New Yorker
Pop Music
Everything but the Tour
Tracey Thorn turns semi-pro.
by Sasha Frere-Jones
May 17, 2010
The widely reported demise of the music business isn’t necessarily going to be bad for music. The forty-seven-year-old British singer Tracey Thorn, who has removed herself from a race she once ran—and ran well—has added a fantastic album, “Love and Its Opposite,” to her solo catalogue. Both the album’s themes and how it was made suggest a model that may become increasingly popular: the semi-professional musician. Making music as a pastime has appealed to talents as diverse as the modernist composer Charles Ives and the post-punk engineer and guitarist Steve Albini. If hits are to be had by only the very few, perhaps more musicians will feel free to stop worrying about making them.
Thorn will not tour for “Love and Its Opposite,” and she didn’t tour for “Out of the Woods” (2007), her second solo release. (Her first was a 1982 EP called “A Distant Shore.”) With the collapse of album sales, touring is one of the few dependable sources of income for artists; Thorn’s decision not to do it suggests that she is taking a hobbyist’s approach. “I just want to make it and then get back to my other life,” she told me.
Thorn is best known as the singer of Everything But the Girl, a duo she has maintained with her husband, Ben Watt, since 1982. Though the couple is still together, the band hasn’t released an album since 1999, which she attributes largely to the demands of raising three children in London.
Read the full review HERE.
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Friday, January 01, 2010
The film "Sugar" (2009)
Just saw the film sugar. If you love either the Caribbean or baseball, this is a film for you; if you love both, it's definitely for you. The film begins in the Dominican Republic in a Major League Baseball farm league development camp and follows the exploits of a pitcher nicknamed "Sugar." Seeing the minor leagues through Caribbean eyes is a nice change from standard baseball movies. The novel setting aside, though the film's trajectory starts out ordinarily, following Sugar as he finally gets a call to go to a pro camp and try out for Kansas City Single-A minor league affiliate, it does not end as expected, and though some of my viewer expectations are frustrated, I actually really appreciate the film for what it does. It's an original, understated, brave little film, and it's good. I won't throw out spoilers, but wanted to give this movie a plug. If forced to rate it, I'd give it three out of four stars, or a strong B+.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson's book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price"
New Yorker
It sounds like a provocative book, and Gladwell's review has generated quite a bit of discussion:
Books
Priced to Sell
Is free the future?
by Malcolm Gladwell July 6, 2009
“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”
Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:
There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.
Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Anderson’s argument begins with a technological trend. The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity—storage, processing, and bandwidth—has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero. In 1961, Anderson says, a single transistor was ten dollars. In 1963, it was five dollars. By 1968, it was one dollar. Today, Intel will sell you two billion transistors for eleven hundred dollars—meaning that the cost of a single transistor is now about .000055 cents.
Anderson’s second point is that when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen. Anderson describes an experiment conducted by the M.I.T. behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational.” Ariely offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon has had the same experience with its offer of free shipping for orders over twenty-five dollars. The idea is to induce you to buy a second book, if your first book comes in at less than the twenty-five-dollar threshold. And that’s exactly what it does. In France, however, the offer was mistakenly set at the equivalent of twenty cents—and consumers didn’t buy the second book. “From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free,” Anderson writes. “Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.”
Since the falling costs of digital technology let you make as much stuff as you want, Anderson argues, and the magic of the word “free” creates instant demand among consumers, then Free (Anderson honors it with a capital) represents an enormous business opportunity. Companies ought to be able to make huge amounts of money “around” the thing being given away—as Google gives away its search and e-mail and makes its money on advertising.
Anderson cautions that this philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a “scarcity” mind-set to an “abundance” mind-set. Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things, digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:
Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”
Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.
So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.
Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”
“What if Strauss had been right?” Anderson wonders, and then diligently sorts through the implications: as much fresh water as you could want, no reliance on fossil fuels, no global warming, abundant agricultural production. Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.
Strauss’s optimism was driven by the fuel cost of nuclear energy—which was so low compared with its fossil-fuel counterparts that he considered it (to borrow Anderson’s phrase) close enough to free to round down. Generating and distributing electricity, however, requires a vast and expensive infrastructure of transmission lines and power plants—and it is this infrastructure that accounts for most of the cost of electricity. Fuel prices are only a small part of that. As Gordon Dean, Strauss’s predecessor at the A.E.C., wrote, “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”
This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system. Strauss went on to forecast “an age of peace,” jumping from atoms to human hearts. “As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world,” Kevin Kelly, another Wired visionary, proclaimed at the start of his 1998 digital manifesto, “New Rules for the New Economy,” offering up the same non sequitur. And now comes Anderson. “The more products are made of ideas, rather than stuff, the faster they can get cheap,” he writes, and we know what’s coming next: “However, this is not limited to digital products.” Just look at the pharmaceutical industry, he says. Genetic engineering means that drug development is poised to follow the same learning curve of the digital world, to “accelerate in performance while it drops in price.”
But, like Strauss, he’s forgotten about the plants and the power lines. The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory. It’s what happens after the laboratory, like the clinical testing, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In the pharmaceutical world, what’s more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They’ve been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets—to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases—and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.
And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.
It sounds like a provocative book, and Gladwell's review has generated quite a bit of discussion:
Books
Priced to Sell
Is free the future?
by Malcolm Gladwell July 6, 2009
“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”
Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:
There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.
Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Anderson’s argument begins with a technological trend. The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity—storage, processing, and bandwidth—has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero. In 1961, Anderson says, a single transistor was ten dollars. In 1963, it was five dollars. By 1968, it was one dollar. Today, Intel will sell you two billion transistors for eleven hundred dollars—meaning that the cost of a single transistor is now about .000055 cents.
Anderson’s second point is that when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen. Anderson describes an experiment conducted by the M.I.T. behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of “Predictably Irrational.” Ariely offered a group of subjects a choice between two kinds of chocolate—Hershey’s Kisses, for one cent, and Lindt truffles, for fifteen cents. Three-quarters of the subjects chose the truffles. Then he redid the experiment, reducing the price of both chocolates by one cent. The Kisses were now free. What happened? The order of preference was reversed. Sixty-nine per cent of the subjects chose the Kisses. The price difference between the two chocolates was exactly the same, but that magic word “free” has the power to create a consumer stampede. Amazon has had the same experience with its offer of free shipping for orders over twenty-five dollars. The idea is to induce you to buy a second book, if your first book comes in at less than the twenty-five-dollar threshold. And that’s exactly what it does. In France, however, the offer was mistakenly set at the equivalent of twenty cents—and consumers didn’t buy the second book. “From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free,” Anderson writes. “Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.”
Since the falling costs of digital technology let you make as much stuff as you want, Anderson argues, and the magic of the word “free” creates instant demand among consumers, then Free (Anderson honors it with a capital) represents an enormous business opportunity. Companies ought to be able to make huge amounts of money “around” the thing being given away—as Google gives away its search and e-mail and makes its money on advertising.
Anderson cautions that this philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a “scarcity” mind-set to an “abundance” mind-set. Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things, digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore. Look at YouTube, he says, the free video archive owned by Google. YouTube lets anyone post a video to its site free, and lets anyone watch a video on its site free, and it doesn’t have to pass judgment on the quality of the videos it archives. “Nobody is deciding whether a video is good enough to justify the scarce channel space it takes, because there is no scarce channel space,” he writes, and goes on:
Distribution is now close enough to free to round down. Today, it costs about $0.25 to stream one hour of video to one person. Next year, it will be $0.15. A year later it will be less than a dime. Which is why YouTube’s founders decided to give it away. . . . The result is both messy and runs counter to every instinct of a television professional, but this is what abundance both requires and demands.
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”
Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.
So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.
Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”
“What if Strauss had been right?” Anderson wonders, and then diligently sorts through the implications: as much fresh water as you could want, no reliance on fossil fuels, no global warming, abundant agricultural production. Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.
Strauss’s optimism was driven by the fuel cost of nuclear energy—which was so low compared with its fossil-fuel counterparts that he considered it (to borrow Anderson’s phrase) close enough to free to round down. Generating and distributing electricity, however, requires a vast and expensive infrastructure of transmission lines and power plants—and it is this infrastructure that accounts for most of the cost of electricity. Fuel prices are only a small part of that. As Gordon Dean, Strauss’s predecessor at the A.E.C., wrote, “Even if coal were mined and distributed free to electric generating plants today, the reduction in your monthly electricity bill would amount to but twenty per cent, so great is the cost of the plant itself and the distribution system.”
This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system. Strauss went on to forecast “an age of peace,” jumping from atoms to human hearts. “As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world,” Kevin Kelly, another Wired visionary, proclaimed at the start of his 1998 digital manifesto, “New Rules for the New Economy,” offering up the same non sequitur. And now comes Anderson. “The more products are made of ideas, rather than stuff, the faster they can get cheap,” he writes, and we know what’s coming next: “However, this is not limited to digital products.” Just look at the pharmaceutical industry, he says. Genetic engineering means that drug development is poised to follow the same learning curve of the digital world, to “accelerate in performance while it drops in price.”
But, like Strauss, he’s forgotten about the plants and the power lines. The expensive part of making drugs has never been what happens in the laboratory. It’s what happens after the laboratory, like the clinical testing, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In the pharmaceutical world, what’s more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They’ve been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets—to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases—and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.
And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.
