One-Way Street

Changing Gears for Summer

For a while I've been thinking about making some adjustments to the form of this blog, and the summer is a good time to do it. I'm still enough of an academic to feel the pull of its seasonal rhythms, and the summer is when I used to search for new material about which to read and write. I would also explore new ways of presenting that material. Finally, the summer is when I would really get down to work on longer-term writing projects--or at least I vow to. I have a couple of those to finish, too, so I need to divert some time and energy to those projects.

So first I'd like to swipe an idea from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution and present a "What I'm Reading" list, expanded to include what I'm listening to as well.

Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Reading Unforgiving Years has inspired me to read more from this neglected modernist. 

Charles Lloyd Quintet, Rabo de Nube. A live recording of one of the masters of avant-garde jazz. The quintet features Jason Moran, a personal favorite, on piano.

D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film. A look at the digital future of the cinema from a major voice in film studies.

Rem Koolhaas, S M L XL. Actually, I'm re-reading this for an essay on the generic city. For the same project I'm also looking at Mutations.

So Long, Bud's

I live 1725 miles from Bud's Jazz Records in Seattle, but I feel vaguely guilty, and definitely frustrated. about its imminent closing. Back when I had disk space to buy music, I bought 90% of my music online, mostly from iTunes. I may buy two or three complete albums a year. MIA's Kala was the last one I bought, and even that I purchased through iTunes because the Michigan Avenue Virgin store closed. I work a few blocks from The Jazz Record Mart, which bills itself as the world's largest blues and jazz record store, and occasionally I'll stop by there and buy a new CD by a major jazz musician, but it's hard to find work from lesser-known, up-and-coming jazz musicians there. One day, when I went in looking for a Soweto Kinch CD, a clerk confided to me, "this place is stuck in the 1990s." I haven't returned in months.

Jazz is a niche genre, to say the least, so its institutions are fragile. The Jazz Showcase is in the process of relocating, pushed out of its prime downtown location. You have to travel to Uptown for the next jazz club, the terrifically atmospheric Green Mill, to find the nearest true jazz club. That's why Bud's is so unique. The Seattle Times' Paul de Barros describes Bud's as jazz fans "could always depend on running into someone they knew there, and conversations often ran hot and heavy about the preferences for one artist over another. There was always an album on the CD player to compete with — or support — the conversation." Unfortunately, online sales have cut into owner James Rasmussen's profits, and with rents rising, he's forced to close down the shop.

And yet, de Barros reports that Rasmussen is now wondering "if the stock were for sale online, business might improve." [You can't see this, but I'm shaking my head in dismay.] People buy music online, especially when they can't find what they're looking for in local stores. This is just as true for jazz fans as it is for rock, hip hop--even classical music!--fans. The fate of Bud's is emblematic of jazz in general: a wonderful place that can be maddeningly out of touch.

Bricked

When I heard that Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters won the album of the year Grammy, I was inspired to revisit two musicians that I've always admired more than truly enjoyed. I interested was piqued further after reading Ben Ratliff's thoughtful remarks about River and the whole idea of a jazz album winning such a high-profile award. Alas, the morning of the Grammy awards my iPod bricked. It now feebly alternates between the Apple logo and an image of a sick iPod, and now my iMac wants nothing to do with it. Without an iPod I can't buy anything on iTunes  because my iMac's hard drive is filled, so I've reached the physical limits of my music collection. I can't buy anything new.

I have another iPod, a 2 gig Nano I use almost exclusively for running, using the Nike + system to track my runs. But I have something like 3,000 songs in my collection, so using the Nano as my primary iPod requires some tiresome song management, which is precisely why I continued using my old 40 gig click wheel. Even though I couldn't take it out in public without a slight sense of shame at its monochromatic screen and bulky profile, I kind of liked the click wheel model: it was the last iPod with a perfectly proportioned interface. It's still the most elegant iPod.

Of course, a bricked iPod means a trip to the Apple store for a shiny new iPod Touch, but Apple's technology is temporarily ahead of itself. With the new 32 gig flash drive the iPod Touch finally has a practical storage capacity, but the new model is $500 and history shows that Apple lowers its prices after the initial buyer frenzy. As cool as the Touch is, I'm resentful about my click wheel bricking almost three years to the day after I purchased it. With its complex interface and feature overload, how long will a Touch last?

I wonder how many people still maintain iPod playlists a year or two after purchase. I did, but lately I've gotten lazy and relied on the shuffle feature and a manual free-association trip through my collection. Ironically, my iPod ceased working during a period in which I was consciously trying to use it regularly again. I hadn't grown bored with the unit itself; I'd grown bored with my music. That's why I've lost interest in selecting songs to go on my Nano and I haven't made a playlist in a long time. The same phenomenon has occurred in iPhoto. I can't remember the last time we published a photo album online.

Call me a gullible Mac Head, but I suspect that a new iPod will renew my enthusiasm for my music collection, just as a new iMac--another major purchase I need to make very soon--will revive my interest in digital photography. Apple detractors claim, with some justification, that the company's marketing strategy is mostly about making people junk their perfectly functional iPods and iMacs for incrementally better models. And yet I wonder if new technologies have a defamiliarization effect, making our old familiar content strange enough to force us to look at it again, as if we were seeing it for the first time. The Touch interface is genuinely new, and we'll be seeing a lot of that sort of thing in future computing devices, but for the most part the critics are right when they charge Apple's latest releases are more eye candy than anything substantively new. When genres become more and more dependent on the technologies of their mediums, they run the risk of suffering from the same obsolescence as the underlying technology. We cease to see (or hear) cultural objects very clearly. Maybe from time to time we need to change the window through which we access our content.

I just hope that the price of the 32 gig iPod Touch comes down before Jason Moran releases a new album, or I don't know what I'm going to do.

Air Guitar

On Christmas Day I had the chance to play Guitar Hero on a Wii system. It was a Christmas gift to my nephew or my brother-in-law, it's not really clear which.  On one level, the game makes perfect sense. But on another, there's something unsettling about it as well. Interpreting the experience of performing in a rock band for a video game seems completely natural. The audience demographic for video games and guitarist music is pretty much the same, and sooner or later someone was going to fuse the narcissistic fantasies of rock stardom and video games.

And yet Guitar Hero is yet another example of a collective experience rendered virtual. To put it in Benjaminian terms, the game turns erfahrung into erlebnis; it turns a contingent and transmissible experience into a repetitive and closed-ended one. A crucial part of being a guitar hero is creating music, not just aping other musicians, and the experience of being a rock star is exactly what's being conveyed in a rock song. In other words, the subtext of every rock song is rock stardom itself. Even the game's performance scenario isn't all it appears to be. You must satisfy the demands of an inscrutable other--a crowd of dancing zombies--and play a repertoire that has more to do with corporate license agreements than drugs, sex and rock and roll. On stage with your anonymous band mates, you are alone within a group. In this sense Guitar Hero is a lot like work.

Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, the hosts of Sound Opinions, recently denounced the game, asserting that parents would be better off giving their children real guitars. Kot and De DeRogatis have a point: by the time one masters all levels of the game one could be a serviceable rhythm guitarist in a respectable garage band. In fact, I've avoided game counsels partly because the skills they cultivate seem like a developmental dead end. It's possible, though, that Guitar Hero may be an exception. Others, like Slate contributor Joel Johnson,  have countered that Guitar Hero opens the door for a revival of amateur musicianship, which, in turn, will make better music fans and, eventually, higher quality music for all. This claim isn't as absurd or exaggerated as it may first appear. Guitar Hero doesn't teach notation or time schemes, but the basic concepts are present.

Playing Guitar Hero isn't without its frustrations, but it does force one to listen to music like a musician. The level one songs--the only ones the game let us play--are guitarist anthems of surprising complexity. Even a primitive thumper like Fog Hat's "Slow Ride" has tricky passages. Heart's gimmicky "Barracuda" has those churning power cords, of course, but also some off-tempo runs in the bridges. Most intriguing are the practice screens in which each song is broken down into its component parts, revealing much more intricate structures than the verse/chorus alternation that's usually sufficient to guide a listening experience of a rock song. If the mysteries of "Slow Ride" can be uncovered by a video game, then maybe there's hope for guitarist music after all.

Listening to the Twentieth Century

Last night while riding the CTA's Purple Line home I was hoping to finish Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century as the train pulled into the Noyse station in Evanston.  I was denied a catchy opening, though, as I finished the epilogue as the train approached the much less mellifluous Dempster station.  The point is I made it all the way to the last word of this long book.  I've always found it difficult to sustain interest in discussions of works with which I am not familiar, and Ross's book is full of them.  I could have gone to my grave without encountering Harrison Birtwistle in print or on record. Now I have, and I also know Benjamin Britten ducked out of the 1968 premier of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy to look for a drink. Ross is a good writer, but not one who has much of a gift for metaphor, so he relies heavily on recondite music terminology in his exegeses. He will discuss chord changes and shifts in keys as if we had any idea what a D minor cord sounded like, or if we did, we could pick it out among the first violins amidst a symphony orchestra in full cry.  Other than frequent trips to Wikipedia and regular visits to Ross's helpful website, I don't really have any advice on how to follow along. My own rudimentary musical education helped a little, but not much. I had a brief career as a trumpet player (grades five through nine) playing a largely classical repertoire, so my experience with classical music forms was both intimate and partial. Key changes meant an irritating change in valve fingering. I couldn't understand why Mozart wanted me to play the ugly-sounding B flat, when F sharp sounded so much better. (As you can see, as a sixth-grade honker, my range was pretty limited.) Surrounded by noisy brass in the back of the orchestra, it was hard to hear much less appreciate how D-flat major resolves into E major.

Ross's stated intent is to tell the history of the twentieth century through its music. You're probably not going to learn much about twentieth-century history that you didn't already know, but it's a novel experience to review the last century with classical music as its center. The controlling irony of the book is that classical music has been at the periphery of Western culture since World War I. Ross begins his narrative with the performance of Richard Strauss's opera Salome in Gratz, Austria on May 16, 1906. Strauss was accompanied by Gustav Mahler, the other "titan of Austro-German music," which, in 1906, essentially meant all serious music. Salome is a weirdly erotic opera—at one point Salome kisses, wetly, the severed head of John the Baptist—but the Austrians loved it. It was probably the last time an aggressively innovative classical work was met with immediate popular acclaim. In 1913 it took Parisians about a week to adjust to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But by 1973, Steve Reich's Four Organs could only provoke one old lady to whack the stage with her shoe in an attempt to stop the performance. As they became more acclimated to the new music, audiences became more indifferent. Ross himself struggles to maintain our interest as classical music got shunted to the cultural sidelines in the middle of the century. Reading about Strauss and Shostakovich getting bullied by their authoritarian governments isn't much fun, and even Ross's powers of description start to falter when distinguishing between obscure Europeans fiddling with twelve-tone rows in the 1950s and 1960s. This period is summed up the by the title of Milton Babbitt's 1958 essay, "Who Cares If You Listen?"

The story doesn't pick up again until the 1960s, when rock acts like the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and, yes, the Beatles start adopting some of the tropes of American composers like Reich and Philip Glass, who themselves had checked out of Adorno's "Grand Hotel Abyss."  (Adorno is a major villain in Ross's story.) As classical music embraced rock, jazz, hip hop, and world music in the last decades of the twentieth century, it reintegrated itself back into the center of Western culture. Classical music is correspondingly harder to get one's hands around, and, as a result, Ross fumbles a bit in wrapping up his account. Osvaldo Golijov, my current favorite contemporary composer (I highly, highly recommend his Oceana and Ainadamar [photo above] and his soundtrack is by far the best part of Coppola's Youth Without Youth), gets two short paragraphs—this after a whole chapter on the creepy Benjamin Britten.

A good critic makes you want to read or watch or listen to a work he or she is discussing. A great critic makes you want to listen in the same way they do. Ross fits in the second category of critics. It's impossible, I think, to listen to music--any music--the same way after reading The Rest Is Noise. You may not be able to pick out triads, but you'd have to be tragically closed-minded to not hear something transformative in Schoenberg and Messiaen. Ross is the only music critic who could induce me to listen to Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, then re-listen to Lou Reed's "Heroin."  As Ross teaches us, the twentieth was that kind of century.

My 2007

This isn't a best of list. I wouldn't pretend to have read or seen or listened enough to designate anything as the best of its kind.  Rather, I've put together an idiosyncratic list of the books, films, buildings and technologies that I learned the most from in 2007.

Santiago Calatrava, The Chicago Spire. (Also here and here and here and here.)  Calatrava's 2,000-foot twisting tower is a high risk, high reward proposition. It could be the point around which the entire skyline coheres--what the Sears Tower was supposed to have been but never was. Or it could be an overweening presence that Chicagoans will be faintly embarrassed about, like an impulse purchase that we later regretted. Or it could be something in between, like the fat-man-in-the-bathtub renovation of Soldiers Field that we've learned to live with. Whatever it turns out to be, the Spire is emblematic of a renewed sense of architectural daring in the birthplace of modernist architecture.

The Kindle. Tech nerds have already dismissed Amazon's ebook reader based on a quick glance at Engadget (one wag said the Kindle looked like it was designed by the prop manager for Space 1999), but avid readers love it--at least those who have been lucky enough to get their hands on one. The furious debate about the Kindle has revealed how we read in 2007. It turns out that a lot of people are already reading on screens. It also turns out that people want to read more than books on an ebook reader. They want all the disparate material they read on a PC--HTML pages, PDFs, emails, Word documents, blogs--on a device that's as portable and easy on the eyes as a hardcover book. The Kindle has the potential to be not just the first commercially successful ebook reader, but an extension of the Internet as the new center of the public sphere. In other words, the Kindle isn't the death of the book, as some have feared, but the means to turn the Internet into a book.

