In December 2008 15 year
old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot by the police. US percussion
player Matt Weston, of whom I think I never heard, created a tribute
to Grigoropoulos' memory, which is a powerful, loud work of electronics,
turntablism (it seems, it might also be the kaos pad), and percussive
instrumental bits, all recorded loud, in your face, without becoming
too obvious noise based. This is also only partly rooted in the
world of improvised music, but perhaps owes more to old good musique
concrete in the old analogue sense of the word. Quite a powerful
work of heavy electronics for a heavy subject.
A new orchestra piece, composed, arranged, performed and produced by Matt Weston. Cover design/artwork by Plum Crane. Here's an early review from Dave X at Startling Moniker:
This is not an EP. It’s a three-track, sixteen-minute treasure, filled
to the brim with Weston’s signature percussion and electronics. If Tom
Waits was an orca (a drunken orca, natch) then he’d make music like
“You’re Not That’s Right,” which opens the disc. Off-kilter, sobbing
kettle drum noises issue mournful wails amongst the careless clattering
of tin. “I Just Saw Fog and Dust” brings us to a clearing in an
electronic cuckoo forest, where Weston is a one-man Arkestra.
Amazingly, this doesn’t seem too hyperbolic as I listen to it for the
umpteenth time today. But really, nothing compares to the final act,
which I have described poorly as sounding like an ocean liner AND a
freight train capsizing in the Arctic. “This October, All Octobers” is
Weston’s opus– an arresting and majestic work of musique concrète that
not only evokes nostalgic disaster and sci-fi film, but simultaneously
re-awakens listeners to the immense power of sound. Most highly recommended.
Seasick Blackout will be released on December 22, 2009. It will be available on iTunes, in record stores, and through the 7272Music website. You can hear excerpts here.
December 3rd marks the 30th anniversary of the Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati. The what and how of the incident has been more than amply detailed elsewhere (starting with Chet Flippo's detailed and probing 1980 cover story in Rolling Stone).
More than any other band of similar stature in the 70s, the Who explicitly addressed class politics.
The key difference between the motivations of the Who and those of,
say, Led Zeppelin is that the Who spoke for, to, from, and with their
audience, always looking for the kind of give-and-take that
defined them in their formative years as the favorite band of working-class London
mods; Led Zeppelin only needed the audience as passive affirmation of
their cool solos and pants. No audience input beyond that was
necessary, much less desired. This difference in aims between the two
bands (or rather, between the Who and nearly every other 1970s arena-rock band) was part of what sent the Who into a tailspin of frustration and
confusion. As Daltrey said in the mid-70s, "At one time, the kids told
the musicians what they wanted. Now they sit back and let the
musicians preach to them." The Who were more frustrated by this turn
of events than any band of their era; indeed, such an arrangement was
advantageous to many of the large-scale arena-fillers that now
pervaded the scene. They didn't have to challenge their audience, and
their audience didn't challenge them (or, more accurately, the bands
simply ignored any challenges from the audience). Everyone was happy,
or so it was assumed.
In an age when the demographics of rock & roll are symbolized in
part by a Les Paul hanging on the wall of a CEO's office,
the idea that a rock band playing at a sports arena once represented an
unwanted and unwelcome intrusion seems difficult to grasp.
Yes, the rock fans who filled the arenas (and represented their surest
draws, often keeping them in the black when sporting events couldn't) in the
1970s might have been as rowdy as the sports fans, but to the venue
owners they still represented remnants of the counterculture, the younger brothers
and sisters of anti-war activists (or Vietnam vets
themselves), holdovers from the 60s wanting to test and stretch the
limits of official tolerance. The arena owners responded in kind by
forcibly herding the audience into vast open spaces with shitty
acoustics, treating them with the kind of contempt only workers footing
the boss' bills could engender. In the case of Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, the policy seemed to be that only 4 out of 16 doors were opened for massive throngs who had been gathering for hours in order to get the best seats. Previous incidents at shows by Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Paul McCartney were ignored by the promoters and arena security. Fuck these kids, right? Their enthusiasm is annoying, and they don't deserve much better than to be shoved into dangerous bottlenecks.
