The impossibility of the avant-garde

While aimlessly watching TV for the first time in days, I noticed the above spot, and it reminded me of something Stanley Kubrick once said about how some of the most "brilliant" cinema happens in TV commercials.

If that is true, I wonder about the effect -- either for cinema, or for art in general.

The clip above is fairly "weird" by the aesthetic standards of, say, People magazine. It has the feel of something designed to provoke, and intended as art. It is informed by experimental techniques, however inauthentically. But it is being deployed by a major corporation. To sell jeans. And it will probably be seen by millions of people.



The problem that follows is at least as old as mass media itself: how can there be an outside-of-the-mainstream, if anything can be absorbed and used by the mainstream?

Once upon a time, there was this idea (probably hooey to begin with) that being a "true" artist was about staying a step ahead of whatever the latest cultural "norm" was. Our mission as artists (so we thought) was to figure out which components of a particular practice had been done to death, and then to innovate something new.

We have that impulse toward innovation still, but what's the upshot? It doesn't even matter whether "everything has been done before" (the big complaint of young artists). When the raw power of anything can be instantly appropriated by the people who have the budgets, and the products to sell -- recall Jim O'Rourke's comments on "context" -- there has to be some other reason to make art.

As artists, we may find this or that aesthetic approach tiresome, and we may go after something different in the process of escaping what we already know (that's part of the fun) -- but nowadays, that's ultimately a personal journey, never a broadly groundbreaking act of artistic rebellion.

Which is maybe how it should be -- and maybe how it's always been, under the surface of our mass media economy. There really is no "mainstream" or "avant-garde." No "in" or "out." Art wants to be de-centered, despite all our attempts to organize and rank it. Art wants to be local (and not strictly in a geographical sense). And critical categories ("hip" / "square," "cutting edge" / "predictable") may make sense in the context of a particular microcosm, but beyond that, who really knows? Or cares?

(My wife just walked through the room. She wanted to know who I was yelling at.)

[photo credit: meddygarnet]

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Avant garde or mainstream, the Industrial Jazz Group needs your help! We're having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour. You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Also! Check out the remix contest -- and, as of today, the IJG "The Job Song" video contest.

The second kind of cool

Matt at Twenty Dollars has a post that is tres dope, hip, fly, or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays.

The thesis:

The jazz universe resembles that of railroad enthusiasts or Magic: The Gathering players. It is a subculture: cared for passionately by a small group of insiders, but thought of as a mere curiosity by the wider population, if they think of it at all. [...]

It seems like the only reason jazz is referenced in contemporary popular culture is to mock the music and its fans. [...]

[T]his picture of jazz in popular culture is pretty grim. Jazz is the province of egg-heads and snobs; it is unpleasant cacophony that is perpetuated by bizarrely self-important weirdos. The problem is not just that people don’t see jazz as something cool, it is that they are seeing it as explicitly not cool. This has not always been the case — Bill Cosby used to have jazz musicians guest on his show quite often, and they were always cool “Uncle Dizzy,” or something along those lines. But the older jazz icons are leaving us, and the newer breed of university-trained musicians have not figured out a way to maintain the same aura of cool. [...]

As we struggle with declining audiences, jazz venue closures, and a general music industry upheaval, we must not forget that there is a broader public relations battle that must be waged – the re-coolization of jazz.

One of the more interesting comments came from someone named Nancy:

From my vantage point — that is to say the longtime jazz girlfriend that doesn’t really know or like jazz — I have to say that the reason jazz isn’t cool is because the jazz nerds have effectively shut the rest of us out of it. The way jazz fans fawn over and talk about jazz makes it unwelcome to any casual fan.

There is no music quite dissected like jazz, and no topic quite as boring as dissected jazz. While all of you yammer on about changes and chords and time signatures and social issues related to jazz (bah!), the music has faded to the background... of both your chatter and my mind.

Ah, yes. I feel a stream of consciousness coming on.

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What is "cool," anyway?

On one level I suppose it's a basic stance of intellectual or artistic superiority. The cool person is seen by the outsider as ineffably, unattainably, desirably better than. "Cool" in this sense is style-driven: the cool person has access to the "cutting edge," is in the vanguard of taste, and knows about the "hot" new trend (ironic how "cool" and "hot" fit together like this, eh?). Further: he or she is able to walk a delicate (and potentially contradictory) tightrope: publicly shunning broad popularity (which, of course, is problematically "mainstream" or "square"), but simultaneously driven by a desire to be a leading (and thus popular) taste-maker.

In response to this (possibly arbitrary) definition of "cool," I say: who needs it?

