MoneyMoneyMoney...I'm Bored

Ahh, music & money. I love it when these two things mix and everyone gets all InternetIndignant. There's this latest article about Spotify that folks are talking about, and it's the same ol' stuff about how the artist gets screwed. The artist sure does get completely man-handled, but I'd be very excited for someone to point me to a time in the history of our world where the majority of artists weren't entirely bonked over the head financially. Maybe this time exists; I have not found it.

I'm only 30 years old and I feel like people have been talking about this forever. 'Member this wonderful article Steve Albini wrote in the 90s about how major labels were totally ravaging most of the bands they signed?

Ben "Ziggy" Franklin by Sergio Rodriguez, via MakeYourFranklin.com

Here's the thing: 99 times out of 100, if you are becoming an artist--more specifically a musician because that's what I can speak to--if you are doing this to make decent sums of money you are borderline insane. I am already skeptical of you. I can smell it in what you create and, 99 times of out 100, your stuff is either trite or it's manipulative in all the wrong ways. It's not you. My band-mates and I last night were talking about Jon Brion, and how somebody somewhere asked him what he looks for in an artist he's hoping to work with; his answer was something along the lines of: I look for folks who aren't trying to be artists. [UPDATE, here's the video with his thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhbHFgagIM; merci, MrJonBraun]

Speaking of Jon Brion, this is a really wonderful AV Club interview with him.

Is it frustrating that in 10 years of playing and recording music I haven't made a dime? Sure. But do I actually care and am I going to use that as a reason to stop doing it? I'm laughing at that. I'm not in this shit to be "noticed", to have people incessantly Googling my name, to be on the covers of magazines that won't exist in 10 years, to be blogged about by who-even-cares-who. Would that be neat? Hell yes, I am a human being after all. But if that's your main reason for doing this stuff, you are setting yourself up for utter failure and a lifetime of bullshit. Also, we can spot you from a million miles away. You may even get what you want, score that sweet hit Thing, and maybe even McDonald's will help promote your music! Maybe that's what you truly want (??)... even if you do, it's just not going to last very long and you still won't make much money off it.

Here's a big, cold spoon of truth from that Jon Brion interview up there:

"For every Radiohead, there's 10,000 supposedly modern rock bands who aren't a tenth that creative, or a tenth that emotional. For every Elliott Smith, there are 10,000 people who think they're sensitive poets. For every 10,000 people who have a drum machine and run things through a filter box, there's an Aphex Twin." 

I'm already an incredibly lucky person in that I've never truly worried about money, not in the way that people quite literally scrapping by are. Thanks to my parents, and their parents before them, I have a great education, and the even more empowering knowledge that, whatever I think I know, I don't actually know shit.

One of the few things I'm fairly certain I know is how icky it makes me feel that phrases like "you have to market yourself" have leaked into modern vernacular, masked as sage wisdom for how any artist ought to go about presenting themselves. Don't just be you, be the You calculated to generate the most page-views! Awesome.

I make songs and write stories because it feels so good to do it. It gives me Life. It makes me think and feel ways about stuff.

All this talk about money & artists just bores the hell out of me. Feel free to have that discussion, but my eyes will glaze over and I'll eventually melt into a wall. If you need me, I'll be in your basement writing a song or a story about that dusty old 1970s Fisher-Price toy castle you've got down there, or something.

Conspiracies abound/Love is everywhere/Germs, too

Well I've been a little sick like everyone around me and it tends to make my brain work a little differently. It's pretty neat, but also a little frightening when you consider how easily something can make the world's palette look a bit warped.

I've also been diving into JFK assassination conspiracy theory vortices, along with reading articles about how the mind is pretty easily capable of creating false memories, so sometimes I start to feel like the little kid they call "Postal Weight" in Infinite Jest who's just wailing in the locker room, "NOTHING'S TRUE" and has to get comforted by Pemulis.

The novel I'm working on has a lot to do with memory, nostalgia, sentimentality...all that good stuff. I think I'm attacking it pretty well, but really who knows. Then I found another author I love who had a character say some really lovely stuff that hit home, and thought I'd share:

"Perhaps history this century...is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated...at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30s, the curious fashions of the '20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see."

Dumb Assumptions

Well it took something that moderately pissed me off to remember that I had a blog.

I have a VOICE. This is supposedly empowering but I'm not sure.

What pissed me off was this Pitchfork review of The Dismemberment Plan's new LP Uncanney Valley. I'll just tell you straight up I pretty much love this band, grew up listening to them in DC, so obviously I'm biased but so is everybody so that shouldn't matter too much as long as I'm aware of it. Consider me aware.

That the review pans the album with a 4.5 score doesn't really bother me so much, because I generally think music criticism is a waste of time. There's certainly good critical music writing out there, but there's also a whole glut of it that stinks of people thinking and assuming too much, and also trying so very hard to sound like they know something you don't.

What bothers me is something I keep seeing in a lot of music & writing criticism: Why do lots of folks seem to assume that a writer or a lyricist is always writing from their own point of view? I really don't get this. Writers love playing a role, creating characters, acting out, whatever. Why is it assumed these are all the actual thoughts of the writer him/herself and not the writer acting out a role?

