Close Call

(Thank you Kenny Weissberg for the link!)

MUSIC IN SCHOOLS

Forget the rubbish about it boosting your brain, the bottom line is if we want better popular music, more people have to know how to play it.

Speak with famous musicians and you’ll be stunned how many started in the school band. They caught the bug and stuck with it.

With the evisceration of school music programs has come the decline of quality pop music. In the sixties, not only were there bands, but mandatory music courses wherein you had to learn how to read music.

Not everybody enjoyed these, but does everybody enjoy math?

You don’t need a music degree to enjoy music, but you cotton to those with developed skills.

You wouldn’t go to a surgeon who watched a medical TV show and you wouldn’t want a lawyer schooled in “Judge Judy.” Too many seeking fame and riches have only that…or maybe a good body and a good voice too, and that’s just not enough.

Television singing shows are a diversion. Some quality people slip through. But they’re the cherry on top at best.

Bottom line, you get to the top by hard work, and the focus on ever younger nitwits is not following this paradigm.

PERSPECTIVE

Just because you play, that does not mean you will be successful, that does not mean you’re entitled to a job in music.

With access has come delusion. In other words, if I can put it on iTunes you should buy it.

But if you get a trophy in kiddie soccer do you think you’re one step away from Manchester City?

You should play music for the joy of it, for the couple of bucks, not because it’s a road to fame and riches. Sure, some people will make it, but most won’t.

You realize who’s good in math at school, biology, English…if you’re not at the top, you find another path, why does everybody think they’re at the top in music?

A PLACE TO PLAY

There’s nowhere to start out.

Family functions have deejays and the club business died with the record business, when there was no one to support it.

To a degree, this is responsible for electronic music, and that’s fine, but just because you know how to turn on the turntable, that does not make you a deejay.

But with nowhere to play, no one can get any good. Your skills might be developed, but your live chops are not extant. I love Lorde’s music, but live she’s a bore, because she just hasn’t developed yet.

Think of all the great live bands, from the jazzers to J. Geils to… They honed their skills off the radar, got good over time.

We’ve got to get people to hire live bands for family functions. The energy of live can never be replaced by a deejay. But this requires good bands willing to play the desired music at a fair price.

If you’re not willing to play the hits, you’re not willing to get good.

RECORDING

We need skilled producers and engineers to record all these wannabe bands. Right now, compensation is challenged so many musicians do it themselves.

It’s true a hit can be heard through mud, but a clear, crisp recording helps people to get hooked.

We’ve got all the equipment, learn how to use it.

NO WINE BEFORE ITS TIME

This hooks into perspective above. Just because you made it, that does not mean we should be interested. Used to be making a physical disc was expensive, now making an MP3 is cheap so people bombard us with their substandard productions.

If you want to make it, wait until you’re ready.

If someone isn’t clamoring for the file, so they can spread it to others, then it’s not good enough.

STREET TEAMS/VIRALITY

Somehow, marketing has trumped the organic spread of music.

Yes, you want people to spread it, but only if they want to!

You want a mailing list so you can reach your fans, not so you can turn them into an army dunning those who do not care.

Soft sell at best.

We live in a pull economy. If people aren’t pulling your music, it’s not gonna blow up.

We live in an era of marketing, not music. And we’re all suffering as a result.

GATEKEEPERS

There’s a fiction that having everything available means people are interested in it, the so-called “Long Tail.”

But the truth is in a Tower of Babel society, we gravitate to that which is universal.

We don’t want endless playlists. We want a few certified hits.

Just like you won’t tolerate your OS crashing, just like you don’t want a Windows phone because it has no apps, the line between success and failure is clear, and only a few products pass through. The new BlackBerries are better than the old, but we don’t need ’em if we’ve got iPhones and Androids. Every day I get e-mail from BlackBerry defenders… Don’t you get it, you lost!

It’s even worse in music. At least mobile phones cost hundreds of dollars. Music can be distributed for free so we’ve got delusional people foisting it upon us causing us all to tune out.

