Letting it all hang out

As a composer and cultural gad-about who jumped early and fully into the craziness of the online world, I sometimes wonder if I'm giving too much away with what I do here.

Isn't that the great trade-off of blogging and social media? Hooray: I'm sharing my personal thoughts and experiences with a pretty big audience! Yes, but, you know... I'm sharing my personal thoughts and experiences with a pretty big audience.

Which is not to say that I feel like I've lost my privacy altogether. But I do think I put a lot more of myself out there than my basically introverted nature seems to require. I mean, I used to keep a personal journal, and I don't really do that anymore. I do continue to carry around notebooks, but they are full of fragments and sketches, rendered in the shortest shorthand I can muster. Still, in the end, for better or worse, this blog (and my social media presence in general) has become the new testing ground for most of my latest ideas and observations.

I get the point about how a significant portion of what's out there on the internets is "pointless babble" and "narcissism." Note that pointless babble and narcissism totally make sense in the context of a personal journal -- sometimes you have to slog through (or purge!) what the Zen monks called "roof-brain chatter" to get to anything of substance. But in public? Unseemly! I can only imagine what the great Neil Postman would have to say about Twitter.

Of course, I can't remember ever feeling this paranoid about the way things are going:



I actually really want to see this now, cuz it looks like a good comedy. (Sorry: it's hard for me not to laugh at any film whose trailer includes the line "But he took it too far." (Dun-dun!))

Actually, the movie feels like a trap: showing us what a culture of compulsory voyeurism/exhibitionism does for the human species, and simultaneously implicating us in that process (because as the audience, we're the voyeurs -- get it?).

I dunno: I realize we're living in a new era, but it will take a lot to convince me we are living in a true Panopticon culture of compulsory voyeurism/exhibitionism. To me, it feels less compulsory than compulsive.

And besides: jazz! Perhaps one reason I've adapted to this new landscape so readily is that it resembles the dynamic of improvisatory music (and the sort of music that I do, which is heavily informed by improvisation, whether it explicitly includes it or not).

What is a jazz soloist doing if not publicly presenting a work-in-progress (the fruits of an ongoing routine of practice, study, imagination, listening)? Like a social media junkie, sometimes a jazz musician shares too much, or too soon. ("Hey, I discovered this cool figure while practicing earlier today -- let's see if it works in this tune. Whoops, never mind!")

Even the best bloggers and twitter-devotees let through the occasional typo, awkward turn of phrase, or incompletely-considered idea. (That there is one reason somebody is always "wrong on the internet.") And even the best improvisers and composers-who-think-like-improvisers let through the occasional clam, or hackneyed theme, or bad transition. In both cases, the dedicated ones go back to the drawing board, edit, and try again -- and that persistence (and its subsequent payoff) is part of what makes them great.

Process over product, baby. No?

[Photo credit: Hyku]

We tweeted about it

Last night's dialogue started off in reference to a comment the great Gunther Schuller made in this interview (which you should also read):

uglyrug G. Schuller: "I wanted to write music that is not written in any way to entertain someone, even though I hope it will be entertaining." Huh?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug he hoped people would enjoy his music but didn't try to write likeable music. He hoped the audience would elevate to appreciate it

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But how could he expect people to enjoy it if it wasn't likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He didn't TRY to make it likeable. He wrote what he wanted and HOPED people would like the result. It's a fine line.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug His process wasn't cluttered with concern for audience reaction. But like all composers he wanted his music to be liked.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But if he wanted it to be likeable... why didn't he try to make it likeable?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug He hoped it would be liked but he didn't want to inadvertently censor himself to be liked. He wanted to bring his audience to him.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Is trying to make something that is likeable the same thing as being inauthentic, then?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug No. Different folks have different concepts. I have a tendency to simplify thing because I am in a Univ. setting and want it played

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I have to remind myself to write what I intend to write regardless of playability or audience reaction.

uglyrug @jimmuscomp But surely, on some level, you "intend" for some % of the audience to like it? Even if that % is only you, the composer?

jimmuscomp @uglyrug BTW, this is hard to do in 130 character bursts!!!

uglyrug @jimmuscomp Yeah! I'm trying to do it while watching the news. (BTW, Olbermann quote (on Palin): "Twitter rhymes with quitter.")

jimmuscomp @uglyrug I do try to write things I'd like but sometimes it's about writing what's in your head. Good line from Olbermann, BTW.

kctiner @uglyrug @jimmuscomp you guys are cracking me up.

uglyrug @kctiner @jimmuscomp Yeah, that was fun.

jimmuscomp @uglyrug @kctiner that was fun. Now on the road back to Bak-O. Boo-hoo.

Who says twitter is good for nothing?

