Washington Post
Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Monday, May 28, 2007; A17
Over the past three decades black culture has grown so conflated with hip-hop culture that for most Americans under the age of 45, hip-hop culture is black culture. Except that it's not.
During the controversy over Don Imus's comments this spring, the radio host was pilloried for using the same sexist language that is condoned, if not celebrated, in hip-hop music and culture. As the scandal evolved, some critics, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the NAACP, shifted their attention to the rap industry. Indeed, every couple of years, it seems, we ask ourselves: Is hip-hop poisonous? Is it misogynistic, violent and nihilistic? What kind of message is it sending?
But what critics consistently fail to emphasize in these sporadic storms of opprobrium, as most did during the Imus affair, is that the stakes transcend hip-hop: Black culture itself is in trouble.
Born in the projects of the South Bronx, tweaked to its gangsta form in the 'hoods of South Central Los Angeles and dumbed down unconscionably in the ghettos of the "Dirty South" (the original Confederate states, minus Missouri and Kentucky), there are no two ways about it -- hip-hop culture is not black culture, it's black street culture. Despite 40 years of progress since the civil rights movement, in the hip-hop era -- from the late 1970s onward -- black America, uniquely, began receiving its values, aesthetic sensibility and self-image almost entirely from the street up.
This is a major departure for blacks, who traditionally saw cultivation as a key to equality. Think of the days when W.E.B. Du Bois "[sat] with Shakespeare" and moved "arm in arm with Balzac"; or when Ralph Ellison waxed universal and spoke of the need "to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life."
The historian Paul Fussell notes that for most Americans, it is difficult to "class sink." Try to imagine the Chinese American son of oncologists -- living in, say, a New York suburb such as Westchester, attending private school -- who feels subconsciously compelled to model his life, even if only superficially, on that of a Chinese mafioso dealing heroin on the Lower East Side. The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group.
But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention. Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with "keeping it real" are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
Sociologists have a term for this pathological facet of black life. It's called "cool-pose culture." Whatever the nomenclature, "cool pose" or keeping it real or something else entirely, this peculiar aspect of the contemporary black experience -- the inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality in the hip-hop era -- has quietly taken the place of white racism as the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle classes.
As John H. McWhorter emphasizes in his book "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," "forty years after the Civil Rights Act, African-American students on the average are the weakest in the United States, at all ages, in all subjects, and regardless of class level." Reading and math proficiency test results consistently show this. Clearly, this nostalgie de la boue, this longing for the mud, exacts a hefty price.
A 2005 study by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard University crystallizes the point: While there is scarce dissimilarity in popularity levels among low-achieving students, black or white, Fryer finds that "when a student achieves a 2.5 GPA, clear differences start to emerge." At 3.5 and above, black students "tend to have fewer and fewer friends," even as their high-achieving white peers "are at the top of the popularity pyramid." With such pressure to be real, to not "act white," is it any wonder that the African American high school graduation rate has stagnated at 70 percent for the past three decades?
Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.
The writer is a graduate student in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He also works for n+1 magazine, a semiannual journal of literature.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Gigging for over 75 years: New Orleanian Lionel Ferbos
OFFBEAT
The Pages of History
By Jon P. Pult
Lionel Ferbos & the Palm Court Jazz Band
Friday, May 4, 12:30 p.m., Economy Hall Tent
“One day I was sitting down and wrote out a whole bunch of stuff,” 95-year-old trumpeter Lionel Ferbos says when he hands over the notebook, a small wire-bound affair with a blue floral cover. The first few pages contain a series of pell-mell notations. There are phone numbers and account numbers, a name here, an address there, some figures. After three or four pages of similar entries, the memoranda give way to pages of solid text, the first of them headed “Lionel Ferbos Biography.”
“I had more than that,” he says, pointing to the pages with a crooked, bronze finger, “but it went away in the flood.”
This biography, written in a mostly steady hand, starts simply enough: “Born July 17, 1911, New Orleans La. Adjacent Treme, Orleans Ave. N. Dorgenois,” and then briefly details his education, “Bayou Road School…Valena C. Jones School.” There are references to friends made and jobs worked. He writes that he became interested in music after hearing Phil Spitalny’s All Girl Orchestra at the Orpheum Theater (Pressed about this particular source of inspiration, he says, “I figured if they could do it, I could do it.”) Soon after, he started trumpet lessons, first with a man named Mr. Tennette and later with a Mr. Chaligny. In the late 1920s, he started to play with outfits like the Moonlight Serenaders, Handy’s Louisiana Shakers, and Walter Pichon’s Big Band. He met his wife while employed as a presser at the Haspell clothing factory, After courting Marguerite Gilyot, he married her on April 7, 1934. (73 years later, they’re still married). Ferbos also writes of playing at lakefront restaurants and downtown dances as a young man until he settled into the family trade, sheet metal work, which became his main profession, while he played music on weekends.
From here, his notes jump ahead some 30 years to the early 1970s, when he joined the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra and toured the world. “Went to Europe and everything,” he tells me later, “well, I never dreamed of anything like that.” And then he started playing at the Palm Court, which remains his steady Saturday night gig.
It is all matter-of-fact, what Ferbos has committed to paper. Ninety-five years compressed into five-and-a-half small pages. Yet while the flood may have taken away the unabridged version of the biography of Lionel Ferbos, it didn’t take away the memories that it contained. When the various entries are used as cues, stories start coming out. Ferbos’ speech becomes vivid in the telling and his voice rises and falls as he inserts wry asides (on everything from gas prices to race relations), and he punctuates his speech with things like “you see, at that time,” or “let me tell you something, and not one word a lie.” His eyes widen, he grins and laughs at these small reveries. “Now you’ve put my mind together….”
Ferbos is a storehouse of small gems from another era, a time when riverboats were more transportation than tourism, and trains ran out Tulane Avenue to Jefferson Parish. “Let me tell you this,” he says. “When I first started out, we used to play what they called a ‘ballyhoo,”’ he says. “There were quite a few black theatres on Baronne Street near Poydras, up around there, and we’d play ballyhoo for the dances. You get on a truck and go from place to place and play to advertise the dances. You see, they didn’t have television or radio at that time so we’d advertise on a truck. It was really something different.”
What emerge from many of these stories are scenes from the daily life of a musician in the 1920s and 30s—the days when he was a young man looking for adventure, before he married, and he signed up to work with a touring company. “When I was playing in that vaudeville show,” Ferbos says as if this is nothing out of the ordinary, “we traveled in a seven passenger Cadillac automobile.” That show, “Eddie Lemon’s Dashing Dinah,” was an all-black revue that played the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit (or T.O.B.A., known among performers as “Tough on Black Asses”) throughout the ’20s and ’30s. “I was about 20, 21 years old and me and a friend joined the pit band.” For three months he played theaters in Texas, and Arkansas, and Mississippi. “Oh, it was a nice show,” Ferbos remembers. “We had a guy who sang just like Morton Downey [a popular singer of the period known as “the Irish nightingale”], a dialect comic made up to be Jewish, a man and woman comedy thing. I don’t know if it was Butterbeans and Susie but they were just like them, big tie and everything. They had four dancing boys, and about six or seven dancing girls and a woman—well they call it a leading lady now, but then it was called ‘Soubrette.’” He pauses. “I’m talking about 75 years back.”
Recounting his vaudeville days, he suddenly alights on another memory. “Let me tell you this funny incident,” he says emphatically, gesturing with an open palm, and then describes coming back to New Orleans and checking-in to a Rampart Street hotel, “one of the nicer ones they had at that time for black people.” He was soon approached by a woman, the owner of the establishment, “She came up and said, ‘If I hadn’t seen you come in with that show, I would swear you were from New Orleans because you look just like a friend of mine.’ I told her I was from New Orleans and asked her who I look liked and she said ‘Louise Richeaux,” and I said, ‘Well, I ought to. That’s my momma!”
During the Depression, Ferbos joined the Works Progress Administration band, which he says was 100 men strong. “Anybody who had their hand on an instrument seemed to be in it,” Ferbos says. A published photo of the band shows more than a half-a-dozen trumpets, four banjos, a bank of reeds. “That band played pretty music, ‘Poet and Peasant,’ you know, light classical stuff, and then we played jazz and popular numbers. We played schools, jailhouses, churches, and open parks. They kept us going. We played almost every day.”
What Ferbos describes in these brief vignettes is a world that most of the living have never seen. When he played at the Pythian Roof on Gravier and South Saratoga, for instance, he remembers the view he had onto the nearby parish prison. While the band played for the paying customers, another party went on below. “You could look down into the prison yard and see the inmates dancing together.”
Dancing. Making music for people to dance to, right on the spot. Bands served a purpose, beyond listening and applause. In his lifetime, Ferbos has seen the music he plays move from the dancehall to the concert hall. “For me it was strange,” he says of playing for a static audience. “The dancers give you a certain atmosphere.” But the music is the same. Asked what sorts of tunes the Starlight Serenaders played, or the Herbert Leary Big Band, he responds, “Do you like the music we play at the Palm Court? Well, it’s the same music as that.” As one of his sideman there, clarinetist Brian O’Connell, points out, “Lionel might be the only person playing this music who didn’t learn it from records.”
You’d think, being the oldest active jazz musician in town, maybe anywhere, that these songs he’s been playing for more than 75 years—“Shake it and Break It,” and “Girl of my Dreams,”—and the rest, that these songs would be a part of him, embedded in his D.N.A. But if you see him play, he always has a music stand and sheafs of bound manuscript paper. “I know about a hundred numbers,” he says, “but some night we might have someone might request a number I haven’t played in 40 years and I can’t remember, so that’s why I have all those the stock arrangements. After a while, the music stand became my nameplate. Like one trumpeter might have a beard, another a hat. Well I have my stand.”
He always plays the melody, following the notes laid out on the dog-eared pages in front of him. With a slightly quavering tone, he animates, however briefly, his story. Retrieving the city of his youth, New Orleans of dance halls and picnics and house parties, he is creating that “certain atmosphere.” And his singing, warm and understated, with an odd hum at the end of each line, does the same. Like his stories, there is a sweetness to his performance, a generosity. It is not used to prop himself up, but rather to prop up the spirits of the listener. “I was never worried about being in front,” he says of leading the Palm Court band, “I was always just a member, just one of the men.”
The last full page of Lionel Ferbos’s little notebook records the past two years in a few short sentences. “Then the storm Katrina appeared….” He lived with family in Plaquemines until, with some assistance, he and his wife moved into an apartment in town, “where we are now.” In the interim, his son, Lionel, Jr., his best friend, who worked alongside him in the sheet metal business and took him to every gig, succumbed to cancer. He gets to his gigs now with the help of friends. And at 95, in this changed city that is still home to him, he has nearly finished rebuilding his house.
School Rocks! As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
WASHINGTON POST
School Rocks!
As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
By Melinda Newman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 27, 2007; N01
LOS ANGELES
Four years ago, Maya Ramos couldn't find middle C on a keyboard. Now she's finding her way to first place in international piano competitions.
In a tiny rehearsal studio in a storefront music school, the slender 11-year-old bends over an upright piano and lovingly tucks into Manuel Ponce's "Scherzino Mexicano," her wrists high, her fingers caressing the keys lightly, then heavier as the tone of the piece shifts. It's among the works she will perform in at a recital in Mexico City this fall.
Taking piano lessons wasn't her idea, she says, but her mother insisted and managed to find a place that would nurture Maya's interest and talent: the Silverlake Conservatory of Music on the city's east side. It was co-founded by a rock musician known more for his onstage antics than his appreciation of classical composers. That would be Flea, the frequently shirtless, frenetic bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He's one of a handful of pop stars, including soul singer Macy Gray and hip-hop's Black Eyed Peas, who have established nonprofit music schools for children. The artists initially bankrolled the projects and now rely primarily on donations and fundraisers to subsidize operations.
Such schools help fill a void left by deep state and federal budget cuts that have severely diminished arts programs in public schools. Maya, for example, cannot take piano at her charter public school; the only music electives are for violin and cello. Other students at Silverlake talk about having no music programs at their schools at all.
Flea (born Michael Balzary) launched Silverlake in 2001, in part because of such cutbacks. He says the music program at Los Angeles's Fairfax High School was his salvation in the late 1970s. "I was a troubled kid. I was on the street. I was doing drugs. I was breaking into people's houses. I was bad news," he recalled in an interview.
"Having music in school was the one thing that I really believed in. [It] gave me a focus, a structure and consistency." He took full advantage of a menu of offerings including orchestra, jazz and marching band, choir and musical productions.
After sitting by chance beside Fairfax's music teacher at a Knicks game in New York several years ago, the rocker decided to revisit his alma mater -- and found its music program decimated by budget cuts: "Everything was gone. I couldn't believe it," he says. "When I went, you could pick any instrument. You want to play in an orchestra? No problem. When I went back, it was a volunteer teacher, a couple of acoustic guitars. It was this shell of this thing that was still alive while I was there."
Flea says he put up "a few hundred thousand dollars" to open the Silverlake Conservatory with high school friend-turned-music teacher Keith Barry, who is the school's dean.
On a busy afternoon last week, students lugged their instruments, sometimes in music cases as tall as they are, into the lobby and sat under photos of Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The sounds of piano, trumpet and guitar wafted from the six rehearsal rooms. The school has swelled to 25 part-time teachers tutoring 700 students (ages 4 and up), seven days a week. When his schedule permits, Flea teaches bass and trumpet.
Cut Off
The cuts Flea witnessed began more than 25 years ago. Although there has been some improvement -- most notably in 2006, California's legislature agreed to a $500 million one-time allocation and $105 million in ongoing funding to restore arts education in the state's public schools -- slashing still occurs.
"Today, the first thing to go when there's a budget issue is the arts program," says Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. NARAS's Grammy Foundation provides grants to more than 20 public schools annually to help fund music instruction. (Portnow himself is an alumnus of a musician-run program: he attended late trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's summer jazz camp in the 1960s.)
"It's probably more of a cultural issue than anything," he says. "For some reason, over the years the leadership that makes the decisions has failed to recognize how critical arts are" in an overall educational and humanities program.
Additionally, arts cuts have been an
unintended consequence of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The initiative sets standards of accountability in math and reading, leading to criticisms of schools' "teaching to the test" in those subjects instead of providing a well-rounded humanities curriculum.
The arts cuts are "not something that is intended by the accountability measures that were put in place by No Child Left Behind for math and reading," says Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Department of Education's office of innovation and improvement. Arts courses are included in the act's list of 10 core academic subjects, but, he says, "I think hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that if you can't read by third grade, you're probably not going to do well in music and visual arts and dance and theater either."
Some cuts continue despite data showing a direct correlation between music study and increased SAT scores. Students with four or more years of music and arts education scored 93 points higher on their SATs than students who had half a year or less, according to statistics compiled by the College Board.
Pop stars aren't the only ones stepping up to help. More than $4 million worth of new and refurbished musical instruments have been donated to school programs and students by the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation in Sherman Oaks, Calif. -- started in 1996 by the late composer Michael Kamen, who wrote the music for the movie of the same name. And VH1's Save the Music Foundation, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization, says it has restored musical instrument programs in more than 1,400 elementary and middle schools.
Paul Cothran, Save the Music's executive director, praises the efforts of Flea and other performers, but doesn't believe their generosity absolves public schools of their responsibility to provide arts education.
