Wednesday, 12 July 2017
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Altogether Now / Lose Yourself (An unneccessarily philosophical review of TVMR's 'Factory Fatigue')
It is the fool's errand of the obsessive to try to explain why music matters, what function it fills in our lives. Music is a personal experience, after all, and the human touch of music in the moment depends on … well, the music. And the moment. Possibly in equal measure.
Yet what makes music different from other art is its combination of the personal and the universal, the way it puts each of us in touch with something that we intuitively know we share with others. If you could tour the Louvre on your own, you probably would; yet only petro-despots want a private show from the Rolling Stones. Frustrated fanboys will always claim that Big Star were better than the Beatles, but this is a kind of misanthropy that receives its just punishment in socio-sexual excommunication. Not everything that is good is widely loved, but exclusive fandom will always be less satisfying than broad agreement on brilliance. ‘Hearing the music’ is something we do with others, even when we are alone with our headphones. Maybe especially then.
The best musical experience is a kind of instant communion. Sometimes– gospel, house music, ‘Hey Jude’, etc – this function is explicit in music purpose-built for real-life, physically communal experiences. But most music, and in particular most rock ‘n’ roll music, does not operate on this level. You don’t always need the sing-along or the packed dancefloor to get taken from the personal to the universal; you can come to the same place by a different road. Great rock ‘n’ roll takes us there by removing us from our natural state of self-regard, and loosening the straightjacket of ego. The fundamental nature of rock ’n’ roll music has always been about cool, rather than about guitars or testosterone or leather jackets, and the measure of this cool is exactly how far it is from giving a fuck. Cool dispenses with self-consciousness, gets away with clichés, and makes no attempt to navigate anyone’s expectations, and in so doing frees us from the things that keep us apart. When we wind up to ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ or air guitar to ‘Total Trash’ or slo-mo to ‘Sweet Emotion’ we are forgetting ourselves, and we are becoming each other.
(Cool is sometimes associated with loners – James Dean being the obvious example – but this is a mistake. Those archetypes are not cool because of who they are but because of who they help others not to be: they provide a universal, shared escape route from despairing teenage loneliness. Thus Holden Caufield is cool, but J.D. Salinger is decidedly not; Chan Marshall’s fragile, lonely music became less of a comfort to fans when they were confronted by her crippling stage fright and alcoholism.)
Which is all a very long-winded way of describing what I like about TVMR’s ‘Factory Fatigue’. It is a record with an unrocknroll backstory, made by people who are old enough to know better, but it absolutely refuses to make that mistake. It is sloppy and unafraid, completely unselfconscious and fully vital. The swaggering, half-rapped, half-sung lyrics are dangerously full of familiar phrases and ‘attitude’, but the spectre of cliché recedes behind rhythm and an easy turn of phrase. Like the best lyrics, what’s being said is often not in the content of the words but in their delivery against the music, so that superficially meaningless couplets like ‘Always known but never shown/always dared but never cared’ sit in your stomach and your stride rather than in your consciousness. The music is similarly uncareful – the bubbling bass in particular tramples all over the record, but the impression is one of untethered energy rather than unchecked instrumentation. The tunes are instantly memorable, every element (including voice) works both rhythm and melody, and the dynamics are unfussy and direct. It has the swagger of funk, the edge of post-punk, and the punch of hip-hop. It’s also refreshingly short – the brevity of the album reinforces the idea that these people are expressing something, rather than fulfilling expectations.
‘Bowie’'s unanticipated sizzling electro-funk alienation is a highlight, but it is almost matched on the downbeat side by ‘Never Known’'s defiant street philosophizing. Elsewhere there is distorted kraut/psychedelia (‘Thunder Rise’) that recalls Primal Scream’s early 2000s work; and reminders in ‘Stakked Lightning’ and a ripping furnace blast called ‘Punk Face’ that Kasabian once promised to take people somewhere. Perhaps most disconcerting is ‘Through the Door’, which is pretty much exactly the song you wish Arctic Monkeys would have released this year (instead of this nonsense).