Okay, maybe that's a bit dismissive. We all want our art to "speak," and it won't speak if it has nothing to do with the zeitgeist it is embedded in. And artistic superiority is a fine aspiration (as long as you realize that the results are always going to be relative); another word for that is "excellence," and we should all be interested in excellence.

But at the same time this definition of cool has to do with much more than a simple interest in relevance or excellence. This definition of cool always seems to come back to an obsession with status. It thus reminds me a bit of the dynamic that obtained in high school, and, to a lesser degree, grad school.

I lived through both of those environments once. I do not wish to experience them again. So while I acknowledge its value, this is not my kind of cool.

There is, however, a second kind of "cool" that I do find appealing: "coolness" as an almost zen-like detachment. Its natural musical analog is probably not jazz at all (at least not post-1970s jazz), but the (real folk) blues.

Whereas the first "cool" is socially-obsessed while presenting itself as anti-social ("too cool for school"), the second cool is powerful because it is impersonal, because it eschews self-importance, because it does not seek to impress. While the first cool is about displaying superiority and strength (through "chops," "complexity," or a bitchen hairdo), the second is more about embracing the imperfection of humanity, and somehow making that into something beautiful. The first cool is "da bomb," the second cool is "aplomb."

Can you see where I'm going with this? One way out of the dilemma jazz currently finds itself in (i.e., lacking a sustainable audience) may be through this second kind of cool. (The first kind is valuable too, but, as Nancy would probably tell us, it has its limits.)

Let's compare. In rock, this second kind of cool bubbled up to the surface in the wake of super-serious prog-rockers, and spawned a whole series of superstar bands and artists that were comfortable embracing their inner nerd: Talking Heads, Devo, They Might Be Giants, Elvis Costello, et al.

Where are the jazz musicians who are comfortable embracing their inner nerd? Who are comfortable with the aesthetic possibilities of self-deprecation? Who are comfortable with their own idiosyncrasies?

You might point me toward the term "jazz nerd," and yes, that's a term that I have heard plenty of musicians use to jokingly refer to themselves -- always outside the context of a performance. That last is an important detail, because recognizing your own nerdiness is very different from embracing that nerdiness through your music. What if real live jazz musicians were to take up the sort of mockery highlighted by Twenty Dollars? What if that sort of thing actually informed the music more? Would that kill us or make us stronger? (If the former -- does that mean jazz is so fragile that it can be fractured by a few well-placed jibes?)

Of course, I'm really talking about comedy, a subject that is near and dear to my heart. But that's because I have long thought that all the great comedians have the second kind of cool. It humanizes them, and it feeds their popularity. Consider folks like Dave Chapelle, Carol Burnett, Charlie Chaplin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Louis CK, Sarah Silverman, and so on -- all of them demonstrate keen awareness of the absurdity of life. All of them are great at laughing at themselves. And all of them seem to be coming from a very different aesthetic and philosophical place than most modern jazz musicians.

Maybe that's okay. Jazz is not stand-up comedy (though both involve improvisation). And it's also not like there isn't any humor to be found in modern jazz (though much of it seems cursory to me). Of course Nancy might disagree:

Take for example, the Austin McBride “scandal.” While jazzicists debate his merits/demerits and whether or not it’s all a big joke, the rest of us are left with a video of him counting four over “Take Five.” Yes, I get the humor in it. But funny? No, not really.

Which in turns reminds me of something Zappa said in The Real Frank Zappa Book:

What academicians regard as "humor" in music is usually stuff along the lines of "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" (remember, in Music Appreciation class, when they told you that the E-flat clarinet is going "ha-ha-ha!"?). Take my word for it, folks -- you can do way better than that.

He was right, I think: we can, and we should.

[photo credit: porcupiny]

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If you love jazz nerds, you could do worse than throwing a few bucks at the Industrial Jazz Group. We're having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour. You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Also! Check out the remix contest.

Return of the son of last week's comment thread

Not to get too incestuous on this blog, but I sorta did promise to return to a certain discussion from last week. You know, the one that cropped up in this post, but simultaneously seemed to cry out for its own space.

Quick summary: it's basically a version of the old "recorded music vs. live music" debate. Mr. G and Steve smartly posited the superiority of the latter, while I attempted to argue for the value of both. (Apologies if I am misrepresenting.)

In an effort to get right back into that moment, and to cut off this damned preamble before it goes too far, can we just pretend that what follows is a natural extension of the previous comment thread?

Mr. G: I think it behooves us as musicians to remind folk how canned music is to music as canned peaches are to peaches, and they should re-gain the ears to hear that, and thus demand live music.

Durkin: Again, I'm a big fan of live music, and I agree we need to find ways to increase its presence in the world. But canned music is not to music as canned peaches are to peaches. "Canned music" (if we must call it that) is to music as apples are to oranges.

If, when listening to recorded music, your main question is, "How much does this sound like live music?" then of course you are in for disappointment. It's the wrong question to ask. The authenticity battle is a battle that engineers can never win (and so sound system ads that tout verisimilitude are disingenuous).

Which, by the way, is not to say that live music has a more convincing prior claim on authenticity. What seat do you have to be sitting in to get the "real" symphony? Which concert hall? Which orchestra and conductor does it have to be? What edition of the score should be used? What state of mind do you have to be in? What time of day does it have to be?

It's no disrespect to live music to wonder these things. But that's the problem with the "live" vs. "recorded" debate: we harbor all kinds of anxieties about "technology" (defined pretty narrowly), and so recorded music is regularly scrutinized to see if it passes the "real thing" test, and found wanting because it doesn't. Live music, we assume, is just "music" -- pure, unmediated, undifferentiated, and never filtered by the acoustic idiosyncrasies of the context in which it is heard, or even by the physical and/or psychological biases of its listeners! (Huh?)

Mr. G: As musicians we need to remember that Mintons was Monk, it was a place, it was the place and it was made special by the presence of the living Monk. Place the best Japanese Import LP in a glass case, it just ain't the same. The place is where the living music happened.

Durkin: Sure. But my childhood bedroom, where I spent long hours listening to music on headphones, deep into the night, was also a place. The music I discovered there sure felt alive to me. That's a testament to the records that were involved (many of which I wouldn't really understand until later) -- because with most of them the possibility of ever experiencing their content as actual "living music" had long past.

Mr. G: if music was simply wiggly air, then sound systems would work. What you and I hear, as musicians, is different than what the average person hears because you and I colour what we hear with prior experience. In other words, we imagine most of what we hear on records because we know what it really sounds like. Thus I can listen to old cylinder and victrola recordings and get really excited about the composition and musicianship, whereas everyone I have ever lived near (save a few, musicians all of them) will say "Turn Off That Noise!"

Durkin: Yes, as musicians we fill in a lot of the details when we listen to recordings (though see above reference to records I loved but didn't understand when I first heard them). However, many recordings have a beautiful sound unto themselves. Cylinder recordings are a pretty extreme counterexample, of course, but, for instance, I adore the creepy sound of the original 1928 version of "The Mooche" ("squashed" and "noisy" though it is by modern standards). In fact, I don't think I have ever heard a version I like better. In such cases (and there are many of them) the recorded sound is, for all intents and purposes, a compositional gesture.



More broadly, the recording studio, and recording technology in general -- as the "techno kids" you rightly admire know full well -- is just another instrument. It's a machine that produces sound, just like a trumpet, or an accordion, or a kazoo...

Mr. G: If it is all just filtered sound, everyone should be used to it, like how they all see circles where the eyes nearly always see ellipses, it needn't be a learned thing. Everyone has heard sound filtered through doors, through hats, through distorter muffs of all sorts, yet you play a soundsystem in a subway, you get sneers, you play a guitar, you get smiles. You play a brassband record out your shop window, you get nada, but the Hypnotic Brass plays a street corner and people (who cannot see them) swerve from blocks away to investigate the marvelous 'sound'.

Durkin: This seems to me to be a pretty broad generalization. I have personal experience with friends playing guitars in subways, only to be met with rolling eyes, and then to be escorted out a few minutes later by cops who certainly weren't smiling. And anyone who has been to a discotheque, or a rave, or any other environment that is driven by DJs and sound systems (and the cultures that surround them), knows that whatever "sneering" happens in those contexts is typically unrelated the source of the music.

Both recorded and live music are filtered, inevitably. And so they will remain -- at least until we figure out a way to beam songs directly into each other's brains.

[Photo credit: Eva101]

Faking it

Sometimes I feel like my whole career boils down to / can be summed up as a musical version of this.

Of course, I wonder if there is anyone working in jazz (or music) today who doesn't occasionally feel that way about their own stuff? Like we're all pale reflections?

Maybe, like marketers, all musicians are liars? Pay no attention to whatever's going on behind the curtain! Just buy my damned record!

Of course, in another sense, musicians speak the truth like nobody's business. Testifying is a key part of what we do. And it's a kind of truth you won't get anywhere else.

Sorry to be so cryptic this morning. I'm just free-associating between sips of coffee.

I should just shut my mouth

But sometimes I go on a commenting spree. Totally uncalled for, I know. I'm sorry!