"As recently as two years ago, I was reading reports that there were still about 30 million students that lacked access to music programs. That's K through 12. There's still a lot of work to be done," he says.
Modern Music
If the Silverlake Conservatory of Music leans toward the traditional, the Black Eyed Peas' efforts are geared to the digital age. The Peapod Music & Arts Academy was launched in January with the debut of a $400,000 studio donated by the Peas to a foster kids and at-risk youth group at the Watts/Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club. But there are no violin or flute lessons at this school: The curriculum gives students access to Pro Tools digital audio workstations, video editing bays, cameras and more.
"We were, like, let's give them the same equipment we use to make our music, the same editing tools that we use and the same cameras we use to make our videos," says William Adams, better known as Will.I.Am, the Peas' rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist.
Macy Gray's M.Gray Music Academy combines the old and new, offering after-school and weekend classes in disciplines ranging from jazz guitar and musical composition to "beginning turntable." Classes are offered in eight-week sessions at Gray's North Hollywood studio. The Peapod Academy classes are free, while both the M.Gray Music Academy and Silverlake Conservatory charge for lessons, but offer scholarships to eligible students. Silverlake managing director Jennifer Rey says approximately 100 students are on scholarship (that includes free instruments) and that number will increase to 150 next year.
The oldest of the schools is the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Ga., founded in 1997 by the slain rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur. The program started as a summer performing arts day camp for 25 middle school and high school students, who met in donated space at high schools and colleges. The center, which offers training in singing, acting, dancing, set design and poetry, now has its own facility on 11 acres and has expanded to a year-round after-school curriculum. Much of the teaching centers on Tupac's music and poetry. Last year Shakur launched a foundation in her son's name and is now attempting to raise $4 million to build a community performing arts facility. "Tupac pursued the performing arts as an alternative to life on the streets," Shakur said in a statement to The Post. "Forming the foundation and the center were my ways of guaranteeing that Tupac would be remembered as the man he really was, not as the character he often took on in his music."
As a 17-year-old student and mother, Celina Nixon participated in the Shakur Center's 2000 summer camp. Now 24, she is the center's artistic director and says the skills she gained at camp extended far beyond the artistic: "I learned it wasn't just about performance and who's a big star . . . Being a teenage mother, it gave me other things I could use," including knowledge about careers and finances.
That mirrors the mission the Black Eyed Peas have set for their academy -- to teach life lessons, not just music ones. They also aim to close the digital divide that exists between high-income and lower-income computer users. "The same tools that the people have in Beverly Hills are accessible to the people in the 'hood, but the people in the 'hood don't have the knowledge that they can do that," says Will.I.Am. "The new Steven Spielberg could live in Watts, but they don't know they can compete because there's not the technology in their schools."
The Peas' ambitious plan includes unveiling two more academies over the next two years (2008's will be in the East L.A. projects where Will.I.Am grew up) and then hatching up to four new Peapod schools a year via the Boys & Girls Clubs in inner cities throughout the United States and abroad, according to Will.I.Am.
Flea isn't talking yet about a nationwide program but believes all children deserve the chance to study music as he did. "Even a moderately simple understanding of music leads to a much richer life," he says. The famed bassist is too modest to declare that the Silverlake Conservatory will be his legacy, but is sure of one thing: "It's the best idea I ever had."
School Rocks!
As Arts Education Funds Dip, Pop Stars Make Sure the Beat Goes On
By Melinda Newman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 27, 2007; N01
LOS ANGELES
Four years ago, Maya Ramos couldn't find middle C on a keyboard. Now she's finding her way to first place in international piano competitions.
In a tiny rehearsal studio in a storefront music school, the slender 11-year-old bends over an upright piano and lovingly tucks into Manuel Ponce's "Scherzino Mexicano," her wrists high, her fingers caressing the keys lightly, then heavier as the tone of the piece shifts. It's among the works she will perform in at a recital in Mexico City this fall.
Taking piano lessons wasn't her idea, she says, but her mother insisted and managed to find a place that would nurture Maya's interest and talent: the Silverlake Conservatory of Music on the city's east side. It was co-founded by a rock musician known more for his onstage antics than his appreciation of classical composers. That would be Flea, the frequently shirtless, frenetic bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He's one of a handful of pop stars, including soul singer Macy Gray and hip-hop's Black Eyed Peas, who have established nonprofit music schools for children. The artists initially bankrolled the projects and now rely primarily on donations and fundraisers to subsidize operations.
Such schools help fill a void left by deep state and federal budget cuts that have severely diminished arts programs in public schools. Maya, for example, cannot take piano at her charter public school; the only music electives are for violin and cello. Other students at Silverlake talk about having no music programs at their schools at all.
Flea (born Michael Balzary) launched Silverlake in 2001, in part because of such cutbacks. He says the music program at Los Angeles's Fairfax High School was his salvation in the late 1970s. "I was a troubled kid. I was on the street. I was doing drugs. I was breaking into people's houses. I was bad news," he recalled in an interview.
"Having music in school was the one thing that I really believed in. [It] gave me a focus, a structure and consistency." He took full advantage of a menu of offerings including orchestra, jazz and marching band, choir and musical productions.
After sitting by chance beside Fairfax's music teacher at a Knicks game in New York several years ago, the rocker decided to revisit his alma mater -- and found its music program decimated by budget cuts: "Everything was gone. I couldn't believe it," he says. "When I went, you could pick any instrument. You want to play in an orchestra? No problem. When I went back, it was a volunteer teacher, a couple of acoustic guitars. It was this shell of this thing that was still alive while I was there."
Flea says he put up "a few hundred thousand dollars" to open the Silverlake Conservatory with high school friend-turned-music teacher Keith Barry, who is the school's dean.
On a busy afternoon last week, students lugged their instruments, sometimes in music cases as tall as they are, into the lobby and sat under photos of Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The sounds of piano, trumpet and guitar wafted from the six rehearsal rooms. The school has swelled to 25 part-time teachers tutoring 700 students (ages 4 and up), seven days a week. When his schedule permits, Flea teaches bass and trumpet.
Cut Off
The cuts Flea witnessed began more than 25 years ago. Although there has been some improvement -- most notably in 2006, California's legislature agreed to a $500 million one-time allocation and $105 million in ongoing funding to restore arts education in the state's public schools -- slashing still occurs.
"Today, the first thing to go when there's a budget issue is the arts program," says Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. NARAS's Grammy Foundation provides grants to more than 20 public schools annually to help fund music instruction. (Portnow himself is an alumnus of a musician-run program: he attended late trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's summer jazz camp in the 1960s.)
"It's probably more of a cultural issue than anything," he says. "For some reason, over the years the leadership that makes the decisions has failed to recognize how critical arts are" in an overall educational and humanities program.
Additionally, arts cuts have been an
unintended consequence of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The initiative sets standards of accountability in math and reading, leading to criticisms of schools' "teaching to the test" in those subjects instead of providing a well-rounded humanities curriculum.
The arts cuts are "not something that is intended by the accountability measures that were put in place by No Child Left Behind for math and reading," says Doug Herbert, a special assistant in the Department of Education's office of innovation and improvement. Arts courses are included in the act's list of 10 core academic subjects, but, he says, "I think hardly anybody would disagree with the idea that if you can't read by third grade, you're probably not going to do well in music and visual arts and dance and theater either."
Some cuts continue despite data showing a direct correlation between music study and increased SAT scores. Students with four or more years of music and arts education scored 93 points higher on their SATs than students who had half a year or less, according to statistics compiled by the College Board.
Pop stars aren't the only ones stepping up to help. More than $4 million worth of new and refurbished musical instruments have been donated to school programs and students by the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation in Sherman Oaks, Calif. -- started in 1996 by the late composer Michael Kamen, who wrote the music for the movie of the same name. And VH1's Save the Music Foundation, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization, says it has restored musical instrument programs in more than 1,400 elementary and middle schools.
Paul Cothran, Save the Music's executive director, praises the efforts of Flea and other performers, but doesn't believe their generosity absolves public schools of their responsibility to provide arts education.
"As recently as two years ago, I was reading reports that there were still about 30 million students that lacked access to music programs. That's K through 12. There's still a lot of work to be done," he says.
Modern Music
If the Silverlake Conservatory of Music leans toward the traditional, the Black Eyed Peas' efforts are geared to the digital age. The Peapod Music & Arts Academy was launched in January with the debut of a $400,000 studio donated by the Peas to a foster kids and at-risk youth group at the Watts/Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club. But there are no violin or flute lessons at this school: The curriculum gives students access to Pro Tools digital audio workstations, video editing bays, cameras and more.
"We were, like, let's give them the same equipment we use to make our music, the same editing tools that we use and the same cameras we use to make our videos," says William Adams, better known as Will.I.Am, the Peas' rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist.
Macy Gray's M.Gray Music Academy combines the old and new, offering after-school and weekend classes in disciplines ranging from jazz guitar and musical composition to "beginning turntable." Classes are offered in eight-week sessions at Gray's North Hollywood studio. The Peapod Academy classes are free, while both the M.Gray Music Academy and Silverlake Conservatory charge for lessons, but offer scholarships to eligible students. Silverlake managing director Jennifer Rey says approximately 100 students are on scholarship (that includes free instruments) and that number will increase to 150 next year.
The oldest of the schools is the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Ga., founded in 1997 by the slain rapper's mother, Afeni Shakur. The program started as a summer performing arts day camp for 25 middle school and high school students, who met in donated space at high schools and colleges. The center, which offers training in singing, acting, dancing, set design and poetry, now has its own facility on 11 acres and has expanded to a year-round after-school curriculum. Much of the teaching centers on Tupac's music and poetry. Last year Shakur launched a foundation in her son's name and is now attempting to raise $4 million to build a community performing arts facility. "Tupac pursued the performing arts as an alternative to life on the streets," Shakur said in a statement to The Post. "Forming the foundation and the center were my ways of guaranteeing that Tupac would be remembered as the man he really was, not as the character he often took on in his music."
As a 17-year-old student and mother, Celina Nixon participated in the Shakur Center's 2000 summer camp. Now 24, she is the center's artistic director and says the skills she gained at camp extended far beyond the artistic: "I learned it wasn't just about performance and who's a big star . . . Being a teenage mother, it gave me other things I could use," including knowledge about careers and finances.
That mirrors the mission the Black Eyed Peas have set for their academy -- to teach life lessons, not just music ones. They also aim to close the digital divide that exists between high-income and lower-income computer users. "The same tools that the people have in Beverly Hills are accessible to the people in the 'hood, but the people in the 'hood don't have the knowledge that they can do that," says Will.I.Am. "The new Steven Spielberg could live in Watts, but they don't know they can compete because there's not the technology in their schools."
The Peas' ambitious plan includes unveiling two more academies over the next two years (2008's will be in the East L.A. projects where Will.I.Am grew up) and then hatching up to four new Peapod schools a year via the Boys & Girls Clubs in inner cities throughout the United States and abroad, according to Will.I.Am.
Flea isn't talking yet about a nationwide program but believes all children deserve the chance to study music as he did. "Even a moderately simple understanding of music leads to a much richer life," he says. The famed bassist is too modest to declare that the Silverlake Conservatory will be his legacy, but is sure of one thing: "It's the best idea I ever had."
Friday, May 25, 2007
Site of the Day: Sam Hinton
Sam Hinton is a national treasure, a tireless performer of traditional American music. He's 90 and retired today, but visit his website. My daughter loves his children's music, so you might search out one of his recordings. If you are a harmonica player, you have got to check out his polyphonic playing on the diatonic harmonic--it's unbelievable.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
"Feature Creep": Too much complexity in our technology
THE NEW YORKER
The Financial Page
Feature Presentation
by James Surowiecki May 28, 2007
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,” costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them. Companies now know a great deal about problems of usability and consumer behavior, so why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable?
In part, feature creep is the product of the so-called internal-audience problem: the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what’s best for consumers. Being technically savvy themselves, engineers love to enhance the capabilities of a product and give users more control and more options, particularly now that, thanks to digitization, lots of added features don’t mean lots of added production costs. The engineers tend not to notice when more options make a product less usable. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands.
You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.
It seems odd that we don’t anticipate feature fatigue and thus avoid it. But, as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we’ll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works. A new study by Katherine A. Burson, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, shows that, when we buy things like golf balls and digital cameras, we generally do a poor job of evaluating our skills, and so get stuck with unsuitable products. We’re also willing to pay for extra options because we feel shortchanged if we don’t have them. But, once we actually have a product, our patience with all those features runs out very quickly. Elke den Ouden found, for instance, that Americans who returned a product that was too complicated for them had spent, on average, just twenty minutes with it before giving up.
The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. (A cell phone that doesn’t offer a Bluetooth connection, for instance, may be dismissed as underpowered, even though relatively few Americans use Bluetooth headsets.) But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did. Intended to give drivers unprecedented control over navigation, temperature, and entertainment through a single device, it was so hard to use that it has been described as “arguably the biggest corporate disaster” since New Coke.
There is no easy solution to this. You can try to make simplicity into a selling point, as Philips has done with its Sense and Simplicity campaign, or as Apple has done with the iPod. You can stratify the market, creating different products for different skill levels (as in the market for computer printers), although that may leave consumers bewildered at the sheer number of choices. In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use. This is clearly what Apple believes it will be offering with the iPhone: a device with a remarkable range of features, coupled with an uncluttered touch-screen interface. It won’t be surprising if the iPhone succeeds, but it would be understandable if it failed. The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it. ♦
The Financial Page
Feature Presentation
by James Surowiecki May 28, 2007
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity, often called “feature creep,” costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn’t figure out how to use them. Companies now know a great deal about problems of usability and consumer behavior, so why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable?
In part, feature creep is the product of the so-called internal-audience problem: the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what’s best for consumers. Being technically savvy themselves, engineers love to enhance the capabilities of a product and give users more control and more options, particularly now that, thanks to digitization, lots of added features don’t mean lots of added production costs. The engineers tend not to notice when more options make a product less usable. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands.
You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity. A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.
It seems odd that we don’t anticipate feature fatigue and thus avoid it. But, as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we’ll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works. A new study by Katherine A. Burson, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, shows that, when we buy things like golf balls and digital cameras, we generally do a poor job of evaluating our skills, and so get stuck with unsuitable products. We’re also willing to pay for extra options because we feel shortchanged if we don’t have them. But, once we actually have a product, our patience with all those features runs out very quickly. Elke den Ouden found, for instance, that Americans who returned a product that was too complicated for them had spent, on average, just twenty minutes with it before giving up.
The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates a peculiar problem for companies. A product that doesn’t have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. (A cell phone that doesn’t offer a Bluetooth connection, for instance, may be dismissed as underpowered, even though relatively few Americans use Bluetooth headsets.) But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers and generate bad word of mouth, as BMW’s original iDrive system did. Intended to give drivers unprecedented control over navigation, temperature, and entertainment through a single device, it was so hard to use that it has been described as “arguably the biggest corporate disaster” since New Coke.
