privilege, and tons of under-employed musicians. A few of my friends now make the bulk of their income with 'corporate gigs' – for example, a local new car dealers' Christmas party. The pay is excellent, as is the calibre of musicianship. Granted, it's all cover tunes, unless the corporation is so well-funded they can afford to hire, say, Michael Buble (I use this purely for example's sake – I have no idea if Mr. B does corporate gigs, and he sings tons of covers anyway), but it sure beats playing for the door (minus the cost of the soundman, of course) at a local 60-seat pub.<br>Many years ago, a friend reminded me that I must always deal with the world as it is and not how it should be. If I had my druthers, music stores and venues would be thriving and lucrative, and there would be dozens of mid-sized record labels run by musically prescient executives, all vying to find and develop the best musical talent they could. Radio would be a bastion of variety and substance. Unfortunately, the situation is quite different...but is there a way for high-quality, enduring music to see the light of day in the 21st Century? Surely, there may always be a trickle of the stuff; but perhaps what is required is a modern-day Mark of Brandenburg. Patrons of the arts who 'sign' artists, develop and promote them as record labels (used to) do, but without the impatience or musical indifference of corporate shareholders. Weirdly enough, Supertramp got its start in the late '60's this very way – and didn't enjoy breakthrough success until two failed albums and a near-total line-up change caused their rich patron to walk away. One case is hardly data for a definitive conclusion, however, so this would certainly seem a way forward in the face of an otherwise soulless industry. Big, committed money versus big, impatient and indifferent money – I know which bet I'd put my money on.<br>Well – if I had any. I'm a musician, after all.<br><br><br>*Now bankers, they study statistics and aren't seduced by movies like “La Bamba”. Try getting a bank loan as a musician and you'll see what I mean. Nick Mason of Pink Floyd tried to get a house mortgage just after the release of Dark Side of the Moon. The banker asked him if he had any other collateral or assets that hadn't yet been disclosed. “Well, I've got a hit record in America”, Mason replied. The banker shook his head sadly. “Not enough.”</p></div>
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<h2 class="heading-secondary heading-blog alt-font">
  <a href="/blogs/blog/2018942/be-the-first-one-to-have-a-new-idea">Be the First One to Have a New Idea</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message">For the legions of you out there who are paying attention, you might have noticed I'm not blogging at quite the same rate I used to. This isn't due to significant decline in interest or available time on my part – but some of it is due to my aversion to repeating myself. I've touched on a lot of the questions that occupy my musical thoughts already. These days, when I ponder a blog topic, I quite often reach the quick conclusion that I've blogged it already. This is another price of experience in a creative field – it gets harder to come up with something new...and now we're not just talking blogs anymore...<p> </p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">In the early decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, classical composers began reaching the conclusion en masse that western tonality had run its course – there was nothing new left to say. As a result, some composers (such as Gyorgy Ligeti) threw out rules of harmony in general and devised strange new sonorities; others devised new rules of pitch arrangement (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg). The results: generally unlistenable. Personally, I enjoy a lot of Ligeti's works, and even like some of Schoenberg's non-vocal pieces, but I know precious few others who do – and that even includes a lot of music academics. Whether conventional western tonality – developed over the last millennium - is so imprinted upon our minds by our environment, or there's something about it that is hard-wired to our brains, we can't seem to live without it. This, of course, raises the question: does it matter if anybody likes it? Isn't true art that which seeks no approval from anyone but the artist? Perhaps...but let's compare this to, say, culinary art. Sure, you may come up with a hugely original combination of foods and flavours, but of what value is it if virtually everyone thinks it tastes horrible?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Then, there's the other side of the spectrum...</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Pop music complicates the question. Back when Jazz was the Pop music of the day – in the 1930's and '40's – it could be said that western tonality had acquired a new lease on life by co-opting African-American rhythms. Harmonically, Jazz had simplified (i.e.: regressed) somewhat from the classical strains of the late-Romantic period, but that was temporary. Musical innovation was actually happening on the bandstand in popular clubs and dance halls. Perhaps it was the last time in western history that the leading edge of musical innovation had a 'pop' following.