That that group of under-25s now seem completely incapable of shedding their self-awareness and making music with abandon is a great tragedy, and a situation all too common in post-modern rock music. ‘Factory Fatigue’ is a reminder of what rock and roll music can do when its creators forget themselves, and allow us to do the same.
Yet what makes music different from other art is its combination of the personal and the universal, the way it puts each of us in touch with something that we intuitively know we share with others. If you could tour the Louvre on your own, you probably would; yet only petro-despots want a private show from the Rolling Stones. Frustrated fanboys will always claim that Big Star were better than the Beatles, but this is a kind of misanthropy that receives its just punishment in socio-sexual excommunication. Not everything that is good is widely loved, but exclusive fandom will always be less satisfying than broad agreement on brilliance. ‘Hearing the music’ is something we do with others, even when we are alone with our headphones. Maybe especially then.
The best musical experience is a kind of instant communion. Sometimes– gospel, house music, ‘Hey Jude’, etc – this function is explicit in music purpose-built for real-life, physically communal experiences. But most music, and in particular most rock ‘n’ roll music, does not operate on this level. You don’t always need the sing-along or the packed dancefloor to get taken from the personal to the universal; you can come to the same place by a different road. Great rock ‘n’ roll takes us there by removing us from our natural state of self-regard, and loosening the straightjacket of ego. The fundamental nature of rock ’n’ roll music has always been about cool, rather than about guitars or testosterone or leather jackets, and the measure of this cool is exactly how far it is from giving a fuck. Cool dispenses with self-consciousness, gets away with clichés, and makes no attempt to navigate anyone’s expectations, and in so doing frees us from the things that keep us apart. When we wind up to ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ or air guitar to ‘Total Trash’ or slo-mo to ‘Sweet Emotion’ we are forgetting ourselves, and we are becoming each other.
(Cool is sometimes associated with loners – James Dean being the obvious example – but this is a mistake. Those archetypes are not cool because of who they are but because of who they help others not to be: they provide a universal, shared escape route from despairing teenage loneliness. Thus Holden Caufield is cool, but J.D. Salinger is decidedly not; Chan Marshall’s fragile, lonely music became less of a comfort to fans when they were confronted by her crippling stage fright and alcoholism.)
Which is all a very long-winded way of describing what I like about TVMR’s ‘Factory Fatigue’. It is a record with an unrocknroll backstory, made by people who are old enough to know better, but it absolutely refuses to make that mistake. It is sloppy and unafraid, completely unselfconscious and fully vital. The swaggering, half-rapped, half-sung lyrics are dangerously full of familiar phrases and ‘attitude’, but the spectre of cliché recedes behind rhythm and an easy turn of phrase. Like the best lyrics, what’s being said is often not in the content of the words but in their delivery against the music, so that superficially meaningless couplets like ‘Always known but never shown/always dared but never cared’ sit in your stomach and your stride rather than in your consciousness. The music is similarly uncareful – the bubbling bass in particular tramples all over the record, but the impression is one of untethered energy rather than unchecked instrumentation. The tunes are instantly memorable, every element (including voice) works both rhythm and melody, and the dynamics are unfussy and direct. It has the swagger of funk, the edge of post-punk, and the punch of hip-hop. It’s also refreshingly short – the brevity of the album reinforces the idea that these people are expressing something, rather than fulfilling expectations.
‘Bowie’'s unanticipated sizzling electro-funk alienation is a highlight, but it is almost matched on the downbeat side by ‘Never Known’'s defiant street philosophizing. Elsewhere there is distorted kraut/psychedelia (‘Thunder Rise’) that recalls Primal Scream’s early 2000s work; and reminders in ‘Stakked Lightning’ and a ripping furnace blast called ‘Punk Face’ that Kasabian once promised to take people somewhere. Perhaps most disconcerting is ‘Through the Door’, which is pretty much exactly the song you wish Arctic Monkeys would have released this year (instead of this nonsense).
That that group of under-25s now seem completely incapable of shedding their self-awareness and making music with abandon is a great tragedy, and a situation all too common in post-modern rock music. ‘Factory Fatigue’ is a reminder of what rock and roll music can do when its creators forget themselves, and allow us to do the same.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Value city (Add it Up)
I just got off the phone with a friendly/aggressive telesales agent. Successful, of course. Pushed me right over. But, like all together too many conversations, it got me thinking about economics.