John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination From the Great German Poet. This was the year I started reading Goethe seriously, and he stands out from the vein of post-romantics, modernists, and post-modernists I usually read not just in the awe-inspiring equipoise of his prose and poetry, but in his exemplary life. Michel Foucault and many others have pondered how to break down the barriers between art and life, but Goethe actually did it. No wonder Nietzsche cited him as one of the prototypes of the Übermensch.

Daniel Kraus, Musician. Continuing with the theme of art and life, Daniel Kraus's documentary on the Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark is a clear-eyed look at the reality of a working artist's daily life. Most profiles of artists in the media arise from the appearance of an artwork and, as a result, tend to be little more than extensions of the publicity apparatus. Kraus's film doesn't try to get to the "real" person behind the work. Instead, Kraus takes a sociological approach by showing the prosaic struggles necessary to maintain a career as a creative artist in the early twenty-first century. And Kraus doesn't neglect the art: Musician also conveys the power of Vandermark's performances.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was more fun to read, and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End struck closer to home,  but Man Gone Down was the most moving novel I read all year. None of these novels were flawless: Wao had structural gaps, End resolved itself with a creaky plot device, and Man could have been 50 pages shorter. But each was distinguished by its narrative voice: Diaz's logorrheaic free indirect style, Ferris's innovative second person, and Thomas's realist first person. But of the three I think Thomas's novel will turn out to be the most influential and enduring. Plus, Thomas understands the vernacular of the tradition in which he's working better than Diaz or Ferris. Lots of novelists have tried to emulate the nineteenth-century novel form, usually by foisting all kinds of colorful minor characters upon the reader in misguided imitation of Dickens. Thomas takes an entirely different tack, combining Richard Wright with William Dean Howells--existentialist dread with a keen appreciation of New York City as spectacle. Man Gone Down is about seeing and invisibility as well as the city as a place of constant threat and unsuspected opportunity.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Okay, so this is a DVD release of a made-for-TV miniseries, but Criterion's DVD package is a major event in the film world nevertheless. (Besides, this has been an extraordinarily busy year for me and I haven't seen nearly as many films as I wanted to. DVDs have pretty much been my cinema for 2007.) Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel is demanding on several levels, not the least of which is Fassbinder's manic dramatic sensibility.  In its eccentric, excessive ambition, Berlin is one of the touchstones of modernist European cinema. Because of its formidable length and poor video transfers, it's never been accessible to a wide audience. The Criterion DVDs solved the poor video transfer problem, at least.

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise. I'll have more on this book in a future post--I'm nearly done reading it. It could have been called Everything You Want to Know about Modern Classical Music But Were Afraid to Ask Lest You Have to Sit Through a Clanking, Screeching Avant-Garde Work for Four Orchestras and a Barking Dog. This book has made a lot of "best of" lists because Ross managed to execute the daunting task he set before himself--tell the history of the twentieth century through its music, and make the history a pleasure to read. More importantly, he makes us actually want to listen to those unloved experimental pieces from classical music's post-Stravinsky period.

Pressure Drop

I first started listening to the Clash when they were still known as "the only band that matters." That this was a promotional lark thrown out by their record company, CBS, didn't matter, for once. I'd just missed the Sex Pistols before they self-immolated, and the Ramones seemed a bit clownish to me, so the Clash was my introduction to punk rock and, more broadly speaking, to rock music as something relevant to the world in which I'd grown up in. One of my earliest memories was of my father staying home from work because of the riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. When I saw Super Black Market Clash in a record store, with its grainy photo of a lone rioter confronting a phalanx of police, it seemed to have come directly from my own image repertoire.

The best parts of Julien Temple's latest punk rockumentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten draw on the image repertoire from the Clash's heyday in the late 1970's and early '80's, the second to last time rock was at the forefront of cultural change. (The last was the emergence of grunge in the 1990's.) Temple recreates that charged and despairing time with clips of the Clash rehearsing and performing in coon skin caps. We watch Joe Strummer riffing on the decay around him: pointing to a man passed out against a wall, Strummer proclaims, "And that's the man who invented punk rock! . . . I guess it was too much for him." Some of the images don't make much sense, such as scenes from a cartoon version of Animal Farm and an appearance by Johnny Depp. Others take a moment to register: That guy looks vaguely like Bono. Oh, it is Bono!

The worst parts of the film, or the least satisfying to watch, have to do with the breakup of the Clash. Temple's improvisatory, juggling-six-reels-of-film-at-once visual style has the unexpected effect of making the band's demise seem inevitable, and this is the most troubling part of the film. "We became exactly the kind of people we were rebelling against," Strummer laments. How? Why? Did they really succumb to the usual narrative of rock and roll decline into drug abuse, hubris, and petty squabbles? If the Clash couldn't sustain a politically committed popular art, who could?

After the Clash chapter in Strummer's life, the film loses some of its energy and settles into an elegiac tone as Strummer tries to find his way back to the spirit that made rock matter. We get to know him as a kind of Bruce Springsteen as a good bloke. His post-punk band, the Mescalaros, was well-intentioned and not without some moments of brilliance, but they lacked the elan of the Clash. It's moving, and sad, to watch Strummer drift into middle age as recounted by the fringe players in the rock and roll life. The people who gather fireside to remember Strummer are nice enough, and the image of Strummer they create is appealing, but one is troubled by their irrelevance to Strummer's larger ambitions. "I guess it's called adulthood," A.O. Scott says of Strummer's final days. Maybe he's right. Punk rock was a dead end, but I like to think that somehow the Clash escaped the trap punk rockers set for themselves. We need a politically-committed popular art form that can't be dismissed as youthful nihilism.

Leaving Your Musical Island

New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff and New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross are currently engaged on a correspondence on Slate. The Slate Dialogues debates don't always turn out well: they can drift off topic, or come to a screeching halt just short of their stated goal. Sometimes the elaborate courtesies the participants exchange can lead them to drift off topic for fear of appearing too esoteric, too enthusiastic, or too bellicose. Ratliff and Ross aren't really debating anything.  Rather, mostly it's a polite exchange of bulletins from their respective beats. Their genres carry the same problems and challenges: fusty audiences who don't like the new, the transience of young tastes, lazy concertgoers, the menace of rock.

Ross is a freak of twentieth century culture: a kid who only listened to classical music as a kid, "a preteen classical snob," who encountered rock music, the central musical genre of his lifetime, only after college, and then after a transition phase of Cecil Taylor. Who am I to doubt the veracity of Ross's life story, but his credentials as a critic rest largely on his origins as a listening savant, unsullied by popular music. I'm currently reading Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. I'll have more to say about that book when I'm done, but so far it's been an ear-opening experience.

Ratliff has long been a favorite critic of mine. His tastes are closest to my own, although I'm not as enamored of Cuban music as he is, and I still don't understand his tolerance, even enthusiasm for death metal. I don't know how the New York Times assigns beats to its music critics, but I've always suspected that Ratliff and Kelefa Sanneh (who covers rap and country music, surely the most unwieldy combination of interests of any music critic) were forced to pick up leftover genres because the Times' readers have limited patience for Ratliff and Sanneh's main beats.

