The 40 Year-Old Genius

The 12-Year Old Genius was Stevie Wonder’s first live album, even though it was released when he was actually 13. He may have been 12 when the recordings were made, so I’m willing to give Motown the benefit of the doubt here. Anyway, it features a bunch of songs that would become staples of his, one of which (“Fingertips”) made it onto the excellent 3-LP Looking Back compilation that I bought at the brilliant used records store (indeed, it’s actually called Marvelous Records) on 40^th street in West Philly.

Genius, though, is one of those tough words. I have to admit that, in general I don’t really buy what the word is trying to get at (and here I am ascribing agency to words!). I don’t really believe that certain people are “geniuses”—somehow above and beyond the usual capacities of intelligence—and others aren’t. I know that it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in musical/musicological discourse around people like Beethoven, Mozart, Ellington, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, and my man, Stevie. Obviously, the concept of the “genius” has done a lot of damage in conjunction with European colonial projects, and it has only recently been appropriated by groups (women, people of color, etc.) that were formerly on the receiving end of the genius stick, so to speak. Guy is writing about genius right now, so, who knows, maybe he’ll drop something that will help me come to better terms with the word, though I somehow think that just appropriating the word against the power structure isn’t the answer either, unless it’s a “strategic” (see Spivak) appropriation. Oh, ha ha ha. I’m so clever. Gotta love it whenever you can work in a Spivak reference.

Anyway, the MacArthur genius grants were just announced last week, and I’ve taken something of an interest in them, if only because I personally know fairly well two people who have received them in the past and the MacArthur people have given a lot of much-needed money to jazz musicians over the years (Max Roach, George Russell, Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn). The great thing about the MacArthur genius grants, I think, is that it gives money to interesting people to work on projects that they may have a difficult time finding popular support for.

So this year, Alex Ross, classical critic for The New Yorker, author of the award-winning and bestselling book The Rest is Noise, and keeper of a blog of the same name won a genius grant this year. Now, let me get this out of the way first. I really like Alex Ross’s blog. I really like his writing for The New Yorker. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Rest is Noise (the book), and I look forward to reading what he writes in the future. I also feel a little bit validated that his taste in music is pretty similar to mine (Dylan, Radiohead, minimalism—though I just can’t get into Sibelius the way that he is. It reminds me too much of bad film music).

But I still can’t help but be a little bit surprised that he won a genius grant. The Rest is Noise is great, but it isn’t really a fresh look at anything. I mean, OK, maybe it was the first time that some of the more recent 20^th century classical composers were talked about in an intelligent way in a book put out by a major press. But there’s nothing revolutionary about the way that he writes the history. It’s incredibly competent, well-informed, with interesting opinions and interpretations. But that’s it.

I mean, maybe the MacArthur people know something I don’t and that he’s got a great project in the works that he just needs a bit of bread to finish, and it’s going to knock us all on our asses. But I somehow doubt it.

I think this is also a case of the rich getting richer. I mean, Alex Ross is probably the best known writer about music (period—classical, jazz, popular, whatever) in the world. He writes for one of the most prestigious publications in the English language. His book was published by Random House and sold a bunch of copies—probably about as many copies as all of the musicological books published last year by university presses combined. (I’m exaggerating. I have no idea what the comparison is. But that seems like it could at least possibly be true.) His book won a ton of awards (National Book Critics Circle Award, and a bunch of others I don’t remember right now and can’t be bothered to look up.) This isn’t a person lacking in resources or recognition.

I have no idea how the MacArthur people pick these things, but I can’t help but think that this was a case of jumping on the bandwagon here. Whatever, I don’t begrudge Ross the money and the recognition because, again, I think he does good work. I just think that there was probably somebody out there doing as interesting work who really could use the institutional support the MacArthur Foundation provides. 500 grand buys a lot of ramen noodles.