Monday, January 12, 2009
How the Music Industry Died: Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction
Village Voice
How the Music Industry Died: Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction
A Rolling Stone reporter charts the doomed path from Thriller to Internet-based horror
By Rob Harvilla
published: January 07, 2009
Congrats to Lil Wayne, whose Tha Carter III was the best-selling record of 2008—and the weakest-selling yearly bestseller since SoundScan started tracking these things nearly two decades ago. Couldn't crack three million. The music industry is toast, my friends. And congrats to Rolling Stone vet Steve Knopper, whose fantastic new book Appetite for Self-Destruction explains why, as it charts the dizzying highs (Thriller, the CD boom, boy bands) and brutal lows (payola, Napster hysteria, the "rootkit" debacle) of an oft-amoral biz whose legendary coke-fueled boom times now read as ancient history and/or science fiction. I rang up Steve recently to talk about it; here are some excerpts.
This book vacillates between sympathy for the music industry and outright contempt—you sincerely try to rationalize why the labels decided to start suing junior high students for illegal downloading, but you still conclude it was a horrible, horrible idea. How much pity do you have for these guys? Is this book a tragedy or a comedy?
I would make it a little bit more gray than that. I have a fondness for the record industry. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of [Fredric Dannen's 1990 music-biz tell-all] Hit Men—it's one of my favorite books ever, but I feel that that book was so tough on the music industry, it ventured several times into contemptuousness. My feeling was, I wanted to be very critical, and call a spade a spade, and say what they did wrong, but at the same time, I've covered music and the music industry for a long time, and I have a fondness for, you know, that whole sort of—this is gonna sound cynical; I don't mean it to—but that whole sort of "hookers and blow" era.
I was really getting into the chapter about the CD boom, where you've got these crazy Mafia characters, and you've got these coke addicts like Walter Yetnikoff at the head of these companies, running into offices and screaming at people. Guys who talk like this: raaaowr, raaaowr, raaaowr, like the Penguin in the Batman show. In Hit Men, I think it came across like, "These people are evil." To an extent, that's true. But my feeling was, I bet that was pretty cool, too.
You keep returning to the idea that lots of people, and I'm pretty sure I'm among them, consider a lot of the industry's troubles to be divine retribution—payback for decades of lousy artist contracts and $18.99 CDs. But given the technology, would it have made any difference if this industry had always been fair and benevolent and lovable? You and I both can find pretty much any album we like for free online in a couple of minutes—was there ever any way to stop this?
I'm trying to think of an analogy of another industry that was abused by technology that didn't do all those terrible things that the music industry did, and the only one that comes to mind is the newspaper industry. It seems like the newspaper industry wasn't as evil and stonewalling, and still may face the same inevitable just desserts because of technology. The point I make in the Napster chapter (and I'm not the first one to make this point): Had the record labels jumped into a deal with Napster when the time was right, when Napster was at its peak, I really do think that could've been a business model. Maybe it wouldn't have sent them back to 1994 levels of business, but I think they wouldn't be in the horrible position they're in today.
You're right that people embraced Napster and Kazaa and Torrents because of spite, but I actually think that was a relatively small contingent of people. I think that the people who embraced it most embraced it because, "What a cool thing. I don't have to get in my car and go to Tower Records and buy the $18 CD if I want this song. I can just get it in my home and mess around." And then you start fantasizing a little bit. What if Napster did become a real, legit thing? It would have anticipated Facebook and Friendster and MySpace. It would have been social networking. It would have allowed you to make mixtapes and trade playlists. It would have eventually gone to cell phones; it would have predated the iPhone. It could have been an incredibly powerful service—and not just because everything was free. You charge people a fair price for that, maybe that anti-music-industry contingent wouldn't have taken it, but a lot of people would have.
Did you mess around with Napster yourself at the time? Have you ever been swayed by the "music wants to be free" crowd, ever buy into the theory that this was a people's revolution to overthrow an evil, outdated industry?
No. Basically not. I did tinker around with Napster, yes. I got a lot of good, free music at the time—I guess I won't be sued anymore for that. But, basically, I thought it was theft. I still think it was piracy. I realize I'm walking a bit of a fine line in the book, because I'm not ripping on the music industry for just saying, "Oh, my God, this is piracy. We need better locks." I'm not criticizing that impetus, that notion. I'm basically saying they should've taken the next step and gone, "Oh wait, this'll revolutionize our industry."
The last chapter lists everything the music industry should do—needs to do—to survive. What percentage of that do you think will actually come to pass? How optimistic are you? What percentage of the people you interviewed will still hold the same job five years from now?
I just think that the smaller labels are going to continue to stumble, if they're not bought outright. EMI seems to be reeling right now. Warner's stock price is way down, although they've had some success. Probably, you're going to wind up with a couple hit machines: Universal, maybe Sony-BMG. You still are going to need those kinds of companies, that expertise, to find the proverbial Toni Braxton singing in the gas station, discovered by some label talent scout. But those companies are going to make less and less money, and get smaller and smaller, and get less and less influential, and I think that maybe Live Nation or Ticketmaster or my mythical Apple-EMI is going to pop up and change the model and be more nimble.
Another point I want to make is that these labels will always own some really incredible assets. EMI owns the Beatles catalog, so they're always going to be a player. You or I could own the Beatles catalog and make money. Just not make enough money to have hookers and blow.
More Q's and longer A's from this interview are available HERE.
How the Music Industry Died: Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction
A Rolling Stone reporter charts the doomed path from Thriller to Internet-based horror
By Rob Harvilla
published: January 07, 2009
Congrats to Lil Wayne, whose Tha Carter III was the best-selling record of 2008—and the weakest-selling yearly bestseller since SoundScan started tracking these things nearly two decades ago. Couldn't crack three million. The music industry is toast, my friends. And congrats to Rolling Stone vet Steve Knopper, whose fantastic new book Appetite for Self-Destruction explains why, as it charts the dizzying highs (Thriller, the CD boom, boy bands) and brutal lows (payola, Napster hysteria, the "rootkit" debacle) of an oft-amoral biz whose legendary coke-fueled boom times now read as ancient history and/or science fiction. I rang up Steve recently to talk about it; here are some excerpts.
This book vacillates between sympathy for the music industry and outright contempt—you sincerely try to rationalize why the labels decided to start suing junior high students for illegal downloading, but you still conclude it was a horrible, horrible idea. How much pity do you have for these guys? Is this book a tragedy or a comedy?
I would make it a little bit more gray than that. I have a fondness for the record industry. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of [Fredric Dannen's 1990 music-biz tell-all] Hit Men—it's one of my favorite books ever, but I feel that that book was so tough on the music industry, it ventured several times into contemptuousness. My feeling was, I wanted to be very critical, and call a spade a spade, and say what they did wrong, but at the same time, I've covered music and the music industry for a long time, and I have a fondness for, you know, that whole sort of—this is gonna sound cynical; I don't mean it to—but that whole sort of "hookers and blow" era.
I was really getting into the chapter about the CD boom, where you've got these crazy Mafia characters, and you've got these coke addicts like Walter Yetnikoff at the head of these companies, running into offices and screaming at people. Guys who talk like this: raaaowr, raaaowr, raaaowr, like the Penguin in the Batman show. In Hit Men, I think it came across like, "These people are evil." To an extent, that's true. But my feeling was, I bet that was pretty cool, too.
You keep returning to the idea that lots of people, and I'm pretty sure I'm among them, consider a lot of the industry's troubles to be divine retribution—payback for decades of lousy artist contracts and $18.99 CDs. But given the technology, would it have made any difference if this industry had always been fair and benevolent and lovable? You and I both can find pretty much any album we like for free online in a couple of minutes—was there ever any way to stop this?
I'm trying to think of an analogy of another industry that was abused by technology that didn't do all those terrible things that the music industry did, and the only one that comes to mind is the newspaper industry. It seems like the newspaper industry wasn't as evil and stonewalling, and still may face the same inevitable just desserts because of technology. The point I make in the Napster chapter (and I'm not the first one to make this point): Had the record labels jumped into a deal with Napster when the time was right, when Napster was at its peak, I really do think that could've been a business model. Maybe it wouldn't have sent them back to 1994 levels of business, but I think they wouldn't be in the horrible position they're in today.
You're right that people embraced Napster and Kazaa and Torrents because of spite, but I actually think that was a relatively small contingent of people. I think that the people who embraced it most embraced it because, "What a cool thing. I don't have to get in my car and go to Tower Records and buy the $18 CD if I want this song. I can just get it in my home and mess around." And then you start fantasizing a little bit. What if Napster did become a real, legit thing? It would have anticipated Facebook and Friendster and MySpace. It would have been social networking. It would have allowed you to make mixtapes and trade playlists. It would have eventually gone to cell phones; it would have predated the iPhone. It could have been an incredibly powerful service—and not just because everything was free. You charge people a fair price for that, maybe that anti-music-industry contingent wouldn't have taken it, but a lot of people would have.
Did you mess around with Napster yourself at the time? Have you ever been swayed by the "music wants to be free" crowd, ever buy into the theory that this was a people's revolution to overthrow an evil, outdated industry?
No. Basically not. I did tinker around with Napster, yes. I got a lot of good, free music at the time—I guess I won't be sued anymore for that. But, basically, I thought it was theft. I still think it was piracy. I realize I'm walking a bit of a fine line in the book, because I'm not ripping on the music industry for just saying, "Oh, my God, this is piracy. We need better locks." I'm not criticizing that impetus, that notion. I'm basically saying they should've taken the next step and gone, "Oh wait, this'll revolutionize our industry."
The last chapter lists everything the music industry should do—needs to do—to survive. What percentage of that do you think will actually come to pass? How optimistic are you? What percentage of the people you interviewed will still hold the same job five years from now?
I just think that the smaller labels are going to continue to stumble, if they're not bought outright. EMI seems to be reeling right now. Warner's stock price is way down, although they've had some success. Probably, you're going to wind up with a couple hit machines: Universal, maybe Sony-BMG. You still are going to need those kinds of companies, that expertise, to find the proverbial Toni Braxton singing in the gas station, discovered by some label talent scout. But those companies are going to make less and less money, and get smaller and smaller, and get less and less influential, and I think that maybe Live Nation or Ticketmaster or my mythical Apple-EMI is going to pop up and change the model and be more nimble.