In any case, Ratliff's hip eclecticism contrasts with Ross's precocious purity. Ross is noticeably awkward outside classical music, although he considers himself a "generalist critic."  Ratliff seems more comfortable with the Slate Dialogue form, even going so far as to sign off yesterday afternoon's post "B."  The Tyler Cowen-inspired topic, leaving one's musical island, is only a setting off point. Neither is much interested in listening to anything outside their own categories; they simply want you, with your narrow guitarist tastes, to try their stuff. Ratliff ventures some of critical principles. For instance, he likes music that combines, in a single work, "the really, really new with the really, really old." In his latest post (as of this writing) Ratliff considers "the conditions under which we try to understand our music." He hints at how he listens to music when the musicians are settled in to an ordinary set on a Thursday night. "So you become patient," he tells Ross, "and the visual aspect becomes important: You're looking for clues as well as listening for them, feeling your way through it just like the musicians are." Ross has yet to respond, but Ratliff has hit upon an essential difference between jazz and classical: the former is constantly in flux and open-ended, while the latter strives for wholeness and perfection.

Blackout: A Ghost Story

Kelefa Sanneh reports that Britney Spears' new album Blackout arrives in record stores "as something of a mystery." Spears has been uncharacteristically reticent about its release; typically the publicity machine gets clogged with Britneyisms immediately before the release of a new CD from her. But Sanneh also implies that Spears herself may not be entirely present in her own album. He writes, "she has done almost nothing, in the recording studio or outside it, to convince fans that 'Blackout' is really hers, or really her."  Spears is missing from her own comeback album.

Spears' absence from Blackout shouldn't be so mysterious, considering how she's given up her day job as a pop singer and dedicated herself to selling her own image. The story of her recent career is a set of images--"The unworn unmentionables, the bobbled baby, the hewn hair, the umbrella attack, the loose lip-syncing, the benders and fender-benders," as Sanneh helpfully summarizes--that have become separated from her original incarnation as a singer. She has become a spectacle packaged and sold as a spectacle. Now that she's ostensibly returning to her material practice of producing music recordings, she appears as a kind of ghost. Sanneh notes that Spears's thin singing voice floats free of anything we would normally associate with a singing body. "Even when not buried in electronics," he writes, "her distinctive singing voice sounds unusually vague, and sometimes it's hard to be sure it's hers."

In Spectres of Marx, his reading of Marx's Capital as a kind of ghost story, Derrida reminds us that in Marx's view  the commodity is a specter, a fetishized object that is really nothing, just something determined by its exchange value, a "phenomenological 'conjuring trick,'" as Derrida puts it. We can try to sweep away all of the extraneous stuff from the object to see it as a thing produced by real people, but it's still a commodity. We can't return to its original state. Instead, Derrida says, we only get a substitute, an "artificial body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit, one might say a ghost of the ghost." In Spears' case, Sanneh concludes, "Ubiquitous, one way or another, for almost a decade, Ms. Spears has finally managed to become a spectral presence — on her own album." In other words, Spears isn't behaving like a self-destructive tabloid princess. Rather, she's behaving like a commodity.

It is the fate of all fetishized objects to become phantasmal, to become specters, mouths that say nothing, bodies without substance. No wonder the album is called Blackout.

Seven Ways to Listen to Led Zeppelin

Back in my days as a university professor I once worked with a Turkish sociologist whose specialty was third world women in the global labor market. She was absolutely devoted to her subject matter, traveling widely in the developing world to interview women at the bottom rungs of the world economic ladder. As an adjunct faculty member she was on the bottom rungs of the academic ladder herself. One day she appeared on campus visibly upset. She explained her car had been stolen the night before. I'm sorry to hear that, I said. Was it a nice car? "I don't care about the car," she said in her heavy Turkish accent. "I had all my Led Zeppelin tapes in it!"

I'm sure Gul has rebuilt her Led Zeppelin collection since then. If she's like everyone else, she has a few tracks she downloaded from a file swapping site. Twenty-seven years and several million illegal downloads after they broke up, the band has finally agreed  to sell their music online. David Dorn, the executive in charge of marketing the band's music--easiest job in the music business--can't wait to introduce the band to a whole new generation of fans, telling the New York Times, “The great thing about this band, unlike almost any other band that you could think of, is that every single day there is a new 13-year-old kid who’s just starting to get into music.”

As someone who grew up with the band's music, I have a primer for you kids looking to buy some Led Zep on iTunes.

1. When Led Zeppelin was on, which wasn't all the time, no band before or since played hard rock with such panache.
2. Led Zeppelin should have been the greatest rock and roll band of all time, but they're not. I'm not sure why.
3. Listen to their music chronologically, starting with their early days as skinny blues-based rockers, then proceeding through their peak around 1972. Even at their peak, though, you can hear the bloat starting to set in.
4. They took blues-based rock to its logical extreme. That's why all those contemporary blues-rock bands  like Blues Traveler sound like wankers.
5. It's perfectly normal for your mind to wander during "Dazed and Confused." In concert the band could stretch it out to forty-five minutes. There's a reason why rock bands don't record songs that long anymore.
6. Led Zeppelin isn't really an iPod band. Their records should be played either in a darkened basement with the sound turned up to just below the pain threshold, or in an American car no smaller than a Camaro. (Before it got stolen, my friend Gul had the perfect Zeppelin car to go with her collection: a Z28.)
7. Led Zeppelin was the last rock band with a mystique. However, sometimes their attempts to maintain that mystique backfired. Take, for instance, the symbols on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. The band members designed their own, so three of the four are nonsense runes. John Paul Jones's, though, coincidentally resembles a Druidic rune that means, approximately, "I accidentally stepped on a frog and killed it."

Musician

Filmmaker Daniel Kraus has just released Musician, the second installment in his WORK series. Musician features Chicago jazz musician Ken Vandermark, who can be seen most Wednesday nights at the Empty Bottle. The film presents the life of a jazz musician as one part artistry, one part cagey hustle, and one part pure drudge work. Vandermark is one of the city's top musicians in any genre, but he still has to devote a lot of psychic energy to managing his thin cash flow. Kraus keeps an anthropological eye on his subject as Vandermark gently nudges out a composition, expounds on the virtues of atonal music, and performs his blistering music on stage. Kraus, who thankfully avoided choosing yet another indie rocker to represent the travails of professional musicianship, clearly feels an affinity with Vandermark. Kraus says in an interview with ReelChicago.com,

Ken's work ethic is inspiring, but in truth it's a lot like mine. We're ambitious, prolific, to some extent control freaks, and we're both searching for new models that allow our work to function in more efficient, secure, and financially stable ways.