In December of 1979 Pete Townshend was back on the road with the Who, about
18 months after he swore never to tour again, and 16 months after Keith
Moon died. As is largely forgotten now (understandably, given the
lifeless shows on their early 80s tours),
their 1979 performances, with former Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones
on drums, were widely praised. There seemed to be a renewed sense of
purpose, though without new material, that purpose wasn't entirely clear. Just
how entrenched the Who were in what was quickly cohering into the new
mainstream of mass entertainment didn't become apparent until the
Cincinnati tragedy. As Dave Marsh pointed out, "[the Who] were especially shaken not
just by the fact that something like this could happen at a rock gig
but by the fact that it happened at theirs."
Mike Royko wrote about the Cincinnati concert's attendees as "barbarians" (somewhat incredibly without affixing a shred of blame to the greedy concert promoters or inept police and security at the scene -- in fact, Royko didn't mention them at all). This prompted a slew of angry letters from which Royko naturally chose the most poorly-written to bolster his case. But this was a world that was utterly alien to Royko, under all circumstances (Walter Cronkite displayed a similarly embarrassing unwillingness to meet the culture on its own terms by lazily branding the concertgoers "a drug-crazed mob of kids"). Townshend spelled out the difference between rock audiences and the mainstream entertainment industry (which, at the time of this interview -- 1974 -- were still relatively distinct and separate) at :20 in this clip:
Five days after Cincinnati the Who played at Chicago's International Amphitheater. The concert was broadcast via closed-circuit to movie theaters around the Chicagoland area (one of which was the Varsity Theater in Evanston, where as a kid I had my first exposure to Beatles films, Monterey Pop, The Producers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Ken Russell's campy deconstruction of the Who's Tommy -- and I still wish Russell had taken Townshend's suggestions and cast Stevie Wonder and, no kidding, Charles Mingus). While the rest of the band is reliably solid, Townshend is coked to the gills and drunk off his ass. He seems bent on wiping out any memory of the Cincinnati tragedy as self-destructively as possible, but at one point during "Music Must Change" he spears the camera with a look that says, "Is this what you want? Is this what you, the audience, are willing to die to see? Is this what you promoters are willing to endanger peoples' lives for?" and tears into a series of staggering windmills, determined to confront everything in that instant (at 6:32 in the following clip).
Sadly, subsequent concert tragedies are little more than footnotes
in the histories of those bands, and even less of a part of what Greil Marcus called the "rock &
roll frame of reference." In January, 1991 three fans were killed at
an AC/DC concert
in Salt Lake City. In May, 1996 a young Irish fan was killed in the
mosh pit of a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Dublin. And in June, 2000
nine concertgoers were trampled at the front of the stage during Pearl
Jam's set at the Roskilde festival in Denmark. In a way, it could
almost be argued that the Cincinnati tragedy laid the groundwork for
such incidents to be seen as commonplace -- and for promoters to
continue the practice of "festival seating," conveniently blaming the
bands and audiences for any problems, and absolving themselves of any
responsibility, despite the greed that set the stage for these
tragedies in the first place. The more of these incidents that occur, the more promoters and other assorted music-business weasels can claim it's just something that goes with the territory.
Not that the bands
involved -- and the Who in particular -- were entirely blameless. In the
aftermath of Cincinnati Roger Daltrey proclaimed they would do
"everything we can" to prevent future incidents. But not only did the
band continue to play general admission shows, they played them in
massive arenas and stadiums, some with several times the capacity of Riverfront Coliseum. At a number of shows on their 1982 tour they
had to urge the (sometimes 90,000+) crowd to move back. In 2006
Townshend made reference to their "long time ban...with very few
exceptions" on general admission shows, which was pretty disingenuous
given that no fewer than eight of the shows on their 1982 tour -- in the largest venues possible -- were
general admission, as were many of the shows on their 1989 tour. I don't want to suggest that the Who were unfeeling or uncaring about the situation (and on numerous pre-1979 concert recordings you can hear band members asking the crowd to move back -- they obviously had some sense of the potential dangers of general admission shows). But, like any business that puts profit above the health and well-being of people, the music industry simply couldn't sit around and wait for things to be properly sorted out. There's a show tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next, and for the band to cancel the tour to stay in town and speak with the victims' families (something Townshend in retrospect regretted they hadn't done) will just cut into the loot.
Greil Marcus pointed out in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Townshend that Cincinnati
"...has
not become part of the rock & roll frame of reference, as Altamont
instantly and permanently did. It seems to me that it was an event
that should have signified that something new about the relationship
between bands and their audiences, or about rock & roll as mass
culture, was taking place. It ought to have forced people to reexamine
a lot of assumptions, a lot of what they took for granted. That hasn't
happened."