There is no easy solution to this. You can try to make simplicity into a selling point, as Philips has done with its Sense and Simplicity campaign, or as Apple has done with the iPod. You can stratify the market, creating different products for different skill levels (as in the market for computer printers), although that may leave consumers bewildered at the sheer number of choices. In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use. This is clearly what Apple believes it will be offering with the iPhone: a device with a remarkable range of features, coupled with an uncluttered touch-screen interface. It won’t be surprising if the iPhone succeeds, but it would be understandable if it failed. The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it. ♦
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
School of Schlock: NYU's Clive Davis Dept. of Recorded Music
VILLAGE VOICE
School of Schlock
Rock legends in the making they may be, but for now the NYU Clive Davis alums may have to stick to YouTube for exposure
by Angela Ashman
May 22nd, 2007 8:52 PM
One of the biggest misconceptions about NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music is that its students, while learning how to make it in the music business, will be plucked out of obscurity by Davis himself.
For the last four years, the program's first graduating class had expected that the legendary hitmaker would make an appearance beyond his remarks at freshman orientation and at graduation ceremonies. If not during classes or recording sessions, then at the very least, they hoped, he'd show up during the first "Capstone" project panel, a three-day event beginning
May 2 that had graduating seniors making thesis presentations to judges from the music industry.
"I'd be sort of surprised if he didn't come, just because it's his program and we're the first," says Julia Wilde, a pop singer-songwriter who had wanted to attend the school as soon as she heard 'Clive Davis' in the name. "I would imagine that he would want to be there, given how much he wanted to create this program and how much he believes in it."
Launched in 2003 with a $5 million check from Davis himself, the department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts is the first in the country that awards students a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in producing pop-music records. The program claims to be unique because it develops "creative entrepreneurs" who learn about all sides of the industry—business, technology, and performance—rather than just one aspect.
Some students specialize in engineering, some in business, and the rest—about a third—are performer-producers who gain training in how to record themselves in a multimillion-dollar studio so that they leave with full-length albums upon graduation. And if the final goal isn't already clear, a wall of photos at the fifth-floor offices at 194 Mercer Street makes the point: There's Davis with Whitney Houston and Carlos Santana. Davis with Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart. Davis handing a gold record to American Idol standout Clay Aiken.
Clive Davis, 75, has made a fortune discovering raw talent, from Houston to Alicia Keys, and shaping it into consumable form. And now the NYU department that bears his name is trying to do that with 28 students in each graduating class, giving them not only experience producing music but also taking seriously the theory behind the craft. Rock critic Robert Christgau, for example, gives a class on rock history that begins with the ancient Greeks (and, in a session two years ago, found him answering a question about the Sex Pistols by ripping off his button-down shirt to reveal a too-tight circa-1977 T-shirt containing the quiz answer).
"We're not like a star academy or something. We don't train the next rock stars," says Katherine Flatt, who handles the program's admissions. And yet, even though the program isn't supposed to be focused merely on musical performance, when you talk with the school's performer-producers, you can't help thinking that with students paying $40,000 each year, it's just a very expensive version of Idol.
On a Saturday afternoon last fall, a long cord ran from the studio's control room, across a hall, and into a restroom, where the thumping sound of a bass could be heard. The bass stopped, the restroom door opened, and out walked Tom Schecter, wearing ripped jeans, a white T-shirt, and a Guns N' Roses medallion around his neck, sporting a mess of bleached blond hair with dark roots. It was the first day of recording an album, The Ageless and the Insane, with his band Dibble Edge, and he thought the reverberation in the bathroom sounded cooler than it did in the studio.
Jennifer Newman contemplates a future in a music business free of assholes.
photo: Alana Cundy
Schecter has spent a large part of his college education honing his rock-star persona, which he fully expects will pay off when he becomes the biggest rock star in the world. He wears sunglasses indoors and punctuates his sentences with a slight growl. He talks incessantly about his craving for whiskey.
"This is my last free shot to make it without paying through the nose," Schecter says, referring to the fact that the 40 g's in annual tuition is also paying for his studio time. Recording in such a professional studio, he hopes, will convince a major label to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at him to go on the road after graduation.
A lanky freshman with glasses named David Pollock, who fronts an indie-rock band, is busy in the studio setting up the microphones around a drum kit. In the control room, Schecter looks on with Josh Silberberg, a senior specializing in engineering. Silberberg tweaks knobs and adjusts the shiny silver faders on the console. "It's given me a purpose in life," Silberberg says about the program. "I was going to be a psych major. Now this is homework."
"My name may be first," Schecter remarks about his album, "but I couldn't do it without these guys."
"Do you have two bucks for duct tape?" his drummer asks. Schecter slaps some cash into his hand.
Schecter continues talking about the band's selling points: "We're all good-looking guys, and I think this is the kind of band people will take a chance on. Musically we sound better than anything on the radio right now. I want it badly. Now here I am. This is the first day, a big day.
"I can't believe I went to college for this," he adds. "I'm still grinning like an idiot."
While Schecter dreams of selling out stadiums, other students have already had real-world success. Carter Matschullat, tall and open-faced with shaggy reddish hair, runs an indie-rock label called Dovecote Records, and can afford to have an office/recording studio on St. Marks Place because one of his bands, Aberdeen City, signed to Columbia last year. (He's also in a hardcore band, Bed of Arms, with other students from the department.)
Matschullat had finished his freshman year at Duke, and then repeated his freshman year at the Clive Davis program because he wanted to attend so badly after reading the program's press release. A major perk for him has been taking classes with Nick Sansano, who recorded and co-produced Sonic Youth's Goo and Daydream Nation. "When I heard he was teaching here, I almost couldn't speak, I was so happy," Matschullat gushes.
But Matschullat isn't without complaints. He thinks the program is too focused on success at major labels. In a music business class taught by Lauren Davis, Clive's daughter, he says she complained that the budget he'd listed in an assignment was too low. But the numbers he was using were from an actual, working marketing plan for an indie rock band. "It's all taught from the super mega major label standpoint, when that's all like, dying," he says.
All of the students seem to admire Bo Pericic, because the DJ regularly jets off to parties in places like China and Ecuador as a part of the duo Filo and Peri, recently ranked number 77 in the world by DJ magazine. Pericic says attending the NYU program has helped him meet people he might not otherwise associate with, like Eric Lumiere, who writes sentimental love songs on his acoustic guitar. Pericic remixed Lumiere's song "Anthem," sold it to the world's number one DJ, Paul Van Dyk, and it's being played at dance clubs around the world.
Two years ago, engineering student Evan Moore started his own production company, Thunder, Lightning & Lightning. A rock drummer, Moore is one of two senior class representatives; the other is Jennifer Newman, a singer-songwriter who is a second cousin of Randy Newman. Their positions were created after complaints from students piled up in the program's first two years. But Moore says the bugs have mostly been worked out. And he says he's learned much more outside of school than from his classes. "One of the big realizations I've had . . . is that, well, I think so many of us going into this program thought that—it sounds so silly—but that it would bring them fame and fortune. You know what I mean? Like this is the coolest program ever. Like it's going to teach me everything I need to know to be successful in life. And it's just not true about any college program. It's still just school. It's not actually a part of the music industry."
Moore partly blames the school for giving students the wrong impression: "Our freshman year, all our events were catered. We were treated like rock stars, and it really got it into everyone's mind that they were rock stars. Like if we had any kind of meeting with the class—I mean regular school stuff—it was catered. They all just seemed so pleased with all of us. It was all about how all the students were so amazing and accomplished and bright. And some people ate that up."
One recent evening, Moore and Newman met up in the school's studio to mix the album she was preparing for graduation. Newman, who was wearing preppy pearl earrings with her Tool concert T-shirt and jeans, was paying several thousand dollars extra to get her album just right, and she had hired Moore to help her. Conversation ranged from her concept for her album's cover ("quirky sexy") to how cool their adjunct instructor Tony Maserati is because he's worked with the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé, to the one class they take together with the other seniors, the Capstone Colloquium.
Students prepare a final project for the culminating event that includes an artist's statement and a 25-page business plan mapping out their careers for the next 10 years. Moore had missed a class that called for students to make a short speech about what had inspired them to make music.
He wasn't sorry that he'd been absent that day. "I'm not going to say what inspired me to do music in my senior thesis," Moore said, disgusted.
"I think it would be good for you," Newman replied.
"It's too show-and-tell-y to say what I learned in college."
"We all hugged," Newman said, clearly still glowing from the warm feeling it gave her.
Moore burst into laughter.
"It kind of felt like therapy. It was like we finished an AA meeting. It made me realize how far we've come."
Moore laughed even harder.
"You're so sarcastic—that's why it's good you weren't there."
"Nobody I know was there," Moore countered, referring to Matschullat and the engineering clique.
"It was good all the assholes weren't there," Newman responded. "No offense. It's just not conducive to people sharing how they feel."
Most faculty and students seem to agree that of all the performer-producers in the senior class, Mario Spinetti is the one most likely to succeed.
Spinetti wears his brown hair in a curly eccentric pompadour and has a big, beautiful singing voice inherited from his opera-singing parents. He plays the piano and other instruments, and composes and arranges his own music. He records himself with gospel choirs and orchestras, and incorporates dancers into his live shows. He describes his sound as chamber pop and loves rock opera.
Spinetti counts Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Prince as inspirations, and has dreams to fill stadiums with people chanting his name. "I'm not much for money, not at all. I just want to survive. I want to be able to support myself and do what I love. Um, it just so happens that the place that I want to be, if I do get there, I would be loaded. You know, like, there would be a lot of money at stake," he says.
The only thing holding him back, it seems, is finding the right star persona. At the beginning of the school year, Spinetti was performing under the alter ego Aiden Eve. But by the second semester he dropped it because he'd rather be himself.
"There's been a lot of pressure leading up to this year. In my head at least. I wanted to know exactly what I was going to be by the time I got here. Which is even deeper than recorded music. It's like, know thyself by the time you're 21," he says.
Spinetti had entered the department with the dream of scoring an audition with Davis. But as each year went by without seeing the department's namesake, his hopes dwindled. Still, he figured Davis would make some kind of appearance at the Capstone panel.
"It's kind of pitched as a scout program. Like, oh, he's fostering these new artists and new producers, but he's not there. And none of his people are there checking us out. It's not to say that what he's done isn't monumental and great. It's just not exactly as it appears on paper. Is he going to be there? I'm sure. But is it going to be for the reason everybody thinks? Probably not."
Over the final three days of school, the stu dents pitch their business plans and play their albums during the Capstone to a panel of experts.
None of them is Clive Davis.
Disappointed, Spinetti gamely goes to the piano to begin his presentation. Dressed in black, he turns down the lights, and sits behind the judges. Some turn around to watch him, others don't. He plays "I Was There," a song he says was partly inspired by his parents' divorce. Then he gets up and gives a short talk and plays the album version of the same song.
The judges let him know they prefer the live version to the recorded one, which includes a choir. Overall they are enthusiastic about his voice and his piano playing, but they can't figure out how to categorize the rest of his act—the pompadour, the orchestra, the choir, the dancers, the chamber pop. Comparisons to Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright are tossed about.
"It's a question of direction," says Lesley Bleakley, who oversees British indie labels such as XL Recordings and Mo' Wax as CEO of The Beggars Group U.S. "Is it the show-tunes route you want to go? Or is it alternative? Is there a direction you want to go?"
"I basically want to perform music for the rest of my life," Spinetti answers.
"What's your direction?" Bleakley asks again.
"My direction is rather general in my mind and in my heart," Spinetti responds. "I want to perform for as many people as possible. I enjoy live music far more than recorded music."
Steve Smith, founder of Acme Partners Ltd., who has worked with Pink Floyd and the Who, chimes in, "What's your style? How can I characterize you when I walk out there and say, hey, that guy Mario sounded like— fill in the blank."
Spinetti has no idea. And suddenly they can't help him.
"I think some of us feel we see a road for you to go very easily," says the last judge, Celia Hirschman, founder of Downtown Marketing. "And that road has been well laid by some very talented musicians who are doing really well now, but it's not contingent on us. . . . You have to tell us who you are. And with that, we can help get you there."
"Otherwise it's manufactured," says Bleakley, "like American Idol."
They all laugh, except for Spinetti.
After Tom Schecter finishes taking a final exam on the decline of ancient Rome, a part of his general education requirements, he hurries back to his dorm room to get ready for the biggest day of his academic career. He puts on his black leather pants, spikes his brown hair, slips on his sunglasses, and struts over to the studio, where all day the seniors have been pitching the albums to the Capstone panel.
Schecter feels certain his record will win over the judges. "I'm not expecting to walk out of here with a deal or even a 'we'll call you next week,' " he says, speaking with authority and confidence. "I'm walking in there with the expectation of, OK, I'm going to rudely in troduce myself to these guys, and when they hear from me again, they will be offering me something in a few months."
Out of the studio door bursts Eric Lumiere, the singer-songwriter who had the dance-club hit. His eyes are red from crying. A few paces behind him, his mother follows, also in tears. And a few paces behind her is Lumiere's equally teary-eyed professor, Nick Sansano.
"They didn't understand me," is all Lumiere manages to choke out.
Lumiere had just finished pitching the pop album he self-produced. While the school is cautious to refer to these panels as merely an educational exercise, the starry-eyed students see it as something else—a chance of a lifetime to score a record deal. But the judges are brutal. They call Lumiere arrogant for comparing his sound to that of U2, Coldplay, and Damien Rice. They call his business plan a wish list.
Lumiere walks off, leaving his mother to explain, "They said they liked his music, but they didn't say that until the end." She and Lumiere's father had flown out from Los Angeles to watch the big event that has not only ended with them in tears, but also with faculty members in the room crying as well. "I guess that's real life," she shrugs.
Schecter tries not to focus on the wreckage in front of him. He walks up to the studio door and then gets down on his knees and says a prayer.
"Tom! Tom! Tom!" a professor calls from inside.
Schecter struts in with a full swagger into the middle of the semicircle of judges. He takes off his black leather jacket and swings it over the bar stool in the middle. Then he gives his opening.
"All right. So I'm the last one. You guys have been here for a while. I appreciate that. So I'm gonna make this as brief as possible. Hand to God, you're not going to be here for more than another two hours."
The boast gets a big laugh. He cocks his eyebrows, tucks his chin down toward his chest, and stares them down with his rock-star gaze. He's the bad boy and they love him. After playing them two clips and giving a pitch, he has the panel hooked.
"I love this kind of stuff," says Susan Dodes, manager, producer, and a&r executive of SuLeDo Music, who describes herself as "a rock chick from way back." "Your presentation is really good in that you have the whole story there. You say you've been to rehab already and you're not even signed. You've got your rock persona and you've got the attitude." But she adds, "I want to know, do you kick ass live? What is the audience reaction like? This is rock and roll, man. It's a way of life."
"At the risk of sounding cliché," says Denise Brown, an attorney and former Senior VP of Warner Bros. Records, "You had us at hello."
"So, what's my next step?" Schecter asks, fishing for good news.
They tell him to tour, go out on the road, and build a fan base. Someone suggests doing a YouTube video. Schecter leaves, confident he'll see them all again soon.
On the Sunday after the panels, at an end-of-the-year awards ceremony called the Remmys, the students gather in an auditorium, where prizes like Best Production or Best Song are announced. And less serious awards like Best Hair and Best Dressed. One citation, the Tom Schecter Rock Star of the Year Award, obviously goes to Schecter.
"It's been a long four years and I wish I remembered more of it," Schecter cracks in his speech.
On the back of every certificate is the face of Clive Davis and a slogan: "Congratulations, now you're going to be famous."