And I Ain't Talking About Ritz

The other thing, in terms of old business is this. So Cath and I watched a lot of television when we were in Boston for a couple of reasons. Her parents have cable and we don’t. The TV was in our room. And we were doing a lot of sort of mindless things (packing, putting together envelopes with documents) and the TV was nice to have on to help pass the time. Plus, we have a slight addiction to Law and Order, and Comedy Central was showing a marathon of Chappelle’s Show.

But the other network we watched a lot of was the Food Network. Don’t get me started on the various chefs on this network and the bizarre personalities that they either have or affect. But one thing in particular stands out. Paula Deen, the older woman with a Southern accent (though I’m reasonably certain she’s from, like, New Jersey, and not Savannah, Georgia, like her wikipedia page says) was preparing an engagement dinner for her brother Bubba (really). She made homemade pork rinds by (if I remember correctly) baking the skin off a ham. When she made them, they were really crispy and looked very tasty, although I have to confess that I’ve never actually eaten a pork rind. In fact, they were so crispy that when she cracked one, she described the sound it made as, “That’s music to a cracker’s ear.”

Really? “Music to a cracker’s ear?” I clearly know what she was getting at, but I have to admit that I was surprised to hear such a thing on television. Is “cracker” being reclaimed as a term of endearment? I know that lots of people (including my former professor at Columbia, Aaron Fox, and my current Penn colleague, Jennie Noakes) have written about how terms like “redneck” and “hillbilly” are being used within communities, after having formerly been used by outsiders as terms of abuse. (And for our purposes, it’s particularly interesting that this often happens around music. Also, there’s obviously a huge discourse about this with the n-word, too.) But cracker? At least according to our friends at urbandictionary.com, the etymology of that word comes from the crack of a slavemaster’s whip, hardly the type of thing one would want to rehabilitate and valorize. In fact, my experience is that “cracker” is primarily used by African-Americans to refer to white racists. Is this something that Paula Deen wants to identify with?

Whatever. I mean, I understand that words only have the meanings that we choose to give them, that no meaning is self-evident, that there’s a “struggle for the possession of the sign” (Hebdige), that “il n’y a pas hors-texte” (Derrida), and that words are free-floating signifiers. And I should also put it out there that I don’t really have any stake in this game. The peculiar kind of semi-urban Upper Midwestern Lutheran whiteness that I was born into doesn’t really contain “crackers.” I like to think it’s because there isn’t very much racism in the community I grew up in, but that may just be me looking back with rose-colored glasses.

So, what’s up with “cracker”? Is this a term of endearment now? Can I call one of my white friends a “cracker” and have it taken the right way. And for my purposes, the other thing that I’m really interested in is: is there music out there that deals with “crackers” in a positive light? Questions, questions.

I Won't Drive a Truck Anymore

OK, so I'm in Guatemala now, which is very nice. Everything went according to plans in terms of planes arriving, baggage arriving, people meeting us at the airport in Guatemala City (which is super space-age, by the way), getting on a bus to Xela, getting picked up from the bus stop in Xela, getting dropped off with our nice host family, etc. But rather than this blog becoming just a travelogue, I'm going to try to keep writing about musical things. So . . .

We first flew from Boston to Houston. I finally made it to Texas for this first time this past spring for the Society for American Music Conference in San Antonio, at which I delivered the Wynton paper ("The World According to Wynton: Musical Political Critique in From the Plantation to the Penitentiary) that I'm working on submitting for publication. I never made it to Houston, and I guess I can't really say that spending a few hours in George H. W. Bush Aiport (yikes!—but at least it's him and not Bush 43) means that I've been to Houston, either. Mostly, what I know of Houston is that it's hot, smoggy, tied up heavily in the oil industry, and featured in a great Steve Earle song, "Home to Houston." The first three of those may be balanced out by the fourth.