As Dave Marsh wrote in Before I Get Old, "Nor would the new Who ever encourage it to happen. That was perhaps the biggest tragedy of all."
Woodstock for me has always uneasily see-sawed between solipsistic self-congratulatory hippie bullshit and a genuine political expression of struggle, solidarity, and liberation. Of course, it could have been both. But the most penetrating and enduring performances also wade waist-deep in the mud of the festival's contradictions. For one thing, the pop festivals of the 1960s did not develop and evolve out of any adherence to some vaguely-expressed hippie ideals. As Dave Marsh wrote in Before I Get Old: The Story Of The Who:
In the wake of Monterey, the festival had become the fashion among hippie promoters. Replacing the package show concept, in which a group of performers traveled to small knots of listeners, the festival put together a lump of performers in one place and let the audience come to them -- in vast numbers.
There were few advantages for festival attendees over, say, a package-show type of presentation; those who most vigorously championed the festival concept were the promoters who earned vastly greater amounts of money than they would have promoting any other type of concert. The promise of a certain level of tolerance for things like open pot-smoking was the promoters' justification for shafting the audience in every other possible way. Marsh again:
The comfort and needs of the festival audience were afterthoughts. Sound systems were barely adequate to fill the open spaces with noise, much less music. Toilet and sanitation facilities were scant. If it rained, the audience sat in mud and discomfort for up to three days; if it was beatiful and sunny and hot, backs and faces became blistered. Outside of the promoter-controlled concession stands, there was no way to obtain food and drink. The acts who came on before the stars were often lame or incompetent, leaving the crowd to entertain itself.
What the festival promoters were selling was, in terms of the entertainment industry, no less exploitative of the audience than other prior modes of presentation, and in fact, far more so. As Marsh pointed out,
The festival audience came to celebrate a spirit that eventually disintegrated in their faces, and strangest and nastiest of all, they were willing to pay up for the privilege and resented anyone who questioned their wisdom. This does not endorse the logic of the law-and-order Right, which wished to quell the festivals because they still represented a ghost of hope for the youth counterculture as a community. But licentious opportunity was finally the only justification for the festivals, even if the drug-taking and sex were decadent in the long run. Ultimately, the pop festival served to reestablish the old order of the entertainment business: Star time had come to the hippie generation.
The incident with Abbie Hoffman during the Who's set at Woodstock would seem to place the band, or at least Pete Townshend, firmly in the camp of the apolitical. Not only had the Who not wanted to appear at the festival but, as Marsh writes,
The Who had no use for the rhetoric of hippie pastoralism that ruled at Woodstock. ... They'd all paid enough dues to have rid themselves of any illusions about the nearness of glamour to squalor. Townshend was naturally in sympathy with some hippie goals; Daltrey paid them lip service; Entwistle ignored them; Moon actively hated them.
Disturbingly, a 1967 radio spot by Townshend encouraging enlistment in the US Air Force at the height of the Vietnam war would, not unreasonably, have casual observers assuming that the Who weren't apolitical; they were downright right-wing.
While he later said he was mortified about the radio spot (which wasn't widely aired, hence the lack of audience backlash -- critic and Who fanatic John Swenson said, "If I'd heard that spot in 1967, I'd never have become a fan of the Who"), in early 2002 a confused and deeply reactionary Townshend wrote, "Maybe I was naive. But recent events make me wonder who was right or wrong." (Marsh -- who, in Before I Get Old, excoriated Townshend for the Air Force spots -- responded to Pete's right-wing revisionism here).
During their set at Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman jumped on stage just as they finished playing "Pinball Wizard," attempted to put things in perspective, and was nearly impaled by the headstock of Townshend's guitar:
In the immediate aftermath of the incident Townshend called it "the most political thing I ever did." But he quickly revised his view and surprisingly (for Townshend, who has made a habit of contradicting and reversing himself about everything else in his past), that view has remained consistent in the ensuing decades:
1970: "Quite honestly, I mean knock for knock, everything Abbie Hoffman said was very fair."
1987: "I deeply regret [hitting Hoffman]. If I was given the opportunity again, I would stop the show. Because I don't think rock & roll is that important."
1999: "My motivation was that people had come for music, not speeches -- and if Abbie hadn't been so stoned, perhaps I'd have reacted different. But what he was arguing for was very valid."
(In a recent piece in Relix, Marsh calls Hoffman's outburst "the only expressly political comment from the stage" during the festival. This ignores not only Country Joe's "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag," but also Joan Baez' "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill." But it is true that Hoffman's statement was the only one that weekend to truly confront hippie navel-gazing.)