There is no center anymore, and we’ve got to create one.

The reason labels cater to Top Forty is at least there’s a market there, in hip-hop too, country also. Other than that, it’s a great wilderness with classic acts and concertgoers but the inability to break a record.

Sure, the music may not be good enough, but the landscape is incomprehensible to the fans.

We don’t need tons of playlists on Songza, we just need five, maybe ten, tracks that EVERYBODY IN AMERICA listens to!

That’s why Top Forty is successful.

But radio isn’t about music, but advertising.

So we’ve got to wrest dissemination and consolidation of new music FROM radio.

There needs to be one site where everybody goes that features few tracks and readily rotates them. Nothing will boost music more.

But the techies don’t want anything that doesn’t scale financially.

And the wannabes don’t want to be left out.

So instead we’re living in a vast, incomprehensible wasteland.

THE KIND OF MUSIC

It does not matter. It’s just got to titillate the eardrums.

We’ve become too genre-specific.

Once a few outsiders break through with edgy material, more will be inspired to do so.

As for rewards… If playing music for a living and having people listen to it is not enough, stop now. If you’re focusing on money, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. You need the ability to eat and have shelter, that’s about it. But the truth is scale on the Internet is so much larger than everything that existed previously that those who break through will become very wealthy and powerful. But we’ve got to make sure we don’t purvey crap, we don’t sell good to the masses. They only want incredible, that’s why they’re all watching TV.

BUSINESSMEN

You want someone to sort the money, to make the deals.

But we need an entrepreneurial spirit in business too.

Wipe out music business schools, they’re a rip-off teaching what does not need to be known. You’re learning how to work at a record company that neither wants nor needs you, unless you’re willing to work for free as an intern.

We’ve got to attract the renegades, the limit-testers, those willing to turn the tables upside down who are now going into tech.

Did you know Travis Kalanick, the majordomo of Uber, which you love, started with a P2P music site, Scour?

Don’t pooh-pooh P2P, everything good in music has happened as a result.

Daniel Ek stayed in, but you want him out, not realizing that the ability to have everything at one’s fingertips includes YOUR music, and that there’s a ton of money in streaming, just read this:

“An Independent Artist’s Take on Spotify”

Until we can attract the best and the brightest to music, we’re doomed.

He cowrote and starred in my favorite stupid movie of all time, “Stripes.”

No “Private Benjamin,” the stars of “Stripes” were never co-opted, always maintained their humor and outsider perspective, and won in the end.

In other words, the nerds inherited the earth.

That’s what comedians once were. Before they all got sitcoms and made millions. They were outcasts, class clowns, with mediocre grades and a small group of friends, and they never got the girl. Which is why it’s so great that Bill Murray and Harold Ramis hang out with the hottest in “Stripes.”

But the reason I like “Stripes” so much is this:

Stripes Breakup Scene

And just in case YouTube is blocked in your territory, here’s the relevant portion:

“Anita: You sleep until noon and then you watch ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ and then you drive your cab what a couple hours a day and then you come home and order out food and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until two in the morning.

Winger: Tito Puente is going to be dead and you’re going to say ‘I’ve been listening to him for years and I think he’s fabulous!'”

It’s hard to remember an era when you went back and listened to the catalog, when people boasted they were into an act before they were big.

Just like it’s hard to remember an era when movie comedies were smart and had nothing to do with comic books, and made the little girls smile and the young boys roll in the aisle with laughter.

It all started with “Animal House.” A gross-out comedy that bent the history of the medium ninety degrees, from which it never recovered.

This was the exponent of “Saturday Night Live.”

Which emanated from Second City and the “National Lampoon” and featured heroes not only known, but unknown, from John Belushi to Doug Kenney.

Yes, once upon a time being smart and irreverent was a job. Your goal wasn’t to be like everybody else, but to have those who got it come to you.

And at the nexus of all this was Harold Ramis.