Twitter killed the video star

Or so Christopher Weingarten (high profile music critic, writes for Rolling Stone, et al) would have us believe.

The dude says some interesting things, so check out the video. There's also this response.

Ah, what the hell, let's go for the hat trick. Exhibit no. 3 is the following statement from Arnold Schoenberg, as quoted by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise:

Art is from the outset naturally not for the people. But one wants to force it to be. Everyone is supposed to have their say. For the new bliss consists of the right to speak: free speech! Oh God!

Oh God, indeed! Interesting juxtapositions.

Of course, that Schoenberg statement won't be relevant in the context of this post if you haven't actually checked out the Weingarten video. Never fear! For those of you with no time to watch, here are some excerpts, along with my (probably unhelpful but definitely not snarky) commentary:

"And then around 2004, 2005, everyone got a music blog [...] and guys like me got scared, and editors got scared, because people were doing our job for free."

(Aside: Yes! 2004, baby! Hard to believe I've been doing this blog for almost five years, or that my first post was so, well, unceremonious.)

"Music writers and editors became a filter for trends on blogs. [...] Magazines and websites don't discover bands, they just report on trends. The blogger hive mind does the filtering and the critic reported on it."

The observation here seems to be that the epicenter of the critical community has shifted somewhat, from the "official" publications, to the blogs. Of course, from the perspective of the artist, that's not a huge difference, in that there are still critical gatekeepers -- they are just farther down the food chain. (And with that metaphor I don't mean to suggest that the music blogs are inferior. Though some of them may be.)

"You don't need a critic to tell you if something is good; you can listen to it."

Hasn't it been ever so?

"All a music review does now is reinforce the opinion that somebody already has."

By which I think he means that there is a bit of a herd mentality going on in music blog-land, and that the traditional publications have to follow that herd, because that's what people want to read. Also: that there is very little reasoned advocacy going on in music writing as a whole.

"One of the unfortunate side-effects of the lack of critic culture is that people are getting more stratified and separated in their listening habits. [...] It's harder to get exposed to things that aren't in your comfort zone. [...] that dude John [...] was up here saying that Twitter makes it easy to find stuff that pertains to you, and he thinks that's awesome. That's the fucking problem. [...] I can always learn about stuff that's important to me, that's easy. I want to learn about stuff that isn't important to me. I want to be exposed to things. Crowd sourcing killed punk rock, hands down. Crowd sourcing kills art. [...] It's bullshit. You want to know why? Cuz crowds have terrible taste. [...] it's all this music that rises to the middle. [...] It's not the music that's the best, it's the music that the most people can stand [...] if you let the people decide, then nothing truly adventurous ever gets out."

This is the money quote, of course. (See Schoenberg, above.)

Holy cow, the question of genre stratification continually vexes me. I guess it's because, the older the Industrial Jazz Group gets, the more we seem to evolve into some kind of weird, idiosyncratic, syncretic-eclectic monster. Which is a little harder to sell to an audience that likes its genres stratified. (Not saying I think Weingarten is necessarily right. But he may be. Anyway.)

"No one said why these bands were great. [...] and that's what we're missing in a world without critics: the because. #musicmonday is another example: it's just [a list of] artist names and song titles. Lots of who, but no why."

Okay, fair enough. This is the complaint of most college writing instructors, too -- it's the distinction between asserting something and making an argument for it.

Of course (and now I'm going off on a tangent): lately, even those pieces of music writing that are argument-based seem to me to be reducible to a two-step process. First, establish (or choose) a set of criteria. Next, examine how well a given work matches up to that criteria. Which seems to me to be both 1. easy to do, and 2. not very interesting. I wish more critics would apply the "why" question to the selection of the criteria itself.

But I'll have to develop that idea in another post.

Another 2.0 note

So, yeah, I recently joined Twitter. As if my life isn't already cluttered with too much web-stuff.

Here's my Twitter page.

I'm not totally sold on the value of this site yet, but I will say it's entertaining. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will bring back the aphorism? (It's a dying art form, you know.)

In grad school, I used to ask my students to avoid using fancy language to say something that could be said simply. You know -- don't say "in my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that" when you can just say "I think."

So in some ways I get Twitter, and I appreciate the challenge it offers (say something useful in 140 characters or less) -- even if only as an exercise. Nuanced discussions are impossible (or at least inconvenient) in this context, but that's okay, because I suspect they can start there. (And I think Twitter's often-cited proclivity for generating gibberish could also be useful -- perhaps as a way of publicly clearing out the "brain roof chatter" and trying to get to something more pithy.)

According to some, Twitter could become the go-to site for fast news (assuming you're following relevant sources, of course). Here's how that facet of it played out with yesterday's earthquake in China.