Rant: Derivative Crap

Originally posted at Crappy Indie Music.

There is no doubt that other forms of music are a huge influence on anyone creating music in the 21st century. With the huge collection of recorded music available to the modern artist and the speed at which this music comes to us, it becomes difficult to distinguish a bands influences from it's creativity. So what qualifies a band as being derivative? I believe it is the extent to which they are able to synthesize these influences and progress the art form. Derivative music can be traced back to a tiny handful or perhaps just one major influence. Truly good modern music can trace it's lineage to a thousand different influences and a progressive form that pushes the boundaries of how you define what you're hearing. It is said that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. That may be so, but I don't feel compelled to listen to it.

Any decent musician has spent a huge amount of time listening to music; absorbing, reacting, analyzing and deconstructing their favorite recordings. They will have spent innumerable hours listening to their own work and the performances of others and reflecting on what they like about it. Likewise, they have an opinion about what they don't like. Taste is everything in music production. There is little doubt that what you listen to has a deep rooted influence on what you play, they are both extensions of your musical tastes and come from the same place. This is an inescapable fact of music. It doesn't mean that you can't innovate.

Derivative music is music without risk. It is the safe road, the comfortable pair of shoes. It is familiar and does not challenge the ear. Papa Roach is a perfect example of derivative music. It's actual worth as music can be debated endlessly, such things are the realm of taste but even a most ardent fan of their work must admit that there is little innovation present. Their music is a culmination of modern rock radio habits. The song structure that they employ varies by no more than 10% per song. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out. It is a method that has evolved significantly in the last 30 years and left this particular canker sore of pop music behind. There is nothing distinctive whatsoever about this band, they pass through my ears like every other craptacular band with a Digitech pedal rig and a few bad ideas about songwriting that radio calls "modern rock".

In another sense music that, while derived from a great number of influences, fails utterly to either properly synthesize these influences or innovate upon them is just as bad. Ne-Yo is little more than a place marker sitting on top of twenty years of dull eyed, radio friendly R&B music. It is the culmination of a generation of mediocrity in soul, artists unwilling to take a risk with their sound or truly flex their vocal abilities; choosing instead to play to the least common denominator and appease the lazy listening habits of a pre-defined market. It is a grand example of the major label music form, as bland and lifeless as a bowl of cold oatmeal. The fact is, there is a great deal of room for innovation even within the context of soul music and performers like Ne-Yo fail to even recognize it's existence. If you don't believe me, go listen to Cee-Lo.

In that light there is merit to traditional forms. Soul music is becoming a tradition slowly, and it is still very young. If you want to see the progression of a traditional form that has a longer lineage look no further than bluegrass. Abigail Washburn is a banjo player of considerable skill. This is not why she stands out. Bluegrass is chock full of extremely talented pickers and the dexterity with which they play amazes me constantly. Her talent is in the arrangement of her material, her fine sense of timing and her inclusion of Chinese folk forms in her music. There are deep parallels between Celtic root and Chinese root music but I won't bore you with the technical aspects of this. Instead, look to the beauty and uniqueness of her art. One can draw a direct line between her and her influences and still, we must stand in awe of her brilliant fusion. It is what distinguishes her from so many other bluegrass musicians and it shows a deep commitment to progressing the tradition instead of keeping it locked away in a glass box to be admired from afar.

Broken Social Scene stands in as my example of truly excellent modern music. I can dissect the influences that lead into it, I can analyze the structure and it would take me far too long. It is a finely woven mesh of music, pulling from so many areas of culture that it takes in a life of it's own. It is transcendent art, recognizing it's past while embracing the future. Broken Social Scene is becoming an influence on music moving forward, which is the mark of true innovation. You could debate the relative worth of their contribution to music but one cannot escape the fact that they have made a contribution, which is more than I can say for the vast array of trite, boring crap that occupies so much of popular culture. Even within their collected recordings and side projects there is a remarkable amount of diversity and creativity. They give me hope, they make me think that I'm not doomed to listen to the same music over and over again until I die.

High quality modern music is more than the sum of it's influences. It is a unique synthesis of other musical forms but achieves far more than acting as a single point at the end of an extensive lineage. It expresses the personalities of the musicians involved and ensures that their voices come through in the song. It challenges our preconceptions of what music is capable of and keeps the lifeblood of art flowing forward. It synthesizes and improves on music we thought we knew so much about and keeps people like me from getting burned out and cynical. On occasion an entirely new form of musical expression will come along. Many times it is simply not worth listening to, a great deal of modern music theory revolves around concepts so cerebral, so disconnected from reality that it has little resemblance to an enjoyable experience. I would not presume to know the future history of musical innovation (who in the 60's could predict the rise of hip-hop?) but I can tell you one thing. Influence is no bad thing, there is a considerable amount of synthesis that has yet to be explored and music will continue to evolve. I hope we will always have artists that refuse to be derivative and take big artistic risks for the chance to make me wake up and pay attention.