"Home to Houston" is on his album The Revolution Starts Now, which came out in 2004. That summer, I worked at the Columbia Music Library on their card catalog, going through and matching their old paper catalog with the online version. It was incredibly mindless work, but the great thing about it was that I just listened to headphones the whole time, and I got to set my own hours. So it was in the run-up to the 2004 elections and, mindless liberal that I am, I remember listening to a lot of Air America radio. And this album was advertised basically non-stop, since it's supposed to be a political album. (It also has a song, somewhat bizarrely, about how attractive Condaleeza Rice is.) Rhapsody—the online music service that I love (can I get an endorsement contract?—has hilarious biographies of artists and reviews of some albums. I think that they say of Steve Earle: "he makes the kind of music that will have Michael Moore dancing in the street." And that, I gotta see.

Anyway, "Home to Houston" is about a truck driver who joins the army and is sent to Iraq. I'm not sure what kind of change of heart he encounters while there, if he becomes against the war, if this isn't what he thought he signed up for, or if he is just homesick and scared, but the ending line of each verse is "God, get me back home to Houston alive, and I won't drive a truck anymore." It's a great song, set to a kind of rockabilly style beat, with some witty lyrics, "Sergeant on the radio hollerin' at me, he said/'Look out up ahead, here come the R.P.G.'"

I have to admit to growing to like Steve Earle quite a bit, and I also like the fact that his fans span a bizarre range of people. For instance, Sugarland—the pop country band that's currently pretty popular—has a song called "Steve Earle" about how much the female lead singer in the group has a crush on Steve Earle. Who would have thought that she would be interested in this grizzled, ex-drug addict, alt-country playing dude?

Alt-country, by the way, is one of my least favorite genre names, but perhaps one of my favorite genres. I mean, any genre that takes in Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams (a musician I hate to love), and Wilco is fine by me. But I hate the name—it's such a sort of East Coast elitist type of thing. "Oh, I don't like that country music [remember when it was cool to say that you liked every kind of music except country?], I like alt-country." Actually, what I really think is going on with the way alt-country is used is that it's country music for people who don't like country people. I'm pretty sure that's the subtext here. So let's get a better name. Let's call it country music, with the understanding that that genre name itself is pretty broad and takes in a lot of things, not just the much-lambasted Nashville-style country. Or let's call it folk rock (which most of it sort of sounds like anyway) or something else. Any ideas?

Doppelgangers

The following is a brief exercise in reader-response theory.

I was catching up on reading my old New Yorkers before leaving the country this Friday when I came upon something interesting. It's from a story called, "The Code of the West: What Barack Obama can learn from Bill Ritter." I will quote the opening few sentences, along with my reactions.

"One day in early August, Bill Ritter, Jr., the governor of Colorado, met with Steve Feld . . ."
What? Really? He met with Steve Feld, probably the most famous ethnomusicologist of the last 25 years? That's very strange.

". . . met with Steve Feld, a professional filmmaker,"
OK, I know that Feld has done a lot of things with film over the years. When he was at colloquium at Penn a few years ago, he showed a film that he had made in Ghana that would be shown in 2007 on the occassion of the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence. But no mention of the fact that he is better known as an ethnomusicologist (and that he won a MacArthur)?

". . . a professional filmmaker, to work on the video that will welcome delegates to the Democratic National Convention--and present Colorado to the rest of the country."
Hmmm, I know that he now teaches at the University of New Mexico, so I guess it makes sense for him to make a video about Colorado. It's close enough.

" . . . to the rest of the country. Feld, whose television credits include 'The New Lassie' and 'America's Funniest People,'"
OK. What the hell? I know that Feld is a polymath and all, but this is ridiculous. What is he doing directing lame television shows?

" . . . and 'America's Funniest People,' steered the Governor toward a conference room on the seventeenth floor of a downtown building and clipped a microphone to his lapel."
I'm still getting over my shock that Steve Feld is directing episodes of 'The New Lassie' (which I've never even heard of anyway). How come this hadn't made the rounds of ethnomusicological gossip?

So, the full text now, for your reading pleasure.