Another point I want to make is that these labels will always own some really incredible assets. EMI owns the Beatles catalog, so they're always going to be a player. You or I could own the Beatles catalog and make money. Just not make enough money to have hookers and blow.
More Q's and longer A's from this interview are available HERE.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, REsistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (book review)
From the NYT
July 20, 2008
Rock the Casbah
By HOWARD HAMPTON
Skip to next paragraph
HEAVY METAL ISLAM
Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.
By Mark LeVine.
Illustrated. 296 pp. Three Rivers Press. Paper, $13.95.
This professor of Middle Eastern history walks into a bar in Fez, Morocco — right from the get-go, Mark LeVine’s “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam” is not your typical dry academic slog. (Did I mention he’s also a longhaired Jewish rock guitarist whose bio lists gigs with Mick Jagger and Dr. John?) So when somebody in that hotel bar starts talking up the local punk and metal scenes, an incredulous LeVine is hooked. “There are Muslim punks? In Morocco?” Quicker than you can whistle “Rock the Casbah,” he’s on the trail of Western-influenced underground music movements that have blossomed under authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.
Going to meet the seven-string guitarist Marz of Hate Suffocation, a Cairo band, LeVine confesses sheepishly, “I still couldn’t tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash and half a dozen other styles.” (Marz explains that his group plays a cross between death and black metal: “But it’s not blackened death metal!”) Despite a certain amount of scholarly dogma that goes with the territory — here any combination of “neoliberal” and “globalization” is as ominous an epithet as Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” — “Heavy Metal Islam” offers the hit-and-run (as well as hit-and-miss) pleasures of a lively road trip. Practicing a first-person brand of shuttle diplomacy as he moves between countries and cultures, musicians and Islamic activists, LeVine manages to unpack enough cross-cultural incongruities to mount his own mosh pit follow-up to “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
An ex-Mossad hairdresser is scarcely more anomalous than disheveled Moroccan riot grrrls, virtuoso Egyptian metalheads, Lebanese “muhajababes” (young women wearing full head scarves, army fatigues, tight black T-shirts and Hezbollah wristbands), Tupac-influenced Palestinian M.C.’s, “the Israeli Oriental death-doom metal band Orphaned Land” (complete with a devoted Arab following) and rapt Iranian Iron Maiden acolytes. A participatory, hands-on guy, LeVine not only meets and eats with Muslim headbangers, he jams with them in apartments, studios and outdoor festivals, taking in the food and the noise and the people as if it were all a movable metal feast.
Eagerly seizing on the stereotype-busting possibilities of “an 18-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a 20-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup,” LeVine would like us to see them as the faces of an emerging Muslim world, potentially a much less monochromatic place than the one represented on TV by the usual “Death to America” brigades. “Heavy Metal Islam” turns the notion of irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West on its head, appealing to the universality of youth culture as “a model for communication and cooperation” in the Internet age. LeVine reckons the likes of Metallica and Slayer provide a brute lingua franca that knows no borders, opening up breathing room in cloistered societies, gradually undermining rigid belief systems — a benign, bottom-up brand of globalization as opposed to the ruthless corporate or state-sponsored kind.
It’s that old-time Lennon/Bono rock idealism reimagined for a post-Cannibal Corpse world, and that’s winning on a case-by-case basis. In lands where playing “satanic” music or even attending semi-clandestine concerts can get you thrown in jail (actually charged with things like “shaking the foundations of Islam”), there’s something truly heartening about the Moroccan thrash girls Mystik Moods striving to break through centuries-old sexist taboos, or Hate Suffocation trying to carve out a niche to play music and “be left alone by both the government and society.” In theocratic Iran, when Arthimoth’s leader wears a T-shirt reading “Your God Is Dead,” he’s risking a fate much worse than being suspended from school or getting dirty looks at the mall.
“Heavy Metal Islam” gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, “We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal”), but don’t confuse it with “If I Had a Hammer.” Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a warning or “the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,” but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and feed them to the wolverines.
Even though these antisocial bands want no part of hard-liners like the mystical Justice and Spirituality Association in Morocco or the spooky Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (and the disdain is often mutual), LeVine thinks if they could all put aside their petty differences and work together, they could start a domino effect in the Middle East like the one that toppled the Eastern bloc. (He’s like the straight arrow in comic books who’d invariably look around at the scene of Armageddon and say with a sigh, “If only we could have harnessed their mutant energy for goodness.”) The punch line of LeVine’s informative, valuable and moderately mad book is twofold: this conscientious anti-imperialist has written a swell tract in favor of large-scale cultural imperialism — a Marshall Amps Plan — and his program is undoubtedly the first to enlist death metal as the spearhead of a new Peace Corps(e).
Howard Hampton is the author of “Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses.”
July 20, 2008
Rock the Casbah
By HOWARD HAMPTON
Skip to next paragraph
HEAVY METAL ISLAM
Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.
By Mark LeVine.
Illustrated. 296 pp. Three Rivers Press. Paper, $13.95.
This professor of Middle Eastern history walks into a bar in Fez, Morocco — right from the get-go, Mark LeVine’s “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam” is not your typical dry academic slog. (Did I mention he’s also a longhaired Jewish rock guitarist whose bio lists gigs with Mick Jagger and Dr. John?) So when somebody in that hotel bar starts talking up the local punk and metal scenes, an incredulous LeVine is hooked. “There are Muslim punks? In Morocco?” Quicker than you can whistle “Rock the Casbah,” he’s on the trail of Western-influenced underground music movements that have blossomed under authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.
Going to meet the seven-string guitarist Marz of Hate Suffocation, a Cairo band, LeVine confesses sheepishly, “I still couldn’t tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash and half a dozen other styles.” (Marz explains that his group plays a cross between death and black metal: “But it’s not blackened death metal!”) Despite a certain amount of scholarly dogma that goes with the territory — here any combination of “neoliberal” and “globalization” is as ominous an epithet as Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” — “Heavy Metal Islam” offers the hit-and-run (as well as hit-and-miss) pleasures of a lively road trip. Practicing a first-person brand of shuttle diplomacy as he moves between countries and cultures, musicians and Islamic activists, LeVine manages to unpack enough cross-cultural incongruities to mount his own mosh pit follow-up to “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
An ex-Mossad hairdresser is scarcely more anomalous than disheveled Moroccan riot grrrls, virtuoso Egyptian metalheads, Lebanese “muhajababes” (young women wearing full head scarves, army fatigues, tight black T-shirts and Hezbollah wristbands), Tupac-influenced Palestinian M.C.’s, “the Israeli Oriental death-doom metal band Orphaned Land” (complete with a devoted Arab following) and rapt Iranian Iron Maiden acolytes. A participatory, hands-on guy, LeVine not only meets and eats with Muslim headbangers, he jams with them in apartments, studios and outdoor festivals, taking in the food and the noise and the people as if it were all a movable metal feast.
Eagerly seizing on the stereotype-busting possibilities of “an 18-year-old from Casablanca with spiked hair, or a 20-year-old from Dubai wearing goth makeup,” LeVine would like us to see them as the faces of an emerging Muslim world, potentially a much less monochromatic place than the one represented on TV by the usual “Death to America” brigades. “Heavy Metal Islam” turns the notion of irreconcilable differences between Islam and the West on its head, appealing to the universality of youth culture as “a model for communication and cooperation” in the Internet age. LeVine reckons the likes of Metallica and Slayer provide a brute lingua franca that knows no borders, opening up breathing room in cloistered societies, gradually undermining rigid belief systems — a benign, bottom-up brand of globalization as opposed to the ruthless corporate or state-sponsored kind.
It’s that old-time Lennon/Bono rock idealism reimagined for a post-Cannibal Corpse world, and that’s winning on a case-by-case basis. In lands where playing “satanic” music or even attending semi-clandestine concerts can get you thrown in jail (actually charged with things like “shaking the foundations of Islam”), there’s something truly heartening about the Moroccan thrash girls Mystik Moods striving to break through centuries-old sexist taboos, or Hate Suffocation trying to carve out a niche to play music and “be left alone by both the government and society.” In theocratic Iran, when Arthimoth’s leader wears a T-shirt reading “Your God Is Dead,” he’s risking a fate much worse than being suspended from school or getting dirty looks at the mall.
“Heavy Metal Islam” gets trapped by its good intentions whenever it attempts to shoehorn the headbangers’ intransigence into preconceived political slots. Metal music, however you parse it, is dystopian in the extreme: hyper-aggressively embracing the death instinct, regimented chaos, deliriously fetishized morbidity. Call it cathartic, sure, even a way of keeping sane in an insane world (as one performer here says, “We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal”), but don’t confuse it with “If I Had a Hammer.” Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilist gods aimed at your forehead — not to hammer out justice or a warning or “the common struggle for democracy and economic equality,” but to crack your skull open, scrape out your pulverized brains and feed them to the wolverines.
Even though these antisocial bands want no part of hard-liners like the mystical Justice and Spirituality Association in Morocco or the spooky Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (and the disdain is often mutual), LeVine thinks if they could all put aside their petty differences and work together, they could start a domino effect in the Middle East like the one that toppled the Eastern bloc. (He’s like the straight arrow in comic books who’d invariably look around at the scene of Armageddon and say with a sigh, “If only we could have harnessed their mutant energy for goodness.”) The punch line of LeVine’s informative, valuable and moderately mad book is twofold: this conscientious anti-imperialist has written a swell tract in favor of large-scale cultural imperialism — a Marshall Amps Plan — and his program is undoubtedly the first to enlist death metal as the spearhead of a new Peace Corps(e).