School of Schlock
Rock legends in the making they may be, but for now the NYU Clive Davis alums may have to stick to YouTube for exposure
by Angela Ashman
May 22nd, 2007 8:52 PM
One of the biggest misconceptions about NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music is that its students, while learning how to make it in the music business, will be plucked out of obscurity by Davis himself.
For the last four years, the program's first graduating class had expected that the legendary hitmaker would make an appearance beyond his remarks at freshman orientation and at graduation ceremonies. If not during classes or recording sessions, then at the very least, they hoped, he'd show up during the first "Capstone" project panel, a three-day event beginning
May 2 that had graduating seniors making thesis presentations to judges from the music industry.
"I'd be sort of surprised if he didn't come, just because it's his program and we're the first," says Julia Wilde, a pop singer-songwriter who had wanted to attend the school as soon as she heard 'Clive Davis' in the name. "I would imagine that he would want to be there, given how much he wanted to create this program and how much he believes in it."
Launched in 2003 with a $5 million check from Davis himself, the department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts is the first in the country that awards students a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in producing pop-music records. The program claims to be unique because it develops "creative entrepreneurs" who learn about all sides of the industry—business, technology, and performance—rather than just one aspect.
Some students specialize in engineering, some in business, and the rest—about a third—are performer-producers who gain training in how to record themselves in a multimillion-dollar studio so that they leave with full-length albums upon graduation. And if the final goal isn't already clear, a wall of photos at the fifth-floor offices at 194 Mercer Street makes the point: There's Davis with Whitney Houston and Carlos Santana. Davis with Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart. Davis handing a gold record to American Idol standout Clay Aiken.
Clive Davis, 75, has made a fortune discovering raw talent, from Houston to Alicia Keys, and shaping it into consumable form. And now the NYU department that bears his name is trying to do that with 28 students in each graduating class, giving them not only experience producing music but also taking seriously the theory behind the craft. Rock critic Robert Christgau, for example, gives a class on rock history that begins with the ancient Greeks (and, in a session two years ago, found him answering a question about the Sex Pistols by ripping off his button-down shirt to reveal a too-tight circa-1977 T-shirt containing the quiz answer).
"We're not like a star academy or something. We don't train the next rock stars," says Katherine Flatt, who handles the program's admissions. And yet, even though the program isn't supposed to be focused merely on musical performance, when you talk with the school's performer-producers, you can't help thinking that with students paying $40,000 each year, it's just a very expensive version of Idol.
On a Saturday afternoon last fall, a long cord ran from the studio's control room, across a hall, and into a restroom, where the thumping sound of a bass could be heard. The bass stopped, the restroom door opened, and out walked Tom Schecter, wearing ripped jeans, a white T-shirt, and a Guns N' Roses medallion around his neck, sporting a mess of bleached blond hair with dark roots. It was the first day of recording an album, The Ageless and the Insane, with his band Dibble Edge, and he thought the reverberation in the bathroom sounded cooler than it did in the studio.
Jennifer Newman contemplates a future in a music business free of assholes.
photo: Alana Cundy
Schecter has spent a large part of his college education honing his rock-star persona, which he fully expects will pay off when he becomes the biggest rock star in the world. He wears sunglasses indoors and punctuates his sentences with a slight growl. He talks incessantly about his craving for whiskey.
"This is my last free shot to make it without paying through the nose," Schecter says, referring to the fact that the 40 g's in annual tuition is also paying for his studio time. Recording in such a professional studio, he hopes, will convince a major label to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at him to go on the road after graduation.
A lanky freshman with glasses named David Pollock, who fronts an indie-rock band, is busy in the studio setting up the microphones around a drum kit. In the control room, Schecter looks on with Josh Silberberg, a senior specializing in engineering. Silberberg tweaks knobs and adjusts the shiny silver faders on the console. "It's given me a purpose in life," Silberberg says about the program. "I was going to be a psych major. Now this is homework."
"My name may be first," Schecter remarks about his album, "but I couldn't do it without these guys."
"Do you have two bucks for duct tape?" his drummer asks. Schecter slaps some cash into his hand.
Schecter continues talking about the band's selling points: "We're all good-looking guys, and I think this is the kind of band people will take a chance on. Musically we sound better than anything on the radio right now. I want it badly. Now here I am. This is the first day, a big day.
"I can't believe I went to college for this," he adds. "I'm still grinning like an idiot."
While Schecter dreams of selling out stadiums, other students have already had real-world success. Carter Matschullat, tall and open-faced with shaggy reddish hair, runs an indie-rock label called Dovecote Records, and can afford to have an office/recording studio on St. Marks Place because one of his bands, Aberdeen City, signed to Columbia last year. (He's also in a hardcore band, Bed of Arms, with other students from the department.)
Matschullat had finished his freshman year at Duke, and then repeated his freshman year at the Clive Davis program because he wanted to attend so badly after reading the program's press release. A major perk for him has been taking classes with Nick Sansano, who recorded and co-produced Sonic Youth's Goo and Daydream Nation. "When I heard he was teaching here, I almost couldn't speak, I was so happy," Matschullat gushes.
But Matschullat isn't without complaints. He thinks the program is too focused on success at major labels. In a music business class taught by Lauren Davis, Clive's daughter, he says she complained that the budget he'd listed in an assignment was too low. But the numbers he was using were from an actual, working marketing plan for an indie rock band. "It's all taught from the super mega major label standpoint, when that's all like, dying," he says.
All of the students seem to admire Bo Pericic, because the DJ regularly jets off to parties in places like China and Ecuador as a part of the duo Filo and Peri, recently ranked number 77 in the world by DJ magazine. Pericic says attending the NYU program has helped him meet people he might not otherwise associate with, like Eric Lumiere, who writes sentimental love songs on his acoustic guitar. Pericic remixed Lumiere's song "Anthem," sold it to the world's number one DJ, Paul Van Dyk, and it's being played at dance clubs around the world.
Two years ago, engineering student Evan Moore started his own production company, Thunder, Lightning & Lightning. A rock drummer, Moore is one of two senior class representatives; the other is Jennifer Newman, a singer-songwriter who is a second cousin of Randy Newman. Their positions were created after complaints from students piled up in the program's first two years. But Moore says the bugs have mostly been worked out. And he says he's learned much more outside of school than from his classes. "One of the big realizations I've had . . . is that, well, I think so many of us going into this program thought that—it sounds so silly—but that it would bring them fame and fortune. You know what I mean? Like this is the coolest program ever. Like it's going to teach me everything I need to know to be successful in life. And it's just not true about any college program. It's still just school. It's not actually a part of the music industry."
Moore partly blames the school for giving students the wrong impression: "Our freshman year, all our events were catered. We were treated like rock stars, and it really got it into everyone's mind that they were rock stars. Like if we had any kind of meeting with the class—I mean regular school stuff—it was catered. They all just seemed so pleased with all of us. It was all about how all the students were so amazing and accomplished and bright. And some people ate that up."
One recent evening, Moore and Newman met up in the school's studio to mix the album she was preparing for graduation. Newman, who was wearing preppy pearl earrings with her Tool concert T-shirt and jeans, was paying several thousand dollars extra to get her album just right, and she had hired Moore to help her. Conversation ranged from her concept for her album's cover ("quirky sexy") to how cool their adjunct instructor Tony Maserati is because he's worked with the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé, to the one class they take together with the other seniors, the Capstone Colloquium.
Students prepare a final project for the culminating event that includes an artist's statement and a 25-page business plan mapping out their careers for the next 10 years. Moore had missed a class that called for students to make a short speech about what had inspired them to make music.
He wasn't sorry that he'd been absent that day. "I'm not going to say what inspired me to do music in my senior thesis," Moore said, disgusted.
"I think it would be good for you," Newman replied.
"It's too show-and-tell-y to say what I learned in college."
"We all hugged," Newman said, clearly still glowing from the warm feeling it gave her.
Moore burst into laughter.
"It kind of felt like therapy. It was like we finished an AA meeting. It made me realize how far we've come."
Moore laughed even harder.
"You're so sarcastic—that's why it's good you weren't there."
"Nobody I know was there," Moore countered, referring to Matschullat and the engineering clique.
"It was good all the assholes weren't there," Newman responded. "No offense. It's just not conducive to people sharing how they feel."
Most faculty and students seem to agree that of all the performer-producers in the senior class, Mario Spinetti is the one most likely to succeed.
Spinetti wears his brown hair in a curly eccentric pompadour and has a big, beautiful singing voice inherited from his opera-singing parents. He plays the piano and other instruments, and composes and arranges his own music. He records himself with gospel choirs and orchestras, and incorporates dancers into his live shows. He describes his sound as chamber pop and loves rock opera.
Spinetti counts Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Prince as inspirations, and has dreams to fill stadiums with people chanting his name. "I'm not much for money, not at all. I just want to survive. I want to be able to support myself and do what I love. Um, it just so happens that the place that I want to be, if I do get there, I would be loaded. You know, like, there would be a lot of money at stake," he says.
The only thing holding him back, it seems, is finding the right star persona. At the beginning of the school year, Spinetti was performing under the alter ego Aiden Eve. But by the second semester he dropped it because he'd rather be himself.
"There's been a lot of pressure leading up to this year. In my head at least. I wanted to know exactly what I was going to be by the time I got here. Which is even deeper than recorded music. It's like, know thyself by the time you're 21," he says.
Spinetti had entered the department with the dream of scoring an audition with Davis. But as each year went by without seeing the department's namesake, his hopes dwindled. Still, he figured Davis would make some kind of appearance at the Capstone panel.
"It's kind of pitched as a scout program. Like, oh, he's fostering these new artists and new producers, but he's not there. And none of his people are there checking us out. It's not to say that what he's done isn't monumental and great. It's just not exactly as it appears on paper. Is he going to be there? I'm sure. But is it going to be for the reason everybody thinks? Probably not."
Over the final three days of school, the stu dents pitch their business plans and play their albums during the Capstone to a panel of experts.
None of them is Clive Davis.
Disappointed, Spinetti gamely goes to the piano to begin his presentation. Dressed in black, he turns down the lights, and sits behind the judges. Some turn around to watch him, others don't. He plays "I Was There," a song he says was partly inspired by his parents' divorce. Then he gets up and gives a short talk and plays the album version of the same song.
The judges let him know they prefer the live version to the recorded one, which includes a choir. Overall they are enthusiastic about his voice and his piano playing, but they can't figure out how to categorize the rest of his act—the pompadour, the orchestra, the choir, the dancers, the chamber pop. Comparisons to Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright are tossed about.
"It's a question of direction," says Lesley Bleakley, who oversees British indie labels such as XL Recordings and Mo' Wax as CEO of The Beggars Group U.S. "Is it the show-tunes route you want to go? Or is it alternative? Is there a direction you want to go?"
"I basically want to perform music for the rest of my life," Spinetti answers.
"What's your direction?" Bleakley asks again.
"My direction is rather general in my mind and in my heart," Spinetti responds. "I want to perform for as many people as possible. I enjoy live music far more than recorded music."
Steve Smith, founder of Acme Partners Ltd., who has worked with Pink Floyd and the Who, chimes in, "What's your style? How can I characterize you when I walk out there and say, hey, that guy Mario sounded like— fill in the blank."
Spinetti has no idea. And suddenly they can't help him.
"I think some of us feel we see a road for you to go very easily," says the last judge, Celia Hirschman, founder of Downtown Marketing. "And that road has been well laid by some very talented musicians who are doing really well now, but it's not contingent on us. . . . You have to tell us who you are. And with that, we can help get you there."
"Otherwise it's manufactured," says Bleakley, "like American Idol."
They all laugh, except for Spinetti.
After Tom Schecter finishes taking a final exam on the decline of ancient Rome, a part of his general education requirements, he hurries back to his dorm room to get ready for the biggest day of his academic career. He puts on his black leather pants, spikes his brown hair, slips on his sunglasses, and struts over to the studio, where all day the seniors have been pitching the albums to the Capstone panel.
Schecter feels certain his record will win over the judges. "I'm not expecting to walk out of here with a deal or even a 'we'll call you next week,' " he says, speaking with authority and confidence. "I'm walking in there with the expectation of, OK, I'm going to rudely in troduce myself to these guys, and when they hear from me again, they will be offering me something in a few months."
Out of the studio door bursts Eric Lumiere, the singer-songwriter who had the dance-club hit. His eyes are red from crying. A few paces behind him, his mother follows, also in tears. And a few paces behind her is Lumiere's equally teary-eyed professor, Nick Sansano.
"They didn't understand me," is all Lumiere manages to choke out.
Lumiere had just finished pitching the pop album he self-produced. While the school is cautious to refer to these panels as merely an educational exercise, the starry-eyed students see it as something else—a chance of a lifetime to score a record deal. But the judges are brutal. They call Lumiere arrogant for comparing his sound to that of U2, Coldplay, and Damien Rice. They call his business plan a wish list.
Lumiere walks off, leaving his mother to explain, "They said they liked his music, but they didn't say that until the end." She and Lumiere's father had flown out from Los Angeles to watch the big event that has not only ended with them in tears, but also with faculty members in the room crying as well. "I guess that's real life," she shrugs.
Schecter tries not to focus on the wreckage in front of him. He walks up to the studio door and then gets down on his knees and says a prayer.
"Tom! Tom! Tom!" a professor calls from inside.
Schecter struts in with a full swagger into the middle of the semicircle of judges. He takes off his black leather jacket and swings it over the bar stool in the middle. Then he gives his opening.
"All right. So I'm the last one. You guys have been here for a while. I appreciate that. So I'm gonna make this as brief as possible. Hand to God, you're not going to be here for more than another two hours."
The boast gets a big laugh. He cocks his eyebrows, tucks his chin down toward his chest, and stares them down with his rock-star gaze. He's the bad boy and they love him. After playing them two clips and giving a pitch, he has the panel hooked.
"I love this kind of stuff," says Susan Dodes, manager, producer, and a&r executive of SuLeDo Music, who describes herself as "a rock chick from way back." "Your presentation is really good in that you have the whole story there. You say you've been to rehab already and you're not even signed. You've got your rock persona and you've got the attitude." But she adds, "I want to know, do you kick ass live? What is the audience reaction like? This is rock and roll, man. It's a way of life."
"At the risk of sounding cliché," says Denise Brown, an attorney and former Senior VP of Warner Bros. Records, "You had us at hello."
"So, what's my next step?" Schecter asks, fishing for good news.
They tell him to tour, go out on the road, and build a fan base. Someone suggests doing a YouTube video. Schecter leaves, confident he'll see them all again soon.
On the Sunday after the panels, at an end-of-the-year awards ceremony called the Remmys, the students gather in an auditorium, where prizes like Best Production or Best Song are announced. And less serious awards like Best Hair and Best Dressed. One citation, the Tom Schecter Rock Star of the Year Award, obviously goes to Schecter.
"It's been a long four years and I wish I remembered more of it," Schecter cracks in his speech.
On the back of every certificate is the face of Clive Davis and a slogan: "Congratulations, now you're going to be famous."
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
3-D: The Future of Film?
NYT
May 22, 2007
Top Directors See the Future, and They Say It’s in 3-D
By SHARON WAXMAN
LOS ANGELES, May 21 — If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing newfangled 3-D glasses.