"One day in early August, Bill Ritter, Jr., the governor of Colorado, met with Steve Feld, a professional filmmaker to work on the video that will welcome delegates to the Democratic National Convention--and present Colorado to the rest of the country. Feld, whose television credits include 'The New Lassie' and 'America's Funniest People,' steered the Governor toward a conference room on the seventeenth floor of a downtown building and clipped a microphone to his lapel."

Intrigued, I went to imdb.com to find out more about the bizarre parallel schlock television career of a highly respected ethnomusicologist. Quickly, I realized something. The person in the New Yorker story wasn't really Steve Feld. Or, actually, it was, but the ethnomusicologist I know actually is Steven Feld. So they're two different people.

I don't know which one of them came first, but I wonder if there was ever any confusion between the two of them (other than my own), and if either one of them changed the name they go by professionally in order to distinguish themselves. I think it is probably true in this day and age that having a name that is easily google-able is very important. So this includes both having a unique name and a name that people can spell easily. One of the reasons I go by John Paul Meyers (at least professionally) is because there are already quite a few John Meyerses out there. JohnMeyers.com is the website of some guy who works for HUD, which is great, but it isn't going to help people find me online and, I don't know, offer me a job. And John Myers (a perhaps more common spelling of my last name) is already an ethnomusicologist--I read his book about pipa music while studying for spots a few summers ago. So, I like the fact that the 3rd, 4th, and 5th hits on google for "John Paul Meyers" all refer to me. Maybe if I type it a few more times here, this page will show up on google, too . . .

If You Hear Any Noise . . .

. . . it's just George Clinton with a new album coming out on Tuesday, George Clinton and His Gangsters of Love. The Boston Globe has a preview story about the album, which is apparently mostly an album of old R&B and doo-wop tunes with special guests including RCHP, Sly Stone, and Carlos Santana. It was Carlos, of course, who got the ball rolling with the old-legend-does-big-album-with-lots-of-special-guests. And I also blame him for the fact that I hear the Michelle Branch song that he played guitar on every single time that I go into the grocery store.

But no doubt this album will be more interesting than Supernatural, if only because I don't really believe that Clinton would toe the Clive Davis commercial party line like Santana did. And, having just briefly listened to the samples of the album up on Amazon, I'm intrigued that the track "Heaven" samples one of my favorite Prince songs, "If I Was Your Girlfriend."

And while we're on the topic of George Clinton (and let's be honest, when aren't we on that topic?), did anyone notice the way that Young Jeezy's new album cover seems to be referencing Clinton? The picture above from Clinton's Greatest Hits album isn't the best representation, but there are a ton of close-up images of Clinton around with his dreads framing his face. So that's what the picture of Young Jeezy with (apparently) an American flag around his face immediately called to my mind. Anyway, you be the judge.

In Space It's Always 1982

Hmmm, was disco really still around in 1982, as the disco ball in the first few frames of this ad would have us believe? The mythical end of disco (Disco Demolition Night at a White Sox-Tigers game in Chicago) was in 1979. The actual background music for this ad, a vaguely jazz-inspired vibes-and-flute piece is, at least for me, more associated with the 1960s and early 1970s (Austin Powers-era) than with mid-1970s disco. Racially and culturally, these musics have very different referents.

And it may be a little bit dicey for Obama to try to bash the culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. After all, isn't that when he (born 1961) came of age? But then again, from what we know about Obama's musical tastes from this time in his youth (Stevie and Coltrane is what I've heard mentioned), he's not in any danger. He was cooler than disco then, and this ad is trying to show that he's cooler than disco now.

Music Mediated and Live in The New Yorker

(with a tip of the hat to Charles Keil's "Music Mediated and Live in Japan," one of the first academic articles about karaoke)

Sasha Frere-Jones has a short essay in The New Yorker about the phenomenon of the usage of laptops in live performance. Check it out.

Otherwise, I haven't had too much time recently to listen to music (or think about it and write up my thoughts here). But Kanye's got a new single, which doesn't have any rapping--it's completely sung by Kanye with Auto-Tune on it. You can hear it on his blog, here. Or, you can see the live performance of it from the VMAs, here. Evidently he's got a new album coming out this year with a great title, 808's & Heartbreak. Is he going to be singing on the album, as he is on this single? Only time will tell.

