Oi! To The World

This weekend I got in a small phone argument (which is strange cause I never get in arguments with anyone… especially about music) about the importance of “punk”

The basic theoretical standpoints

Me: “Punk Changed Everything”

Him: “Punk changed nothing. It will be a foot note. The Sex Pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd”

Just to establish some background I was hardly a “punk” kid growing up. I didn’t own an Anarchy shirt, or have a “god save the queen” patch safety-pinned to my backpack. If we were to jump back to my high school days you would have found me in a daily haze humming Brian & Robert to myself (though you could say that PHiSH worked because the dead heads met the gutter-punks and created a new country composed entirely of parking lots and Golden Gate Park).

So I wasn’t one of those kids. But I did understand the appeal. I’m not a very good musician so any movement that actively embraced and ignored a working musical skill set was alright with me

But the comment “ A Band like the sex pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd” is interesting to me

First, this was coming from a person who often cites Animals as their favorite Pink Floyd album, an album which wears it's punk influence on it's sleeve

Second, how and who gets to define the popular? Yes, the Sex Pistols never sold as many records as Pink Floyd. But is defining “popular” something that has to be so tightly tied to economics?

To put this in some sort of perspective thirty-five years after the Release of Electric Ladyland( I choose this album because it contains “All Along The Watch Tower” which again, if we are talking popular as economic Watchtower is Hendrix’s only “hit”) the album sold 2 million copies. Nirvana’s Nevermind sold that amount within a year of its release. It’s currently estimated Nevermind has sold around 8 million copies . Of course there are some agency/structure issues at comparing these two, but this is simply an example to begin a dialog

I don’t believe it’s an elitist or utopian belief to say “popular” is not based strictly on a “units sold” mindset

I would argue if punk had not come along and rattled the cages of popular music the industry would have been shaped entirely by the likes of James Taylor and Peter Frampton. I a firm believer that punk is embedded in much of the music we consume. The Edge has no problem admitting he’s not very good at guitar but he had something to say and he set out to say it (layered in reverb and phaser)

I think an even bigger disruption of the popular was Hip-hop. There is no denying we live in a Hip-hop world (yes, I just created an advertisement, but if you can locate and retrieve my copy I’ll happily lend it to you and you can skip the whole amazon.com thing. I think Joel had it last) even if it appears in some strange hybrids

Punk’s symbolic death occurs in 79’ with the Thatcher/Regan elections. I’m not sure hip-hop has such a distinctive tipping point ( ?uestlove used to suggest Illmatic represented a certain sea-change, not so much a death as the creation of a predictable formula)

But this is how culture, particularly the “popular” kind works.

The conversation this weekend mimics that which I’ve had with so many musicians. Few seem to really give a shit about these clusters of disruption and because of that we're missing our chance to engage in a bigger musical conversation

Banking in a Musical Economy?

I opened this blog last spring with the intention of it being a device to help keep in contact with people and help facilitate the conversations that I’d like to be having with friends over a few bottles of wine. But are lacking due to various bribes of the world. I fell a little short of that mission, but I’d like to get back to it.

The other night Boner Champ, G and I were in the studio mixing a track for what will eventually be the next release for Houdini's Last Act. We finished the session by taking a look a that bigger picture. In this case it is the ten songs that will compose the album. That’s right ten songs. I’m very proud of the these ten songs, but somehow I kept feeling something like shame (that’s probably not the right word, but it’s the only one I can think of at the moment) that the album would be composed of only ten songs

“Why ten? Why couldn’t I pull it together and scrap up the standard 12-13 track album”

The more I wrestled with this inadequacy the more I began to question where my notion of a 12 song standard had even derived from. Which of course lead to question the past and present myths that surround the concept of “albums”

I’m sure no one disagrees that as a society our listening habits have changed in the last 10-15 years. Few songs get played in their entirety on my (recently lost) iPod. Never mind entire albums. It makes me wonder if the traditional sense of an “album” has run its course. .

But albums (the artifact itself, never mind the ideas embodied in them) really were not a popular form of music consumption until the shift between 1948-1952 (I’m using the formation of the RIAA as the tipping point in the locus of power) and the discovery of a new middle-class “youth market”. Both are pretty intrinsic to the birth of rock’n’roll’s (or is it rock-n-roll?) as “popular”. Previous to this music was composed mainly of songs. Sheet music, radio, Broadway musicals

I feel we’re seeing this idea recycled. ITunes economic power certainly came from the $0.99 per song purchase. For a while Starbucks was offering a free song download a day from different artists (they may still. I just can’t afford not-so-tall cappuccinos so I frequent the store less). The old ethos have been thrown out and bands can make a lot of money for having their song play in a commercial (“the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally, naked and purring on the hood of a new car” Tom Waits)

I left the studio that night and I tried to think of albums released in the past five years that I devoted my time to listening

I came up with two

1.) Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

- I bought this cd on my way home from work. When I got to my parent’s house (where I was living at the time) I shut off my phone , put the cd in my parents stero (usually reserved for Dylan on Saturday mornings) and laid on the dining room floor for the sixty-two minutes. This wasn’t because I thought the cd was going to produce any profound listening experience . I was simply a Modest Mouse fan who felt the band had found their (unlikely) way into the mainstream on their own terms and I was interested in their next move. I remember bring the cd to my friend Joel’s house that same day and we spent the night drunkenly trying to decipher while simultaneously singing Parting of the Sensory (it’s not that the lyrics are particularly difficult to decipher we were just drunk)

2.) Brendan Canning: Something for All Us...

- I’m not sure this entirely counts since I received the album with the price of admission to a cd release party at the Mercury Lounge a few summers ago before BSS played Siren Music Festival. I was really into the Cover Art. It felt like a Sgt. Peppers for the Toronto collective. As someone who over- analyses everything I liked the little glimpses the art provided into the lives of such an amazing set of musicians (3/5 of DMST grilling?). But the painting is reduced to a cd cover, not something you could really get lost in. I remember feeling that both the music and its packaging was coming from a much cooler place than I was currently at, a much cooler place that also happened to be twenty years ago.

I’m sure there is more but these were the only two that produced anything I would warrant as an “experience”. These two aren’t particularly important to me in some life-altering way, they simply stick out. Nor do I think that just because I can only produce two albums in five years that everyone else has abandoned their music rituals.

I understand that with a certain maturity I had to abandon the days of Mezz and I running home from school to act out some bedroom rock-opera to Mellon Collie. But I can’t accept that this can be boiled down to “adult” listening practices.

I’m curious where other people are at on this?

I’m not saying this is good or bad just that I feel the music industry and music itself is at a serious paradigm shift.

So I guess eff it. Ten songs