Musician can be read as a gloss on the life of an independent director as well. Some of the idealism of documentary filmmaking dictates the choice of subject matter for the series. The first installment was Sheriff, and future films in the WORK series include Truck Driver, Messenger, Professor, Preacher, Social Worker, and Cemetery Groundskeeper. There's something quaintly retrograde about the titles; except for preacher, these are job titles that could have been included in the WPA. They recall a time when labor, either intellectual or manual, had still had dignity and meaning in itself—concerned, in one way or another, with the real, like documentary filmmaking itself.

MTV’s Poet Laureate

mtvU may have an irritating acronym and a dubious business plan, but at least it showed some imagination in selecting John Ashbery as its first poet laureate. mtvU will broadcast snippets of his poems  to 750 colleges across the US as part of an effort to expose students to poetry and provide some cultural cover for Viacom's expansion plans in the 18-24 demographic.

Ashbery has taken a what-the-hell approach to the project. He doesn't get paid, but one or two students somewhere may be paying enough attention to read some more poetry. For the students who already read poetry--and there are more than one would expect--the project will be yet another well-meaning but somewhat puzzling publicity campaign, much like the 1990's vogue for poems in subways.

The mtvU presentations are slick and minimalist, and, I suppose, it's beside the point to object that they're not accurate representations of the experience of reading a full Ashbery poem. The short mtvU films lend the poems a formal closure the full poems lack. For instance, "Soonest Mended" becomes aphoristic, and Ashbery is anything but an aphoristic writer. On the other hand, Ashbery's aesthetic has been likened to music, or, perhaps more accurately given the current context, a music video: scraps of discourse and images float by, each arresting in its own way but not adding up to anything coherently meaningful. It's also worth noting that Ashbery is the only major literary figure associated with the Abstract Impressionist movement in the 1950's. Ashbery is too reserved and cerebral to be a prosody version of Willem de Kooning, but Ashbery did pick up on the Abstract Expressionists' explorations of form and emotion--at the same time early rockers were forging the same connections. Maybe someday soon mtvU will designate Barnett Newman as its first court artist.

The End of Rock History

I have two opinions about the general state of rock music: 1., it's dead, and 2., it isn't. A recent conversation between some very knowledgeable indy rock fans I know may or may not be symptomatic. One guy said he loved the Arcade Fire's new album Neon Bible the first time he heard it. He listened to their first album, Funeral, which he had once really liked but now all of the sudden hated. Then he listened to Neon Bible again and decided he now hated that album, too. He concluded bitterly, "It sounds like Bruce Springsteen."

At least among the people I know, his experience isn't completely idiosyncratic. Once heroic Chicago indy bands are now dismissed as tiresome and irrelevant: Does anyone still care what Wilco does? How pointless is a Smashing Pumpkins reunion? The thirty and fortysomethings I know are exhausted with the whole enterprise of alternative rock. They search with increasing skepticism for new acts to listen to, always prepared to dismiss the next exciting newcomers as a boring retreads by the time they release their second album. More TV on the Radio, anyone? Whatever happened to the Hives, who were supposed to save rock? How did Bruce Springsteen, rock's first savior, fall so low?

Observing the British rock scene, John Harris is about ready to declare rock dead once and for all: "That's right: rock is dead, or it definitely might be. One or other must be true, because Glastonbury wasn't very good." He pinpoints the cause of death in all the alternadads and tattooed moms pushing Bugaboos: "To paraphrase the late Cyril Connolly, perhaps there is no more sombre enemy of good rock than the pram in the crowd." Harris, who is 37 and starting to feel conspicuous at Arctic Monkey shows, proposes a generational apartheid. Starting at age 30 or thereabouts, people should stop listening to youth-oriented bands like Enter Shikari and "prepare for a world of new and more dignified fun," suggesting,

Band-wise, you might want to start thinking about people of your own age, and thus realise that a new life is just beginning - a matter not just of talents as varied as the good and old Hold Steady, Rufus Wainwright and Richard Hawley, but an inevitable embrace of music that might not spark with teenage energy, but in its ploddingly wistful way, will somehow essay your advancing years.

Listening to Rufus Wainwright on my iPod while my teeth to fall out sounds incredibly dreary, but Harris looks on the bright side: there's now a rock for every age demographic. The old generational barrier between rockers and everyone else, famously set at age 30 during the 1960's, is now gone.

I wonder if we're approaching not the end of rock, but the end of rock history. Alexandre Kojève was the first to propose the thesis of the end of history, which he formulated by reading Marx and Hegel. According to Kojève, history ends when ideology does, bringing about some ultimate achievement in social equality. When the benefits of historical progress are equally dispersed--now everyone can enjoy rock music--there's also a waning of collective hope that anything will change. The desire for endless novelty is an ideology in itself, so maybe the endless recycling of a defined set of musical memes isn't such a bad thing. Jazz musicians have been plowing the same fields for years while still creating worthwhile music. There's plenty of listening pleasure to be found in rock music, but it may never again be an agent of cultural change. 

Inside the Speaker Box

Whatever happened to the big home audio system? Does anyone still listen to music on a racked audio system, with each component carefully chosen for maximum fidelity so that you can hear Jimmy Page's fingers drag on the E string from a block away? Nearly every male I knew in high school had a stereo system featuring huge speakers. (I had a great pair of bass-heavy Advents. I have no idea what happened to them.) Some guys I knew actually made their own speakers. They usually sounded like crap, but you had to admire the handiwork. No one I know now has a true audiophile setup. It seems like everyone has a home theater system with surround sound and an iPod. That's my setup, along with an iMac with Harmon Kardon speakers, and I'm pretty happy with it, but sometimes I miss the power of my old Marantz receiver. Cinematic surround sound is a totally different sonic experience than a music performance, and while headphones bring you closer to the music, they offer a disembodied experience--nothing like the physicality of a live performance.

The vanishing physicality of live music is the subject of Chicago artist Juan Angel Chávez's Speaker Project. The Project is a collaboration between the artist, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Empty Bottle, a West Side club owned and operated by fellow Oak Parker Bruce Finkelman (our kids sometimes play together). Chávez has constructed a giant speaker that's a descendant of those old high school wood shop speaker systems, except the band performs inside the speaker. Bands have found the acoustics somewhat bewildering, but they're game. Plus, the intimacy of the space seems to relax them.

Gapers Block's Graham Sanford describes the Speaker Project as "a prime example of what's been termed 'relational aesthetics,' that newer breed of art that aims to collapse the gap between artifice and shared experience, passive viewing and interactivity, spectatorship and participation." Older forms of interactivity consisted largely of passing a joint around; now the audience mills around outside the performance space, peeking in through gaps in the speaker walls. No matter where one stands, they remain within the sonic zone of a high-amp rock band. It's a great combination of performance art and a stoner's basement stereo. As Steve Krakow, who performs as Plastic Crimewave, puts it, the idea is to "create an environment where you can't escape from the sound, from the sheer physicality of it." That was precisely the idea of those great old stereo systems.

Images from Gapers Block.