Howard Hampton is the author of “Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses.”
Monday, May 19, 2008
Book Review: Hiding in Hip-hop (hip-hop's gay subculture)
Newsweek
Outing Hip-Hop
In a new memoir, a former MTV staffer dishes on the rap industry's persistent "down-low" culture. He doesn't name names, but it's a fascinating peek inside hip-hop's last taboo.
Jessica Bennett
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 12:11 PM ET May 19, 2008
In a hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans, Terrance Dean doesn't give off "gay" on first sight—and he has worked hard to present himself that way. In a downtown coffee shop in Manhattan, the former MTV staffer describes the lengths he's gone to over the years to achieve that body aesthetic: he strolls, never saunters. He dresses well, but not too well. He doesn't wear flashy jewelry and substitutes "she" for "he" when he tells colleagues about his weekend plans. Even now that he's out of the closet, he sometimes forgets. When somebody asked if he was gay recently, he blurted out "no" without even thinking.
But Dean is going to have a hard time fooling anyone much longer. His new book, "Hiding in Hip-Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry," is a tale of life inside Hollywood's secret gay subculture, and hip-hop's place within that world. Though it doesn't name names, the memoir is a detailed (and graphic) account of down-low life, gay sex parties and secret societies, where some of hip-hop's major artists openly sleep with men, only to go home to their wives and girlfriends at night's end. (A person who is "down low" considers himself straight but regularly sleeps with members of the same sex; the term is frequently used when describing black men.) And though Dean's intention was never to out anybody, he provides just enough information for readers to go crazy searching Google. There's a New York R&B singer who often opened for Jay-Z, caught the ears of Death Row Records and has worked on Broadway. A member of a rap group that changed hip-hop with its "philosophical rhymes over hard-core beats" who then went solo to achieve chart-topping success, eventually landing the lead in a movie. (He's also married.) "Men who have secret love affairs have separate homes and apartments, and separate phones strictly for their romantic flings," writes Dean. "No one ever suspects a thing, and they go to great lengths to keep it that way."
Except, of course, that everybody inside the industry is well aware of that fact, which is probably Dean's most surprising revelation. Sure, there's always a story kicking around about homosexuality and the music industry; rumors have swirled around rappers since the '70s and '80s. But according to Dean, and a number of other industry insiders, who's gay and who's straight (or rather, who is "down low"; DL brothers don't identify as "gay") is common knowledge. So common, in fact, that one hip-hop radio personality says he discussed it with his Los Angeles barber last week. "I can't sit here and say this is secret, because a lot of times I see things firsthand," says Charlamagne Tha God (real name Lenard McKelvey), who is the cohost of the Wendy Williams show on New York's WBLS. "To be honest, it might be the industry's worst kept secret."
That doesn't mean it's not taboo. Hip-hop has a long history of homophobia, much of which is tied up with the powerful black church. ("I remember the pastor at my church saying 'Homosexuality is a sin!' and pounding his fist on the table," Dean recalls.) As one of the most visible voices of black culture, hip-hop has adopted those beliefs—and, in doing so, transmits them to young fans. And though there was a time when artists like Public Enemy and NWA waxed political, hip-hop today is dominated by money, power, bling and video vixens. Thug appeal is critical to a rapper's image, and there's no place for a "faggot" within that, says Dean, whose upbringing in Detroit involved a drug-addicted prostitute mother and time in jail. Being gay is considered soft, sissy—a putdown that's won emcee battles for years. So when artists like Eminem and Jay-Z—and even so-called socially conscious rappers like Common—throw out insults like "fag" and "bitch," it's the ultimate threat to a man's masculinity. "The more hetero a person is, the more accepted he is," Dean writes. Adds Tim'm West, an openly gay Bay Area rapper and activist, "Straightness is as crudely affixed to skill in hip-hop as the microphone."
Rappers certainly know that. When filmmaker Byron Hurt asked Busta Rhymes about homosexuality in hip-hop for a 2006 documentary on the subject, the rapper was so offended he walked out—on camera. Even when Hurt later screened the film, called "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes," he says his audiences squirmed when the topic was raised. "The very nature of the hip-hop beast has homophobia imbedded in it," says Fred Mwangaguhunga, the editor of MediaTakeOut.com, a black-focused celebrity website.
Which is why hip-hop's gay culture is so shrouded in silence, with intricate measures taken to keep it that way. To get admitted into the "clique," as Dean describes it, a brother is carefully vetted, then interviewed by a person who will become his "sponsor," meaning he'll take the fall if that person screws up or goes to the press. There's also a machine designed to back that up. Managers brief artists on image control, give them extensive media training about how to walk, talk and act the gangster lifestyle—and always avoid the inevitable questions. Publicists go to great lengths to mastermind their artists' appearances—and who those appearances are with—in gossip mags. Producers tap their friends in the industry to find single female celebs they can persuade to be on hand for red carpet events. "We have to make sure [nobody] will run and report it to the media, gossip magazines, or to [their] friends," Dean writes. "We have to make sure you have an allegiance with us and that you will go down for us."
That allegiance extends all the way to the paparazzi, who in many cases won't break the code in an effort to ensure future access. If they do break it, many magazines editors won't buy the photos anyhow, for fear of lawsuits or professional backlash. (In 1998, when Hot 97 shock jock Wendy Williams hinted that a major New York rapper was gay, she was booted from the station.) "You have to understand that once you print a story like that, particularly against a hip-hop artist, you have to be prepared for a full-on kamikaze attack," says Mwangaguhunga. "The artist, the label, and everybody who endorsed that artist will launch a huge lawsuit against you." Mwangaguhunga says his agency gets tips on this type of thing three or four times a week—sometimes in the form of a phone call, photo, or video. But because of the time and money needed to confirm the accusations, a lot of those tips don't make it into print. Says a corporate lawyer turned gossip writer for AllHipHop.com, who would only give his pen name, illseed, "There are people in the tabloid media dying to confirm something of this sort. But at the very end of the day, it's not what you know, its what you can prove—or, these days, what you can print."
As Dean points out, the irony about gay rappers is that hip-hop was founded on the notion of speaking truth; it was the voice of an urban underclass largely hidden from the mainstream. The more adversity an artist faced, the more street credibility he developed. "It was about being real," says Los Angeles rapper Deadlee (real name Joseph Lee), who is openly gay—do-rag, tattoos, hardcore lyrics and all. Money has changed all that, as hip-hop has transformed from the word of the street to the word of the elite: clothes, cars, bitches and bling have overtaken social consciousness. But Deadlee is part of a growing movement of gay rappers who make up the world of "homohop," a genre he hopes will eventually cross over to the mainstream. With more than 50 recognized homohop artists on the Web site Outhiphop.com, many are touring at home and abroad. "There's likely a gay counterpart to every 'brand' of hip-hop in the mainstream," says Tim'm West, who is the founder of the Oakland-based gay rap group, Deep Dickollective. (He also released his second solo album, "Blakkboy Blue(s)," last year.)
Mainstream acceptance of a gay rapper would definitely require a paradigm shift, says West. But perhaps a failing industry could foster that. After 30 years of growing popularity, rap is now struggling with an alarming sales decline and growing criticism; its sales dropped 21 percent from 2005 to 2006. A recent study by the Black Youth Project showed that a majority of youth rap is too violent; even Nas declared in the title of his 2006 album, "Hip-hop Is Dead." "I wonder what would happen if a rapper came out and tapped into this market," says Mwangaguhunga. "Hip-hop is about telling stories of struggle and life, and I think there's a real story to tell of urban, gay youth." That won't happen tomorrow, but if Dean can come out of "hiding," maybe the industry can too.
Outing Hip-Hop
In a new memoir, a former MTV staffer dishes on the rap industry's persistent "down-low" culture. He doesn't name names, but it's a fascinating peek inside hip-hop's last taboo.
Jessica Bennett
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 12:11 PM ET May 19, 2008
In a hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans, Terrance Dean doesn't give off "gay" on first sight—and he has worked hard to present himself that way. In a downtown coffee shop in Manhattan, the former MTV staffer describes the lengths he's gone to over the years to achieve that body aesthetic: he strolls, never saunters. He dresses well, but not too well. He doesn't wear flashy jewelry and substitutes "she" for "he" when he tells colleagues about his weekend plans. Even now that he's out of the closet, he sometimes forgets. When somebody asked if he was gay recently, he blurted out "no" without even thinking.
But Dean is going to have a hard time fooling anyone much longer. His new book, "Hiding in Hip-Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry," is a tale of life inside Hollywood's secret gay subculture, and hip-hop's place within that world. Though it doesn't name names, the memoir is a detailed (and graphic) account of down-low life, gay sex parties and secret societies, where some of hip-hop's major artists openly sleep with men, only to go home to their wives and girlfriends at night's end. (A person who is "down low" considers himself straight but regularly sleeps with members of the same sex; the term is frequently used when describing black men.) And though Dean's intention was never to out anybody, he provides just enough information for readers to go crazy searching Google. There's a New York R&B singer who often opened for Jay-Z, caught the ears of Death Row Records and has worked on Broadway. A member of a rap group that changed hip-hop with its "philosophical rhymes over hard-core beats" who then went solo to achieve chart-topping success, eventually landing the lead in a movie. (He's also married.) "Men who have secret love affairs have separate homes and apartments, and separate phones strictly for their romantic flings," writes Dean. "No one ever suspects a thing, and they go to great lengths to keep it that way."
