Category: Musings

A sad, cute fact

I heard a commentator on NPR this morning point out that sport is the only entertainment field where excellence is rewarded. If you’re really good at a sport, you have a far better chance of being financially compensated for your skills than if you were a musician, actor, artist, etc.

At first that statement really bummed me out, but then I realized it’s kind of a crock. Of course sport rewards excellence. Sport is the most simplistic of fields; excellence can be most easily defined there, even quantized. It’s almost binary: you’re either very fast or you’re not, you’re very agile or you’re not, you can throw a 90mph fastball or you can’t. Despite what the classical music crowd might have you to believe, music is not like that. Just because you can play “Flight of the Bumblebee” at an insane tempo does not mean that you are musically excellent. “Excellence” is a variable quality. Bob Dylan is excellent. Itzhak Perlman is excellent. Try quantizing that. The same goes for artists and actors. There’s a great deal more relativity to the notion of “excellence” in those fields.

I forget the commentator’s name, but his perspective seems common to older generations. I gather that their world seemed aesthetically simpler than ours. Perhaps it was less diverse. I am reminded of a great conversation that I heard on one of my dad’s old tapes of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. He had an older gentleman and a young woman talking about music and the older gentleman rambles on about classical music and how it represents beauty and truth, and the girl just says “but you can’t jitterbug to it.”

Windows to the World

The first window to the world was invented in 1884 by George Eastman. Photographic film allowed pictures to be more conveniently taken, copied, and transferred around the world. Photographic film was quickly adapted for use in inside motion picture cameras, and “movies” were born. In conjunction with the newspapers and magazines of the early 20th century, photography allowed many folks to, in a primitive sense, travel the world without leaving town. Motion pictures offered a similar and somewhat more advanced experience at the local movie house. We had a window to the world.

The second window to the world arrived around 1928 when Philo Farnsworth demonstrated the first working television system with electronic scanning. This went on to shape the TV sets of the next several decades. By the 1950’s many modern homes had television sets that allowed them to see the world without leaving home.

The third window to the world came in 1993 with the development of the first web browser, Mosaic. The Internet and the World Wide Web had previously been text mediums primarily. What Mosaic and later web browsers did was allow for more convenient and widespread transmission of digitized images. By 2000, Web-enabled home computers were pervasive for modern homes.

So this is where we are. Will there be a 4th window? If I had to guess I would say that the second and third windows will fuse somehow. We’re in the process already; I know I tend to watch TV shows on the Internet more than I do on the television.

Just Maybe the Songs

Perhaps the iTunes revolution will help to detach us somewhat from the musician cult of personality. Last year I was suckered into a subscription to Blender[1], which is the most heinous rag of celebrity music journalism (complete with Us Weekly-esque paparazzi shots of musicians clearly unaware that they’re being photographed), and it reminded me that the primary focus of music magazines is not music, but the people who make it. Of course this has probably always been the case, but it seems like today it’s even worse, as every magazine out there has a section full of pictures of famous people at parties, famous people buying groceries, famous people doing whatever.

I do know that there was a day when a hit song was a hit song, and ideally it didn’t matter who sang it [2]. But especially after the Beatles, the songs became unextractable from the musicians. So the musicians became more important (and easier for writers to talk about, as songs are far less often to be found stumbling out of a nightclub with Lindsay Lohan). But as we move away from albums and back to singles, just maybe the artists will become less important. MTV and ProTools have made the artist irrelevant anyway, as today almost anyone can sell millions of records, given the proper marketing push.

We’ll always be attracted to the vicarious thrills of watching celebrities, but I think as the music industry loses focus, the ocean of celebrity will be diluted. I’m probably wrong, but one can hope.

1.) If you want my full rant on Blender, say the word.
2.) So long as they were white.

Redefining Success

Chris Onstad, creator of Achewood, had this to say in a recent interview:

“I’m not saying I don’t see Achewood as a success, because of course I do. The interesting thing about the way the Internet has shaped up over the last two years or so is that I don’t need to have – although I would like – an enormous Achewood collection in Barnes and Noble to be a success. On the Internet, I can monetize in so many different ways. We have a shop where you can buy books, t-shirts, accessories, paintings, on and on and on. There’s close to 100 different items that we sell. I don’t need to be as big as The Rolling Stones to make a living because ultimately I can support my family.”

I’d extend that message to a lot of other areas of artistic expression – music, books, graphic design, etc. I’ve seen a lot more musicians making a living through online means rather than through conventional outlets than ever before. If you’re a cartoonist, why bother with a syndicate? If you’re a musician, why bother with a record label? If you’re a writer, why bother with a publishing company? To paraphrase Andy Warhol: “in the future everyone will be famous in their own microcosmic niche.”

Thought for the Day

“I’m not interested in being pegged down with narrow definitions. I’m not interested in defining anything too closely. As soon as one defines, one limits. I don’t want to limit what King Crimson is. I’d rather use some vague terms and let you do the thinking. ”

– Robert Fripp

Leave it to guitar sensei Fripp to crystallize an important concept in understanding anything: to define is to limit. I had never quite considered that.