Rant: I hate you Indie Genre Tag.

I listen to a lot of music. By a lot of music I mean I border on obsession. I listen to every kind there is, all the time I'm not playing it. Before you can say "Everything? Who does this guy think he is?" I will tell you this. My last few procurements are a collection of ancient Chinese folk songs, some Blur albums (Parklife is great by the way, very 80's in spots) and bunch of old ragtime records I found in a thrift store. So I'm into it, hardcore ya know?

A few years ago my CD collection had grown to an unmanageable size and I decided it was time to rip the whole thing into MP3. It took me about 2 years to get through it all but it was totally worth it. Now I had most of my music in a searchable index and I was pleased. Soon as my collection grew beyond it's original 60GB size it started getting harder and harder to search so I decided that it was time to start tagging all of my music. The only fields open to me were Artist, Album and Genre. I groaned, I wailed, I pulled on my hair and finally sat down and started creating genres for my music.

I hate genre. I hate it with a burning passion, I think it's a terrible way of describing music in any but the broadest of terms. So I stick with some pretty broad terms; Opera is easy to distinguish from Punk Rock, Hip-Hop sounds very different from Mexican Bolero etc. The real bitch of it comes in truly modern music. Where the hell do I put Devotchka? They're a Gypsy/Bolero rock band from Denver for fucks sake. Genre? They want nothing to do with it, just enjoy. What about Beck? Every album sounds like a new street drug I've never tried and any attempt to file it in my collection feels wrong.

Alas a gigantic music collection requires some organizing or I'll find myself back with my CDs, staring at a giant cluster fuck of boxes and buying the same album three times in one year because I don't think I own it. So I can either create a genre tag for every Balkan Beat Box that keeps scribbling outside of genre lines or I can try and group some of this crap together so I can find it. Recently a genre tag that I truly despise is creeping into my digital music.

Indie.

I hate you, Indie genre tag. You are a method for distributing music, not a damn genre. You describe nothing, but so much of what I'm all about these day keeps landing in this pile. Again, Devotchka? Where the hell do you go Devotchka? Beyond creating a specific genre for Ukranian/Mexican Rock I can find little else to place them in. Maybe rock, but it still doesn't fit quite right. I'm not rocking out while I listen to them, I rock out when I hear The Black Keys. Or to make things worse, where am I to file Beirut? Gypsy-folk? AAAARG!

I've tried replacing the Indie tag with a few others and I've managed to extract Indie Pop and Psychedelic into their own categories but honestly it's painful work and not something I'm interested in spending a lot of time laboring over. I want to enjoy my music, not spend a couple hundred hours organizing it. That is the exact reason I went to MP3s so long ago, it's supposedly very convenient. Prove it to me MP3s, be more convenient.

I want music playing software that allows me to write in my own fields and then populate them with data that matters to me. Like what kind of sex goes good with this particular Leonard Cohen collection, or what color fruit reminds me of this Animal Collective track. I want emotional tagging. I want to be able to ascribe a mood to every track and every album in my library so when I'm feeling pissy I can just scroll down through my Ani Difranco records and listen to all the tracks tagged as "Pissy". Where's my Magical iPod that can do all of this? Damn you Indie genre, damn you for being useful and annoying.

Fuck it, someone please just take a picture of me every time I play Gulag Orkestar and tell me where it should be filed.

Thanks for listening to me rant,
Eriq Nelson.

Rant: A call to villainy

Throughout human history people have grappled with the unassailable forces of adversity and found strength in their struggle against them. Be it natural disasters, war or highly irascible mega fauna there has always been some horror beyond the next bend. Humanity has been propelled to this point in its development by adversity, strife, chaos and the urge to overcome it. Not just overcome it, but to tame the chaos surrounding their lives, to use it towards their own ends. Villains provide us with a human face to that struggle, a corporeal and mortal manifestation of our frustrations. They provide the world a target in times when there is no one to blame. At times villains take action that causes them to be blamed. But most importantly, villains provide opposition.

Opposition and strife has generated far more innovation than any other force in human life. Through this agent of change humanity has altered the face of the planet, invented endless new technologies to alleviate suffering and in a moment of striking irony, secured future generations their fair share of suffering with the byproducts of developing that technology. So not all is lost for the budding villain. Humanity has devoted it's time and attention in equal measures to feeding people and finding new ways to turn those crops into a fiery wasteland, don't think that utopia is around the corner just waiting to be found.