Except, of course, that everybody inside the industry is well aware of that fact, which is probably Dean's most surprising revelation. Sure, there's always a story kicking around about homosexuality and the music industry; rumors have swirled around rappers since the '70s and '80s. But according to Dean, and a number of other industry insiders, who's gay and who's straight (or rather, who is "down low"; DL brothers don't identify as "gay") is common knowledge. So common, in fact, that one hip-hop radio personality says he discussed it with his Los Angeles barber last week. "I can't sit here and say this is secret, because a lot of times I see things firsthand," says Charlamagne Tha God (real name Lenard McKelvey), who is the cohost of the Wendy Williams show on New York's WBLS. "To be honest, it might be the industry's worst kept secret."
That doesn't mean it's not taboo. Hip-hop has a long history of homophobia, much of which is tied up with the powerful black church. ("I remember the pastor at my church saying 'Homosexuality is a sin!' and pounding his fist on the table," Dean recalls.) As one of the most visible voices of black culture, hip-hop has adopted those beliefs—and, in doing so, transmits them to young fans. And though there was a time when artists like Public Enemy and NWA waxed political, hip-hop today is dominated by money, power, bling and video vixens. Thug appeal is critical to a rapper's image, and there's no place for a "faggot" within that, says Dean, whose upbringing in Detroit involved a drug-addicted prostitute mother and time in jail. Being gay is considered soft, sissy—a putdown that's won emcee battles for years. So when artists like Eminem and Jay-Z—and even so-called socially conscious rappers like Common—throw out insults like "fag" and "bitch," it's the ultimate threat to a man's masculinity. "The more hetero a person is, the more accepted he is," Dean writes. Adds Tim'm West, an openly gay Bay Area rapper and activist, "Straightness is as crudely affixed to skill in hip-hop as the microphone."
Rappers certainly know that. When filmmaker Byron Hurt asked Busta Rhymes about homosexuality in hip-hop for a 2006 documentary on the subject, the rapper was so offended he walked out—on camera. Even when Hurt later screened the film, called "Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes," he says his audiences squirmed when the topic was raised. "The very nature of the hip-hop beast has homophobia imbedded in it," says Fred Mwangaguhunga, the editor of MediaTakeOut.com, a black-focused celebrity website.
Which is why hip-hop's gay culture is so shrouded in silence, with intricate measures taken to keep it that way. To get admitted into the "clique," as Dean describes it, a brother is carefully vetted, then interviewed by a person who will become his "sponsor," meaning he'll take the fall if that person screws up or goes to the press. There's also a machine designed to back that up. Managers brief artists on image control, give them extensive media training about how to walk, talk and act the gangster lifestyle—and always avoid the inevitable questions. Publicists go to great lengths to mastermind their artists' appearances—and who those appearances are with—in gossip mags. Producers tap their friends in the industry to find single female celebs they can persuade to be on hand for red carpet events. "We have to make sure [nobody] will run and report it to the media, gossip magazines, or to [their] friends," Dean writes. "We have to make sure you have an allegiance with us and that you will go down for us."
That allegiance extends all the way to the paparazzi, who in many cases won't break the code in an effort to ensure future access. If they do break it, many magazines editors won't buy the photos anyhow, for fear of lawsuits or professional backlash. (In 1998, when Hot 97 shock jock Wendy Williams hinted that a major New York rapper was gay, she was booted from the station.) "You have to understand that once you print a story like that, particularly against a hip-hop artist, you have to be prepared for a full-on kamikaze attack," says Mwangaguhunga. "The artist, the label, and everybody who endorsed that artist will launch a huge lawsuit against you." Mwangaguhunga says his agency gets tips on this type of thing three or four times a week—sometimes in the form of a phone call, photo, or video. But because of the time and money needed to confirm the accusations, a lot of those tips don't make it into print. Says a corporate lawyer turned gossip writer for AllHipHop.com, who would only give his pen name, illseed, "There are people in the tabloid media dying to confirm something of this sort. But at the very end of the day, it's not what you know, its what you can prove—or, these days, what you can print."
As Dean points out, the irony about gay rappers is that hip-hop was founded on the notion of speaking truth; it was the voice of an urban underclass largely hidden from the mainstream. The more adversity an artist faced, the more street credibility he developed. "It was about being real," says Los Angeles rapper Deadlee (real name Joseph Lee), who is openly gay—do-rag, tattoos, hardcore lyrics and all. Money has changed all that, as hip-hop has transformed from the word of the street to the word of the elite: clothes, cars, bitches and bling have overtaken social consciousness. But Deadlee is part of a growing movement of gay rappers who make up the world of "homohop," a genre he hopes will eventually cross over to the mainstream. With more than 50 recognized homohop artists on the Web site Outhiphop.com, many are touring at home and abroad. "There's likely a gay counterpart to every 'brand' of hip-hop in the mainstream," says Tim'm West, who is the founder of the Oakland-based gay rap group, Deep Dickollective. (He also released his second solo album, "Blakkboy Blue(s)," last year.)
Mainstream acceptance of a gay rapper would definitely require a paradigm shift, says West. But perhaps a failing industry could foster that. After 30 years of growing popularity, rap is now struggling with an alarming sales decline and growing criticism; its sales dropped 21 percent from 2005 to 2006. A recent study by the Black Youth Project showed that a majority of youth rap is too violent; even Nas declared in the title of his 2006 album, "Hip-hop Is Dead." "I wonder what would happen if a rapper came out and tapped into this market," says Mwangaguhunga. "Hip-hop is about telling stories of struggle and life, and I think there's a real story to tell of urban, gay youth." That won't happen tomorrow, but if Dean can come out of "hiding," maybe the industry can too.
Friday, May 02, 2008
AACM: Four Decades of Music That Redefined Free
New York Times
May 2, 2008
By NATE CHINEN
“First of all, No. 1, there’s original music, only.”
Those words would have consequences, yielding everything from runic silence to braying cacophony, from open improvisation to orchestral scores. Baubles and bells. Bicycle horns. The rumble of a hundred tubas. Ancient drums and electronic striations, and flashes of full-tilt swing.
The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams uttered that statement of purpose one afternoon some 43 years ago, in a meeting on the South Side of Chicago. In the process he laid the groundwork for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.
Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.
The scene plays out vividly in “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music,” an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams’s aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of “original music.” (Whose music? How original?) From the start, it’s clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.
Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
The evening was conceived largely as a celebration of Mr. Lewis’s book, which in turn was conceived largely as a celebration of the organization, an African-American body now rooted in both Chicago and New York. Mr. Lewis narrates its development with exacting context and incisive analysis, occasionally delving into academic cultural theory. But because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it’s a swift, engrossing read.
“I told George, ‘It’s like you wrote a Russian family novel of the A.A.C.M.,’ ” said the critic Greg Tate, who will moderate the panel.
Mr. Abrams reflected on the book and the organization last week in a conversation on the roof terrace of the apartment building in Clinton where he has lived since 1977. “The A.A.C.M. is a group of individuals who agree to agree, or sometimes not to agree,” he said. “Our cohesiveness has been intact because we respect each other’s individualism.”
Mr. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case professor of American music and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, offered a similar thought. “As I saw it,” he said in his office, “here’s a group of people who had a robust conversation going on, with basically no holds barred, and yet managed to manage their diversity without falling apart, without falling into factionalism.”
Such is the basic philosophy of an association once pegged by the jazz critic Whitney Balliett as “a black musical self-help group.” Three years ago, as part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, some clearer definitions emerged at a colloquium presented by the Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario.
The saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell began by recalling how the organization grew out of the Experimental Band, led by Mr. Abrams on the South Side of Chicago. “We wanted to have a place where we could sponsor each other in concerts of our original compositions; provide a training program for young, aspiring musicians in the community; reach out to other people and other cities; and have exchange programs,” he said.
Noticeably absent from Mr. Mitchell’s description, and from the language of the early planning meetings, was the word jazz. This was partly in keeping with the arm’s length the organization intended to establish between its art and the commercial realm of nightclubs, then the de facto setting for any African-American art music. Partly, too, these musicians were concerned with a breadth of style that reached beyond jazz, to encompass serious classical composition, as well as music from Africa and the East. Having inherited the new freedoms of 1960s jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the artists in this movement were ready for a next step, one they could claim as their own.
“This is a book about mobility and agency,” Mr. Lewis said. He links this impulse conceptually to the Great Migration, illuminating how the association’s first generation came from families that had moved to Chicago from a postslavery South. He examines the continuing debate over the organization’s exclusion of nonblack musicians, shedding new light on the phrase Great Black Music, which many in the association adopted.
“What a lot of us are looking for,” he added, “is a much more open-ended conversation than any simplistic prescriptions of blackness will allow.”
Pluralism has always been an ideal of the organization. Reporting on a marathon WKCR radio broadcast in 1977, Mr. Balliett quoted one unidentified member, responding to a question of style: “The A.A.C.M. sound? If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that’s the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.”
The utopian tinge of such language was hardly lost on the artists themselves. “If this was to be a revolution,” Mr. Lewis writes, “it would be a revolution without stars, individual heroes or Great Men.”
But the association has had its share of great men (and a few great women): audacious improvisers like the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and the violinist Leroy Jenkins; visionary composers like Mr. Abrams, Ms. Myers, Mr. Threadgill, Mr. Mitchell and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the most celebrated of all its groups, has always principally emphasized the elusive chemistry of its players, who in the group’s heyday included Mr. Bowie and Mr. Mitchell alongside the multireedist Joseph Jarman, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Famoudou Don Moye.
Yet even in the most solitary of settings — the solo saxophone recital, as represented by Mr. Braxton’s landmark 1968 album, “For Alto” (Delmark) — the aesthetic of the organization called for something other than the jazzman’s heroic voice. For this reason, Mr. Lewis said, the association represents a postmodern ideal: “You’re thinking about it in terms of multiple subjectivities rather than a unified subject.”
