sunday jamz vii

I already wrote a lot today so, uh, jam

□□□ (Kuchiroro) - 00:00:00 short ver.

I'm not really sure what's going on here but what I am sure of is that it is awesome.

an open letter to the music industry (on transparency)

Dear The Music Industry,

Hi. How's it going? I know you get a bad rap, but I want to start off by saying, thanks for all the music! We all know you are far from perfect, and some parts of you--ok probably a lot--have strayed into full-on evil territory way more than any of us would have liked. But overall, I know that you have dedicated your lives to discovering and fostering and bringing us new and exciting music, and though I've never met you in person, I can only assume that anyone who would do that must be pretty cool. Which is why I would like to help you. So, inspired by a post by Lower Dens frontwoman Jana Hunter on the economics of the music industry that has been making the internet-rounds lately, here are a few thoughts that I think might help us all out.

don't let everyone think you're this guy

Since Spotify finally opened its, uh, doors(?) here in the US, I have seen many people jump ship from both piracy and purchasing to instead legally streaming all their music, and since it's all legal and stuff, it must be better for the artists, right? Well, Lower Dens frontwoman Jana Hunter has come correct with an in-depth examination on how the advent of streaming services (and the internet) has effected musicians' ability to actually make a living off their music, and it's not super pretty. I.e. the Spotify cut is tiny.

But that's not really what I want to talk about. Because while Hunter covers a lot of ground on the economics of music, there was one thing that I found particularly interesting. When adressing the common perception that "Record companies rob artists of profit more so than streaming," she replies that:

A common independent deal is the 50/50 deal, wherein a label pays for everything up front, and then recoups (takes back via profits) their costs, after you which you and your label split the remaining profits. If your record costs $40k, and your record makes $100k, you get $30k. If Spotify paid you for an equivalent amount of plays on their paid subscription service, you’d get $1250.

Which is, like, good to know! Really! 50/50? Sounds like a pretty good deal for everyone involved. Were people less able to pull the "but all the moneys just go to the labels brahhhhh" argument, maybe they'd actually pay for more music. Or at least be less fucking self-righteous about it. But here's the thing:

How the hell is anyone supposed to know this?

The gist of Hunter's message is that with technology constantly reshaping the landscape of music industry, we, the listeners have to act as a self-regulating force that guides said shaping into something that is mutually beneficial for everyone involved. Which is absolutely true. But the fact is, the actual economics of the music industry have been basically hidden from us, the fans/consumers, for its entire history. Of course most people don't understand the the economic implications of what they're doing--because how could we beyond very general statements about the industry as a whole, which, who knows what that means? "Sales declining? Thats probably just like, manufactured pop stars can't sell 20 million generic albums anymore, right? Not the music real heads listen to right?"

"only sellouts ever made money anyway, man!"

In a followup post, Hunter sums up her message to listeners as follows:

A lot of people responded to 10/25 post and others with an almost confessional breakdown of their personal habits. “I spend x hours on spotify, go to x shows a month, and spend x amount on records,” and then drew various conclusions about their contributions to music. I hope that that sort of thing helps to put in perspective something about your relationship to music, and I’d really only respond to it by saying that if you don’t consider the flip-side, the musicians’ income, then you’re not seeing the end of that equation, and not getting a real picture.

And again, I say this is absolutely true. But again, maybe part of the reason no once considers the "flip-side, the musicians' income" is because that information is for the most part unavailable to us. I don't say this to attack Hunter or anything--on the contrary, her post goes into great detail on exactly this, which is exactly what I'm saying.

fans not privy to economic data

But the music industry, indie or otherwise, needs to do far, far better than a few stray tumblr posts by artists on how much money they make from selling music in different formats. Shit like this (warning, pretty violent 'cause it's the Boondocks) doesn't work, and actually exacerbates consumer resentment instead of building the listener-artist/label connection we need. Instead of vague platitudes or attacks, give us real data! People aren't stupid--I mean, this is the generation that's basically figured out how to topple the entire media industry. They can handle percentages.