As for the performance itself, it was the typical Who performance of the day, which is to say, visceral on a level, and in a manner, attainable only by a handful of artists. Roger Daltrey called it "the worst gig we ever played," fighting as they were against sleeplessness and their unwitting ingestion of acid from the spiked water, coffee, and soda backstage (the Who weren't exactly straight-edge, but they had all long sworn off psychedelics). This is the Who playing, in their view, well below their standard:
One of the other obviously epochal performances of the festival was that of Jimi Hendrix. As the festival naturally ran long, Hendrix went on Monday morning, instead of the Sunday night he was scheduled for. So he "only" played for an audience of 25,000 (which qualifies as an "only" compared to the half a million or so at the festival's peak). His band, the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, included Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell and Jimi's old Army buddy Billy Cox on bass, in his first performance with Hendrix. The lineup also included guitarist Larry Lee, and percussionists Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez. It's difficult to say whether it was a lack of rehearsal or the fact that they'd probably sat around waiting 9 hours or so for their set that resulted in the somewhat shambolic nature of the performance. Hendrix and Cox are heroic, but Mitchell tends to drag (the other musicians are inaudible, likely due to a combination of confusion on the part of the audio engineers and the fact that the engineers had been up for three days straight). But "heroic" seems woefully inadequate in the face of this:
As for Hendrix' intentions, Juma Sultan recently said, "I think that it meant that we were all Americans and we were happy to be in a free country where we could express ourselves." Given that Hendrix routinely introduced the national anthem in concert by saying, "Here's one you've all been brainwashed with" and interrupting it with "And the flag was still there, big deal," Sultan's interpretation of Hendrix' interpretation rings hollow. As Charles Shaar Murray wrote in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Rock & Roll Revolution,
The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the screams of the dying, the crackle of the flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters ... "The Star Spangled Banner" is probably the most complex and powerful work of American art to deal with the Vietnam war and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche. One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs and movies put together. ... it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves. ... Kurt Weill could have imagined it, Albert Ayler could have played it, but only Hendrix could have hefted the symbolic weight.
Some have interpreted an off-the-cuff utterance by Jimi to Eric Burdon in 1966 as Hendrix' unwavering support for the Vietnam War. A nauseatingly willful misreading of Hendrix' national anthem, using his alleged support of the war as "evidence" that his "Star Spangled Banner" was purely patriotic, and praising its "radiant objectivity" (huh??) and Hendrix' "reverence" for the anthem (what??) appeared on his official website soon after 9/11. It cherry-picked a few quotes from Murray's book and naturally missed this one:
Hendrix knew the score as far as the position of the black GI was concerned: in 'Nam they represented 2 per cent of the officers and were assigned 28 per cent of the combat missions. When he dedicated "Machine Gun" to "all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam," he was neither jiving his audience nor indulging in games, and when he used the uncanny onomatopoeic power of his guitar to evoke the sounds of urban riots and jungle fire-fights -- as he did in "Machine Gun" and "The Star Spangled Banner" -- he used every atom of that knowledge.
Even in the face of how Marsh characterized Woodstock -- "some slick guys figuring out how to make a buck off...the social vision of the 60s" -- expressions like Hendrix' managed to burst through, working against the grain of the galloping corporatization and commodification of said vision.
I've been thinking a bit more about Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis' assertion that "...Jackson's canon actually is much skimpier than those of Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles or any other superstar who had such a massive impact on the culture. ...a total of three keepers out of 10 solo albums." As I pointed out in an earlier post, if you confine the source of his achievements and stature to the Thriller album alone, that's still a degree of worldwide influence that Sinatra, Presley, and the Beatles couldn't achieve with much larger discographies. But the main problem with cataloging Jackson's accomplishments only in terms of albums is that Jackson also made videos and was as dynamic a live performer as has ever walked the earth. To exclude his video and performance work is as misrepresentative as, say, limiting the scope of Neil Young's work to his films and ignoring his records completely.