Paul Thompson hated Travis Morrison's lyrics on the new 'Plan album. Fine, fair enough. I happen to like them for all their weirdness, but who really cares. I hate pickles and olives and I bet Thompson doesn't really care. But why is he assuming Morrison is singing about himself the whole time? Here's part of his review:

All over Uncanney Valley, Morrison—once one of indie rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists—cracks wise, veers off erratically, shoehorns in dated slang or beside-the-point chanting. "Well, look who it is—been a little while since you been up in my 'biz," he sputters as "Waiting" whirrs to a start, coming off like a "cool dad" in a lousy sitcom. "I am not an inhibited man—try to keep it in my pants when I can," he admits on lowlight "White Collar White Trash", before rattling off a far-too-long list of places he's been "doin' it in."

I think his use of the superlative "one of rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists" is a pretty dumb thing to say (to my calculations there's roughly 400 million incisive indie rock lyricists). It's one of those things you can just say and don't have to defend because it's impossible to prove or refute. But whatever to that, too. (P.S. "whirrs" up there with the two Rs is really British usage and somehow I don't think he's British...sorry, can't help myself).

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that I'm sure Morrison isn't singing about himself. You'd have to ask him and if I know anything about writers, I'm pretty sure he won't tell you. But to just assume he's only singing about himself is lazy and surface level.

That's kind of my biggest problem with these real quick reviews that lots of sites like to post. An album gets listened to a few times, maybe, and then you write about it and try to put it in galactic context with superlatives of "Best New" Whatever. Maybe I'm an old fart but that just seems laughably myopic.

Everybody just calm down. Enjoy stuff, or don't. It doesn't matter. Not everything has to be the absolute best or worst. Shh...Shh...It's all gonna be OK.

Melv learns about the Civil War

"Any minute now it would all begin. All hell would break loose and then no more worrying and fretting and fuming; he'd hit straight up that road with everything he had. Never been afraid of that. Never been afraid to lose it all if necessary. Longstreet knew himself. There was no fear there. The only fear was not of death, was not of the war, was of blind stupid human frailty, of blind proud foolishness that could lose it all. He was thinking very clearly now. Mind seemed to uncloud like washed glass. Everything cool and crystal."

--Michael Shaara, from The Killer Angels, channeling a solitary pre-battle moment with Confederate General James Longstreet, possibly the CSA's most logical brain, and the one nobody wanted to listen to.

So many of those battles were fought pretty much right on the land I grew up on, and it's all just utterly fascinating and overwhelmingly tragic.

Friday songs

TW Walsh, a man who shares my family name and one of my brothers' first names, is currently mastering the debut album of a band I'm singing and drumming in called The Most Americans. Check out this Pedro the Lion song (TW, I believe, did the drumming and probably lots of other stuff for that band, since he's a real life Wizard), and try to picture my then-20-year-old jaw dropping at the line "But I trust T. William Walsh, and I'm not afraid to die."



And here's a great solo tune of TW's from looks like late 2011:

"Laughing in the dark..."

Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent guest column in the New York Times made me feel things. It's an honest, emotional piece about his reaction to Forest Whitaker's incredibly upsetting frisking incident at the Milano Market in NYC.

Of course it's also about so much more. I see it as written by a person who isn't mad anymore (maybe he is, but if so he has beautifully tamed it in his writing), but rather is deeply, passionately disappointed. It's written by a person with life stories that I won't ever be able experience in the same way.

I tried, though. Still trying quite hard, actually, to relate to exactly what Coates must be feeling. I've found that I have an intense need to do this, to try to experience things in the exact way that others must have experienced them so I can feel their emotions. This is generally a losing battle, but it's worth the effort. His post made me desperately realize that I can't ever get to that exact place, that so many things are out of my control, and that so much history is prescribed into the way we all think and act, at least on some level.

His post did what all good writing should do, it provoked deep thought into the weird, murky areas of my life, past and present. 

I've been called homophobic slurs by however many Allston, MA bros just like most other Boston musicians who dress a certain way. In fact, in high school lots of folks assumed I was gay because my voice is higher and I can tend to be effeminate. People would just say this out loud like it was nothing, and use Gay as if it were a bad word. I thought about how I've never really let it bother me, using the defense that I'm not actually gay, so whatever. But I think there's something much worse at work here: I'm conditioned to people being that offensive toward homosexuals. That actually really frightens me now that I've written it down.

I do partly understand the Louis C.K. theory that words are words, and that you have the power to choose not to be affected by what ignorant, offensive people sling your way. But in his 2008 special Chewed Up, Louis himself jokingly/seriously notes, "I'm a white man, you can't even hurt my feelings! What can you call a white man that really digs deep? Hey, uh, Cracker?" God, does he hit the nail on the head of our little societal blueprint. (I don't want to go off on a total tangent here, but it really is amazing to watch Louis C.K. rip the power away from certain words, at least for a moment, by overly insulting everyone, himself included. That's an incredibly rare feat, and people like him do not come around very often.)