Listeners need to give far more consideration to the needs of the artists whose works they take part it. But understanding is a two-way street, and  it is the musicians' and labels' responsibility to trust the people they depend on for livelihood enough to actually provide them with information on how their industry actually works. And don't just release it, publicize it! If someone is deciding on whether to buy or stream or download an album, maybe they could know exactly where that money goes, or how much it cost to make, or how badly the artist probably needs it to keep going. I dunno exactly, these are all just random ideas. But we need to try them, and many more, and we need to figure out a better level of economic transparency than the current standard of "none". Because it is only with a real understanding of the dynamics of their relationship with the music that consumers can begin to cooperate with artists in reshaping those dynamics into something that will better serve us all.

and hopefully we'll never have to worry about product placement

--h.s.t.

mathy mondays vii

don't even try to clap along, it's mathy mondays!

Henry Threadgill - Little Pocket Sized Demons

The world of weird big band music is sadly under-explored. Were you to venture in with your land roving satellite, you would find that something about having to keep that many weird players in some form of coherent sound all while playing weird compositions in weird ways creates a particular tapestry of of interplay that can only ever arise under weird these weird big band conditions.

Henry Threadgill is a living master of this. From the unsettling harmonies to the unsettling melody to the unsettlingly mingled acoustic and electric textures is formed something that simultaneously grooves, swings, skronks, and rocks out. When guitarists Brandon Ross and Masujaa come in for solos, they straight up shred, weird 80's style and yet it sounds totally natural. Along with his own mad sax skills, the Threadgill shows that ultimate bandleader accomplishment: making all this shit work together while still retaining the band's overall guiding/compositional voice. What more can you ask for? 

sunday jamz vi

sundayz of soul

Sunz of Soul - Life, Love ft Shawn Struggle

If you are checking the Black Radio: Recovered EP as hard as I am (why aren't you?!) you may have come across the name Jewels, and wondered who that is. Well, Jewels, my friends, is the fucking fantastic producer of underrated as fuck group Sunz of Soul, who should all be checking immediately. "Life, Love" is a powerful entry in a long line of "gettin by and livin life" rap manifestos that have dropped over the years. Over a loping drums and a sample that toes the line between smooth strings and haunting woogity-woogity-woogity and back across every few bars, Black Mamba and guest Shawn Struggle spit tales of life. And look, there's that rarity, an actually good hook! Boom it in ya boom it in ya boom it in ya jeep.

mathy mondays vi

fuck a rock song, it's mathy mondays!

Shudder To Think - Hit Liquor

Yeah, this had a music video. The 90's were a strange time for rock. One time, I actually heard this song playing on the radio at a Guitar Center, and wondered whether I'd ended up in an alternate universe where someone had grabbed rock by it's cock and pulled it permanently inside out--like how they used to think female reproductive organs were literally just inverted male ones (people were dumb as hell back then--I would google you a link but my stomach is not up for the results "inside out victorian genitals" will bring right now)--and instead of macho, crushing riffitude our priorities became this. Really, all the good alt-rock bands had that thing they replaced their fore-overbearer's primal and oft-putrid* "maleness" with--e.g. Nirvana's nhilistic roar, My Bloody Valentine's vocal-masking washes of distortion, Garbage's, uh, sexiness--but Shudder To Think's was one of the weirdest. For once deconstruction is an actually apt term; it sounds like they disassembled a rock song into its constituent pieces, strew them across the floor, and then duct-taped them back together with no rhyme or reason into some horrific monstrosity that just barely works, Sid-style.

It is the this of rock songs

Here comes a part of a riff! Oh wait there's a downbeat! What the fuck it's a vocal! All just coming and going at wrongly timed intervals, the result of too small gears connected to too long pinions... or something. Throw in the seriously homoerotic video, and guitarist Christian Bale's** at first fairly straightforward sounding guitar solo made utterly weird by context until it evolves into a little buzzsaw of noise itself, and the next time you hear a normal song you'll wonder--just what the fuck is really going on under there anyway?