The young lady on the phone spent 7-8 breathless (and thereby difficult-to-interrupt) minutes boring me with information about how much of my pension I am free to speculate with in financial markets now that the Swedish government has tweaked some minor regulation. She further talked me into a (free!) consultation (at my convenience!) to talk about how her company, or perhaps even one of their worthy competitors, might help me take advantage of the new rules.
There is of course an enormous HELLOOOOO!?!?!?! component to such a conversation. I mean, last I checked the news about 'actively managing' one's retirement money with the help of the financial service industry's finest Type A-s was not altogether good. But I found myself more interested in her cog in the economic cuckoo-clock.
Fundamentally, this person was a big economic success tonight -- she performed her task more succesfully than anyone had a right to expect, generating a 'lead' for Jack Lemmon and the rest of the boys from a customer who frankly should and does know better. At 8.45 pm. She's the winner in the game of economics. She will be rewarded, via her normal paycheck or perhaps even by a performance kicker. Who knows.
The sum of all the good economic soldiers doing their jobs is called 'value added' -- the extra money created by each worker, machine, or strategy that manages to push willingness-to-pay towards the handover of ducats. Some percentage of suckers like me turn into customers, and so the telesales agent has created value by pushing potential demand/willingness-to-pay towards transactional consummation.
How did she do this? Well, she bored and bullied a tired father at home with his 3 year old son who speaks imperfect Swedish into saying 'Ok, whatever, can I go now?' She made it so difficult for me to be honest with her ('I'm not interested') that I will now have to find it in me to be honest with her much cleverer, smoother, more subtly aggressive colleagues in sales during my lunch hour next Friday. Or else I will have to agree to pay them for something I don't really want or even believe exists, that is, their supposed ability to find better ways to use my pension contributions than the millions of other money managers in the world. Look around, OECD 2010. This is value-added.
It is value-added because it gently increases the amount of money that changes hands in the world, and that money, unlike my squirming discomfort, can be measured. The fundament (and I mean that in every sense of the word) of economic theory is 'revealed preferences', that is, the only way to know what people place a value on is through their actions, or, more specifically, their trans-actions. Anything else -- asking them what they want, for example, or measuring the things that other sciences think lead to fulfillment -- is either unforgivably inexact or the first step towards totalitarianism, or both.
Fair enough, the other options (including yours, mon President) are really unattractive. But that doesn't make me feel any better about the vast majority of 'economic growth' I see every day, and the fact that our whole socio-political system is designed to encourage more of it, as long as you can measure it.
My resignation was compounded by the fact that the call interrupted me while I was cleaning out my closet in advance of taking a bunch of clothes to Stadsmissionen, a charity that sells second hand goods to raise money for the homeless. My donation of the clothes will, should they be sold, create a tiny uptick in economic growth, but Stadsmissionen's turnover would surely get lost down the back of the leather sofa in the waiting room of any financial services firm. And no measurement will be made of the job satisfaction of those who work at their shops, or of the avoided waste from clothes that were re-used. There is something fundamentally *right* about Stadsmissionen that is not measurable, and that is hard to incentivize, and that therefore remains a marginal activity. Meanwhile, the fundamentally *wrong* strategies of high-pressure sales and high-maintenance fund-management for everybody are built on factors that are easy to measure, and therefore easy to reproduce. They multiply by masturbation.
Mostly I think we have to do our best to build good incentives and common values into the economic system that we know can grow; for all its nasty externalities, growth has gone hand-in-hand with quite a bit of progress. But sometimes it seems to me that growth in the rich societies has increasingly decoupled from the welfare of people, and that more serious interventions might be needed.
(This is not true across the board, of course... I am thoroughly enjoying drafting and publishing this missive as it comes into my head thanks to the world wide web ... while listening to 15,000 little bits of musical wonder fill the room in random order thanks to digital audio ... etc.).