Critic Bill Wyman's blog Hitsville is a pretty thoughtful and engaging read, but some of what he's written about Jackson lately seems a little confused, if not misguided:
As for Jackson, jesus—his biggest claim to fame is his celebrity qua celebrity. He’s an amazing pop artist, of course, but he’s no Stevie Wonder, to name just one Motown fellow. He’s no Springsteen**, either, and he’s no Prince. A lot of black activists, like the buffoonish Al Sharpton, have been trying to prop up his rep as a breakthrough black artist; I take the point that “Billie Jean” was a watershed for MTV, but Wonder was hitting crazy commercial landmarks in the 1970s. (Songs of the Key of Life debuted at number one, for example, an almost unprecedented event at the time, and while I don’t care much about the Grammys, his dominance of the event in the middle part of the decade was nearly total.)
First of all, the comparison to Springsteen is apples and oranges. And while I personally prefer much of Wonder's work to Jackson's, commercially speaking, records are made to be broken. His "crazy commercial landmarks" were handily eclipsed by Jackson; it doesn't diminish what Wonder did (artistically or commercially), but it's like saying, "I'm suspicious of all the hype surrounding the Concorde. Don't people realize that there was powered flight in 1903?" Jackson's breakthrough via MTV does bear some comparison to Wonder's breakthrough, but Jackson's was on a previously-unimaginable scale. MTV brought him into millions of households that may not have contained a single album by a Black musician, and by reducing the impact of "Billie Jean" to "a watershed for MTV," Wyman seems not to have considered at all what Jackson's ubiquitousness on MTV meant for Black audiences and artists alike.
(It would be years, however, until MTV's racist policies were finally squashed; as late as 1986 only 10 percent of their videos were by Black artists, and when Run-DMC appeared at Live Aid in 1985 -- the only hip-hop act at the event -- MTV's VJs talked over their performance during the live broadcast. Run-DMC was the only act on the broadcast to suffer this fate).
As for Thriller's sales records, or at least how they've been trotted out over the past couple of weeks, Wyman says,
[Thriller was the best-selling album ever in the U.S.] until Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles supplanted it. Now, you’ll, note, everyone talks about how Thriller is the largest selling album worldwide. It probably is, but it’s a conveniently uncheckable factoid; in some twelve days of almost constant coverage, I’ve yet to hear someone say that Thriller is the second best-selling album in U.S. history.
That might be because having the all-time worldwide best-seller is a more significant achievement than having the best-seller in just the U.S. As for it being an "uncheckable factoid," that goes for pretty much all record sales pre-SoundScan (which itself isn't a 100% accurate gauge of sales). In those days, labels routinely claimed records shipped as sold; worldwide sales figures from that era are no more or less reliable than U.S. sales figures. (And if the members of the Eagles were to simultaneously meet with some horrific fatal end, I somehow doubt that the outpouring of grief would be 1/100th of that surrounding Jackson's passing.)
MTV's early racism was a subject missing from most mainstream media coverage of Jackson's passing. This 2006 Jet magazine article reveals that not only was Rick James leading the charge against MTV's racist policies, but his efforts came up against a formidable wall of bullshit in the form of MTV co-founder Les Garland:
The video for [Rick James'] Super Freak, recalls Garland, was not aired because, "Its contents was a little over the top for us, and our standards and practices wouldn't go for it because of the content of the visuals. It had nothing to do with the song. It had nothing to do with him. It was a little over the top for us back then. Then he went on that whole tirade."
Needless to say, Garland is completely full of shit, as anyone who's seen the J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" (in heavy rotation around the time "Super Freak" was shut out) can attest. MTV programming director Buzz Brindle is Garland's brother in shitfullness, saying, "The point I always made was that MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel." Right, and nothing says "rock music" like early-80s heavy-rotation MTV stars The Buggles, Chilliwack, or Duran Duran. Those examples are particularly infuriating for how heavily they borrow/rip off from funk and disco, however ineptly. And the idea, put forth by Garland, that Black acts simply weren't making videos is factually incorrect; among others, some group called the Jacksons made a few videos (whose production values pretty much put everything on MTV to shame). Garland's story about MTV co-founder Bob Pittman eagerly accepting "Billie Jean" strains credibility; around that time Pittman was quoted as saying, "Black and white music have always been separate."
(In 1983,Rock & Rap Confidential -- then known as Rock & Roll Confidential -- did a small piece on MTV's racism which can be found here.)
"You know who plays guitar on that record?" my friend asked, keeping his voice low so as not to attract the attention of our teacher during a school assembly.
"Yeah, that's Eddie Van Halen," I replied. My friend nodded as if to say, we know about something special. A secret shared by about 15 million others at the time.