*seriously fuck that song
**2:15 in the video. AND YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING

sunday jamz v

I am sick, so all I have to say is

This is the shit they play in heaven at night.

Rafiq Bhatia - Strata EP - Pt. 1 (in which nothing is said about the actual album)

(apologies if you tried to read this before it got proofread... it is proofread now)

A Really Long Preface

People don't really listen to jazz. That is, a lot of people who should listen to jazz, don't listen to jazz. Oh sure, everyone has their brief flings with Miles Davis and John Coltrane or whatever; and lots of people even go further and actually continue to learn about and listen to all that stuff, but I'm talking current jazz--the fucking shit that is happening right now. And Rafiq Bhatia's "Strata" EP, released earlier this week, is a blazing spacecraft, pointing the way though hyperspace to what the thing called "jazz" can be in 2012 and beyond. Or maybe already is.

What the hell is jazz anyway? Peeps toss around words like and "improvised" and "saxophone" as if that would define. Sorry but no. If you're interested you can read some really angry yet often on point shit by Nicholas Payton on the history of the word "jazz", and the not little controversy that followed, but right now I'd rather just get some kind of operational definition that encompasses its unique ethos and explains the connection between a large and sometimes disparate group of musicians.

When most people think of "jazz" today, they are thinking of the creatively, African-American based-musics of the 50's and 60's, and maybe the various strains that branched off from them the 70's, but that is pretty much as far as they go, though it does go much further.

We got this kind of jazz--which is, for all intents in purposes, Jazz, so let's dispense with the qualifyingyness--when Bebop, with its emphasis on instrumental mastery, first splintered off from the rest of the jazz world. And while it might be an oversimplification to say that the goal of Bebop was to play some shit that white people couldn't play, I think that ethos has been and continues to be the defining factor of jazz to this day.


Jazz is:

A. Rooted in African-American culture, and,
B. Emphasizes the players' mastery of their instruments

And then maybe a more ambiguous corollary stemming from those two of: 

C. Striving to move forward.

From Bebop, we moved to Cool Jazz, which on the surface would seem to be the antithesis of the former's lighting fast, fiery, competitive nature. But, after all, its pioneer, Miles Motherfucking Davis, was there for Bebop, and while he may not have drawn explicitly on its vocabulary, did draw heavily on its meaning, as did most of the jazz that followed. 

But mastery of the instrument. Before we can discuss this, lets just get it out of the way that mastery of the instrument does not mean playing really fast. I would just use the word virtuosity, which should mean the same thing, but unfortunately it's been pretty much hijacked to mean stupid shit like child prodigies, guitar speed record holders, and/or Yngwie Fucking Malmsteen, or as he is known in some circles, the most coolest motherfucker in the entire world.

What constitutes actual mastery of the instrument is a little harder to define, and technical facility is definitely a part of it, but only in its ability to facilitate instrumental exploration.  And when multiple people are making those explorations together, you get what I think is the ultimate part of or maybe goal of playing jazz: to be simultaneously creating and communicating in a new and unique musical language.

While every genre (and form of art) consists of this kind of language forming/communicating thing, in jazz it is especially emphasized; its very form is set up to encourage and maybe even require it. Because of the unpredictable nature of the music, its song structures that are generally meant to facilitate variation and improvisation over plain recital, and the prevailing lack of lyrics from which to derive a song's meaning, the players of jazz are and must be constantly striving to find ways to create and convey feeling.

You could say that the drama of jazz comes from the constantly morphing and evolving structure of the melody, harmony, and rhythm of the song itself.