In April, I hope, I will go to Oxford to meet with the 29 other people who have received the Skoll Scholarship in Social Entrepreneurship these last six years. I don't know if they see themselves this way, but I think they are the Edisons of the problem I describe, working in the socio-economic laboratory on the challenge of creating genuine, lasting welfare where it is most needed. Their work doesn't create transactional value in huge volumes, but it is fundamentally *right*, and their refusal to believe otherwise gives it a good chance of being more than that one day. My two days with them were two of the best I had in 2009. I think it's time for a little more inspiration.
The young lady on the phone spent 7-8 breathless (and thereby difficult-to-interrupt) minutes boring me with information about how much of my pension I am free to speculate with in financial markets now that the Swedish government has tweaked some minor regulation. She further talked me into a (free!) consultation (at my convenience!) to talk about how her company, or perhaps even one of their worthy competitors, might help me take advantage of the new rules.
There is of course an enormous HELLOOOOO!?!?!?! component to such a conversation. I mean, last I checked the news about 'actively managing' one's retirement money with the help of the financial service industry's finest Type A-s was not altogether good. But I found myself more interested in her cog in the economic cuckoo-clock.
Fundamentally, this person was a big economic success tonight -- she performed her task more succesfully than anyone had a right to expect, generating a 'lead' for Jack Lemmon and the rest of the boys from a customer who frankly should and does know better. At 8.45 pm. She's the winner in the game of economics. She will be rewarded, via her normal paycheck or perhaps even by a performance kicker. Who knows.
The sum of all the good economic soldiers doing their jobs is called 'value added' -- the extra money created by each worker, machine, or strategy that manages to push willingness-to-pay towards the handover of ducats. Some percentage of suckers like me turn into customers, and so the telesales agent has created value by pushing potential demand/willingness-to-pay towards transactional consummation.
How did she do this? Well, she bored and bullied a tired father at home with his 3 year old son who speaks imperfect Swedish into saying 'Ok, whatever, can I go now?' She made it so difficult for me to be honest with her ('I'm not interested') that I will now have to find it in me to be honest with her much cleverer, smoother, more subtly aggressive colleagues in sales during my lunch hour next Friday. Or else I will have to agree to pay them for something I don't really want or even believe exists, that is, their supposed ability to find better ways to use my pension contributions than the millions of other money managers in the world. Look around, OECD 2010. This is value-added.
It is value-added because it gently increases the amount of money that changes hands in the world, and that money, unlike my squirming discomfort, can be measured. The fundament (and I mean that in every sense of the word) of economic theory is 'revealed preferences', that is, the only way to know what people place a value on is through their actions, or, more specifically, their trans-actions. Anything else -- asking them what they want, for example, or measuring the things that other sciences think lead to fulfillment -- is either unforgivably inexact or the first step towards totalitarianism, or both.
Fair enough, the other options (including yours, mon President) are really unattractive. But that doesn't make me feel any better about the vast majority of 'economic growth' I see every day, and the fact that our whole socio-political system is designed to encourage more of it, as long as you can measure it.
My resignation was compounded by the fact that the call interrupted me while I was cleaning out my closet in advance of taking a bunch of clothes to Stadsmissionen, a charity that sells second hand goods to raise money for the homeless. My donation of the clothes will, should they be sold, create a tiny uptick in economic growth, but Stadsmissionen's turnover would surely get lost down the back of the leather sofa in the waiting room of any financial services firm. And no measurement will be made of the job satisfaction of those who work at their shops, or of the avoided waste from clothes that were re-used. There is something fundamentally *right* about Stadsmissionen that is not measurable, and that is hard to incentivize, and that therefore remains a marginal activity. Meanwhile, the fundamentally *wrong* strategies of high-pressure sales and high-maintenance fund-management for everybody are built on factors that are easy to measure, and therefore easy to reproduce. They multiply by masturbation.
Mostly I think we have to do our best to build good incentives and common values into the economic system that we know can grow; for all its nasty externalities, growth has gone hand-in-hand with quite a bit of progress. But sometimes it seems to me that growth in the rich societies has increasingly decoupled from the welfare of people, and that more serious interventions might be needed.