Sound Grammar

A couple of weeks ago Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for Sound Grammar, and, in its casual way, the jazz world is just now taking notice. Coleman's erratic output over the years has created a sense that when he finally releases a worthy disc it seems to sum up everything that made him such an important figure in jazz in the first place. Thus, the release of Sound Grammar prompted a Lifetime Grammy Award this year. The album presents a familiar set of Coleman tropes: lines at once discordant and elegant, melodies stretched to their limits and beyond, harmonies dispersed then resolved between the ensemble members. It sounds like nothing else released last year.

Sound Grammar proved that Coleman remains a singular presence in jazz. The Nation's David Yaffe recalls when Coleman first burst onto the jazz scene with his debut performance at Manhattan's Five Spot club on November 17, 1959. As Yaffe puts it, "For a few dollars and a cheap drink, you could stand at the bar and see jazz history in the making, a glimpse into the future that would become part of a fetishized past." Although he's talking about 1959, Yaffe sums up what it's like to listen to jazz in 2007 as well. Jazz is an ephemeral art, yet it's also one deeply rooted in a glorious past--too deeply rooted, at times. The drinks aren't so cheap at jazz clubs these days, but relaxing with a martini while listening to a small-ensemble jazz performance is one of my favorite nights out. (Alas, with a toddler and a newborn and the Jazz Showcase vacating its Grand Avenue digs, one that I haven't had in too long.) Every jazz club--every worthwhile one, anyway--has a New York City in the 1950's feel to it, when Miles Davis and Charles Mingus were lurking at the end of the bar while Norman Mailer took notes at a table in front. For a moment, jazz was the center of the world.

The great jazz pianist Bill Evans once said, "Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created." But nowadays the moment from which jazz emerges is tinged with nostalgia, which, as Sound Grammar demonstrates, isn't an altogether bad thing. One always has to ask, why do we keep jazz around? It has a marginal presence in contemporary American popular culture, at best. There hasn't been a moment in jazz like Coleman's debut at the Five Spot in decades. And yet what makes art forms like jazz valid is that they must constant justify their existences. What makes Ornette Coleman an important figure at age 76 is that he's still working hard to prove jazz is still a worthwhile form. It's the cultural forms that we take for granted are the ones that are doomed.

Dowager Rap

Negotiating the popular music scene as one gets older--older than 25, that is--is a tricky business. By the time one reaches 25 a whole new set of musicians have grabbed the top spots in the hit charts and the music that seemed so fresh in high school gets worked into the rotation on the "classic" rock stations. Live trough a couple more of these cycles and you start to wonder if the whole genre isn't going to pot.

The nagging sense of permanent decline can make it difficult to survey the current music scene objectively. For quite a while now I've had the general impression that rock music has hit a dead end. Other people must be noticing the same thing because rock's current moribund state even has a name: Rockism. Rap is an even trickier domain to survey for someone outside its target audience, but it seems to have fallen into a comfortable groove of familiar gestures. Now that rap seems to be living off its inheritance perhaps a good name for its current state would be Dowager Rap. The entire American music scene seems like it's just going through the motions.

Yet, at the same time, there's more exciting and innovative music available than ever before. Certainly more than I could get my hands on when I was a kid. Take a quick visit to Calabash Music or Other Music and you'll find amazing music from all over the world--including lively corners of the United States and Canada. Montreal--Montreal--is now hot. It's mainstream music that's boring. Then again, it's always been boring to anyone who truly cares about music.

Kelefa Sanneh, who probably has the most adventuresome tastes of the New York Times's music critics,  reports on the current state of rap and finds it under siege, yet again, but also growing distressingly bland and irrelevant. The current denunciations of rap music after l'affair d'Imus cite rap music as it used to be--compelling enough to denounce. In fact, Sanneh says, "hip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted and clean-cut than it has in years." Like rock music, part of rap's claim to authenticity is its outsider status. Rap's and rock's central contradiction has been the way both genres mass market that outside status. Rap's Naughty Three Words have become commodities, and they now have all the bite of an aerobics workout soundtrack. Sanneh concludes with these troublesome questions:

For all the panicky talk about hip-hop lyrics, the current situation suggests a scarier possibility, both for hip-hop’s fans and its detractors. What if hip-hop’s lyrics shifted from tough talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations — and it didn’t much matter? What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?

Rap still sells, a lot, but it's become harder to discern broad social conditions in its songs. However, it may be that rap has grown too diverse to speak about it as a unified phenomenon any more. Diversity will reduce its relevance in the public sphere, making it harder to denounce or rally around. But at this point political irrelevance may preserve its creativity. Offshore bastard forms of rap and rock are creating whole new forms of music. Some of the best rock, for instance, is being created south of Miami. Eventually, perhaps, rock and rap will be like the blues: roots music that's present everywhere, but attracting a small number of devotees to its original form. If that's the case, then we're already moving on to the next big thing, which, frankly, we could use. Maybe I'm just a geezer from the tight-pants days of New Wave, but I can't believe people are going to miss all those baggy pants.

Interview with Saul Austerlitz

Now that the music video is packing up and moving from television to the Internet, it's time to take a look at how the form started and how it developed.  Saul Austerlitz traces the history of the music video in Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes. Born of the World War II-era Soundies, the music video first took its modern form in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964). Austerlitz details the development of the form through its MTV heyday to its current incarnation on You Tube and other online outlets.  I asked Saul about his book and his thoughts on the future of the music video.

What interested you in this project?

I grew up with MTV, in what turned out to be the last moments of its unquestioned primacy as musical tastemaker.  I used to watch “120 Minutes,” on Sunday nights, religiously, and take notes on what videos were shown, who the directors were, etc.  Being mad for music as I was, music videos seemed miraculous to me, as cultural products invested with wit and vigor and a sense of cool, and yet flew almost entirely under the cultural radar.  This only became more true when music videos were bounced, for the most part, from TV.  I became fascinated by the idea of the music video as a shadow cultural history that had been neglected, caught between music and film, and wanted to write a readable, hopefully enjoyable history of a form that possessed a remarkable array of performers, styles, and traditions.  When I started, it was also intended as something of a summation of a closed genre- one that had nearly ended its run.  It ended up becoming something else because of the Internet-fueled revitalization of the music video, and became an assessment of a form in the midst of major change.

I was struck by the Foo Fighters' video for "Everlong," which you rank as the second best music video of all time. It's an amazing video directed by Michel Gondry, who you regard as a major video director. Yet, as brilliant as the video is, the song is kind of boring--to my mind, anyway. Do you think there are acts that wouldn't have been nearly so popular or highly regard without the music video?

I happen to like “Everlong” as a song quite a bit, but I fully understand your question, and think you’ve hit on something.  I think that in the early years of MTV, especially, it was possible to see sonically unexciting bands flourish by virtue of the skill shown by their videos.  I happen to like the British New Romantic groups, like Duran Duran or Adam and the Ants, but it’s clear to me that neither of them would ever have achieved the success they did in the U.S. without their videos.  It’s even more true for later artists who sell sex in their videos; does anyone think that Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” or Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” would have been hits of the same magnitude without Tawny Kitaen and Bobbi Brown, respectively?  Examples like these are only further proof of the power of the music video, which is capable of resuscitating otherwise uninteresting songs, and making classics of mediocre work.  Who actually loves “Thriller” as a song?