We were talking about Michael Jackson's new single "Beat It" which, as with every subsequent single of his for the next two years, was inescapable. What was notable about the inescapability of "Beat It" was that every station had to play it. The most backward-looking narrowcasting "classic rock" stations even played it, and frequently (you could literally hear it sandwiched between Foreigner and Styx).
But I mostly listened to Chicago's WLS-AM, which played top 40...which meant the top 40 from roughly 1956 to the present. You would literally hear Chuck Berry, REO Speedwagon, and Prince in the same hour. Jackson's songs seemed to occupy roughly 1/3rd of its playlist from late 1982 to late 1984, so like everyone else who listened to top 40 radio in those days, I was deeply familiar with the singles off Thriller (which is to say, seven out of its nine tracks).
But I didn't actually buy a copy of Thriller (or even hear the whole record) until years later. For the time being, my allegiance was to Duran Duran. I'm not sure why, other than that most of my friends were into Duran Duran and weren't particularly into Michael Jackson. Some Duran Duran records were decent (Rio), some were horrible (everything else), and all of them had shitty singing. But in junior high, fights would break out over who was better, Duran Duran or Michael Jackson (I've often wondered if this was our generation's version of the 70s Ace-Frehley-vs-Jimmy-Page schoolyard brawls). I couldn't argue the case for Duran Duran too strenuously; as much as I liked them at the time, I ultimately knew that Michael Jackson's music wasn't just far superior, but was destined to endure in a way Duran Duran's simply couldn't. Duran Duran sounds hopelessly dated now; Thriller and Off The Wall sound timeless.
Or rather, they would if Quincy Jones hadn't kept putting those moronic horn fills in Jackson's songs. I've heard arguments that Jones was the "real" genius behind Jackson's records. I've heard similar theories about George Martin; a friend once told me that "all the Beatles had to do was sing," which is like saying, "All Michael Jackson had to do was sing" -- if performances that heroic can be so dismissed as an afterthought, I suspect the point of those records is being missed. What's forgotten is that, like the Beatles, Michael Jackson made brilliant music without his supposed puppetmaster, and the puppetmasters (Jones and Martin) almost never made indisputably great music without their supposed puppets. Jackson's home demos of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" and "Billie Jean" show that the arrangements -- Jackson's arrangements -- are complete (and bracing and groundbreaking and a blueprint for future hip-hop arrangements) and nearly identical to those on the master takes. Jones does add strings and horns to "Don't Stop" (as he would to, in a similarly clumsy fashion, "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'") -- a big, bold, brassy horn section, technically proficient, precise, unnecessary, and utterly laughable, the only element of Jackson's records that dates them (and, not coincidentally, the only one not followed up on, or even imitated, by the vast legions of artists influenced by Jackson).
I don't want to suggest that Jones was useless, or that Jackson could have made those records without him. He couldn't have. The role of a producer can be anything from composing and arranging to simply being physically present, but with equal sway over the proceedings. As Jackson's keyboardist Greg Phillinganes put it, Jones was "running the show without really running the show." But the music snobs who grudgingly praised Thriller and Off The Wall's innovations with their disdainful comments about who was really the genius behind them (hint: not Jackson) unwittingly provided another example of how unfathomably broad Jackson's influence was.
In the summer of 1988 I attended the Northwestern High School Music Institute. On the second day, the director of the Institute, a longtime NU band director, gave a speech with some pretty cogent advice for the students (from what I remember, it amounted to, "You might think you're hot shit; but everyone sitting in this room thinks that about themselves too"). But out of nowhere he made some crack about Michael Jackson saying, "Heh...if you can call that music!" I thought, yeah, way to engage the world and encourage us to engage it. I'm not saying he should've uncritically sung Jackson's praises, but I've never considered "music" (like "art") to be a qualitative term, and to offhandedly dismiss anything as "not music" strikes me as ignorant at best (it's like weather: just because the weather sucks doesn't mean it's not weather). I didn't even consider myself a Jackson fan at the time, and I still thought it was a fucked up thing to say. He could've said the same thing about, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber and I would have had the same reaction (though not nearly as strong...and, truth be told, I'm not sure a white composer would have provoked such a flip dismissal). But in slamming Jackson this band director was, intentionally or not, revealing a desire to shut himself off from one of the more important currents in music and, implicitly, encouraging us to do the same.