And I see on Fripp’s blog a statement echoing my recent bit on Frank Zappa:

“The attitude that life owes us something, if not everything, encourages life to thwart our endeavours.”

A Pack Rat Finds a Friend

“I kept stealing the phone books. Because I thought I may never be back in this city…I want to have a souvenir from Phoenix. And I used to go through the phone books and I would look at all the names and I’d go, “All these people…and they live in Phoneix…I’m never going to meet these people. I have to take a piece of them with me.” And my bag broke one day and it was always because of those phone books.”

– Cameron Crowe

That’s a quotation from the Almost Famous director’s commentary. It encapsulates the near-overwhelming sensation I get whenever I land in or drive through a large city. I’m continually fascinated by how enormous this country is. But I’m not nutty enough to steal phone books. I have to draw the line somewhere.

Mottos and Axioms

In the last several years I’ve been fond of saying, “expect the worst and everything becomes a pleasant surprise.” Today I was watching a German documentary on Frank Zappa which quoted Frank saying:

Don’t expect friends, don’t expect fun, don’t expect the good life, don’t expect anything. And then if you get something it’s a bonus.”

Is that cynical? I don’t generally think of myself as a cynic. Maybe I’m more of a realistic optimist. I believe the world is terrible, has always been terrible, but it’s slowly getting better in tiny, imperceptible increments. There have been fewer wars than ever before, less famine, more peace, slavery is at an all-time low, and for the most part we’ve stopped sacrificing virgins to appease the rain gods. If these things don’t particularly impress you, then you expect way too much from your fellow well-dressed primates. Perhaps you’ve watched too many movies and TV shows or you were mislead by your culture into thinking that everything is completely spiffy.

Thoughts on Garage Sales

I have a lot of stuff. It’s dangerous enough being the kind of person who hangs on to random items because of an emotional attachment, but I’m also the sort of person who constantly wonders about what an item’s future value might be. Consequently I have a lot of baseball cards, toys, comic books and obscure CDs.

In a post-eBay world, what really becomes collectible and valuable anymore? It seems to me that, since the mid-80’s at least, Americans are more keenly aware than ever that the little things with which we decorate our world will have monetary value to others in the future. For example, the baseball card industry exploded in the late 1980’s as more people started to discover that big money was being paid for cards from the 50’s and 60’s – but the thing that made those cards valuable was their scarcity, and they were scarce because few people thought they were worth saving. These days, however, fewer people are throwing anything out. So what’s rare anymore? What toy, card, or comic could ever become the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card?

The temptation to keep an item simply because it might be worth something to someone else is a maddening game. I have rare CD singles by completely obscure acts…maybe there’s an obsessive fan out there somewhere who’d pay money for it?

Fortunately, eBay helps connect me with that potential obsessive fan, but what eBay giveth, it also taketh away, as there is now such a glut of stuff in their database that everything tends to get devalued. Back in the day, I could have sold a Mark Grace rookie card at a local shop for a price based on my buyer’s demand (a buyer could only travel so far and visit so many shops) but with eBay, there are dozens of Mark Grace rookie cards to choose from, so the price drops. Ebay doesn’t increase a supply, but it does facilitate a greater degree of supply fluidity. Add to that a public giving increasing scrutiny to every little potentially collectible knickknack, and you’ve got a recipe for a buyer’s market. Good luck profiting from your massive stash of stuff when it turns out everyone else stashed theirs, too.

“Ha” Is All You Need, All You Need Is “Ha”

As abbreviations and l33t-speak dominate conversations on the Internet, words tend to get shorter. “Be right back” becomes, “brb,” for example. What is so peculiar and somewhat bothersome to me is how “laugh out loud” was chosen to be abbreviated as “LOL” while the far superior and shorter “ha” is not as popular.

Similarly, the variants ROTFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”), ROTFLMAO (“rolling on the floor laughing my a** off”) are also annoyingly long. Why not just “hahahahaha”?

My message to Internet users everywhere: STOP USING “LOL,” “ROTFL,” “ROTFLMAO” and any other abbreviation that conveys laughter. “Ha” is accurate, short, and has thousands of years of history behind it.

SPECIAL NOTE TO EMILY, AUSTIN AND RYANN: tell your friends! “Ha” is all you need! “LOL” must DIE!!!

Basic Music Math

Artist with major label contract sells 100,000 albums @ $15, gets $1 per disc* = $100,000
Independent Artist sells 10,000 albums @ $15, gets $10 per disc = $100,000

Granted it takes a lot of touring and sweat and word of mouth for an independent artist to sell 10,000 albums, but if you are truly an excellent, original act that electrifies people at every show, you can do it. For a generic band with a big marketing push from a major label, 100,000 copies isn’t all that hard to do, and even then it’s unlikely you control your publishing (royalties), and the $100,000 you made still has to go back to the label to recoup your advance and your recording costs (subtract $50,000 and do not pass go).

Fortunately, ProTools allows any musician the ability to produce a decent-sounding album. Which is ironic, given that ProTools also allows people like Ashlee Simpson to have their pitchy vocals corrected. For everything you gain, you lose something.

* Best case scenario, given standard industry rates.