The benefits of villainy have been heaped upon society, of this have no doubt. Why the greatest friendships ever known were formed under considerable duress! Is there a greater friendship than one that was formed in battle? A man who has held your life in his hands countless times, who has risked his own so you might both survive the horror is the greatest friend you can know. Whom do you suppose drove the engine of war to manifest that battle? Villains. It requires a villain to look at the bleak, senseless horror of warfare and extract this gleaming heart from it's chest - we are blessed to know adversity.

Being heartless is not the only requirement of true villainy. There is a subtlety to it that escapes the vast majority of politicians, investors, broadcast anchors and other aspiring villains. There is a prevailing philosophy amongst these pretenders that a villain must burn down the whole building to spite a room. Any five year old with access to a large enough arsenal can destroy the planet wholesale. That is simple. A true villain will only crush as much as is necessary to instill paralyzing fear in what remains. It is a far more effective use of resources than attempting to dominate the entire planet at once. Too often in today's pathetic excuses for villainy do I see those with the heart of a villain but with none of the restraint that is needed to fill the role. We, as persons of integrity, do not want to see the world destroyed. Just a little more under control. Our control.

So does this call for villainy go out to the world, a call for any who wish to see the world a better place. People of vision, integrity, honor and considerable personal wealth with little moral grounding I call upon you all. Act now towards providing the world its adversaries, its nemesis, its good fight. The world has need of measured doses of evil perpetrated by those who will understand the nature of their goals. We must stop the amateurs from disgracing the role. These hack villains must be stopped, they lack grace in their actions and lower the art to mere thuggery.


Thank you for your time:

Eriq Nelson
Adversary.

Poetry: I am not your lover

I bet you thought you had a lover then

the two of us snuggled up against the teat of military spending

sucking down the milk of suffering and death

Until I took off all my clothes

and my teeth started coming out of the walls

Until my skin started wearing too thin

and the wool over my eyes evaporated

in a burst of flames

I almost let it slide this time

I almost believed in it all

that the shiny new toys of the 21st century could make me happy

that a cage so gilded, so covered with flashing lights

could ever contain a wolf

that any man would ever be happy in his golden shackles

that the tiny rebellion

of an iPod full of punk rock

will sing my soul to sleep

or make me shut my fucking mouth

I have been bleeding my soul onto Interstate 95 too long

I send these white blood cells up the concrete

riding on waves of cancerous clouds

the irony of this does not escape me

that this system needs it's repairs so bad that it will sacrifice anything

to keep it moving

I am wired into this sleepless monolith

of recorded conversations and cost-benefit analyses

that never looks at the costs in anything other than dollars

information never takes a break to watch the sunset

24 hour caffeine buzz burns mindless droning sounds

across the wires that replace the trees

I can almost fall asleep

I can sometimes ignore the pain

of this wire jammed up my ass

but as ashamed as I'm told to be

about my anger

that no evolved man is angry

That we talk about our feelings

and we work it out

I can't let it go

There are words burned a thousand feet tall in my heart

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

And I am not your fucking lover.

Rant: Private speech

We spend a lot of time in shopping malls. That's where this whole thing began for me. Working at the Tower at Willow Lawn I'd interact with hundreds of other Richmonders and area residents every day and at the same time was going through a huge political and social awakening. What does any other moon eyed 20 year old with his first Noam Chomsky book want? An audience. The more I looked into the legalities of distributing literature and engaging public discourse the more disillusioned I became. You can't. This is private property and we determine what goes on here. Private property laws backed up with police paid extra to spend there time off enforcing mall rules. It's a wonderful system full of controls and carefully worded things. The real problem here is that our public areas have been almost completely privatized. All that's left is for our park systems to be sold off to the highest bidder and the mind-fuck is complete. Looks like all we have left is the Intertubes.

But the tubes are threatened at every turn. They are a series of interconnected privately held networks mind you. People treat Myspace like it's theirs, like they own what's going on there. Legitimate right? Owned by News Corp, the fine folks who control Fox News and a big ass chunk of global newspapers. Our ISPs, our blog posts, our digitized thoughts, our entire fictional identities are owned by hedge funds, investment groups and shareholders. So where is the impetus to allow free discourse? Why should any individual fight for the right of someone else to hold a belief they don't agree with? Especially when it's their money on the line. Who's talking about the loss of something just as precious? Our right to talk to one another.