The music video was originally developed as a promotional vehicle.  But you mentioned that certain videos seem to instruct the viewer in how to listen to a song. How did this instruction work?

One doesn’t discount the other.  The instruction doesn’t take away from the promotion, or vice versa.  What I meant by the notion of instruction was that certain videos tell their viewers how to hear the music- in short, what to look out for sonically, or how to picture the music visually.  One of the examples that springs to mind is Dave Meyers’ videos for Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It,” which serve as visual analogs to the processes at work in the song itself.  Just like the songs, Meyers’ videos are shattered- split into a thousand pieces, and then haphazardly reconstructed.  Seeing Meyers’ choppy, splintered imagery, we grasp the nature of Elliott and producer Timbaland’s enterprise better than we would have been capable of without the video.

There seems to have been an implicit dialog between male and female artists over gender definitions.  Who do you think is key in this debate?

You can’t talk about gender and video without talking about Madonna, and David Bowie.  Bowie predates the MTV era, but in many ways he is the figure that represents its promise, and its excitement.  Bowie goes from video to video without ever keeping to the same look, the same style, or the same aura.  Is he straight, or gay?  Comic, or tragic?  Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke?  Bowie is all these things, and his videos understand implicitly the fluidity of persona that music video would come to embrace.  Part and parcel of this is a willingness to expand the borders of masculinity to include his 1970’s brand of fey theatricality, bordering on outright homosexuality in videos like “Heroes” and “D.J.”  Madonna picks up where Bowie leaves off, messing around with notions of femininity from video to video so that she becomes a larger-than-life Everywoman.  In one video, she’s an innocent young girl from around the way (“Borderline”); in the next, she’s a scheming modern version of Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (“Material Girl”); and soon after that, she’s Mary Magdalene for the 1980’s (“Like a Prayer”).  With Bowie and Madonna, it’s less a debate than a meeting of like minds.  It’s not women vs. men; it’s the video-savvy going up against the unsavvy, and it’s no contest. 

Michael Nesmith seems to be kind of a hero in the rise of the video in the 1960's. What impact did he have?

Nesmith was one of the first musicians to appreciate the capabilities of music video.  He not only made videos for his 1970’s solo work, he sought to get in on the ground floor of music video in the U.S..  Nesmith was originally involved in the discussions for what would later become MTV, although he was quickly given the boot.  Nesmith was never commercial enough to take the music video to a mass audience, but he was one of the first to imagine it being possible.  Nesmith was willing to experiment; he was even one of the first to make a long-form video for an entire album.  In many ways, Nesmith is the Moses of the music video; he’s the first to imagine the promised land, even if he didn’t quite make it there himself.

Country music was slow to embrace the music video, but eventually the form flourished there. Why didn't the form catch on with other kinds of music such as jazz or classical?

I suspect it’s due to the fact that jazz and classical are less abundantly commercial forms.  Music videos are salesmen- they look to close the deal.  They want to sell a performer, a song, a lifestyle, or more prosaically, an album.  Jazz and classical, being products of high culture (at least relatively speaking), are too high-minded to sully themselves like that, and therefore the music video has never particularly worked for them.  It’s also a youth-culture form; music videos are the fruit of adolescence and post-adolescence, and have never translated particularly well to more adult musical genres. 

What, if anything, has rock and rap lost with the decline of the music video on cable television?

They’ve lost the ability to talk directly to a mass audience through the medium of video, the way they once did.  For mainstream rock and hip-hop, there isn’t much to replace what they once had- although hip-hop still has BET, and rock, to a lesser extent, has Fuse.  However, the rise of the Internet as a repository for the music video has greatly changed the equation.  While YouTube is not going to cut it for the mega-bands of the world, it has been an enormous boon for smaller artists.  YouTube and other streaming-video sites have become places for bands to be discovered, and videos themselves another way of attracting an audience for up-and-coming acts.  The Internet has replaced cable as the locus of the music video, and what it loses in unity (everyone watching the same clip) is made up for by its capabilities as a virtual library of music-video history.  Go to YouTube, check out Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” and tell me that the Internet isn’t working miracles in preserving the forgotten detritus of music-video history.

You talk a lot about how the production values of music videos improved in the 1990's, making me wonder if the improvement in television technology during this period had something to do with the creation of ever more elaborate visual effects in video. You see the future of the music video in small-screen outlets like YouTube and MySpace. Given the technological limitations of online viewing, in your view how will the music video develop in the next three to five years?

Well, you’re right, inasmuch as watching a music video online remains less vivid an experience than watching it on TV, because of the low quality of Internet video.  Computer technology improves so fast, though, that what was once impossible becomes de rigueur in no time at all.  Streaming video itself is a fairly recent development, and as computers, and Internet connections, grow more sophisticated, the gap between Internet and TV will shrink accordingly.  I think the music video will grow in the same direction it has been heading over the next few years, becoming one of the essential enticements of the Internet.  Whether the mainstream will find a place in this sphere, or if music videos will remain primarily under the purview of up-and-coming artists, remains to be seen.

Grammys and Geezer Rock

I've been boycotting the Grammys since the album of the year award went to Steely Dan's vapid Two Against Nature instead of The Marshall Mathers LP, arguably one of the greatest albums released in the 2000's. But after Prince's performance in the Super Bowl--the highlight of the game here in Ursine Nation--I was ready for another dose of geezer rock in the form of the Police's rendition of "Roxanne." I remember how bracingly new the song sounded when it first appeared, how much it contrasted with the power ballads that dominated Chicago radio at the time. This time Sting demurred from attempting the high notes in the chorus, and mild scandalousness of the song is now lost to nostalgia, but the Police still sounded pretty good. Who knew tantric yoga was the key to rock and roll longevity? Remember Sly Stone's performance last year? In his weird way he recaptured some of the mystique major rock stars used to have in the 1970's. In the days before MTV and 360 degree celebrity coverage, moving images of rock stars were rare. You  heard them all the time, but you rarely saw them. Film clips of performances by the Who or Led Zeppelin had a furtive aura about them. Even a Rolling Stones appearance on TV was an event. Contrast that with the tiresome Shakira, who could be the subject of her own cable channel. Maybe that's why indy rock persists as a cultural force long after it ceased to be a source of musical innovation: it's hard to find music acts that aren't overexposed, that aren't just another node in the celebrity culture.

For quite some time now the Grammys have been two or three years behind the rest of the culture. After getting slammed by American Idol last year, this year's show featured a lame and transparently desperate "My Grammy Moment" in which some non-entity gets the chance to perform with Justin Timberlake, who was probably too genial and accommodating to say no. My Grammy moment? Stevie Wonder's moving call out to his late mother, followed by Tony Bennett cheerfully giving thanks to “Target, the greatest sponsor I ever worked for in my life.” This moment seems to pretty much sum up the current state of the American music industry: isolated moments of genuine feeling co-existing with blatant obsequiousness toward its corporate masters.