Last week the next phase in the theatrical viewing experience took a significant leap forward, as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson signed on to direct and produce for Paramount’s DreamWorks Studios a trilogy of 3-D movies about the intrepid Belgian comic-book hero Tintin. And on Saturday nearly an hour of footage from the 3-D concert film of the Irish rock band U2 made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
As “U2 3D” demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories. The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono’s face, then soars over and down among the 60,000 concertgoers. And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses, they are not the old red-and-green variety but sleek black ones.
“This is a different experience; it’s much more voyeuristic,” said Jon Landau, the producer of “Avatar,” James Cameron’s ambitious and expensive movie about a battle between humans and aliens, which is currently being shot in 3-D using a combination of computer animation and motion-capture technology. “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”
That view, however, isn’t completely clear yet. So far digital projection has been installed in only about 2,300 of the 37,000 theaters in the United States, with 3-D projection in just 700 of those. Theater owners have been slow to upgrade to expensive digital projectors, and it is an open question whether many American moviegoers will pay an extra dollar or two for tickets to 3-D films.
The 3-D film first flourished in the early 1950s, when movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and Disney’s “Melody” introduced audiences to the delights and annoyances of donning special glasses. But because of a combination of technological complexities, eye fatigue and a lack of compelling feature-length movies, many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the filmmaking format on the fringes of the mainstream.
The emergence of Imax and the technological advances of the last few years, however, have piqued the interest of Hollywood’s top directors. Mr. Cameron, who made the 3-D Imax documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” in 2003, is using motion capture technology and computer graphics to create realistic characters and fantasy worlds for “Avatar.”
Twentieth Century Fox will release that film, with an estimated $200 million cost, in 2009, mainly in 3-D. (Mr. Landau said that Mr. Cameron wore 3-D glasses — the latest have plastic rims — to look at his daily footage.)
Audiences, which have had a taste of the future in 3-D versions of children’s fare like “Monster House” and “Chicken Little,” will get another early blast of the experience in Robert Zemeckis’s adventure-drama “Beowulf,” to be released, wherever possible in 3-D, by Paramount and Warner Brothers in November.
And DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that all of its future movies will be shot in 3-D, for release beginning in 2009.
“I believe that this is the single greatest opportunity for the moviegoing experience since the advent of color,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, said in an e-mail message. “It has been more than 60 years since there has been a significant enhancement or innovation to the moviegoing experience.”
He predicted that starting in 2009, “a significant percentage of the big mainstream films will be made and exhibited in this format.”
The widening embrace of 3-D by Hollywood’s leading directors and major studios comes at a critical moment for the movie industry, which faces expanding competition for leisure time from home theaters, the Internet and games. And it also solves, at least temporarily, the continuing pressures from the thriving trade in bootleg movies. A 3-D film cannot be recorded easily from a movie screen because the images are blurry to the naked eye. And so far there is no way to show a movie in 3-D on DVD.
The push to 3-D may also be the impetus needed to spur movie exhibitors to switch from film projectors to digital ones, say industry executives. A digital projector can cost around $100,000, a sum that has proved prohibitive to many exhibitors. Adding the 3-D component, including the silver coating of the screen, costs about $20,000 more, but the added benefit is immediately visible, said Michael V. Lewis, chairman of Real-D, which dominates the 3-D projection business.
There is already evidence of a box office payoff. “Meet the Robinsons,” an animated Disney film, was released in early April in 3,400 theaters, of which 600 (about 18 percent) were equipped with 3-D. The 3-D theaters brought in 30 percent of the box office revenue from the first weekend, according to Disney. And a 3-D version of “Polar Express” from 2004 has been released three years in a row in Imax theaters around the winter holidays, taking in $65 million.
Greg Foster, the chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, warned that not all films were suited to the format. “Three-D isn’t a panacea — it isn’t a magic pill,” he said. “It’s a spectacular thing if it fits three specific criteria: Does it take you somewhere? Is it made by a visionary filmmaker? And is the concept behind the film organic to 3-D?”
He added: “If you’re going to do 3-D because you need a gimmick to sell tickets, the audience is too smart for that.”
Among films that have not worked well in 3-D were “Chicken Little” and “Ant Bully,” which were also not successful at the box office.
The new projects aim to be more than mere gimmicks. Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson have been working on the “Adventures of Tintin” project for about a year with Mr. Jackson’s special effects company, Weta Digital.
Part of the decision-making process included a week of motion capture work on the “Avatar” set in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles last November. That visual information was sent to Weta in New Zealand. There it was married to a computer model of Tintin, the young, red-haired Belgian adventurer of comic-book fame, who is wildly popular in Europe though less so in this country. The results persuaded both directors to push forward with the trilogy.
Mr. Jackson is expected to direct the first film, Mr. Spielberg the second, with the director for the third undecided, according to a DreamWorks spokesman. There is as yet no start date for the first project.
Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson both declined to comment for this article. Stacey Snider, the co-chairwoman of DreamWorks, also declined.
Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, said the director had long been fascinated with 3-D but until now had not been swayed by the ability to create a full-length feature experience. “Based on various tests he’s seen, he believes in the future of 3-D,” he said. “This is really starting to create some interesting imagery that gives the filmmaker a lot more creative license to play with.”
To shoot the U2 concert film, the directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington placed about a dozen cameras throughout stadiums during the band’s concert tour in Latin America last year, and shot more than 100 hours of footage. The film, co-owned by the band and 3ality Digital, a 3-D movie production company, does not yet have a distributor, but the partners expect the film to reach theaters in the fall.
Sandy Climan, chief executive of 3ality Digital Holdings, said the improved 3-D format would entice moviegoers eager for something new.
Mr. Katzenberg agreed. He predicted that after 2009, “consumers will own their own 3-D glasses in the same way they have sunglasses for going outside.”
May 22, 2007
Top Directors See the Future, and They Say It’s in 3-D
By SHARON WAXMAN
LOS ANGELES, May 21 — If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing newfangled 3-D glasses.
Last week the next phase in the theatrical viewing experience took a significant leap forward, as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson signed on to direct and produce for Paramount’s DreamWorks Studios a trilogy of 3-D movies about the intrepid Belgian comic-book hero Tintin. And on Saturday nearly an hour of footage from the 3-D concert film of the Irish rock band U2 made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
As “U2 3D” demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories. The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono’s face, then soars over and down among the 60,000 concertgoers. And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses, they are not the old red-and-green variety but sleek black ones.
“This is a different experience; it’s much more voyeuristic,” said Jon Landau, the producer of “Avatar,” James Cameron’s ambitious and expensive movie about a battle between humans and aliens, which is currently being shot in 3-D using a combination of computer animation and motion-capture technology. “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”
That view, however, isn’t completely clear yet. So far digital projection has been installed in only about 2,300 of the 37,000 theaters in the United States, with 3-D projection in just 700 of those. Theater owners have been slow to upgrade to expensive digital projectors, and it is an open question whether many American moviegoers will pay an extra dollar or two for tickets to 3-D films.
The 3-D film first flourished in the early 1950s, when movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and Disney’s “Melody” introduced audiences to the delights and annoyances of donning special glasses. But because of a combination of technological complexities, eye fatigue and a lack of compelling feature-length movies, many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the filmmaking format on the fringes of the mainstream.
The emergence of Imax and the technological advances of the last few years, however, have piqued the interest of Hollywood’s top directors. Mr. Cameron, who made the 3-D Imax documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” in 2003, is using motion capture technology and computer graphics to create realistic characters and fantasy worlds for “Avatar.”
Twentieth Century Fox will release that film, with an estimated $200 million cost, in 2009, mainly in 3-D. (Mr. Landau said that Mr. Cameron wore 3-D glasses — the latest have plastic rims — to look at his daily footage.)
Audiences, which have had a taste of the future in 3-D versions of children’s fare like “Monster House” and “Chicken Little,” will get another early blast of the experience in Robert Zemeckis’s adventure-drama “Beowulf,” to be released, wherever possible in 3-D, by Paramount and Warner Brothers in November.
And DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that all of its future movies will be shot in 3-D, for release beginning in 2009.
“I believe that this is the single greatest opportunity for the moviegoing experience since the advent of color,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, said in an e-mail message. “It has been more than 60 years since there has been a significant enhancement or innovation to the moviegoing experience.”
He predicted that starting in 2009, “a significant percentage of the big mainstream films will be made and exhibited in this format.”
The widening embrace of 3-D by Hollywood’s leading directors and major studios comes at a critical moment for the movie industry, which faces expanding competition for leisure time from home theaters, the Internet and games. And it also solves, at least temporarily, the continuing pressures from the thriving trade in bootleg movies. A 3-D film cannot be recorded easily from a movie screen because the images are blurry to the naked eye. And so far there is no way to show a movie in 3-D on DVD.
The push to 3-D may also be the impetus needed to spur movie exhibitors to switch from film projectors to digital ones, say industry executives. A digital projector can cost around $100,000, a sum that has proved prohibitive to many exhibitors. Adding the 3-D component, including the silver coating of the screen, costs about $20,000 more, but the added benefit is immediately visible, said Michael V. Lewis, chairman of Real-D, which dominates the 3-D projection business.
There is already evidence of a box office payoff. “Meet the Robinsons,” an animated Disney film, was released in early April in 3,400 theaters, of which 600 (about 18 percent) were equipped with 3-D. The 3-D theaters brought in 30 percent of the box office revenue from the first weekend, according to Disney. And a 3-D version of “Polar Express” from 2004 has been released three years in a row in Imax theaters around the winter holidays, taking in $65 million.
Greg Foster, the chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, warned that not all films were suited to the format. “Three-D isn’t a panacea — it isn’t a magic pill,” he said. “It’s a spectacular thing if it fits three specific criteria: Does it take you somewhere? Is it made by a visionary filmmaker? And is the concept behind the film organic to 3-D?”
He added: “If you’re going to do 3-D because you need a gimmick to sell tickets, the audience is too smart for that.”
Among films that have not worked well in 3-D were “Chicken Little” and “Ant Bully,” which were also not successful at the box office.
The new projects aim to be more than mere gimmicks. Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson have been working on the “Adventures of Tintin” project for about a year with Mr. Jackson’s special effects company, Weta Digital.
Part of the decision-making process included a week of motion capture work on the “Avatar” set in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles last November. That visual information was sent to Weta in New Zealand. There it was married to a computer model of Tintin, the young, red-haired Belgian adventurer of comic-book fame, who is wildly popular in Europe though less so in this country. The results persuaded both directors to push forward with the trilogy.
Mr. Jackson is expected to direct the first film, Mr. Spielberg the second, with the director for the third undecided, according to a DreamWorks spokesman. There is as yet no start date for the first project.
Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson both declined to comment for this article. Stacey Snider, the co-chairwoman of DreamWorks, also declined.
Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, said the director had long been fascinated with 3-D but until now had not been swayed by the ability to create a full-length feature experience. “Based on various tests he’s seen, he believes in the future of 3-D,” he said. “This is really starting to create some interesting imagery that gives the filmmaker a lot more creative license to play with.”
To shoot the U2 concert film, the directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington placed about a dozen cameras throughout stadiums during the band’s concert tour in Latin America last year, and shot more than 100 hours of footage. The film, co-owned by the band and 3ality Digital, a 3-D movie production company, does not yet have a distributor, but the partners expect the film to reach theaters in the fall.
Sandy Climan, chief executive of 3ality Digital Holdings, said the improved 3-D format would entice moviegoers eager for something new.
Mr. Katzenberg agreed. He predicted that after 2009, “consumers will own their own 3-D glasses in the same way they have sunglasses for going outside.”
Monday, May 21, 2007
Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?
Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesClive Campbell, known as D.J. Kool Herc, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the west Bronx. He wants the apartment building to be declared a landmark for its role in hip-hop culture. “This is where it came from,” he said.
NYT
May 21, 2007
Citywide
Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx, not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.
“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”
O.K., Mr. Campbell is not just anybody — he is the alpha D.J. of hip-hop. As D.J. Kool Herc, he presided over the turntables at parties in that community room in 1973 that spilled into nearby parks before turning into a global assault. Playing snippets of the choicest beats from James Brown, Jimmy Castor, Babe Ruth and anything else that piqued his considerable musical curiosity, he provided the soundtrack savored by loose-limbed b-boys (a term he takes credit for creating, too).
Mr. Campbell thinks the building should be declared a landmark in recognition of its role in American popular culture. Its residents agree, but for more practical reasons. They want to have the building placed on the National Register of Historic Places so that it might be protected from any change that would affect its character — in this case, a building for poor and working-class families.
Throughout the city, housing advocates said, buildings like 1520 Sedgwick are becoming harder to find as owners opt out of subsidy programs so they can eventually charge higher rents on the open market.
The Sedgwick building is part of the state’s Mitchell-Lama program, in which private landlords who receive tax breaks and subsidized mortgages agree to limit their return on equity and rent to people who meet modest income limits. The contracts allow owners to leave the program and prepay their mortgage loan after 20 years. Rent regulations can protect tenants from increases, but not always.
While Mitchell-Lama buildings in parts of Manhattan, like the Lower East Side, were among the first to leave the program, housing experts say that the trend has spread far beyond, from the Rockaways to the west Bronx.
Tom Waters, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, said there are about 40,000 Mitchell-Lama units in the city, down from 66,000 in 1990. The rate of buildings leaving the program has accelerated since 2001, he said, as landlords find they can do better on the open market.
Labor groups and housing advocates have called for safeguards on moderate-income housing, which they said was essential for the city’s economic health. While the groups have lauded Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for his commitment to building such housing, they said the State Legislature should address policies that affect the city’s housing market.
“There is no single solution,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “Preservation of currently affordable housing is something we need to look at. Working people are going to have no place to go.”
In February, tenants of the Sedgwick Avenue building, which has 100 units, were told that the owners planned to leave the Mitchell-Lama program. The building’s owners did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.
Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said landlords were entitled by contract to opt out after a set period. He said that if there were concerns about keeping the buildings in the program, the government should consider better incentives.
“Contracts should still mean something,” Mr. Spinola said. “Affordable housing is clearly a problem in the city. I do not believe the social concerns for citizens of the city of New York should fall on the backs of one particular owner when it is a citywide problem.”
The problem has been widespread enough to keep Dina Levy of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board looking for new strategies to slow it down. The group, a nonprofit housing advocacy organization, is advising the Sedgwick tenants.
“The market is so out of control in every corner of every borough,” said Ms. Levy, director of organizing and policy for the group. “We have run out of land, so anywhere in the boroughs can be the next hot real estate market. That’s why we’re scrambling to find preservation opportunities to keep them affordable.”
That usually involves seeing if there are mortgage requirements or land covenants that mandate the property be used for moderate-income housing, she said. But when tenants of 1520 Sedgwick came to her group in February, organizers stumbled on an interesting fact when they searched for the address online.
“The first hundred hits said ‘birthplace of hip-hop,’ ” said Dan DeSloover, an organizer for the group. “Kool Herc had lived there. That was a great coincidence to have this building be part of that history.”
The idea to have the building declared a landmark as a way of keeping it affordable for moderate-income families developed slowly, as organizers discussed it with tenants and elected officials’ staff members.
Preservationists doubted it would stop the building’s owners from leaving the subsidy program, since the landmark distinction would apply to the structure and not necessarily its use. And there is another obstacle: to be eligible for the National Register, a building normally has to be at least 50 years old. The Sedgwick building falls short of that by 12 years. Exceptions are made for extraordinary cultural significance.