But think about it: We laugh when a white guy is called a cracker. I cannot even begin to imagine what the slurs must feel like for someone who's race or sexual orientation has been slighted their whole life (in visible or invisible ways). I will never be able to put myself in those shoes. Because of history, words are more than just a combination of letters. They can be compassionately powerful, and they can be poison. Because of history, the reality we live in today is that so much is etched into our subconscious, all these emotions the words carry along with them.

The flip side to all of this, of course, is that Coates can't ever realistically put himself in my shoes either. But I think his point goes deeper than that. Of course he doesn't know what it's like being a white kid growing up in the suburbs in the 80s/90s. 

I thought about another point in high school when I was the only white kid on a basketball team in Northern Virginia. Racial paranoia consumed my every thought for the first few practices; I distinctly remember feeling shame over that. I had grown up being vaguely taught that "we're all the same! yay!" But here, clearly, I came from a completely different neighborhood. Sure, we shared so many similarities like lots of teenagers, but there was absolutely no getting around the fact that we were not at all "the same" like I'd been taught. I never once wondered if my education had failed me. 

There were so many other elements at work here, though. I was also the new guy, and I basically became their little brother in the way that all sports-team newcomers are initiated. The other guys used to jokingly call me Whitey, or even sometimes LWB (Little White Bitch). I'm sure some folks would call that racism, and I guess I wouldn't call them wrong. I just never thought about it like that. I don't know how to clearly explain that this was done in a loving way, the kind of camaraderie that happens in tight knit groups of boys like that. Just like how my older brothers back home would pick on me, it told me that I'd been accepted into the team. It also kind of helped that I could play. My teammate J used to do a totally side-splitting, fake play-by-play: "Whitey passes it to Darkie; Darkie dribbles, passes to other Darkie; other Darkie tries alley-oop back to Whitey but, folks, Whitey cannot jump! He cannot jump! His feet are nailed to the floor!"

I don't mean to make it out as even a thing, like it happened every day or something. We were just all able to see how strikingly odd and hilarious the reality was, how I literally stuck out on the team. (When we took the team pictures, J pointed at me in the photo saying, "Whoa where'd that ghost come from?! You guys see that ghost?!" and we all just about died laughing.) We would have done anything for each other, just like brothers, and that included making fun of each other. We knew we were similar in many ways, but also quite different, and I think we tried to embrace it all. The key here is that, in the moment, we never really thought about it. After those first few days, racial paranoia ceased living in my own brain, at least.

Sadly, real life just isn't like that for everybody. I will always truly and strongly believe that the quiet, compassionate people in this world outnumber the small-minded racists, homophobes, etc. But, again, I'm not sure that's Coates' point. His point, I think, is that our world has this blueprint that can makes some people feel uncomfortable in certain situations with people of color (and/or makes people of color feel uncomfortable with all these unspoken, subliminal things going around), and these same people tend to use the defense of still being a "good" person when what they're actually doing is racist. It's just a cold, hard truth, and ignoring that only makes it worse. It doesn't mean that white people don't suffer from reverse discrimination, too, but that's not an argument worth having or winning. Any type of discrimination like that is awful. But what you cannot avoid is this: It happens more to people of color than it does to white people. Sure, this is a generalization, but try to tell yourself it's not true. It just doesn't work. Ignoring the history of our country is a very scary thing to do.

Seriously. Think about Coates' statements: "...it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner." Or, "I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark."

I saw this video a while back and it was terrifying:



I'm not even entirely sure what the point of my post is. I know there are also myriad examples of Irish, Italians, Polish, Jews, and so many other folks being discriminated against; Hell, even lots of Southerners get lumped into one big "racist South," which just isn't true, down to the person, either. Thinking there's an easy answer (or even just one answer) is naive. But I'm certainly not trying to make this a competition. All I know is I was moved to write all this down because of Coates' piece, and I think what's so moving about it is that he's still trying so hard to be compassionate and forgiving, even with the burden of history all around him. I cannot imagine how hard this must be. You can feel his utter desperation in those last sentences, "And right then, I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I can take."

I cannot blame him for feeling that way, and his honesty is so powerful. Even me sitting here writing all this down feels somehow self-indulgent. But I think it's important. Please don't give up. There are some truly Righteous people out there from all walks of life and, to paraphrase my man J.R.R. Tolkien, they are eternally worth fighting for.

One very sexy anecdote

I recently wrote a little piece for a cool series called Living, Breathing History that a good friend of mine moderates on his blog, From An Unknown Indian American. It's called Any Single Impact and is just begging for your eyes to look it up and down.

Also here's another song:

Rhytidectomy

Felt like it was time to give the blog a good scrubbing and face lift. Time for something warmer. Except the cool fonts I picked in blogspot's create-a-blog-o-page thing are showing up as very uncool fonts for a split second before reverting to the right ones. It kind of looks like it's making the post titles Comic Sans, which...jesus. No idea why it's doing that, or if I care enough to try to sort it out. But, Comic Sans...oof.

So, let's forget about it and listen to a song:

[update!]: the quick wrong font doesn't look like comic sans on all web browsers, apparently just on my dumb work PC. Haven't figured out what the deal is, but I have discovered that I don't care, for now. This has been Melvin Ralsh with a worthless UPDATE. But here's another great song: