How To Cook A Screaming Eagle
This is the best thing I’ve read all day, and I’ve read a lot.
Well, maybe if we’re including last night as part of today, after all, it was past midnight, I’ve got to give props to the book "Bad Things Happen", which was the unread remnant from a long ago trip that I found on my Kindle which riveted me, making me wonder why I purchased a genre novel yet enjoyed it so much.
ANYWAY, today music is about money. The spicy center, the nougat that makes life worth living, that’s been pushed aside. Now it’s all about how many t-shirts you sold and lamenting that iTunes downloads do not equal CD sales. But what actually gets people to listen to music, to enjoy it? There’s very little discussion of that. Unlike the seventies, when being a rock critic could ensure fame that transcends your corporeal body. See Lester Bangs for instruction. When he wrote about rock and roll you were inspired to hear it. When you read the letter grades of records in "reviews" today the factoid escapes your cranium shortly thereafter. What has a grade got to do with music?
And what does writing have to do with eating?
There’s all this hogwash that you can’t write about music, can’t capture its essence. The key is not to try and analyze music, but capture its excitement, its mood, draw people in, make them want to hear it. In other words, just don’t tweet that you love so-and-so, EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
But explaining is for pussies. That’s what English majors do. And everybody knows you can’t make money pursuing the liberal arts. You need to be a computer science major, or a business major, which is why our music today sounds so bad. It evidences science instead of soul. It bounces right off of you instead of penetrating.
The picture of the Screaming Eagle in this story was enough to make my mouth water and get my taste buds salivating, but it was the discussion of those who partake that really got me going. Remember college, when calories were something you burned off walking to class? When the girls were fatter than their mothers? Yup, you can be chubby in college, but it’s anathema once you’re in the workforce. Who wants to be involved with a woman who doesn’t eat?
Because eating is like music. The essence of life.
And I’m not talking McDonald’s and I’m not talking Britney Spears, even though Mickey D’s fries are fantastic and "…Baby One More Time" is life-affirming.
But what we like most is not the mainstream music, what’s on Top Forty radio, but what we discover at a buddy’s house, uncover at a club, that which hits us unexpectedly, that makes us feel so good.
One can categorize a Screaming Eagle as junk food, but that would be wrong. A Screaming Eagle is "Satisfaction", "Hang On Sloopy", "Wild Thing", something so simple yet so right. Something that shoots low and succeeds. Something we live for.
In this article Sam Sifton captures college, drunkenness, late nights and chow and wraps them up in a concoction that makes you feel you can both taste and smell the food, even though all you’ve got is a picture. The best rock writing did the same thing. You had to run to the store to buy the album, just to be part of the writer’s elation, which is what I did with Lester Bangs’s review of Alice Cooper’s "Killer", and when I dropped the needle on "Under My Wheels", not only did I get it, my life was changed.
This food renaissance is what music used to be. People can’t stop talking about it, can’t stop reading about it, can’t stop spending their money trying to titillate their taste buds. The food truck scene is like indie or punk, a reaction to the establishment that captures the heart of the adventurous.
With bands making so much money during the MTV era, music became about money. And now with money more prevalent in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, music no longer gets the best and the brightest, but Snookis, the marginally-talented having a go before they settle into a life of drudgery.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The Kogi truck doesn’t sell McDonald’s. Why are we giving credit to Dr. Luke for churning out the same crap with different people?
Why do we laud "American Idol" when we wouldn’t let an inexperienced chef prepare our meal?
Why is it about everything but the art?