And by the way, for all the honors handed out to mainstream acts like Mary J. Blige and the Dixie Chicks, the best-selling album of 2006 was the soundtrack to a Disney Channel movie, High School Musical, which sold 3.7 million copies. The best selling song in the new online music universe? Daniel Powter’s fatuous “Bad Day,” which first appeared on American Idol.   

The Long Tail of Indy Rock

Apple and Apple made peace again yesterday, clearing the way, everyone hopes, for the Beatles to appear on iTunes.  Now if only Led Zeppelin would sign up for iTunes for those times--every six months or so--when the desire to hear one of their songs suddenly and inexplicably strikes me.

Overshadowed by this deal between a behemoth of the old pop music and a behemoth of the new pop was the announcement of a new consortium of indy rock labels called Merlin, a sort of central bazaar for rockism. Indy labels are also forming collective bargaining units to increase their leverage with the major online music distributors, including Yahoo. How much impact feistier and better organized independent labels will have in the marketplace  remains to be seen.  Labels large and small are getting smacked around in the market: According to Nielsen Soundscan, album sales in all genres declined by nearly 5 percent in 2006, primarily because of increasing popularity of digital downloads. Even rap, which dominates American popular music right now, saw its sales drop by more than 20 percent, the most of any genre.

But the decline of the CD is only part of the general crisis in popular music. The MySpace phenomena, with its four-song bands that appear and disappear with alarming regularity, merely accelerates the ephemeral nature of popular music. The days when bands like the Beatles ruled the charts for a decade are long gone. Rap has always been notorious for its brisk turnover in chart-topping bands. Now the same thing seems to be happening in indy rock: Some Loud Thunder, the second release from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which seemed to have figured out the new music industry order, has been received with lukewarm reviews and general disappointment, apparently consigning them to the long tail of rock music sales. While there's no shortage of great new artists in virtually all categories of music, the business overhead of signing, recording, and promoting these new acts, only to see them flame out after one album, has to take its toll.

I once heard a longtime observer of the indy rock scene remark that what's bad for a music executive is good for a music fan. Indy rock labels have considered themselves immune from such sentiments because they're supposed to be on the side of music fans. Probably that will remain the case, especially after another new development in the online music industry occurs later this month: Other Music, the terrific New York independent music store, will begin selling MP3 downloads.

One and Done

It seems like everywhere you look on the Web right now everybody's talking about either Bush's disastrous plan for Iraq or the iPhone. As Jessa Crispin over in Bookslut laments, "This January is such a dead zone for books even the Guardian has given up and is running stories like 'Just how ugly was Dante anyway?'" Here in Chicago we're distracting ourselves from the cultural drought and the gray weather by anxiously awaiting the One and Done weekend--or as everybody else knows it, the Bears NFL playoff debut, when Rex Grossman will heave passes to his imaginary friends and Brian Urlacher will spin around while Shaun Alexander runs past him.

Meanwhile, there are some other cultural developments in Chicago that are worth keeping an eye on. The Jazz Showcase has closed its doors after losing its lease on its Grand Avenue location.  Owner Joe Segal is looking for a new location, but it will be a cold winter without Chicago's premier jazz venue. And Santiago Calatrava has come up with yet another design for his 2,000-foot, 160-story skyscraper, now known locally as the Twizzler. If completed, the Twizzler will be the tallest building in this universe, and probably several others as well. The newest design drops the flat-top look of design number three in favor of a tapering top and a shaft of light extending into the sky, much like the ghostly tributes to the vanished World Trade Center. The design will come before the Chicago Plan Commission for a vote very soon, but no hearing date has been set. Calatrava and Dublin-based developer Garrett Kelleher want to break ground by June. As much as I'd like to see a Calatrava in Chicago, every day when I leave from work I look toward the lake front and try to imagine a tower nearly twice the height of any building in the city and think how uneasy I'll feel when so many wealthy people are stacked above me. I just hope I'm not in the way when the Twizzler finally falls.

Best of 2006

Here's what I'll remember from 2006, in no particular order:

Claire Messud, The Emporer's Children

Joanna Newsom, Ys

Michael Winterbottom, director, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

Andrew Zago, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Jason Moran, Artist in Residence

Irene Némirovsky, Suite Française

Larry Charles, director, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Yansong Ma and Yosuke Hayano, design for a residential tower in Mississauga, Ontario

Lucas Santtana, 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse

Requiem for a Tubist

Nine-nine tuba players (aren't you glad you weren't behind these guys in the baggage claim?) gathered to pay tribute to the king of all tubists, Tommy Johnson. A Hollywood studio musician for 50 years, he was known as "the most heard tubist on the planet," a sobriquet that should tell you a lot about the life of a tubist.  You've heard him, too: he played the menacing shark attack music for Jaws. Tubists have the reputation of being the sweating stompers at the back of  the marching band, all of them looking like Oliver Hardy, even the women. And indeed, most tubists are big guys, although the Philadelphia Orchestra has a fine tubist who is a petite 21-year-old woman named Carol Jantsch.  Tubists get fewer solos than string bass players, and fewer gigs, too. Gerry Mulligan had a tubist in his jazz ensemble for a while in the 1950's, I think, but otherwise tubists are rarely featured outside marching bands and orchestras. It's too bad: in the hands of a capable and imaginative player, a solo tuba can be a surprisingly pleasant thing to hear. Maybe one day there will be a Kurt Cobain of the tuba, and a band playing entirely in treble clef will hit the charts.

Can You Hear It Now?

Like about two-thirds of the American population right now, I'm contemplating getting another iPod--my second, but I know people who are already on their fourth or fifth. While the newest iPods are more exquisitely elegant than ever before, Apple still hasn't upgraded the one feature I'd really like to see improved: the sound quality. I know I can go lossless in my CD conversions, but Apple lossless conversion still leaks bits and eats up disk space, forcing me to make decisions about what goes on my iPod and what doesn't. I don't like leaving anyone on the iMac; I prefer to take everyone along on the ride. I'm not an audiophilic bit rate snob, but 80% of the music I listen to is jazz, which generally features acoustic basses and trademark tonal differences between musicians. Listening to rock music on earbuds is no substitute for the sonic force of a live concert, but the trade off comes in the form of greater intimacy--hence the disappointment at the often canned sound of iPod rock.

MP3 conversion is the first new audio format to have lower fidelity than the one it replaced. If this article is any indication, there's a growing chorus calling for higher quality compression methods that won't result in having an iPod full of a wonderful-sounding Outkast album but not much else. There's even a website devoted to educating the pink iPod Mini crowd to the virtues of high fidelity. Hopefully, Apple is listening, and they'll come out with a way to release a song's full sonic glory from a compressed file. Maybe they'll have the new format ready by next Christmas, when I'll be ready to buy my third iPod.