Unlike Coltrane or even Ornette Coleman, who each developed a recognizably penetrating sound, these artists largely favored a sense of identity that was protean and slippery. And their resistance to habitual gestures was fierce.
“With the A.A.C.M., you’re not rooted in a set of simple, codifiable practices,” Mr. Lewis said, “but you’re rooted in an attitude, in a creation of an atmosphere, in an orientation to experience.”
Not surprisingly, this approach never enjoyed mass acceptance, though the Art Ensemble of Chicago has always played to large concert audiences. The greater impact of the association has been felt among other artists. It inspired the formation of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis in the late 1960s. And as its first generation gradually relocated to New York in the 1970s, its experimental ethos connected with a larger circle of musicians. One was the alto saxophonist and composer John Zorn, a chief architect of the so-called downtown scene of the 1980s and ’90s.
Mr. Lewis’s book takes a cleareyed view of the historic tensions between the Chicago and New York chapters of the association. Within his narrative those tensions sit side by side, unresolved, as they are in real life. The flutist Nicole Mitchell, a younger member of the organization who now serves as its first chairwoman, suggested as much in an e-mail message this week: “New York and Chicago will continue to be very distinct organizations.”
But Ms. Mitchell, who lives in Chicago, framed those differences in positive terms. “For example, new members only come through in Chicago, and the A.A.C.M. School only exists in Chicago.” She was referring to the organization’s educational program, which, as she put it, “continues to fill a gap that is still present today on Chicago’s South Side.” And she pointed out that the two chapters had grown much more interactive in recent years, partly as a result of events surrounding the 40th anniversary in 2005.
Matana Roberts, an alto saxophonist, weighed in as a younger member of the Chicago chapter who now lives in New York. “The Chicago organization and the New York organization have different goals,” she said. “The people who came to New York were pretty major performers on an international level, whereas there are a lot of people in Chicago who perform on more of a local level. So I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding. But in the last five or six years, things seem to be pretty well connected.”
The association’s presence in New York can be harder to find than it is in Chicago, but it has grown increasingly pervasive. Certainly its spirit of self-preservation and collectivity can be found in the Vision Festival, presented each June on the Lower East Side by the artist-run nonprofit organization Arts for Art. (This year’s event will feature performances by numerous members of the association, including Mr. Lewis.) A related entity, Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, has been presenting performances each weekend this spring, also on the Lower East Side. On Friday the series will feature Ms. Roberts in a solo performance.
The association’s practices can also be found around the city on a regular basis, thanks to artists like the pianist Vijay Iyer, a nonmember who has worked extensively as a sideman with Mr. Smith and Mr. Mitchell. Both of the albums released by Mr. Iyer last month reflect his deep experience with the organization; one, “Door” (Pi), is a product of the collective trio Fieldwork, which could be considered a sort of unofficial byproduct of the association. (Fieldwork’s other two members are the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who has backed Mr. Abrams in concert, and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, who is now a teaching assistant for Mr. Lewis.)
For Mr. Lewis, who began work on “A Power Stronger Than Itself” more than a decade ago as a professor in the music department at the University of California, San Diego, the association presents a continuing story, especially given the relatively recent arrival of talent like Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Roberts. And as he has demonstrated in his own career, the older members of the organization have continued to create and innovate.
Mr. Abrams made much the same point. “Certainly there has been great development, and I think at the base of that development is constant work,” he said.
And at the heart of that work? Originality, of course. Or as Mr. Abrams put it, “The word and the work are the same.”
May 2, 2008
By NATE CHINEN
“First of all, No. 1, there’s original music, only.”
Those words would have consequences, yielding everything from runic silence to braying cacophony, from open improvisation to orchestral scores. Baubles and bells. Bicycle horns. The rumble of a hundred tubas. Ancient drums and electronic striations, and flashes of full-tilt swing.
The pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams uttered that statement of purpose one afternoon some 43 years ago, in a meeting on the South Side of Chicago. In the process he laid the groundwork for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization that has fostered some of the most vital American avant-garde music of the last 40 years.
Though noncommercial, often pointedly conceptual and unabashedly arcane, this music has had a profound influence over the years on several generations of experimental musicians worldwide.
The scene plays out vividly in “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The A.A.C.M. and Experimental Music,” an important book by the trombonist-composer-scholar George Lewis due out from the University of Chicago Press this month. Reconstructing that inaugural meeting from audio tapes, Mr. Lewis conveys not only Mr. Abrams’s aim but also the vigorous debate begun by his notion of “original music.” (Whose music? How original?) From the start, it’s clear, the association expressed its firm ideals partly through collective discourse.
Next Friday night another sort of discourse will unfold at the Community Church of New York in Murray Hill, when the association convenes a panel discussion with a handful of its current members, including Mr. Lewis, the multireedist Henry Threadgill and the pianist and vocalist Amina Claudine Myers. The conversation will precede a concert featuring Mr. Lewis and Mr. Abrams in an improvising trio with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
The evening was conceived largely as a celebration of Mr. Lewis’s book, which in turn was conceived largely as a celebration of the organization, an African-American body now rooted in both Chicago and New York. Mr. Lewis narrates its development with exacting context and incisive analysis, occasionally delving into academic cultural theory. But because the book includes biographical portraits of so many participating musicians, it’s a swift, engrossing read.
“I told George, ‘It’s like you wrote a Russian family novel of the A.A.C.M.,’ ” said the critic Greg Tate, who will moderate the panel.
Mr. Abrams reflected on the book and the organization last week in a conversation on the roof terrace of the apartment building in Clinton where he has lived since 1977. “The A.A.C.M. is a group of individuals who agree to agree, or sometimes not to agree,” he said. “Our cohesiveness has been intact because we respect each other’s individualism.”
Mr. Lewis, the Edwin H. Case professor of American music and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, offered a similar thought. “As I saw it,” he said in his office, “here’s a group of people who had a robust conversation going on, with basically no holds barred, and yet managed to manage their diversity without falling apart, without falling into factionalism.”
Such is the basic philosophy of an association once pegged by the jazz critic Whitney Balliett as “a black musical self-help group.” Three years ago, as part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, some clearer definitions emerged at a colloquium presented by the Guelph Jazz Festival in Ontario.
The saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell began by recalling how the organization grew out of the Experimental Band, led by Mr. Abrams on the South Side of Chicago. “We wanted to have a place where we could sponsor each other in concerts of our original compositions; provide a training program for young, aspiring musicians in the community; reach out to other people and other cities; and have exchange programs,” he said.
Noticeably absent from Mr. Mitchell’s description, and from the language of the early planning meetings, was the word jazz. This was partly in keeping with the arm’s length the organization intended to establish between its art and the commercial realm of nightclubs, then the de facto setting for any African-American art music. Partly, too, these musicians were concerned with a breadth of style that reached beyond jazz, to encompass serious classical composition, as well as music from Africa and the East. Having inherited the new freedoms of 1960s jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the artists in this movement were ready for a next step, one they could claim as their own.
“This is a book about mobility and agency,” Mr. Lewis said. He links this impulse conceptually to the Great Migration, illuminating how the association’s first generation came from families that had moved to Chicago from a postslavery South. He examines the continuing debate over the organization’s exclusion of nonblack musicians, shedding new light on the phrase Great Black Music, which many in the association adopted.
“What a lot of us are looking for,” he added, “is a much more open-ended conversation than any simplistic prescriptions of blackness will allow.”
Pluralism has always been an ideal of the organization. Reporting on a marathon WKCR radio broadcast in 1977, Mr. Balliett quoted one unidentified member, responding to a question of style: “The A.A.C.M. sound? If you take all the sounds of all the A.A.C.M. musicians and put them together, that’s the A.A.C.M. sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.”
The utopian tinge of such language was hardly lost on the artists themselves. “If this was to be a revolution,” Mr. Lewis writes, “it would be a revolution without stars, individual heroes or Great Men.”
But the association has had its share of great men (and a few great women): audacious improvisers like the trumpeter Lester Bowie, the tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and the violinist Leroy Jenkins; visionary composers like Mr. Abrams, Ms. Myers, Mr. Threadgill, Mr. Mitchell and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, the most celebrated of all its groups, has always principally emphasized the elusive chemistry of its players, who in the group’s heyday included Mr. Bowie and Mr. Mitchell alongside the multireedist Joseph Jarman, the bassist Malachi Favors and the drummer Famoudou Don Moye.
Yet even in the most solitary of settings — the solo saxophone recital, as represented by Mr. Braxton’s landmark 1968 album, “For Alto” (Delmark) — the aesthetic of the organization called for something other than the jazzman’s heroic voice. For this reason, Mr. Lewis said, the association represents a postmodern ideal: “You’re thinking about it in terms of multiple subjectivities rather than a unified subject.”
Unlike Coltrane or even Ornette Coleman, who each developed a recognizably penetrating sound, these artists largely favored a sense of identity that was protean and slippery. And their resistance to habitual gestures was fierce.
“With the A.A.C.M., you’re not rooted in a set of simple, codifiable practices,” Mr. Lewis said, “but you’re rooted in an attitude, in a creation of an atmosphere, in an orientation to experience.”
Not surprisingly, this approach never enjoyed mass acceptance, though the Art Ensemble of Chicago has always played to large concert audiences. The greater impact of the association has been felt among other artists. It inspired the formation of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis in the late 1960s. And as its first generation gradually relocated to New York in the 1970s, its experimental ethos connected with a larger circle of musicians. One was the alto saxophonist and composer John Zorn, a chief architect of the so-called downtown scene of the 1980s and ’90s.