It's All Too Much

I'm pretty sure that this video deconstructs itself, but allow me just a few words of comment.

I first saw this video when I watched the Michael Phelps/Husain Bolt games a few weeks ago, known in some parts, I gather, as "The Olympics." But evidently the commercial had been airing for some time now--I just don't watch much television.

So first of all, the music, which is what I know best. The commercial uses as a backing track "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream. However, I would guess that it's not the original version of the song from Disraeli Gears (incidentally, one of the LPs I stole from my dad's record collection), but a copy of it newly-recorded for the occasion by some studio musician geeks. I say this because I think that Just for Men would have actually had to negotiate with Cream (or whomever own their music these days) for the rights to use the original recording. It's probably cheaper just to pay the standard royalties to cover the song and get some guys to copy the original sound as faithfully as possible. (And you should all know that I'm resisting the postmodern urge to put "faithfully" and "original" in scare quotes.) This also works because the snippet of the song used in the commercial is instantly recognizable to the desired audience without the use of vocals--which are harder to copy exactly (there's a Barthesian/Benjaminian argument about grain, aura, and presence here, but we'll pass it by). In fact, "Sunshine of Your Love" may be relatively unique in being a "classic" rock song (couldn't resist the scare quotes there) that has a fairly long instrumental section (at least, long enough for a 30-second commercial) that is still easily recognizable. And, interestingly enough, it shares with other candidates for this honor --such as "Smoke on the Water" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"--a heavy reliance on our old friends, the first, second, flatted third, fourth, raised fourth, fifth, and flatted seventh scale degrees of the blues scale. I will leave it to you to reflect on the implications of that.

Anyway, so this commercial is clearly meant to be appealing to Baby Boomers, a generation that includes those born in the United States between 1945 and about 1960. I just finished reading a hilariously polemical book by Joe Queenan titled Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation that gets at some of the things that I find interesting and amusing about this commercial. Queenan writes:

"Baby Boomers are embarrassing the entire nation through their misguided obsession with remaining youthful in both appearance and behavior in spite of the biological facts and social imperatives working against them. Traditionally, older people in most societies have functioned as wise, respected mentors to younger generations. But how could any young person today possibly take advice from a fifty-three-year-old man wearing a baseball cap turned backward, perched on roller blades, who is contemplating a stint at Burning Man?"

Burning Man (which, did you hear, had a major dust storm?) may be a bit too edgy for this crowd. But other than that, the obsession with youth is one of the things I find most interesting about this commercial. And, by the way, I don't think that Baby Boomers are alone in being obsessed with their youth. I think everyone is, but the Baby Boomers may be the first generation with the size, influence, and economic clout to have entire industries devoted to recapturing, re-living, and replaying their youth. This is particularly apparent now that Baby Boomers are all reaching retirement age--and perhaps a newfound freedom from the responsibilities of work and raising children, a freedom they haven't experienced since, well, the sixties. Maybe they'll be entering a second sixties now of free love (aided by Viagra and Cialis this time, not the Pill) and antiwar protest. Let's twist again, like we did last summer, even if last summer was 40 years ago.

In other ways, though, I don't think that commercials like this (and the topic that I study, tribute band performance) are really about re-living or re-experiencing a past. I think they're about experiencing it for the first time. I think most Boomers didn't go to Woodstock, didn't live in a hippie commune in San Francisco, weren't at Kent State. And yet, they've had (and we've all had) an endless parade of mediated images from these events and assorted talking heads and other "experts" telling us that these are the really important events, these are the events that defined a generation. But how terrible to be ostensibly a member of the Baby Boomer generation and to have missed out on the things that are, apparently, basic to your existence.

The good news is that you've got another chance. You can party, protest, and play guitar in a rock 'n' roll band. "Just take those old records off the shelf," as Bob Seger says. But first, why not just get rid of a little bit of that gray.