“It is complicated when you try to preserve some other feature of a building besides its architecture,” said Lisa Kersavage, a preservationist at the Municipal Art Society of New York. “But this is a very important cultural touchstone for New York, and awareness should be raised.”
Cindy Campbell, who promoted the first party where her brother spun the tunes, is intent on doing at least that. She hopes that by highlighting the history of the building, where her family lived for nine years, she might be able to enlist big-name rappers to Mayor Bloomberg in her campaign to help the tenants.
She still recalls the first party — on Aug. 11, 1973, she says — which she dreamed up as a way for her to get some extra money for back-to-school clothes.
“I didn’t want to go to Fordham Road to buy clothes because you’d go to school and see everybody with the same thing on,” she said. “I wanted to go to Delancey Street and get something unusual.”
Her brother wound up giving the neighborhood something unusual, too, inside the packed and sweaty community room. Drawing on his wide-ranging musical tastes, he combined sounds and in time those sounds were combined in new ways as he extended the beats to the delight of the dancers.
“It wasn’t a black thing, it was a we thing,” said Mr. Campbell, now 52. “We played everything. Gary Glitter? We rocked that. We schooled people about music.”
Since leaving 1520 Sedgwick, Mr. Campbell has moved to Long Island and has continued spinning tunes. (On Sunday, he was the D.J. for the city’s first Dance Parade, which traveled from Midtown to Lower Manhattan.)
Some old-timers rushed up to him last week when he and his sister visited the building. They told him — to his dismay — that the community room has been closed for renovations since last year.
“All of it came from here,” he said. “From this building. It should be respected.”
Curtis Brown, who was a teenager living a few blocks away during Kool Herc’s heyday, agreed. Mr. Brown went from being a fan to becoming Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers, an early and influential rap group.
“That place means everything,” he said. “You can look at it objectively and say it could have happened somewhere else. Maybe. But this is where it did happen.”
To him it is already a landmark.
“As far as government and what they consider important, who knows?” he said. “But for something that saturated the world culture, that went from one building to the world, I would want to hold on to the historical significance of that building.”
Creole Musician Bois Sec Ardoin (1915-2007)
May 20, 2007
Bois Sec Ardoin, Musician and Nurturer of Creole Tradition, Dies at 91
By JON PARELES
Alphonse Ardoin, a Louisiana Creole accordionist and singer nicknamed Bois Sec whose music stalwartly sustained South Louisiana tradition, died Wednesday of natural causes in Eunice, La., where he had been living in a nursing home, said his son Morris. He was 91 years old.
For five decades, Alphonse Ardoin worked regularly with the fiddler Canray Fontenot, trading quick-fingered passages on some of the oldest known Creole tunes and infusing Cajun waltzes with the blues. English speakers sometimes called the style “la la music,” but it was known by its players simply as “la musique Creole.”
Eventually, the Creole waltzes and two-steps would be punched up, plugged in and fused with rhythm and blues, creating the zydeco music that still fills South Louisiana dance halls. In 1986, Mr. Ardoin and Mr. Fontenot (who died in 1995) both received from the National Endowment for the Arts the National Heritage Fellowship, the highest American award for traditional arts.
Alphonse Ardoin was born in 1915 in rural Duralde, La., the son of sharecroppers, and he worked on farms all his life. As a child, he was nicknamed Bois Sec (“dry wood”), because he had a reputation for being the first in the cotton fields to seek shelter during Louisiana’s sudden downpours.
Mr. Ardoin took up the button accordion, an instrument that had a family tradition. His cousin Amédé Ardoin made pioneering recordings of French Creole music with the fiddler Dennis McGee. Alphonse Ardoin took up the accordion and learned his cousin’s style, in part by playing triangle in Amédé’s band. According to Michael Tisserand’s book “The Kingdom of Zydeco,” Alphonse told his cousin, “It won’t be long until I catch up with you.”
But music remained a sideline until the 1940s, when he started working regularly with Mr. Fontenot. As the Duralde Ramblers, they played at dances and parties and on a live radio show broadcast from Eunice. Their reputation spread so widely that they were booked at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival. On the way back south from the festival, they stopped in Virginia and recorded their first album, “Les Blues du Bayou,” which was later reissued by Arhoolie as “La Musique Creole.”
As the old Creole style was replaced by zydeco on the dance-hall circuit, Mr. Ardoin and Mr. Fontenot took their music to folk festivals and concerts worldwide. In the 1970s, Mr. Ardoin added his sons Morris, Lawrence and Gustave to his group, which became the Ardoin Family Orchestra.
He also recorded and performed with the Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa and later with a younger generation of Creole traditionalists, notably Balfa Toujours, led by Dewey’s daughter Christine, with whom he made the 1998 album “Allons Danser.” And through the years, Mr. Ardoin’s songs made their way into the repertory of zydeco bands and traditionalist groups like Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys.
He is survived by a brother, Delphin; his children, Morris, Florence, Mildred, Amelia, Dorothy, Juanita, Emily, Alberta, Matilda, Lawrence, Ronald and Russell; and “a whole bunch” of grandchildren, Morris Ardoin said. Three of those grandchildren — Dexter, Sean and Chris — lead their own bands, playing Creole music and zydeco.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
"Cancer Country": Cancer Comes to Country Music
SLATE
the spectator
Cancer Comes to Country Music
Old-fashioned tear-jerking or emotional porn?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 3:00 PM ET
I can't make up my mind: Has country music finally gone too far? Has the brilliant and powerful mastery of emotional manipulation that is its signature, its relentless effort to make you weep at all costs, at last taken it into territory—the bitter end of its manipulative side—that it might be better off avoiding?
Or does the advent of a subgenre you might call "cancer country"—that is, songs that make use of cancer as their chosen means of ratcheting up emotion—represent a perversely healthy evolution of country music, raising it to a new level of emotional truth—a realism beyond honky-tonk heartbreak and cheatin'-spouses sorrow. A deeper acknowledgment of the grim power of death and disease.
I write as a lonely defender of mainstream country in New York, a city that tends to turn up its nose at some of the more undeniably risible aspects of the genre's achy-breaky heart. (If you doubt my country credibility, let me cite the two weeks I spent traveling in Willie Nelson's tour bus as he played honky-tonks across the South. The highlight? Willie playing the "lost" verse of "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.")
I've always felt that at its best, mainstream country music (not just hipster-friendly bluegrass and alt-country) is unappreciated as writing. That the best C&W songwriters have created an idiom, a genre, whose excellence in elliptical emotional compression rivals the best contemporary American short-story writing. Some of these C&W geniuses, people like George Jones and Rodney Crowell, are the unheralded Raymond Carvers and John Cheevers of their genre—masters of self-lacerating self-pity. Consider the spare, aching, profoundly needy lyrics of Crowell's "Till I Gain Control Again":
I've never gone so wrong as for telling lies to you
What you see is what I've been
There is nothing I could hide from you
You can see me better than I can.
On the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
'Til I can gain control again …
It always makes me lose control.
Sure, I get a kick out of good-time whiskey/sexy country (like the contemporary "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off"). But it's the ones that know how to push your saddest buttons, the buttons marked "Regret," "Sorrow," "Remorse," "Self-Pity," in particular that I love.
But with no country radio station in New York City, intermittent bouts of watching the country-music cable channels have been my main fix. And one aspect I love about getting out of Manhattan is that there's almost always at least one country station on the car radio, which is, of course, the best place to hear country.
Even in wonkish Washington, D.C., which is where I was when I heard the latest in the cancer-country genre, the new hit from Craig Morgan, "(I Thought That I Was) Tough."
It's one of those songs that hit you in a way that makes you remember the mundane particularity of the first time you heard it. We were driving to a Safeway supermarket one sunlit Sunday morning. My friend, who—fortunately—likes weepy C&W songs, too, had the local country station on the car radio when "Tough" came on.
It cleverly sneaks up on you, because it starts out like one of those country songs that's a tribute to a multitalented, multitasking wife and mother. The lyrics of the first verse (written by Monte Criswell and Joe Leathers) begin:
She's in the kitchen at the crack of dawn
Bacon's on, coffee's strong
Kids running wild, taking off their clothes
If she's a nervous wreck, well it never shows
Takes one to football and one to dance
Hits the Y for aerobics class
Drops by the bank, stops at the store
Has on a smile when I walk through the door
The last to go to bed, she'll be the first one up
And I thought I was tough.
But then, in the second verse, you learn that the song is more than a tribute to a supermom housewife. This is no ordinary housewife:
We sat there five years ago
The doctors let us know, the test showed
She'd have to fight to live, I broke down and cried,
She held me and said it's gonna be all right.
She wore that wig to church
Pink ribbon pinned there on her shirt
No room for fear, full of faith
Hands held high singing Amazing Grace
Never once complained, refusing to give up
And I thought I was tough.
Suddenly, that last line, "I thought I was tough," takes on a far deeper meaning, and the thing that's really "tough" is trying not to cry when you hear it. It was like a dark shadow blotted out the sun in the Safeway (metaphor?) parking lot that sunny Sunday. You know, of course, that famous painting by Poussin, the one with the idyllic country folk puzzling over a grave they've stumbled on? A scene which the painter labels, adopting the voice of the Grim Reaper, "Et in Arcadia Ego"—I, Death, am here even in bucolic country arcadia.
"Whoa," I said, as the song ended. "Did I just hear that right?"
"Amazing, isn't it?" she said. "It's cancer country."
She proceeded to tell me about the song she thought was the absolute apex of the genre—the song that made her think of the term cancer country in the first place, a song from 2005, now a classic, that I somehow (fortunately?) missed, a song called "Skin" (although it's more familiarly known as "Sarabeth").
But before we get to "Sarabeth," the icon of the cancer-country subgenre, let's take a look at the song that seems to have started it all. It may not have been the first country cancer anthem (readers, please let me know of any I have missed), but it is the first one to become a mega-hit—a breakthrough for cancer in country. Made "Sarabeth" possible. Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying."
It doesn't waste any time getting to the X-ray moment. Tim (who wrote the song) sings about "a friend":
He said, "I was in my early 40s,
With a lot of life before me,
When a moment came that stopped me on a dime.
I spent most of the next days,
Looking at the X-rays.
Talking 'bout the options
And talking 'bout sweet time."
I asked him when it sank in,
That this might really be the real end,
How's it hit ya' when you get that kind of news?
Man whad 'ya do? And he said:
"I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull name Fu Manchu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'."
And he said, "Some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'."
What is the source of this song's power? Its ostensible message is uplift, but underlying that, I believe, is dread. The dread that is there in a certain kind of reticence or obliquity that betokens the long-standing, fearful, not-to-be-named power of cancer. It exists, literally, in a negative space: He's staring into X-ray negatives which, presumably, display the evidence of disease as a menacing, ghostly shadow.
Then there's troubling contrast with the purported uplift of the chorus, with all that gettin'-busy-enjoying-life, the triumphantly redemptive notion that the prospect of death can give the life that's left a joyous intensity. But is it me, or there an ambiguity in that last line, "I hope you get the chance ..."?
"I hope you the chance," taken literally, means, "I hope you get cancer." Because then you'll feel all uplifted like me. So, it's just a great excuse to party, getting cancer? I'm not sure all cancer patients would feel it's an unalloyed blessing. Still, the song's bridge ends with one of those annoyingly profound-however-trite-type questions great country songs are always asking:
Like tomorrow was a gift
And ya got eternity to think
About what you'd do with it,
What did you do with it,
What did I do with it,
What would I do with it?
Now, I'm not saying that country—or rock, for that matter—has shied away from death. But in the past, the death has more often come from hedonistic excess, too much drinking, driving too fast (as in the "teen angel" car crash songs in rock); the Hank Williams live fast/die young ethos in country. Yes, there have been sad, peaceful, emotional songs about dying in country music—Johnny Cash's duet with his daughter Rosanne on the unbearably beautiful "September When It Comes," for instance.
And recently there have been a number of country songs about the war. At first, they were all gung-ho, but they've turned darker: like Darryl Worley's painfully melancholy "I Just Came Back (From a War)"—about a vet trying and failing to feel normal again in his old hometown after coming back from Iraq.* Another "Et in Arcadia Ego" moment.
Still, there's something different about cancer-related country songs. The dread that forbids naming the disease in the Tim McGraw song can be found in "Skin," aka "Sarabeth," as well.
You've gotta give this song credit: In the history of contemporary death, dying, and disease songs, few rival this Rascal Flatts weeper. It's probably the most well-known cancer-country song, the one some have called the saddest country song ever.
"Skin" doesn't waste any time getting to the heart of the matter:
Sarabeth is scared to death
To hear what the doctor will say.
She hasn't been well
Since the day that she fell
And the bruises just won't go away.
So she sits and she waits with her mother and dad
And flips through an old magazine
Till the nurse with the smile
Stands at the door
And says will you please come with me
Sarabeth is scared to death
'Cause the doctor just told her the news
"Between the red cells and white
Something's not right
But we're gonna take care of you"
"Between the red cells and white/ Something's not right." Again, a kind of artful evasion of naming: Is it fearfulness or a way of heightening the dread?
Anyway, to make a rather long next verse short, the doctor says they've caught it in time, and they're going to use a newly approved method of chemo that should give her a six-in-10 chance of surviving.
This doesn't allay Sarabeth's concerns. She's got a prom date coming up and worries about the effects of chemo, because, as the chorus puts it:
Sarabeth closes her eyes
She dreams she's dancing
Around and around without any cares
And her very first love is holding her close
And the soft wind is blowing her hair
But that hair is about to suffer a fall:
Sarabeth is scared to death
As she sits holding her mom
Says it would be a mistake
For someone to take
A girl with no hair to the prom
For just this morning right there on her pillow
Was the cruelest of any surprise
And she cried when she gathered it all in her hands
The proof that she couldn't deny.
But after another chorus, now doubly heartbreaking, about that "soft, blowing hair," the song swiftly shifts to prom night:
It's a quarter to 7
That boy's at the door
Her daddy ushers him in
And when he takes off his cap
They all start to cry
'Cause this morning where his hair had been
Softly she touches just skin
It's a killer song, its "message" is uplift and solidarity, but is it the uplift that gives it its tear-jerking power? I think it depends on who you are.
If you're a cancer patient or survivor, the song is a gesture of solidarity, like the prom date shaving his head. It's become a widespread gesture. Indeed, John Edwards, in a recent interview in Marie Claire, said that when his wife got her cancer diagnosis, he offered to shave his head, but she turned him down because—he said—she liked his locks so much.
So, some with cancer might welcome it, and even if you don't have the disease, the song can be an invitation to join in solidarity with victims and survivors, a way of extending empathy.
But is there a less noble aspect to it? Does the song in some way that is a little disturbing use cancer as a hook? A way to do the thing that country music considers its job: to make you cry? To jerk tears the way other fluids are jerked in porn?
It raises all sorts of questions about our conflicted attitude toward tear-jerking, toward extreme sentimentality, perhaps even toward sentiment itself. Is tear-jerking necessarily bad? Is the jerking of tears a sign of bad art or a sure sign of a lack of artistic seriousness? Do we all subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum that "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell" (in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop)?