Aaaaaanyway, this language, the kind of shared though still differing schools of Jazz, reached kind of critical mass in the mid-to-late 60's (as did like everything else) with the electric experiments of Miles, the swirling mixture of dissonance and spirituality of John Coltrane, and the sui generis free jazz of Ornette Coleman, before splintering off in the 70's into stuff like post-Bitches Brew fusion, post-Trane Black Saint/Soul Note, a whole bunch of crazy and sometimes European free jazz, and eventually *shudder* smooth jazz.

And then it got a lot less popular.

I mean, look, This band opened for fucking Neil Young at the Filmore. The Byrds' Roger McGuinn drew inspiration from John Coltrane for this guitar solo; Chester Thompson could drum with Weather Report and Frank Zappa and even fucking Genesis; Rashaan Roland Roland Kirk would jam with Jimi Hendrix (and if I could take a time machine to any jam session in history this would no question be it).

So what happened?

Well, TO BE CONTINUED IN PT 2!

mathy mondays v

playing math rock and doing math are both things that are hard to do... it's mathy mondays!

Behold... The Arctopus - Canada

Behold... a bunch of very fractured riffs, bouncing off each other over a springy Chapman Stick bassline. Which is all well and good and weird and mathy, and surprisingly fun (though hazardous) to airdrum to. But if you're not in love, just get to like the 2:10 mark, because there shit gets magical. Out of pretty much nowhere, a serious taping riff takes us away, building up a bed of emerald, videogame skies until we're comfortable--and then back come those bouldery riffs, crashing down in percussive crests, followed by a digital-sounding guitar solo I wish was about 27 times as long, but digital like how Neo is digital; the sound of chiptune having sex with Eddie Van Halen. ...uhhh yeah and then back to riffs again; but honestly I'm mostly just in it for the nigh-godly middle part. This is the soundtrack to the most epic of bossfights.

sunday jamz iv

lay low dontcha know (and if ya don't know... now ya know)

My Morning Jacket - Lay Low

Holy shitfuck its indie rock! Only, unlike a whole lot of that stuff, MMJ  mastermind Jim James/Yim Yames can actually sing. Witness his gruff throat croons over a fat, wierdly accented Bonzo-meets-breakbeat; the riff, the whole momentum of the riff driving forward, stop, forward... Undoubtedly a southern-inflected anthem for chilling.

Well, for like two and a half minutes. Because what follows Yim's beautiful, tube-screamingly piercing hammer on lead is a fucking masterclass in the field of magnificent double lead guitar jam breakdown... ology. Not overly complex, technical, or pyrotechnic, but not blindly simple in that "basically just playing the melody" 80's pop sax solo way, either--no, this is the double guitar solo of two skilled, stylin' axemen who are actually listening to each other. Rather than just trading licks or shredding back and forth everywhere (which I love too, don't get me wrong), Yames and Carl Broemel work together, sending and harmonizing melodic bits and lines back and forth and ultimately building the whole into a crushing, head-banging climax of awesome worthy of the goddamn Allman Brothers.

Indie bands take note: annoying as it its ever looming, Clear Channel FM-approved boomer-spectre is, this is the kind of shit you can learn from "classic rock."

mass debating music

That is all.

mathy mondays iv

rhythmically odd folk music, it's mathy mondays!

Nick Drake - River Man

Ok, I was going to finally break out the totally insane tech death metal shit today, but this just isn't a totally insane tech death metal kind of morning, so we are going with something a bit more relaxing. River Man is in 5/4, maybe the chillest of the non-standard odd meters, and, while it's not the mathiest thing ever, that is pretty weird for folk music right? More importantly, it is great. The strumming pattern creates kind of a stepping motion, as the song's subject, Betty, either steps through or imagines exploring the river, which then flows around her in lush string arrangements by Robert Kirby (who arranged like every frickin British prog folk album ever) and Harry Robertson. Listen to this while walking around on a foggy morning in Cambridge, where Drake probably wrote a lot of this album; or just close your eyes, and pretend you're in Narnia. Sometimes math can pop up in the strangest places.

Also: two big posts comin, and a mix (which is proving to be annoying to upload intact), so stay tuned!