Here's today's. The "critic" referred to herein is a radio listener who complained loudly to a jazz DJ who dared to play a Steely Dan song. Oy!

Music (one of the most social art forms if you ask me) thrives on cross-pollination and hybridization. What we call “American music” today would not exist if previous advocates of musical purity had had their way. I suspect that, a hundred years ago, your critic would have most likely been working to *prevent the development of jazz in the first place*. Oh, the irony!

Often people who take the purist view feel they are defending something that is in danger of disappearing. So your critic may be worried that “traditional” or “classic” jazz is dying, and that a DJ’s gesture of eclecticism (whatever its motivation) only makes that death more imminent. However, with our increasingly niche-driven culture, in which digital technology and social networking make it possible for fans of even the most obscure art form to connect and celebrate it, this seems to me to be a less and less sustainable argument. Sure, there may never be as many “pure” jazz fans as there are Steely Dan fans (though who knows?), but the audience for the former will never disappear.

Peeling away the layers, I personally think your critic’s comments have very little to do with music per se. He / she has gone way beyond simply marveling at the wonderful variety of human taste, and being mildly inconvenienced by that variety for a few minutes. Instead, he / she seems driven by a (alas, very human) need to proclaim membership in a given club. It almost doesn’t matter what the club is *for*…

In response to this post.

Whee!

I love stuff (a stream of consciousness)

Mostly musical stuff, of course (although I did collect bottle caps as a kid). I love the artifacts (CDs, LPs, books) of my addiction.

I know it seems messy to you. But, in the words of WB: "what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?"

Yes, I love collecting, and (somewhat related) I love cataloguing my own compositions. (I love making lists of the tunes I've finished. It gives a concrete quality to the accomplishment.)

And yet increasingly I find this approach compelling too. Enough to create a fairly significant level of cognitive dissonance.

Every item is now judged harshly as a major burden that better have a damn good explanation why I should carry it around with me everywhere as I travel.

Of course, I wonder if one has to have been incredibly successful in the "material world" (as the good Mr. Sivers no doubt has) before one can come to this "enlightened" perspective.

Also of course, at some point in the near future we might not even be having this debate:

Very likely, in the near future, I won't "own" any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won't buy – as in make a decision to own -- any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won't own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to "own" it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.

Maybe the real question is whether it is possible for we humans to "value" something that we don't actually "own."

Or maybe that's a stupid question, I dunno.

Breaking the law, breaking the law

Whoops! If this is a (broad) rule of jazz blogging, I guess I violate it a lot:

It is generally easier to discuss someone else’s music than your own. (I freeze up when I have to write about The Bad Plus.)

(Source: Ethan Iverson's advice to new bloggers (as part of the excellent contest you may have heard about).)

There is some basic truth here, of course. Hence another statement I pompously dispensed to the MTC attendees a few weeks back: "I'm the least-qualified person to say anything valuable about my own music."

And yet what, other than "I like it" or "I don't like it," can I usefully say about other people's music? F'r'instance, when it comes to the well-known critical trope of innovation --

[Artist X] is the first to do [musical strategy Y]. Hooray!

-- isn't the real question this:

Why do you or do you not like [musical strategy Y]?

And when you peel away the layers in an effort to answer that question, aren't you really just saying that you like it because you like it? (Or, maybe worse, because of some brain chemistry process that you may not completely understand?)

Which is not to say it's not fun to read excellent writing about music. Just that, these days, when I make the effort at third-person criticism, I usually end up feeling stymied by the ultimate tautology of it all.

Which is also not to say that I'll never use this blog to write about other people's music again. Just that I'll spend a fair amount of time (maybe too much time) writing about thongs and mustaches too.

But you knew that already, right?

Art & Commerce

Here's a fascinating piece in Rolling Stone about how, in the face of a music economy that is clearly in flux, many artists have been turning to licensing to pick up the slack created by declining CD sales.

And here's the bit that is sticking with me: the piece (by Fred Goodman) cites a slew of bands who have successfully positioned their music for use in commercials (with the implication that there are many more that have gone uncited). Thus we get Spoon shilling for Jaguar, Allison Krauss / Robert Plant for JC Penny, Wilco for Volkswagen, They Might Be Giants for Dunkin' Donuts, The Shins for McDonald's, and so on.

What's surprising about this is not that it happens, but that the idea of getting up in arms about it, from an ethical perspective, seems, at this historical moment, almost passé. (This is perhaps especially remarkable in the context of a genre that can be as -- forgive me -- precious as indie rock sometimes is.)