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">For better or worse, that too soon passed. Bebop Jazz, with its densely complex harmonies and often undanceably quick speeds, eventually won over the critics and abandoned a mass audience. When that hip Jazz audience of the '30's started having children in the '40's, they found their kids flocking to a much more primal style of music – Rock and Roll. With roots more in Blues and Country rather than Jazz, Rock's harmonic complexity was barely 17th-Century – and today, it rarely ventures beyond that, very generally speaking. Bands like the Police or Steely Dan might have successfully snuck some Jazz harmonies into their compositions, but it had to be kept pretty subtle for public consumption. Jazz and Classical seem to have a knack for finding pop audiences' gag reflex. I wish it weren't so.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Now here we are in a brave new century, trying to say something new with 60-year-old beats, and harmonies that were old hat three centuries ago. Some might argue: who cares? Isn't it easier to write this stuff if you don't have to innovate? You can't copyright a song title or a chord progression, so it's not difficult to re-arrange one hit into another (check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ</a>, for an entertaining medley of over fifty recent hits that share the same chord sequence...omitting Pachelbel's Canon, written a decade or two before 1700 and published in 1919). Of course, I'd be a hypocrite not to point out that I love a lot of rock music for its primal character as well as for the ways it does manage to innovate; and I never set out to innovate when I write music. I do, however, try to say something fresh, honest, striking and enduring. Accessible? Beyond myself and my band, I really don't care. In my attempt to keep things fresh and avoid over-used pop devices, I've probably moved things further from accessibility than a successful pop career would allow, but consciously playing musical cliches makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I'd sooner play music I love for small audiences than music I hate for stadiums.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">This begs the question: what of pop music's future? There is certainly cause for optimism and pessimism. On the one hand, with the music business now run by three monolithic corporate entities posing as record labels, and North American radio in a very small number of large corporate hands, there is virtually no hope that anything but recycled crap will come from such risk-averse, reactionary entities. The good news is that the internet allows innovative independents to find their audiences, albeit with appalling difficulty. The trick now is to turn the public's musical tastes away from the musical junk food pedalled by the Machine, and toward the fresh sounds of actual musical artists. I'm hoping that will happen quite naturally over the next few years, but I am, obviously, an optimist (hell, I'm a musician in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century – how much more optimistic can one be?). Perhaps, as in the '30's, pop will find new, fresh things not by building above the existing structure but by annexing a new wing from elsewhere. However it happens, I hope I'm around to see it. It's been far too song since I've been excited by current pop.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">And to bring things full circle: I borrowed this blog's title from the lyric's of the Cheap Trick tune “Next Position Please”.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm">Maybe nothing's original, but let's at least try to keep things freshened up, no?   </p></div>
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    <p class="post-info"><span data-time="2013-11-09T08:35:36-08:00" title="November 09, 2013 08:35">11/09/2013</span></p>

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  <a href="/blogs/blog/1884366/who-s-seducing-whom">Who&#39;s Seducing Whom?</a>&nbsp;
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  <div class="message"><p>A quick recap of the Cyrus Circus of the last few weeks:<br>August 26, 2013: Miley Cyrus performs at the MTV Music Video Awards – to generally negative reviews. Critics complain that her presentation is more lewd than sexy; that the song's lyrics devalue a woman's right to not consent to sex; and that Cyrus's costume, choreography and demeanor were so over-the-top, she was probably intoxicated onstage. Still, she's huge news for a couple of weeks.<br>September 24: Miley Cyrus appears on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine – she's naked (though positioned to not expose anything a bathing suit wouldn't) and, as in much of her MTV dance, showing off her tongue. The effect is certainly provocative.<br>October 2: Sinead O'Connor weighs in. Apparently, Cyrus has cited O'Connor as an influence and a role model in earlier interviews. O'Connor's open letter to Cyrus can be summed up as follows: Don't let your management and record company pimp your sexuality to sell records – you're talented enough that you don't need to go that route, and it's ultimately a career-killer. O'Connor explains that management's only care is making money – and if that means sacrificing Cyrus's career in order to make a truckload of cash right now, so be it. O'Connor's signature head-shave was a deliberate wrench in the sex-marketing machine that was gearing up to sell her albums back in the '80's.<br>Cyrus tweets commentary referring to O'Connor's intermittent struggles with mental health over the last couple of decades. O'Connor tweets back a threat of a lawsuit against Cyrus, and writes several more open letters demanding an apology for the sake of those suffering from mental health issues.<br>October 4: The new, heavily-promoted Miley Cyrus album 'Bangerz' is released, debuting at Number 1 on the Billboard top 200.<br>I can't tell you anything about Miley Cyrus as an artist – I've never listened to her music, and I have zero interest in doing so. I saw about half a song's worth of her MTV performance, and the music was unremarkable at best. I do own three Sinead O'Connor albums, and I'm happy to give them a listen once in a while.<br>So why am I blogging about this?<br>I respect Sinead O'Connor as an artist, and I hope she's right about Cyrus not needing sex to be noticed – but I'm not sure she is.<br>The music industry was never a saintly business, to be sure. Most of the 'suits' and probably a lot of the artists would do anything to anybody (including themselves) in order to have a hit, whether now, twenty years ago, forty or sixty...but the lay of the land has changed between O'Connor's 1986 debut release ('the Lion and the Cobra') and the new Miley Cyrus album.<br>As I've pointed out in previous blogs, the record industry is now run by three major labels, all parts of massive multi-media, multi-national corporations. Indie artists have a little more of a foothold in the market now than they did in the '80's, but the Majors still have massive promo power and market share. The larger the corporation, the more beholden it is to its stockholders. If you, as a member of management, don't bring a quick, easy profit on investment, you're out of a job. Your choice now is: do you develop Cyrus as an artist, enable her to bring forth an album of artistic vision, try to market it accordingly and hope her unique musical statement resonates with the record-buying public (thereby saving your job)...or do you quickly hammer together a dance-album, get the 'artist' to put out as sexual an image as she can (without crossing into porn) and guarantee yourself one hit album? Cyrus herself is expendable, in case the public tires of the sex-banshee image – better her than you.<br>It's also entirely possible ('though perhaps not likely) that Cyrus herself sees things this way. She may well have noticed the sea of independent 'integrity' artists out there against whom she'd have to compete – and that would require some mighty strong songwriting as well as some very capable marketers at the label. Still far less work to have Robin Thicke hump you onstage.<br>It may also be possible (and even less likely) that the sexual creature is Cyrus the artist. Whether this is a drug-inspired mindset is debatable, but it's not impossible that being an object of lust brings her some gratification, if not fulfilment (at least for now). It's been pointed out that Madonna played the sex card often enough, and she is generally regarded as an empowered woman – so why can't Miley? People are sexual creatures, so shouldn't sexual expression be a significant component of any artist's palette?<br>Of course, sex grabs our attention, just as fat, sugar and salt grab our appetites. We're designed to seek out all of the above – and they all zip to the pleasure centres in our brains by the quickest, most direct route. What's on prominent display at the grocery store check-out? It certainly ain't vegetables and current events periodicals. Candy bars, and gossip magazines, the latter of which always has a hefty dose of sexual content (of comparable quality to the nutritional value of the accompanying Crunchie bars) are all you'll find now. You won't even see Time or McLean's there anymore. Whether this is the case because Time wasn't selling as well as National Inquirer, or because corporate interests would prefer to keep Joe and Jane Average distracted with irrelevant sensationalism, is immaterial to this discussion – the result was the same at the VMA's, and with the former Ms Montana's career. Sure, if Miley Cyrus wants to express her sexuality through song, more power to her – but the crap music betrays her intentions. This isn't about artistic expression, it's about grabbing your attention and your wallet. Everything's a come-on.<br>So did O'Connor give wise counsel? That depends on if the recipient has an artistic soul. An artist must express honestly, and Cyrus's sell-out may have just precluded her chance of doing that for a living, however remote the chance was. If the intent is to make a quick buck before a quiet career-change, O'Connor's advice is of no use to Cyrus...yet it may well be of use to young artists contemplating how best to distinguish themselves in a sea of other artists; and it probably didn't hurt O'Connor herself, who finally received a bit of positive press after years of near-obscurity. Well-played, Sinead. Miley – I'll have to get back to you later on this one.</p>
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    <p class="post-info"><span data-time="2013-10-19T06:33:34-07:00" title="October 19, 2013 06:33">10/19/2013</span></p>

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