I finally heard Thriller in its entirety when I was a freshman in college, a used cassette I bought off another student. I also heard Cheap Trick's first record and John Coltrane's "Live" At The Village Vanguard that same week for the first time. By law, the Coltrane record should have negated the Cheap Trick and Jackson records, and while it did have an absolutely massive impact on me, one that hasn't abated to this day, it didn't reveal those other records to be frauds. I've never understood what is ultimately a false dichotomy: that the brilliance and power of one record somehow negates the brilliance and power of others. I've written about this many times before, how the overwhelming influence of the musics of Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Bill Dixon in my life not only didn't kill my interest in other musics, but in fact strengthened it. There are a handful of instances in which such a dichotomy has made sense to me: Sam & Dave surely reveals the Blues Brothers to be the minstrel act they always were, and a John Zorn aficionado's first exposure to, say, Anthony Braxton or Jimmy Lyons would likely reveal the utter lack of depth in Zorn's work. But immersing myself in Coltrane's and Jackson's (and Cheap Trick's) records for those weeks revealed far more common ground (and more crosstalk between those artists) than one might think possible. It's there for all who are willing to listen.
When I finally took a conscious, deliberate listen to Thriller it was somewhat shocking at first; initially, I smiled at what struck me as quaint sonics/production. This was in the early 90s, after years of bombastic, digital-reverb-heavy production in pop music. By comparison, Thriller almost sounded stripped-down, but Jackson's instincts, before his music suffered from his constant second-guessing, were infallible. Thriller still sounds more contemporary than much of the music he's made since. On subsequent records, instead of trying to expand on the groundbreaking arrangements of Thriller, he was mostly flailing around trying to hit a moving (and rapidly fragmenting) target.
In a recent blog post, Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis wrote, "The singular success of 'Thriller' makes it easy to forget that Jackson's canon actually is much skimpier than those of Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles or any other superstar who had such a massive impact on the culture. ...a total of three keepers out of 10 solo albums." Another false dichotomy (and one which inexplicably ignores Jackson's work with his brothers). Just as the mountains of mediocre-to-shitty records that Sinatra and Presley made don't negate the achievements of their great records, Jackson's two indisputable (I haven't heard Bad in years, so I'm reserving judgement on it for now) masterpieces don't somehow disappear because of his more recent subpar records. In fact, such a wide-ranging impact largely centering around one record (Thriller) is something that Sinatra, Presley, and the Beatles were not able to achieve, and I doubt DeRogatis would claim that those artists' respective accomplishments were too dissipated or unfocused.
I'll leave the last word to Dave Marsh who wrote the definitive study of Jackson's heyday-turned-sour (linked above), and wrote this passage for The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, published in 1983. He's cooled on Jackson somewhat since then, but this still rings true for me:
Michael Jackson's importance as a singer was established with the very first Jackson Five singles. His importance as a record-making innovator is somewhat obscured by his collaboration with Quincy Jones (although the difference between the debacle of Jones' work with Donna Summer and the genius of his work with Jackson gives a clue as to who is really boss), but both his songwriting and his production and arranging chops have grown so mightily on [Thriller] that he is now in the very top rank of rock artists measured from the beginning. Like Stevie Wonder, Jackson has been capable of sustaining an artistic persona from preadolescence into adulthood, and theorists of rock's eternal attachment to youth notwithstanding, his music has grown richer and more intelligent with each passing year. Michael Jackson is no longer an optional pleasure for those who pretend to know about American music. He has become a necessity.
Right after I promised myself to start blogging more, I decided to move. So packing has been taking up time that...well, in all honesty, still wouldn't necessarily be spent blogging. I'm still working on my piece for Absurd Records (who knew that hundreds of overdubs could be time-consuming?), and now I'll be doing music for a video game, in addition to my duties with Barn Owl and ThRiLLpiLLow. So blogging is a distant 14th. Anyway, I was looking over Phil Freeman's Running The Voodoo Down blog yesterday and came across this book:
The press release reads:
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst
enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like
Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions
commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news.
However,
while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and
experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde
and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under
similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and
Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to
establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media.
This book
examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and
examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored,
derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense
perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on
interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find
answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?
I have several problems with this, all of which I will catalog right now in excruciating detail. Heh, no, I'm kidding. Just irritating detail. Anytime a critic accuses "people" of "not getting" art my first reaction (well, third; my first impulse is to crank call them, and my second impulse is to concoct an Annie Hall-type scenario in which Stockhausen confronts Stubbs in person) is, "You elitist jagweed!" The most obvious contradiction -- unless Stubbs (or whoever wrote his press release) really believes that a handful of millionaire art collectors constitutes the "general public" -- is, since when does the sale of artwork for "record breaking sums" constitute "mass acceptance" of said artwork? If sale and auction prices are what he's basing everything on, then, by Stubbs' logic, the fact that Sun Ra's original vinyl Saturn records routinely go for anywhere between $100 and $1000 means that the "general public" "gets" Sun Ra. Done and done.