Obviously, the absence of outrage here is in direct contrast to the kind of "music for music's sake" ethic articulated by Mr. Young in the above video -- for a tune that was, as I recall, a somewhat big deal when it came out in the late eighties. At that point, there was a sense of shame about rockers who "went commercial" (and it was probably related to what I would call the "Milli Vanilli backlash" -- the hand-wringing that accompanied the suspicion that any given musical performance was not entirely "authentic").

In contrast, here's the one fleeting moment of soul-searching in the Goodman piece:

Of Montreal have appeared in a commercial for T-Mobile, composed music for Subway and licensed their tunes for Outback Steakhouse and Nasdaq ads. "When I first started Of Montreal, I probably would have been hesitant to do a commercial for Outback," says the band's songwriter, Kevin Barnes. "In the indie world, there's a holdover from the punk movement that any commercial endeavor will taint your art. But if you care about the band, you won't begrudge us a living."

Of course not. It's a good point. I can no more begrudge a songwriter who makes a quick buck selling a tune to T-Mobile than I can get annoyed at one of my own players when he or she has to take a single gig with Christina Aguilera because it pays much more than a tour with the IJG. That's the nature of the beast.

So I'm not so naive as to throw my hands up in shock at this sort of thing. I know full well the economic pressures involved in day-to-day survival for anyone making a living from music. And I know that, as long as there has been an economically-driven power structure in western society, musicians have had to negotiate with and (often) kowtow to it, in weird and sometimes humiliating ways.

But I also think it's important (artistically and psychically) to nurture the impulse to fight back against these realities. I spent ten years of my life in Los Angeles, and while there I watched talented friends make their way into the commercial music scene, which, dare I say, can impose a few pressures of its own. Those who had the wrong sensibility (even the slightest insecurity, perhaps) found the experience withering. So I'll be curious to see, ten years from now, how many of the above bands come out the other side in one piece, with a consistent handle on their own artistic vision.

I guess what I'm saying is that, when it comes down to it, I'm not exactly sure this "turn your oeuvre into jingles" thing is my favorite aspect of the emerging post-big-label music industry.

(What's that, you ask? Have I ever considering licensing IJG stuff for commercials? You bet your sweet ass I have.)

Yup yup

It's true, it's all true.

Atlas flagged

Digby points to something I also noticed on Tom Hull's website last night, and which was initially noted by Paul Krugman (the quote is from Bloomberg News):

Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

Shudder.

Digby adds some context (for those of you who have been fortunate enough to escape Ms. Rand's, uh, "oeuvre"):

Corporations, which have very good reasons to train young people into an ethos that extols the alleged virtues of heroic captains of industry and their lonely fight to retain freedom in the face of left wing collectivism, should not be buying academic curriculum of any kind. The very idea of academic freedom is that the academics decide what to teach, not the government or the community or especially some company who wants to promulgate a puerile political philosophy designed to make people believe that selfishness is a virtue. That it's in the form of a very bad romance novel makes it even worse. (To those romance novel aficionados out there, please note that I said "bad" romance novel. It's not a slam at the whole genre.)

True, true.

Unfortunately, as Jennifer Washburn pointed out in a great book a few years back, this intersection of money and academia is by no means a new phenomenon.

Still, Ayn fucking Rand? What's next: music appreciation courses in which Rush is required listening? (That was a joke, Rush fans.)

An addendum on taste

I've been pondering, on and off, further ramifications of Carl Wilson's investigation of taste -- which I first pondered here.

(We're all about further ramifications here at JTMOUE.)

Still haven't actually gotten to the book yet.

(We're all about overscheduling here at JTMOUE.)

But check this out: bass wizard Steve Lawson recently had a cool post about a cool post about a cool post (see how this Internet thing works?), and all three tie into this topic nicely.

An excerpt from the primary document (the context is an experiment in which the trajectory of a given song's popularity could be "rewound" and tested numerous times):

In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs -- and the bottom ones -- were completely different.

For example, the song "Lockdown," by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song's success seemed to be due to merit.

"In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible," he says.

Why?

Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. And who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

How many of us are willing to admit that that beautiful tune we hold so dear, that authentic expression of heartfelt artistry, that potent signifier of some significant event in our lives, may actually be something we have (at least in part) been conditioned to love?

There is a lot of writing about musical likes and dislikes as if they are scientific, subject to the play of immutable laws (most musical analysis-based criticism takes this tack -- which of course is fine as far as it goes). But what if musical taste is actually a very complex kind of choice?

What if our record collections are full of things we (again, at least in part) decide to like because it suits some larger agenda about who we think we are or who we want to be?

These are silly questions, I know. I'm in a silly mood.