It is possible to jerk tears uncynically. Great literature is not averse to it: death of Prince Andrei, anyone? And don't tell me Shakespeare wasn't going for tears with the death of Desdemona. And yet if the death of Little Nell didn't get to me in The Old Curiosity Shop, the death of little Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son did, and the illness and recovery of Esther Summerson in Bleak House did. Still it raises the question: Is the lingering reluctance among some intellectuals to credit Dickens' genius related to his occasional tear-jerking opportunism?
I'm conflicted, because I find myself loving some beautiful tear-jerking country songs—but sometimes I distrust or resent them, or distrust or resent myself for giving in too easily to them. I think it comes down the the question of opportunism and cynicism: Do you feel the song comes out of genuine sentiment or manipulative sentimentality? It's sense versus sensibility again.
It's also not without interest that none of the three characters in these songs actually dies. (Although the Tim McGraw "friend" seems to have the worst prognosis.) Country is ready to deal with cancer, but is country ready to deal with cancer death?
Finally, how would I evaluate the three cancer songs? The Tim McGraw anthem comes off a little too insistently upbeat, might have the effect of making cancer patients feel guilty if they don't display a new-found love of life all the time, deprive them of the right to feel bad or scared once in a while. Cause us to expect them to be all upbeat about it. Indeed, it can seem to partake in the New Age ideology that disease is caused by negative thoughts and cured by positive ones.
As to the "Sarabeth" song, I can't criticize it, but I do feel a little bit overmanipulated by the soft-hair-blowing-in-the-wind motif, which seems to buy into the notion that loss of hair is the key signifier of the cancer experience.
But I kind of like "Tough." It's got a kind of humility and awe at the courage of what the woman has gone through, and still goes through, that feels right, not contrived. There's something genuinely loving about it. Loving tear-jerking rather than emotional porn. It's a tough song to listen to; it must have been tough to write. But it suggests an awareness of what real toughness is about.
Correction, May 18, 2007: This piece originally misspelled Darryl Worley's name and misstated the title of his song. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Ron Rosenbaum's most recent book is The Shakespeare Wars.
M&C NOTE: original online article contains sound clips.
Article URL: /id/2166481/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
the spectator
Cancer Comes to Country Music
Old-fashioned tear-jerking or emotional porn?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 3:00 PM ET
I can't make up my mind: Has country music finally gone too far? Has the brilliant and powerful mastery of emotional manipulation that is its signature, its relentless effort to make you weep at all costs, at last taken it into territory—the bitter end of its manipulative side—that it might be better off avoiding?
Or does the advent of a subgenre you might call "cancer country"—that is, songs that make use of cancer as their chosen means of ratcheting up emotion—represent a perversely healthy evolution of country music, raising it to a new level of emotional truth—a realism beyond honky-tonk heartbreak and cheatin'-spouses sorrow. A deeper acknowledgment of the grim power of death and disease.
I write as a lonely defender of mainstream country in New York, a city that tends to turn up its nose at some of the more undeniably risible aspects of the genre's achy-breaky heart. (If you doubt my country credibility, let me cite the two weeks I spent traveling in Willie Nelson's tour bus as he played honky-tonks across the South. The highlight? Willie playing the "lost" verse of "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.")
I've always felt that at its best, mainstream country music (not just hipster-friendly bluegrass and alt-country) is unappreciated as writing. That the best C&W songwriters have created an idiom, a genre, whose excellence in elliptical emotional compression rivals the best contemporary American short-story writing. Some of these C&W geniuses, people like George Jones and Rodney Crowell, are the unheralded Raymond Carvers and John Cheevers of their genre—masters of self-lacerating self-pity. Consider the spare, aching, profoundly needy lyrics of Crowell's "Till I Gain Control Again":
I've never gone so wrong as for telling lies to you
What you see is what I've been
There is nothing I could hide from you
You can see me better than I can.
On the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
'Til I can gain control again …
It always makes me lose control.
Sure, I get a kick out of good-time whiskey/sexy country (like the contemporary "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off"). But it's the ones that know how to push your saddest buttons, the buttons marked "Regret," "Sorrow," "Remorse," "Self-Pity," in particular that I love.
But with no country radio station in New York City, intermittent bouts of watching the country-music cable channels have been my main fix. And one aspect I love about getting out of Manhattan is that there's almost always at least one country station on the car radio, which is, of course, the best place to hear country.
Even in wonkish Washington, D.C., which is where I was when I heard the latest in the cancer-country genre, the new hit from Craig Morgan, "(I Thought That I Was) Tough."
It's one of those songs that hit you in a way that makes you remember the mundane particularity of the first time you heard it. We were driving to a Safeway supermarket one sunlit Sunday morning. My friend, who—fortunately—likes weepy C&W songs, too, had the local country station on the car radio when "Tough" came on.
It cleverly sneaks up on you, because it starts out like one of those country songs that's a tribute to a multitalented, multitasking wife and mother. The lyrics of the first verse (written by Monte Criswell and Joe Leathers) begin:
She's in the kitchen at the crack of dawn
Bacon's on, coffee's strong
Kids running wild, taking off their clothes
If she's a nervous wreck, well it never shows
Takes one to football and one to dance
Hits the Y for aerobics class
Drops by the bank, stops at the store
Has on a smile when I walk through the door
The last to go to bed, she'll be the first one up
And I thought I was tough.
But then, in the second verse, you learn that the song is more than a tribute to a supermom housewife. This is no ordinary housewife:
We sat there five years ago
The doctors let us know, the test showed
She'd have to fight to live, I broke down and cried,
She held me and said it's gonna be all right.
She wore that wig to church
Pink ribbon pinned there on her shirt
No room for fear, full of faith
Hands held high singing Amazing Grace
Never once complained, refusing to give up
And I thought I was tough.
Suddenly, that last line, "I thought I was tough," takes on a far deeper meaning, and the thing that's really "tough" is trying not to cry when you hear it. It was like a dark shadow blotted out the sun in the Safeway (metaphor?) parking lot that sunny Sunday. You know, of course, that famous painting by Poussin, the one with the idyllic country folk puzzling over a grave they've stumbled on? A scene which the painter labels, adopting the voice of the Grim Reaper, "Et in Arcadia Ego"—I, Death, am here even in bucolic country arcadia.
"Whoa," I said, as the song ended. "Did I just hear that right?"
"Amazing, isn't it?" she said. "It's cancer country."
She proceeded to tell me about the song she thought was the absolute apex of the genre—the song that made her think of the term cancer country in the first place, a song from 2005, now a classic, that I somehow (fortunately?) missed, a song called "Skin" (although it's more familiarly known as "Sarabeth").
But before we get to "Sarabeth," the icon of the cancer-country subgenre, let's take a look at the song that seems to have started it all. It may not have been the first country cancer anthem (readers, please let me know of any I have missed), but it is the first one to become a mega-hit—a breakthrough for cancer in country. Made "Sarabeth" possible. Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying."
It doesn't waste any time getting to the X-ray moment. Tim (who wrote the song) sings about "a friend":
He said, "I was in my early 40s,
With a lot of life before me,
When a moment came that stopped me on a dime.
I spent most of the next days,
Looking at the X-rays.
Talking 'bout the options
And talking 'bout sweet time."
I asked him when it sank in,
That this might really be the real end,
How's it hit ya' when you get that kind of news?
Man whad 'ya do? And he said:
"I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull name Fu Manchu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'."
And he said, "Some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'."
What is the source of this song's power? Its ostensible message is uplift, but underlying that, I believe, is dread. The dread that is there in a certain kind of reticence or obliquity that betokens the long-standing, fearful, not-to-be-named power of cancer. It exists, literally, in a negative space: He's staring into X-ray negatives which, presumably, display the evidence of disease as a menacing, ghostly shadow.
Then there's troubling contrast with the purported uplift of the chorus, with all that gettin'-busy-enjoying-life, the triumphantly redemptive notion that the prospect of death can give the life that's left a joyous intensity. But is it me, or there an ambiguity in that last line, "I hope you get the chance ..."?
"I hope you the chance," taken literally, means, "I hope you get cancer." Because then you'll feel all uplifted like me. So, it's just a great excuse to party, getting cancer? I'm not sure all cancer patients would feel it's an unalloyed blessing. Still, the song's bridge ends with one of those annoyingly profound-however-trite-type questions great country songs are always asking:
Like tomorrow was a gift
And ya got eternity to think
About what you'd do with it,
What did you do with it,
What did I do with it,
What would I do with it?
Now, I'm not saying that country—or rock, for that matter—has shied away from death. But in the past, the death has more often come from hedonistic excess, too much drinking, driving too fast (as in the "teen angel" car crash songs in rock); the Hank Williams live fast/die young ethos in country. Yes, there have been sad, peaceful, emotional songs about dying in country music—Johnny Cash's duet with his daughter Rosanne on the unbearably beautiful "September When It Comes," for instance.
And recently there have been a number of country songs about the war. At first, they were all gung-ho, but they've turned darker: like Darryl Worley's painfully melancholy "I Just Came Back (From a War)"—about a vet trying and failing to feel normal again in his old hometown after coming back from Iraq.* Another "Et in Arcadia Ego" moment.
Still, there's something different about cancer-related country songs. The dread that forbids naming the disease in the Tim McGraw song can be found in "Skin," aka "Sarabeth," as well.
You've gotta give this song credit: In the history of contemporary death, dying, and disease songs, few rival this Rascal Flatts weeper. It's probably the most well-known cancer-country song, the one some have called the saddest country song ever.
"Skin" doesn't waste any time getting to the heart of the matter:
Sarabeth is scared to death
To hear what the doctor will say.
She hasn't been well
Since the day that she fell
And the bruises just won't go away.
So she sits and she waits with her mother and dad
And flips through an old magazine
Till the nurse with the smile
Stands at the door
And says will you please come with me
Sarabeth is scared to death
'Cause the doctor just told her the news
"Between the red cells and white
Something's not right
But we're gonna take care of you"
"Between the red cells and white/ Something's not right." Again, a kind of artful evasion of naming: Is it fearfulness or a way of heightening the dread?
Anyway, to make a rather long next verse short, the doctor says they've caught it in time, and they're going to use a newly approved method of chemo that should give her a six-in-10 chance of surviving.
This doesn't allay Sarabeth's concerns. She's got a prom date coming up and worries about the effects of chemo, because, as the chorus puts it:
Sarabeth closes her eyes
She dreams she's dancing
Around and around without any cares
And her very first love is holding her close
And the soft wind is blowing her hair
But that hair is about to suffer a fall:
Sarabeth is scared to death
As she sits holding her mom
Says it would be a mistake
For someone to take
A girl with no hair to the prom
For just this morning right there on her pillow
Was the cruelest of any surprise
And she cried when she gathered it all in her hands
The proof that she couldn't deny.
But after another chorus, now doubly heartbreaking, about that "soft, blowing hair," the song swiftly shifts to prom night:
It's a quarter to 7
That boy's at the door
Her daddy ushers him in
And when he takes off his cap
They all start to cry
'Cause this morning where his hair had been
Softly she touches just skin
It's a killer song, its "message" is uplift and solidarity, but is it the uplift that gives it its tear-jerking power? I think it depends on who you are.
If you're a cancer patient or survivor, the song is a gesture of solidarity, like the prom date shaving his head. It's become a widespread gesture. Indeed, John Edwards, in a recent interview in Marie Claire, said that when his wife got her cancer diagnosis, he offered to shave his head, but she turned him down because—he said—she liked his locks so much.
So, some with cancer might welcome it, and even if you don't have the disease, the song can be an invitation to join in solidarity with victims and survivors, a way of extending empathy.
But is there a less noble aspect to it? Does the song in some way that is a little disturbing use cancer as a hook? A way to do the thing that country music considers its job: to make you cry? To jerk tears the way other fluids are jerked in porn?
It raises all sorts of questions about our conflicted attitude toward tear-jerking, toward extreme sentimentality, perhaps even toward sentiment itself. Is tear-jerking necessarily bad? Is the jerking of tears a sign of bad art or a sure sign of a lack of artistic seriousness? Do we all subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum that "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell" (in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop)?
It is possible to jerk tears uncynically. Great literature is not averse to it: death of Prince Andrei, anyone? And don't tell me Shakespeare wasn't going for tears with the death of Desdemona. And yet if the death of Little Nell didn't get to me in The Old Curiosity Shop, the death of little Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son did, and the illness and recovery of Esther Summerson in Bleak House did. Still it raises the question: Is the lingering reluctance among some intellectuals to credit Dickens' genius related to his occasional tear-jerking opportunism?
I'm conflicted, because I find myself loving some beautiful tear-jerking country songs—but sometimes I distrust or resent them, or distrust or resent myself for giving in too easily to them. I think it comes down the the question of opportunism and cynicism: Do you feel the song comes out of genuine sentiment or manipulative sentimentality? It's sense versus sensibility again.
It's also not without interest that none of the three characters in these songs actually dies. (Although the Tim McGraw "friend" seems to have the worst prognosis.) Country is ready to deal with cancer, but is country ready to deal with cancer death?
Finally, how would I evaluate the three cancer songs? The Tim McGraw anthem comes off a little too insistently upbeat, might have the effect of making cancer patients feel guilty if they don't display a new-found love of life all the time, deprive them of the right to feel bad or scared once in a while. Cause us to expect them to be all upbeat about it. Indeed, it can seem to partake in the New Age ideology that disease is caused by negative thoughts and cured by positive ones.
As to the "Sarabeth" song, I can't criticize it, but I do feel a little bit overmanipulated by the soft-hair-blowing-in-the-wind motif, which seems to buy into the notion that loss of hair is the key signifier of the cancer experience.
But I kind of like "Tough." It's got a kind of humility and awe at the courage of what the woman has gone through, and still goes through, that feels right, not contrived. There's something genuinely loving about it. Loving tear-jerking rather than emotional porn. It's a tough song to listen to; it must have been tough to write. But it suggests an awareness of what real toughness is about.
Correction, May 18, 2007: This piece originally misspelled Darryl Worley's name and misstated the title of his song. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Ron Rosenbaum's most recent book is The Shakespeare Wars.
M&C NOTE: original online article contains sound clips.
Article URL: /id/2166481/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Welcome Back, Starshine (Summer of Love at 40)
NYT
May 20, 2007
Welcome Back, Starshine
By JOHN LELAND
THE Summer of Love, by most accounts, began on Jan. 14, 1967, with a gathering known as the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and ended on Oct. 6, with the Death of Hippie march, a mock funeral staged in Haight-Ashbury to tell aspiring flower children to stay home.
Forty years later the children are at it again, only older and more institutional this time. The Whitney Museum of American Art is noting the anniversary with “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” opening Thursday. The Public Theater, which formed that summer with “Hair,” is staging a hippie-friendly season of Shakespeare in the Park, with “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as well as a concert performance of “Hair” in September. Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands will renew the faith in July at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, where their younger selves performed at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.
But the wild cards are in places like Zieglersville, Pa., where a three-day Session Summer of Love beer celebration will feature a mini-firkin fest; or at the Palms Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Rain nightclub will hold a three-night rave event called Summer of Love, the Love-In, billed as an “all-out sensory assault.” If just thinking about these events leaves you tired, you can head to Starbucks for a 40th anniversary Monterey Pop CD set. (And if, like the squares of old, you need help with the lingo, a firkin is one sixth of a hogshead.)
The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon.