Yes, Harold did time at “Second City.”

He wrote “Animal House” with the aforementioned Doug Kenney and Chris Miller.

But that’s not all, he cowrote “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters” and “Back To School” and “Groundhog Day”…seemingly all the movies you quote on a regular basis.

Furthermore, he directed “Caddyshack” and “Groundhog Day”!

You might know him as one of the Ghostbusters, but those jokes aren’t improvised, Ramis sat with his buddies and they cracked each other up and then they proceeded to crack us up.

So right now we’re subjected to endless reams of press about Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, neither of whom is doing anything new. The last time there was innovation in late night was with David Letterman, thirty years ago, when he turned an interview format into a comedic one, featuring ever more bizarre stunts, and started a cult that propels him to this day.

And once upon a time, “Saturday Night Live” was dangerous. The cast were ringleaders, testing limits, embracing their hipness and their otherness, SNL cemented the vision of the sixties, the youth finally took over.

And now baby boomers are in control and are so self-congratulatory it makes me puke.

And the generations after them are so broke and so desperate they’re focused on money to the exclusion of art.

Who knew SNL was a stepping stone?

Who knew “Animal House” would be a groundbreaking paradigm shifter?

But that was the seventies, before the greedy eighties, when what was in your mind, how you lived your life, was important as opposed to how much money you made.

So, so long Harold Ramis. You’re a footnote in history but paramount in baby boomer brains. Your work will continue to live on, because everybody knows institutions are to poke fun at, and you were one of the best.

So long the modern movie business, wherein comedies can’t be made because they don’t play worldwide, if it’s not funny in Uzbekistan, the studio doesn’t want to make it. And if it’s all about getting a sponsor for an online production…sponsors don’t like edgy, never did.

And so long the music business. Wherein we used to have to listen and now we don’t. Your life can go on just fine being ignorant of not only Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, but Kanye and Jay Z too.

Everybody had to see “Animal House.”

Nobody has to hear today’s music.

Sure, they burned out the Lampoon formula.

Sure, “Bridesmaids” was a good movie.

Sure, Chris Rock is almost as edgy and insightful as Richard Pryor.

But so far, no one’s broken the mold. All we’ve seen is variations on the theme. It’s like we’re in an endless “Groundhog Day,” repeating ourselves ad infinitum until someone, hopefully you, stands apart and makes fun of the endless iterations of the same theme.

Like Harold Ramis.

On one hand, technology enables us.

On the other, it disables us.

Sure, we’re coughing up information on Facebook, trying to make it evaporate after communicating on Snapchat, but the truth is there are cameras and tracking devices everywhere, what does this mean for the human condition?

Is it a renaissance for thought? To quote Bob Dylan… “If my thought dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine”…

Or, are we all going to become gun-shy, fearful not only of doing something illegal, but distasteful, something that will be trumpeted eons from now on our permanent record.

Oh, kids are aware of that now. They judiciously decide what to post online. It’s only their tech-ignorant elders who don’t know what you post can come back to haunt you.

But there’s going to be pictures of you smoking dope, consorting with the enemy…

In other words, was Edward Snowden just a wake up call, too late, that not only is our government out of control, but so are we?

You may not be keeping your texts, but your mobile provider is.

Used to be you were truly alone in the wilderness. Now you can call rescue from the top of Mt. Everest.

Do we see the end of duplicity?

Or a locked down environment where everybody is fearful of their past, worried they’re going to be shunted off the track?

If you raise your head, there’s 24/7 documentation. I’m sure Justin Bieber didn’t think egging a house would be caught on film.

Oh, that’s right, there’s no film anymore. Just digits. 1’s and 0’s, captured on storage media that becomes ever larger and ever cheaper.

My father was a fan of petty theft. He saw it as sport.

But he was also afraid of the law.

Sounds like a conundrum.

Not in the sixties, but definitely today.

Everybody knows there’s a camera in the retail store. No one ever really feels free.

Or do they?