Mr. Lewis’s book takes a cleareyed view of the historic tensions between the Chicago and New York chapters of the association. Within his narrative those tensions sit side by side, unresolved, as they are in real life. The flutist Nicole Mitchell, a younger member of the organization who now serves as its first chairwoman, suggested as much in an e-mail message this week: “New York and Chicago will continue to be very distinct organizations.”
But Ms. Mitchell, who lives in Chicago, framed those differences in positive terms. “For example, new members only come through in Chicago, and the A.A.C.M. School only exists in Chicago.” She was referring to the organization’s educational program, which, as she put it, “continues to fill a gap that is still present today on Chicago’s South Side.” And she pointed out that the two chapters had grown much more interactive in recent years, partly as a result of events surrounding the 40th anniversary in 2005.
Matana Roberts, an alto saxophonist, weighed in as a younger member of the Chicago chapter who now lives in New York. “The Chicago organization and the New York organization have different goals,” she said. “The people who came to New York were pretty major performers on an international level, whereas there are a lot of people in Chicago who perform on more of a local level. So I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding. But in the last five or six years, things seem to be pretty well connected.”
The association’s presence in New York can be harder to find than it is in Chicago, but it has grown increasingly pervasive. Certainly its spirit of self-preservation and collectivity can be found in the Vision Festival, presented each June on the Lower East Side by the artist-run nonprofit organization Arts for Art. (This year’s event will feature performances by numerous members of the association, including Mr. Lewis.) A related entity, Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, has been presenting performances each weekend this spring, also on the Lower East Side. On Friday the series will feature Ms. Roberts in a solo performance.
The association’s practices can also be found around the city on a regular basis, thanks to artists like the pianist Vijay Iyer, a nonmember who has worked extensively as a sideman with Mr. Smith and Mr. Mitchell. Both of the albums released by Mr. Iyer last month reflect his deep experience with the organization; one, “Door” (Pi), is a product of the collective trio Fieldwork, which could be considered a sort of unofficial byproduct of the association. (Fieldwork’s other two members are the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who has backed Mr. Abrams in concert, and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, who is now a teaching assistant for Mr. Lewis.)
For Mr. Lewis, who began work on “A Power Stronger Than Itself” more than a decade ago as a professor in the music department at the University of California, San Diego, the association presents a continuing story, especially given the relatively recent arrival of talent like Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Roberts. And as he has demonstrated in his own career, the older members of the organization have continued to create and innovate.
Mr. Abrams made much the same point. “Certainly there has been great development, and I think at the base of that development is constant work,” he said.
And at the heart of that work? Originality, of course. Or as Mr. Abrams put it, “The word and the work are the same.”
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Asha Bhosle Returns: The Voice of Bollywood, in the Flesh
New York Times
April 19, 2008
Music Review | Asha Bhosle
The Voice of Bollywood, in the Flesh
By JON PARELES
“I sing everything,” Asha Bhosle told an adoring audience at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, and she was not exaggerating.
Ms. Bhosle, who turns 75 in September, is probably the most recorded singer in history. As the voice of Bollywood musicals — called a playback singer, because actresses sing and dance while her vocals are heard — and a queen of South Asian pop, she has recorded more than 12,000 songs in a career that dates to 1943. (One of her few rivals is her older sister, Lata Mangeshkar, another hugely prolific playback singer. At Carnegie Hall Ms. Bhosle sang one of her sister’s hits, “Lag Ja Gale.”)
Ms. Bhosle has sung Indian classical and semiclassical styles and all the culture-hopping pop hybrids that Bollywood composers have devised. Bollywood music is wonderfully multifarious; there’s no telling what might show up in a song, from traditional tabla rhythms to funk guitars to synthesizers. Ms. Bhosle’s Carnegie Hall set encompassed the pristine, unaccompanied Hindustani classical-style singing as well as styles from across India and twists on disco, rock, polka, waltzes and Latin music.
They all found room for her voice: high, clear, sweet and girlish even now. It can hover in the weightless, long-breathed, intricately rippling phrases of classical style or push, lightly but firmly, over a danceable beat, whether it’s Eastern or Western or a mix. Through her career Ms. Bhosle has collaborated not just with film composers but also with Indian classical musicians, like Ali Akbar Khan, and with Westerners from Boy George to Michael Stipe of R.E.M. to the Kronos Quartet.
Ms. Bhosle can also sing in many of India’s languages. For the many Bollywood actresses who have lip-synched to it, her voice has been innocent, flirtatious, heartbroken, naughty or reverent.
Although Ms. Bhosle has spent much of her career as an unseen voice, she is at home onstage. Barefoot in a glittering white sari — and later in regal saffron and pink — she was elegant and playful, whether reminiscing about learning to sing in classical style from her father, the singer and actor Dinanath Mangeshkar, or twirling a wrist in graceful dance gestures.
Sharing the concert with her was Amit Kumar, a singer and actor who is the son of Kishore Kumar, the Bollywood actor, director and singer with whom Ms. Bhosle recorded 656 duets. Amit Kumar sang his father’s hits, including a few duets with Ms. Bhosle — love songs — in which she danced him across the stage.
Near the end of the concert Ms. Bhosle unfurled a pink and saffron scarf, matching her sari, and within seconds expertly tied it around her head in a Sikh-style turban. The beat picked up into the earthy 4/4 of Punjabi bhangra, while she traded long, improvisatory phrases with a keyboardist.
Then the beat moved toward the Caribbean as the band plunged into a riff straight from Santana. In the finale, “Dum Maro Dum” — an award-winning song from a 1971 film — she sang “Hare Krisha” over a hand-clapping, galloping beat and wailing rock lead guitar: devotional, frisky and joyfully cosmopolitan.
SEE ALSO: NPR Story on Bhosle's tour.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Review-Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio
New York Times
April 13, 2008
Radio Days
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Skip to next paragraph
RIGHT OF THE DIAL
The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.
By Alec Foege.
294 pp. Faber & Faber. $25.
To those listeners who long for the days when their favorite radio station was independent, eclectic in its programming and as responsive as a tripwire to breaking local news, Clear Channel is nothing less than the Evil Empire. In Internet chat rooms where the media giant’s acquisitions and cost slashing have been tallied as if on a scoreboard — it grew from 43 stations to more than 1,200 from 1995 to 2001 alone — its name is regularly followed by the same expletive typically directed at the Yankees during a game at Fenway Park.
But when Alec Foege, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Spin and Playboy, set out to write the definitive history of a company that possesses more radio stations than any other, he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.
“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”
The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”
While unable to refute the conventional rap against Clear Channel — he finds it responsible for a “McDonald’s approach to radio programming” that makes one city’s offerings largely indistinguishable from another’s — Foege nonetheless succeeds in telling the story of how all this came to pass. The reader is guided from the company’s dusty beginnings in Texas in 1972 to its subsequent acquisition of the company that employed Rush Limbaugh (it still syndicates him on about 600 stations), and from its binge buying, as federal media ownership rules were relaxed in the late 1990s, to the high-tech battering it began receiving from the iPod in the new century.
Even before television and movies surpassed it in the nation’s cultural pecking order, radio was a medium that attracted a disproportionate share of colorful, often shady characters. Foege brings many of them to life, not least the pioneering radio programmer who hitchhiked for days at a time to divine what drivers were listening to (he later helped program XM, the satellite radio channel) or another who presided over a programming meeting where strippers were paraded through (his company was later bought by Clear Channel, and he was installed as a top executive).
Foege is an unabashed radio wonk, but he is particularly adept at translating the medium’s culture and technology for a lay audience. This includes those listeners unaware that their local Clear Channel station may well be operating on autopilot via remote control. He writes: “Clear Channel arguably innovated the practice of importing voice-tracked disc jockeys cross-country, whereby a D.J. in San Jose, Calif., would appear on the air in Boise, Idaho, making occasional references to local haunts, news events and the weather, giving every impression that he was in Boise. In truth, he had recorded his broadcast in San Jose weeks before, aided by a cheat sheet of local reference information.”
And Foege can obviously navigate a balance sheet, to say nothing of a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, taking the reader inside Clear Channel meeting rooms as the stock price of the overstuffed company plummets to $27.17 a share by August 2006 from more than $90 in early 2000. The reader is hardly surprised when Clear Channel begins reducing some of its holdings (including the spinoff of its concert division) before ultimately agreeing to be bought out by a private equity partnership in late 2006.
If there is a gaping hole in Foege’s narrative, it is one largely outside his control: the voices of his main characters are absent — like someone who chooses not to attend a roast being staged in his honor.
The Mays family, which founded and still runs Clear Channel, has long been reluctant to talk to journalists, and Foege has fared no better than previous suitors. “When I received the go-ahead for this book,” he writes, “I wrote multiple letters to Lowry Mays, Mark Mays and Randall Mays, informing them of my plans and encouraging their participation. In return, I received complete and utter silence — not even a ‘no thank you.’” Later, he adds, a Clear Channel publicist “fired off a letter to my publisher, threatening a lawsuit if I got any of my facts wrong.”
In their absence, Foege is forced to rely on scattered interviews with former Clear Channel associates and some competitors, as well as the groundbreaking work of other journalists, particularly that of Eric Boehlert of Salon.
The book also suffers from Foege’s uneven writing style. His prose can be as clear as a 50,000-watt station in the dead of night, only to become muffled a few pages later by crackling static. For starters, there are too many clichés. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess the partnership would create heat,” he writes at one point. At another: “Clear Channel’s executives learned there was more than one way to skin a cat.” In his telling, too many entities are variously “spit out,” “coughed up,” “slurped up” or “hoovered up.”
Still, to those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege’s effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving.
Jacques Steinberg is a media reporter for The Times and the author of “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.”
April 13, 2008
Radio Days
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Skip to next paragraph
RIGHT OF THE DIAL
The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.