“Why are we fascinated now?” asked Jann Wenner, 61, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which will publish a Summer of Love double issue in June. “It’s our youth for a great number of people, especially those of us who now control things.”
In recent political campaigns, claim on the era’s legacy has swung largely to conservative debunkers, who hold up the Summer of Love as an exercise in liberal self-absorption and a touchstone of moral decline. Now, with the nation again in an unpopular war, utopian voices are coming out again, softer in their politics but no less determined in their exceptionalism.
“Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and narcissistic and grandiose,” said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon. “But it’s not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did.”
In contrast to the first time around, this summer’s activities will be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq grunts’ generation but of their parents’.
Which raises some questions: Is it possible to extract the Summer of Love from the distorting filter of narcissism? Or is that narcissism the essence of the brand, as revisionists and advertisers would have it? Economists use the term “survivorship bias” to describe the recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit. For the Summer of Love what has survived is the music and industry it created, the fascination with youth culture, the now generic images of gentle hippies and a swirl of pretty colors that has found its home in the language of advertising. Some of the less institutional elements, like the Haight’s Free Store, voluntary sweep-ins, free food-ins, the free health clinic and the Death of Hippie, have receded from the narrative.
Without these the Summer of Love has survived as a simple story: For a magical few months tens of thousands of young people left home for San Francisco, where they gave the nation new sounds, new pleasures and new styles. In went adolescent idealism and creative energy; out came a lifetime of ads for cars, Pepsi and retirement plans.
This story has endured so tenaciously because it played out in the media in real time, with a level of stage management that was as forward-looking as the music. To “drop out” in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.
From the start the season had an official governing body, the Council for the Summer of Love; a hit theme song, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written and produced by the organizers of the Monterey festival; and a television deal, when a young ABC executive named Barry Diller bought the rights to Monterey for a never-realized Movie of the Week. The council came up with the name Summer of Love to put a positive spin on events that were often portrayed negatively in the press. Almost as soon as the hippies hit Golden Gate Park, sightseeing companies offered guided bus tours of the Haight, providing tourists a look at the hairy new wrinkle in humanity. As a 1967 manifesto from the Death of Hippie proclaimed, “Media created the hippie with your hungry consent.”
In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins. Even if you sing along to “Good Morning Starshine” or crash on the sidewalk outside the Whitney, you’re still there to honor someone else’s show. It ends when you walk out the door. If the first Summer of Love was about the shared exploration of possibility, conducted in the public eye, the anniversary demonstrates the accrued authority of the institutions that make this watching possible.
These institutions have not always served the art, said Christoph Grunenberg, curator of the Whitney’s “Summer of Love” exhibition for the Tate Liverpool gallery, where it began in 2005. Instead, he said, they’ve enabled “a rather superficial consumption of a retro aesthetic, which doesn’t take into consideration the motives behind it, the desire for liberation.
“The utopian impulse of the period is missing,” he said.
The exhibition includes underground magazines, psychedelic light shows, album covers and posters and films of concerts, as well as paintings and sculptures from the ’60s and early ’70s. It’s “the first serious art-historical evaluation, as opposed to something that has been looked at as quote unquote just popular culture,” said Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator in charge of installing the exhibition.
Mr. Grunenberg, 44, said the art has been “a victim of its own success at the time and tainted by its association to drug culture, music culture, fashion and design.
“It was unusual in that it aspired to the level of mass culture,” he added, “and that’s the cause of the suspicion that comes to psychedelic art. Can the light shows at a Jimi Hendrix show be art?”
Yet there were other narratives within the Summer of Love. Once the masses started to arrive in the Haight, some pioneers left the city for greener pastures. By late summer LSD gave way to speed and utopian seekers to ill-prepared teenage runaways, children who could not take care of themselves. “Most people see the Summer of Love in very happy terms,” said Brad Abramson, vice president of production and programming for VH1 and an executive producer of the channel’s “Monterey 40,” a documentary about the 1967 pop festival that will be broadcast beginning June 16. “One thing that struck me was finding out what a mess it turns out to be. By the end of the summer speed freaks were catching and eating cats.”
Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone in San Francisco that fall, sees this narrative as a sideshow to the essence of the Summer of Love. For him the survivorship bias has allowed the substantive elements of the day to emerge from the confusion and hype. “I was skeptical of this invasion of the Haight-Ashbury, wear-flowers-in-your-hair stuff,” he said. “The grungy, sleeping-on-the-floor-in-a-sleeping-bag lifestyle was not for me. The drugs were, and the music was, and the peace and love was. But the grungy lifestyle, which was very limited to kids coming in from out of town, was not for me.”
The sunnier side will be on display at this year’s Monterey Summer of Love Festival, where tribute bands, dressed up like Jimi Hendrix or the Byrds, will share the stage with some performers from the original festival, a three-day charity concert that included Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others. Concertgoers this year will get Big Brother and the Holding Company without Joplin, and Carlton Poward performing as Hendrix: proof that nostalgia can conquer even death. But the commercial and canonical imperatives will be familiar.
A goal for the first Monterey festival was to prove that rock music was “an art form in the same way jazz was,” said the record producer Lou Adler, 73, one of the organizers. “It was still looked on as a trend, two and a half minutes and you’re out. So the idea was to do a festival in the same place that there was a jazz festival and a folk festival; that seemed to validate it.”
But from the start there was distrust between the organizers, who came from the Los Angeles music business, and the more underground groups, said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who helped organize the event. “There definitely was that feeling from the San Francisco musicians that the Los Angeles groups were the commercial groups, and they were the real heart and soul,” she said. “I think they were just jealous because we were making the money. The whole point, I thought, was to make hit records.”
In the end of course both sides won: the industry because it sold the ethos of the underground and the hip bands through the growth of the business. The ’60s culture blossomed not at the expense of its commercial tendencies but through them. The branding of the Summer of Love is not a corruption of the original moment but an impulse that was there all along.
Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became.
Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on the desire to forget, not to remember. “Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”
But he added that nostalgia could also have a “progressive aspect” that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to “remember that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn’t determine value, where competition wasn’t the nature of human relations.
“That imagination can be powerful,” he continued. “The dream is real. The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don’t want to do anything about it. That’s just narcissistic. That’s longing to feel important again. Baby boomers are very good at that.”
For Michael Hirschorn, 43, executive vice president for original programming and production at VH1, which has built a business on the synthesis of youth culture and branding, the first order of business is to recover the music from the trappings. The channel’s Monterey documentary, he promised, will be about that music, not peace and love. “The ’60s always felt hokey and lame to me, so smug and self-important,” he said. “Seeing this footage now, maybe the ’60s and the Summer of Love can be reclaimed from its own advocates.”
In the meantime issues of the underground magazine Oracle will be in the Whitney, and Quicksilver Messenger Service will be back at Monterey. And of course mini-firkins will be in Zieglersville. But this year’s pilgrims will find less reassessment, in the sense of discovering something new, than the impossible promise of recapturing the old.
And with luck they will find some good music and art, along with more kitsch than anyone seems to want to acknowledge. To celebrate that, there’s Stanley Donen’s 1967 classic “Bedazzled,” with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It’s newly out on DVD, and it’s a trip.
May 20, 2007
Welcome Back, Starshine
By JOHN LELAND
THE Summer of Love, by most accounts, began on Jan. 14, 1967, with a gathering known as the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and ended on Oct. 6, with the Death of Hippie march, a mock funeral staged in Haight-Ashbury to tell aspiring flower children to stay home.
Forty years later the children are at it again, only older and more institutional this time. The Whitney Museum of American Art is noting the anniversary with “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” opening Thursday. The Public Theater, which formed that summer with “Hair,” is staging a hippie-friendly season of Shakespeare in the Park, with “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as well as a concert performance of “Hair” in September. Jefferson Starship, Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands will renew the faith in July at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, where their younger selves performed at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.
But the wild cards are in places like Zieglersville, Pa., where a three-day Session Summer of Love beer celebration will feature a mini-firkin fest; or at the Palms Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Rain nightclub will hold a three-night rave event called Summer of Love, the Love-In, billed as an “all-out sensory assault.” If just thinking about these events leaves you tired, you can head to Starbucks for a 40th anniversary Monterey Pop CD set. (And if, like the squares of old, you need help with the lingo, a firkin is one sixth of a hogshead.)
The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon.
“Why are we fascinated now?” asked Jann Wenner, 61, the editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, which will publish a Summer of Love double issue in June. “It’s our youth for a great number of people, especially those of us who now control things.”
In recent political campaigns, claim on the era’s legacy has swung largely to conservative debunkers, who hold up the Summer of Love as an exercise in liberal self-absorption and a touchstone of moral decline. Now, with the nation again in an unpopular war, utopian voices are coming out again, softer in their politics but no less determined in their exceptionalism.
“Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and narcissistic and grandiose,” said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the Pentagon. “But it’s not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did.”
In contrast to the first time around, this summer’s activities will be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq grunts’ generation but of their parents’.
Which raises some questions: Is it possible to extract the Summer of Love from the distorting filter of narcissism? Or is that narcissism the essence of the brand, as revisionists and advertisers would have it? Economists use the term “survivorship bias” to describe the recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit. For the Summer of Love what has survived is the music and industry it created, the fascination with youth culture, the now generic images of gentle hippies and a swirl of pretty colors that has found its home in the language of advertising. Some of the less institutional elements, like the Haight’s Free Store, voluntary sweep-ins, free food-ins, the free health clinic and the Death of Hippie, have receded from the narrative.
Without these the Summer of Love has survived as a simple story: For a magical few months tens of thousands of young people left home for San Francisco, where they gave the nation new sounds, new pleasures and new styles. In went adolescent idealism and creative energy; out came a lifetime of ads for cars, Pepsi and retirement plans.
This story has endured so tenaciously because it played out in the media in real time, with a level of stage management that was as forward-looking as the music. To “drop out” in 1967, as Timothy Leary urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity and drop in — into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.
From the start the season had an official governing body, the Council for the Summer of Love; a hit theme song, Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written and produced by the organizers of the Monterey festival; and a television deal, when a young ABC executive named Barry Diller bought the rights to Monterey for a never-realized Movie of the Week. The council came up with the name Summer of Love to put a positive spin on events that were often portrayed negatively in the press. Almost as soon as the hippies hit Golden Gate Park, sightseeing companies offered guided bus tours of the Haight, providing tourists a look at the hairy new wrinkle in humanity. As a 1967 manifesto from the Death of Hippie proclaimed, “Media created the hippie with your hungry consent.”
In this year’s Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins. Even if you sing along to “Good Morning Starshine” or crash on the sidewalk outside the Whitney, you’re still there to honor someone else’s show. It ends when you walk out the door. If the first Summer of Love was about the shared exploration of possibility, conducted in the public eye, the anniversary demonstrates the accrued authority of the institutions that make this watching possible.
These institutions have not always served the art, said Christoph Grunenberg, curator of the Whitney’s “Summer of Love” exhibition for the Tate Liverpool gallery, where it began in 2005. Instead, he said, they’ve enabled “a rather superficial consumption of a retro aesthetic, which doesn’t take into consideration the motives behind it, the desire for liberation.
“The utopian impulse of the period is missing,” he said.
The exhibition includes underground magazines, psychedelic light shows, album covers and posters and films of concerts, as well as paintings and sculptures from the ’60s and early ’70s. It’s “the first serious art-historical evaluation, as opposed to something that has been looked at as quote unquote just popular culture,” said Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator in charge of installing the exhibition.
Mr. Grunenberg, 44, said the art has been “a victim of its own success at the time and tainted by its association to drug culture, music culture, fashion and design.
“It was unusual in that it aspired to the level of mass culture,” he added, “and that’s the cause of the suspicion that comes to psychedelic art. Can the light shows at a Jimi Hendrix show be art?”
Yet there were other narratives within the Summer of Love. Once the masses started to arrive in the Haight, some pioneers left the city for greener pastures. By late summer LSD gave way to speed and utopian seekers to ill-prepared teenage runaways, children who could not take care of themselves. “Most people see the Summer of Love in very happy terms,” said Brad Abramson, vice president of production and programming for VH1 and an executive producer of the channel’s “Monterey 40,” a documentary about the 1967 pop festival that will be broadcast beginning June 16. “One thing that struck me was finding out what a mess it turns out to be. By the end of the summer speed freaks were catching and eating cats.”
Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone in San Francisco that fall, sees this narrative as a sideshow to the essence of the Summer of Love. For him the survivorship bias has allowed the substantive elements of the day to emerge from the confusion and hype. “I was skeptical of this invasion of the Haight-Ashbury, wear-flowers-in-your-hair stuff,” he said. “The grungy, sleeping-on-the-floor-in-a-sleeping-bag lifestyle was not for me. The drugs were, and the music was, and the peace and love was. But the grungy lifestyle, which was very limited to kids coming in from out of town, was not for me.”
The sunnier side will be on display at this year’s Monterey Summer of Love Festival, where tribute bands, dressed up like Jimi Hendrix or the Byrds, will share the stage with some performers from the original festival, a three-day charity concert that included Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others. Concertgoers this year will get Big Brother and the Holding Company without Joplin, and Carlton Poward performing as Hendrix: proof that nostalgia can conquer even death. But the commercial and canonical imperatives will be familiar.
A goal for the first Monterey festival was to prove that rock music was “an art form in the same way jazz was,” said the record producer Lou Adler, 73, one of the organizers. “It was still looked on as a trend, two and a half minutes and you’re out. So the idea was to do a festival in the same place that there was a jazz festival and a folk festival; that seemed to validate it.”
But from the start there was distrust between the organizers, who came from the Los Angeles music business, and the more underground groups, said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who helped organize the event. “There definitely was that feeling from the San Francisco musicians that the Los Angeles groups were the commercial groups, and they were the real heart and soul,” she said. “I think they were just jealous because we were making the money. The whole point, I thought, was to make hit records.”
In the end of course both sides won: the industry because it sold the ethos of the underground and the hip bands through the growth of the business. The ’60s culture blossomed not at the expense of its commercial tendencies but through them. The branding of the Summer of Love is not a corruption of the original moment but an impulse that was there all along.
Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became.
Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on the desire to forget, not to remember. “Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”
But he added that nostalgia could also have a “progressive aspect” that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to “remember that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn’t determine value, where competition wasn’t the nature of human relations.
“That imagination can be powerful,” he continued. “The dream is real. The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that everything is possible, but we don’t want to do anything about it. That’s just narcissistic. That’s longing to feel important again. Baby boomers are very good at that.”
For Michael Hirschorn, 43, executive vice president for original programming and production at VH1, which has built a business on the synthesis of youth culture and branding, the first order of business is to recover the music from the trappings. The channel’s Monterey documentary, he promised, will be about that music, not peace and love. “The ’60s always felt hokey and lame to me, so smug and self-important,” he said. “Seeing this footage now, maybe the ’60s and the Summer of Love can be reclaimed from its own advocates.”
In the meantime issues of the underground magazine Oracle will be in the Whitney, and Quicksilver Messenger Service will be back at Monterey. And of course mini-firkins will be in Zieglersville. But this year’s pilgrims will find less reassessment, in the sense of discovering something new, than the impossible promise of recapturing the old.
And with luck they will find some good music and art, along with more kitsch than anyone seems to want to acknowledge. To celebrate that, there’s Stanley Donen’s 1967 classic “Bedazzled,” with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It’s newly out on DVD, and it’s a trip.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