The free exchange of ideas and information have a few safe places. Some colleges provide such a place for discussion and for that I am intensely grateful. What happens when you don't have the money for college? Where do you go then to learn what there is to be learned, to hear out your fellow citizens? Well damn, is that even a value in this society? I don't really run in to too many people who'd like to actually have public discourse so maybe the shape of the world just fits what people really want. But there are safe havens, bookstores and coffee shops mostly. We rely entirely on the effort of brave individuals who dedicate their lives to providing such places, both here on the web and in real life. It just makes me sad to think that the vast majority of our culture will never walk through the door of a local coffee shop, get a cup, sit down and find out how someone else lives.

So what can we do about it? Should we really do anything? When it comes down to it, it's up to the people who make up a society to determine the rules by which they live. I think Americans tend to forget that. Laws that have been around long enough start to seem like truth, like they are a permanent part of our world and they've always been there. The fear of authority runs deep, and we're taught it quite well. It's up to each of us to fight for our rights in every moment. The freedom of speech is not granted to us, we take it, we keep it alive. It is eroded every day we do not speak out against it's slow legislative demise, every time we tolerate the silencing of dissenting opinion, every time we allow a journalist to be beaten and imprisoned and every time we brow beat another person for not agreeing with us.

The walls between us get thicker every day, there is always one more reason to not engage a stranger in conversation. There are enough ists and isms out there to keep every ones nose in the air and their opinions to themselves, enough fear floating through our collective unconscious to keep us huddled in our comforting illusions and reruns. I say be brave, talk to strangers. Find out how someone else gets down. But remember, don't talk down to people, never think you are superior and leave people alone if they start getting agitated. Most of all, don't be a dick.

Rant: East Side till I die.

The East end of Richmond is the land of my teenage years. My parents moved out there so I could attend county schools when I arrived here from Maryland. Evidently the county schools were "better" but I've never been able to tell. My experiences there taught me that people are cruel but I think that's more of an age thing than a location. Varina high school was at the intersection of Wannabe Lane and Misinformed Drive. We were close enough to the city that half the white kids wanted to be gangsters and near enough to true country that The Way of the Redneck was strong and true. It created an interesting hybrid, the jacked up pickup truck covered in rebel flags blasting the emergent sounds of the G-Funk West Coast rap scene. Big Johnson t-shirts with baggy pants. I was always mystified by the racist rap listeners, it seemed they would implode with paradox at any given time. I think all teenagers wear their uniforms with pride, I certainly did. Hot topic before Hot Topic existed. My first wallet chain I bought at Kroger, a dog chain attacked with pliers adorned my one pair of Jincos that I treasured above all else.
So here I grow up in this cultural crossroads, one half country, one half ghetto, confused as any young man and assaulted on all sides by fictional racial tensions. They were a fiction, it required a constant stream of inventions by the believers in it to keep the rest of us even paying attention. Ours is a generation where some of us were raised by civil rights activists, some by flat out dogmatic racists and the vast majority by parents who were ambivalent towards the whole issue. The East End is steeped in it all, the old and the new. It's not really a place to me any more, it seems like a metaphor for so much of what's going wrong in our little slice of the human experience. Really, you can see the same cancers in any neighborhood that you do a MRI on, it's just that the East End is one I've seen a lot of.
There was a phone circuit manufacturing plant on Laburnum Avenue when I was living out there in the mid-90's that has been torn down in favor of a new shopping mall. People in the local media laud it as a "step forward" for an area that has seen some really hard economic times. All I can think of is the people I went to high school with that never graduated due to children, their parents or their own drug problems and all the other myriad issues that arise in modern teenage life. When that plant was open, their entry level positions paid anywhere from 9 to 10 dollars an hour and required little more than a GED and the ability to show up sober and on time. From there workers could get training in one of the technical or supervisory fields the plant required and get their wages up to the 12-15 dollar range. Not excessively high, but something you can survive on, maybe even thrive if you plan and save. The work was boring, but not demeaning.
So now we're going to replace that with a fucking shopping mall? That'll really stimulate the local economy, more low paying go nowhere fucking retail and service jobs. People who make minimum wage aren't going to establish roots in the community because they can't afford to buy the housing built during the manufacturing era. They might be able to rent but in all probability they'll have to live a few miles away and take the bus to work. Especially as he local housing revalues higher due to the availability of nearby shopping and services. It occurs to me that this is not a new problem, urban planners have been watching this trend for years. But the Powers That Be (being capital) have no need for solid community. Solid communities lead to things like demands for better education, labor unions and people who expect something approaching a quality of life.

So we end up with a golden cap on an infected tooth, new construction next to abandoned farm houses. It's like refacing a building who's foundation fell apart years ago and expecting that to fix the problem. It pains me to see this pathos repeated all over our country and the only way we're going to stop it is to start buying back our land from the investment class and building community in only way that is sustainable, from the roots up.