By Alec Foege.
294 pp. Faber & Faber. $25.
To those listeners who long for the days when their favorite radio station was independent, eclectic in its programming and as responsive as a tripwire to breaking local news, Clear Channel is nothing less than the Evil Empire. In Internet chat rooms where the media giant’s acquisitions and cost slashing have been tallied as if on a scoreboard — it grew from 43 stations to more than 1,200 from 1995 to 2001 alone — its name is regularly followed by the same expletive typically directed at the Yankees during a game at Fenway Park.
But when Alec Foege, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Spin and Playboy, set out to write the definitive history of a company that possesses more radio stations than any other, he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.
“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”
The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”
While unable to refute the conventional rap against Clear Channel — he finds it responsible for a “McDonald’s approach to radio programming” that makes one city’s offerings largely indistinguishable from another’s — Foege nonetheless succeeds in telling the story of how all this came to pass. The reader is guided from the company’s dusty beginnings in Texas in 1972 to its subsequent acquisition of the company that employed Rush Limbaugh (it still syndicates him on about 600 stations), and from its binge buying, as federal media ownership rules were relaxed in the late 1990s, to the high-tech battering it began receiving from the iPod in the new century.
Even before television and movies surpassed it in the nation’s cultural pecking order, radio was a medium that attracted a disproportionate share of colorful, often shady characters. Foege brings many of them to life, not least the pioneering radio programmer who hitchhiked for days at a time to divine what drivers were listening to (he later helped program XM, the satellite radio channel) or another who presided over a programming meeting where strippers were paraded through (his company was later bought by Clear Channel, and he was installed as a top executive).
Foege is an unabashed radio wonk, but he is particularly adept at translating the medium’s culture and technology for a lay audience. This includes those listeners unaware that their local Clear Channel station may well be operating on autopilot via remote control. He writes: “Clear Channel arguably innovated the practice of importing voice-tracked disc jockeys cross-country, whereby a D.J. in San Jose, Calif., would appear on the air in Boise, Idaho, making occasional references to local haunts, news events and the weather, giving every impression that he was in Boise. In truth, he had recorded his broadcast in San Jose weeks before, aided by a cheat sheet of local reference information.”
And Foege can obviously navigate a balance sheet, to say nothing of a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, taking the reader inside Clear Channel meeting rooms as the stock price of the overstuffed company plummets to $27.17 a share by August 2006 from more than $90 in early 2000. The reader is hardly surprised when Clear Channel begins reducing some of its holdings (including the spinoff of its concert division) before ultimately agreeing to be bought out by a private equity partnership in late 2006.
If there is a gaping hole in Foege’s narrative, it is one largely outside his control: the voices of his main characters are absent — like someone who chooses not to attend a roast being staged in his honor.
The Mays family, which founded and still runs Clear Channel, has long been reluctant to talk to journalists, and Foege has fared no better than previous suitors. “When I received the go-ahead for this book,” he writes, “I wrote multiple letters to Lowry Mays, Mark Mays and Randall Mays, informing them of my plans and encouraging their participation. In return, I received complete and utter silence — not even a ‘no thank you.’” Later, he adds, a Clear Channel publicist “fired off a letter to my publisher, threatening a lawsuit if I got any of my facts wrong.”
In their absence, Foege is forced to rely on scattered interviews with former Clear Channel associates and some competitors, as well as the groundbreaking work of other journalists, particularly that of Eric Boehlert of Salon.
The book also suffers from Foege’s uneven writing style. His prose can be as clear as a 50,000-watt station in the dead of night, only to become muffled a few pages later by crackling static. For starters, there are too many clichés. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess the partnership would create heat,” he writes at one point. At another: “Clear Channel’s executives learned there was more than one way to skin a cat.” In his telling, too many entities are variously “spit out,” “coughed up,” “slurped up” or “hoovered up.”
Still, to those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege’s effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving.
Jacques Steinberg is a media reporter for The Times and the author of “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.”
Monday, January 07, 2008
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
NYT
January 8, 2008
Music
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How serious we look, and how absurd we are.
“Silence is not what we artists want,” Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in “After the Golden Age,” a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press. “We want applause.”
George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic’s hat, wrote that the silence at a London performance of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony represented not rapt attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements, although in Beethoven’s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.
I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr. Hamilton’s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of “La Campanella.”
Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age, yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the first-movement cadenza of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto regularly brought down the house, no matter that the movement wasn’t over.
In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout approval without making a sound.
In describing the hypocrisies of “golden age” pursuers and other nostalgia freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to original instruments and original performance practices, it has to acknowledge original audiences too.
Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power” offers the best metaphor for modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to do with Germanic art’s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata is like Wagner’s “Parsifal,” and listeners should get down on their knees.
Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes. Today’s listeners, still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the final cadences in Donizetti doesn’t make much difference. In “Parsifal” it is a disaster, and a frequent one.
Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical idea of “one man, one recital,” but musical events were usually variety shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players, quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.
Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his violin upside down and on one string.
Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein become lost in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” simply diddling idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.
No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of “Werktreue,” or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the 19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed audiences how hard the piece at hand was.
My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms’s playing his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play the right notes,” he wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.”
There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing the interpretation blow by blow.
Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing, and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It was the most profound concert experience of my life.
January 8, 2008
Music
Concertgoers, Please Clap, Talk or Shout at Any Time
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Concertgoers like you and me have become part police officer, part public offender. We prosecute the shuffled foot or rattled program, the errant whisper or misplaced cough. We tense at the end of a movement, fearful that one of the unwashed will begin to clap, bringing shame on us all. How serious we look, and how absurd we are.
“Silence is not what we artists want,” Kenneth Hamilton quotes Beethoven in “After the Golden Age,” a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries published recently by Oxford University Press. “We want applause.”
George Bernard Shaw, wearing his music critic’s hat, wrote that the silence at a London performance of Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony represented not rapt attention but audience distaste. Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements, although in Beethoven’s case the point is moot, given that hardly anybody played more than one movement of a Beethoven sonata at a time.
I owe this information, along with most of the anecdotes that follow, to Mr. Hamilton’s delightful book, which you should read. People, he writes, also clapped while the music was going on. When Chopin played his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” with orchestra, the audience bestowed its showstopping approval after every variation. As late as 1920, a Berlin audience was applauding Ferruccio Busoni in the middle of “La Campanella.”
Liszt, the composer of that piece, was observed in dignified old age, yelling bravos from the audience as Anton Rubinstein played Mozart’s A minor Rondo. Hans von Bülow boasted to his students that his performance in the first-movement cadenza of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto regularly brought down the house, no matter that the movement wasn’t over.
In condemning modern recitals as canned, without spontaneity, literal and deadened by solemnity, Mr. Hamilton sometimes overstates the case. In the best of circumstances silence during a good performance becomes something palpable, not just an absence of noise. Involved audiences can shout approval without making a sound.
In describing the hypocrisies of “golden age” pursuers and other nostalgia freaks, on the other hand, he has a point. If music is to go back to original instruments and original performance practices, it has to acknowledge original audiences too.
Elias Canetti’s 1960 book “Crowds and Power” offers the best metaphor for modern concerts: the Roman Catholic Mass. Worshipers accept instructions from an executive operating from a raised platform at the front. They speak when spoken to and otherwise shut up. Mr. Hamilton attributes a lot of this recently acquired holiness to the recording age, but I think it has more to do with Germanic art’s taking itself deadly seriously. Every Mozart sonata is like Wagner’s “Parsifal,” and listeners should get down on their knees.
Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing “so loud that it made it difficult for the ladies to talk,” Mr. Hamilton writes. Today’s listeners, still eager to make themselves known, have been reduced to subversive acts in a fascistic society. When they are not interested, they cough. Operagoers long to be the first to be heard as the curtain falls. Anticipating the final cadences in Donizetti doesn’t make much difference. In “Parsifal” it is a disaster, and a frequent one.
Concerts were different back then. Liszt could get away with the radical idea of “one man, one recital,” but musical events were usually variety shows in the manner of vaudeville. The star pianist or violinist was just an occasionally recurring act in a parade of singers, orchestra players, quartets and trios. When Liszt did his solo acts, there was none of the march-on, march-off stage ritual of today. Liszt greeted patrons at the door, mingled in the audience and schmoozed with friend and stranger alike.
Whole recitals also took place between acts of an opera or movements of a symphony. When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by playing his violin upside down and on one string.
Memorization was evidently as much prized in the 1800s as it is now, though people like Chopin and Beethoven thought that playing with scores increased accountability. Virtuosos like Anton Rubinstein learned by heart but frequently forgot what they had memorized. I once heard Arthur Rubinstein become lost in Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” simply diddling idly on the piano for a while before remembering what came next.
No one seemed to mind mistakes. If Liszt landed on a wrong note, he would treat it as a modulation, inventing a new passage on the spot. The idea of “Werktreue,” or honoring what the score says, was a weaker argument in the 19th century. Bülow told pupils that the occasionally planted clinker showed audiences how hard the piece at hand was.
My favorite music criticism is from a German on Brahms’s playing his own B flat Piano Concerto. “Brahms did not play the right notes,” he wrote, “but he played like a man who knew what the right notes were.”
There are still flickers of audience involvement in concerts, but so brainwashed are we by prevailing decorum that they make us nervous. Once in Havana I became troubled by two men in front of me talking excitedly during a performance of a Liszt piano concerto until I realized they were arguing the interpretation blow by blow.
Another time, late on a Spanish evening many years ago, I heard a village band competition at the bullring in Valencia. The playing was astonishing, and as a particular performance gradually took hold of the audience, low hums of approval would grow into something approaching wordless roars. It was the most profound concert experience of my life.
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