(This is not true across the board, of course... I am thoroughly enjoying drafting and publishing this missive as it comes into my head thanks to the world wide web ... while listening to 15,000 little bits of musical wonder fill the room in random order thanks to digital audio ... etc.).
In April, I hope, I will go to Oxford to meet with the 29 other people who have received the Skoll Scholarship in Social Entrepreneurship these last six years. I don't know if they see themselves this way, but I think they are the Edisons of the problem I describe, working in the socio-economic laboratory on the challenge of creating genuine, lasting welfare where it is most needed. Their work doesn't create transactional value in huge volumes, but it is fundamentally *right*, and their refusal to believe otherwise gives it a good chance of being more than that one day. My two days with them were two of the best I had in 2009. I think it's time for a little more inspiration.
Monday, 9 November 2009
Passing Time
This weekend, I got annoyed with the internet. Not with slow connections or cranky servers or expired certificates. I found myself irritated -- disappointed even -- by the content. 109.5 million websites, and nothin' on.
Sufficiently bored, I found it possible to feel genuninely disappointed in the Digital Community-Entertainment Complex whose responsibility it has become to fill our every waking hour with interactivity, news, and the wisdom of Super Hans. Not just disinterested, but disappointed. Mildly betrayed. How can it be that the digital infinite is unable to fill 4 hours per week with fully indexed infotainment at no cost and requiring less effort? If I can't obliterate 25% of my waking hours on demand, what good has really come of binary code? Must I buy a television? Surely not.
My weekend descent from directionlessness and boredom to disappointment and frustration is not really about the shortcomings of the internet. It is end times. It must be. Such decadence always means end times, right? This fella in the New York Times doesn't think so, and he makes an interesting point, despite having forgotten to wash the bit of face that surrounds his mouth.
Perhaps you are searching for the connection between my infantile frustration with web surfing as a time filler and an op-ed on the implications of liberalism's permanent triumph. Well, not as hard as I am. Perhaps it's this: I, too, am afraid of decadence. I feel what laziness and entitlement produces in me when I let it run roughshod over my free time. I believe, on some fundamental level, that the same thing will inevitably happen to western society. We will indulge our personal choice ad infinitum, forgetting we ever had hobbies or causes, wasting whatever time possible and spending the rest complaining about how busy we are.
But there's no use inventing bogeymen, be they fundamentalists and terrorists or wireless networks and handheld devices. We must claim our victories as our own. That means striving for a better world because it's the right thing to do, not because there is an enemy to be defeated. On the personal front, I remembered that I like to write. So I'll start doing it here.
Sufficiently bored, I found it possible to feel genuninely disappointed in the Digital Community-Entertainment Complex whose responsibility it has become to fill our every waking hour with interactivity, news, and the wisdom of Super Hans. Not just disinterested, but disappointed. Mildly betrayed. How can it be that the digital infinite is unable to fill 4 hours per week with fully indexed infotainment at no cost and requiring less effort? If I can't obliterate 25% of my waking hours on demand, what good has really come of binary code? Must I buy a television? Surely not.
My weekend descent from directionlessness and boredom to disappointment and frustration is not really about the shortcomings of the internet. It is end times. It must be. Such decadence always means end times, right? This fella in the New York Times doesn't think so, and he makes an interesting point, despite having forgotten to wash the bit of face that surrounds his mouth.
Perhaps you are searching for the connection between my infantile frustration with web surfing as a time filler and an op-ed on the implications of liberalism's permanent triumph. Well, not as hard as I am. Perhaps it's this: I, too, am afraid of decadence. I feel what laziness and entitlement produces in me when I let it run roughshod over my free time. I believe, on some fundamental level, that the same thing will inevitably happen to western society. We will indulge our personal choice ad infinitum, forgetting we ever had hobbies or causes, wasting whatever time possible and spending the rest complaining about how busy we are.
But there's no use inventing bogeymen, be they fundamentalists and terrorists or wireless networks and handheld devices. We must claim our victories as our own. That means striving for a better world because it's the right thing to do, not because there is an enemy to be defeated. On the personal front, I remembered that I like to write. So I'll start doing it here.
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