Of course, it's a little dangerous and/or mind-numbingly silly to conflate the purchase of work with "getting" it. So does the person who bought a Rothko work "get" Rothko? How do we know? Who decides? For that matter, how is Stubbs determining that "people" don't "get" Stockhausen? What unit of measurement determines...um...getocity?
I desperately hope this book isn't the latest in a series of "Hey MAN, this music is TOO HEAVY for JOHN Q. SQUARESVILLE to DIG!" There are far too many examples to list that contradict the notion that there has been mass rejection of "experimental" music (which is a pointless term, as all music is experimental): Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, let's say, Radiohead, and the emergence and dominance of hip-hop all should serve as the final nail in the coffin of the "people don't like 'out-there' or 'far-out' music" argument once and for all. If he's keeping his focus narrowed on European composers like Stockhausen, it begs the question, at what point was Stockhausen's music promoted and given the degree of visibility that would allow the "general public" to be aware of it? Or did the "general public" somehow reject Stockhausen's work without being aware of its existence (aka, "And where are the fries I did not ask for?! You guys need to anticipate me!")?
Based on their performances last month on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Colbert Report," I may have to do a serious reinvestigation of TV On The Radio's Dear Science,. Everything that seems wrong with the record was completely right with the performance. Tempos were reckless, the interplay was loose and frantic, and they were essentially the anti-Radiohead. Radiohead's live performances frequently suffer from a overly strict adherence to the studio arrangements, which tends to suck the life out of their live shows. Compared to Radiohead, TV On The Radio is the Band, joyously tossing firecrackers at each other.
Anyway, I just finished -- I mean, just finished, as in one hour ago -- recording my new record (can one record a record? Can you sleep on a rainbow? Can you drink the sky?). It's a piece in three movements, where I overdubbed myself many, many times, and I managed to resolved the issue of how to get a saxophone sound out of a rototom. Also, tuba and brass sounds out of tympani. Anyway, this record should be out by October at the latest, but I'll be posting excerpts on my MySpace page before then. I will now commence recording on another piece, which will be released on the Greek label Absurd Records. As if in anticipation of this new recording, my computer (um, which I record on) has been so nice to me lately by accepting things it really shouldn't accept, like playing back twenty-plus overdubs without crashing. It's also stopped making that horrific loud fan noise. I...(sniff)...I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
Barn Owl made a studio recording recently, with the capable and pirate-hat-wearing Chris Cooper at the helm. We recorded a few hours' worth of stuff, so we're not yet sure what form that'll take, but rest assured, it'll take one form if it takes a thousand. Also on the recording front, the concert that Ben and Roger Miller and I played in Cambridge last year was just mixed (unfortunately, without my participation, due to a head full of cement...at least, that's what the doctor told me), and should see release fairly soon. I also recently did an interview with the Rice Thresher, the Rice University paper. Generally speaking, e-mail interviews aren't my favorite, as they don't allow for follow-ups or challenges (shouting "I was cleared of those charges!" doesn't have the same impact in an e-mail as it does in person or on the phone), but I enjoyed this one.
And finally, merci beaucoup to Noel Tachet his review of not to be taken away in the French magazine Improjazz:
matt weston Not to be taken away 7272music #004 www.7272music.com, iTunes Matt Weston dr, traitement du son Il existe encore des musiques inécoutables, Matt Weston en est la preuve, c'est un improvisateur punk sans souci de mesure ni égard pour ses auditeurs. Ce qui l'intéresse ce sont les tourbillons du son, dans la lignée de Cecil Taylor mais assis non pas derrière un monument de la culture musicale mais à une batterie et devant des bidouillages électriques/électroniques. Matt Weston se fiche de l'histoire, il raconte la sienne et il la raconte fort, il fait du bruit comme une cigale qui se secoue les élytres. C'est naturel et parfois insupportable mais on y revient. Comme le dit le titre choisi par Matt Weston, "not to be taken away" ça ne s'emporte pas, ça ne se déplace pas, et sans doute ça ne s'emporte pas au paradis ; c'est lourd, indifférent, agressif et dépourvu de censure. Noël TACHET
