Michael Jackson, RIP

I remember where I was when Jim Morrison, the lead singer-songwriter of the Doors passed away. I was in a camera shop which had decided to branch out into different kinds of merchandise and had just started selling stereo equipment. One of the units on the shelves was tuned to the local top-40 AM station. As I was leaving, after having picked up some darkroom supplies, the national news came on. The top story was that Jim Morrison of the Doors had died of a heart attack in a hotel in Paris, where he and his girlfriend were living at the time. I never even knew he was living abroad. From that point on, their latest single “Love Her Madly” would haunt me every time it was played.

I remember where I was when John Lennon was assassinated. I was in the bedroom of my three-room postage-stamp apartment on the second floor of an unassuming 19th-century house in a working-class neighborhood, owned by a sweet old Jewish lady. I was listening to the local album-rock FM station which the general manager of the college radio station I DJ'd for had a paying gig at. At about 11PM, he interrupted the show he was DJing to read the Associated Press bulletin. He read the copy exactly as it came off the wire. He was on the verge of tears. I myself was stunned. Who, I wondered, would want to shoot a Beatle?

I remember where I was when I learned that Frank Zappa had died. I was in my girlfriend's living room listening to National Public Radio when the talk show Fresh Air came on. Host Terry Gross relayed the Zappa Family's announcement that Frank “had embarked on his final tour”. I did what thousands of his fans did, and called friends to tell them the bad news.

When Michael Jackson died yesterday, I was on a bus returning home from a health care rally in Washington, DC. A passenger's daughter had text-messaged her father that Mr. Jackson had passed on. Our group leader broke out her laptop and surfed a few websites before finding a story stating that Jackson had been taken to the hospital, with no word on his condition. Only about an hour later did we learn that the King Of Pop had indeed, died of cardiac arrest.

As a teenager, I'd always lumped The Jackson 5's music in with a late 60's-early 70's musical trend called bubblegum. Bubblegum to my peers was little more than light-duty pop marketed to impressionable pre-teens, with trite lyrics only a notch or two above the Mother Goose rhymes we got tired of halfway through nursery school. The Jackson 5 TV cartoon series only served to reinforce this notion. Looking back, I think we were a bit hasty in our judgment of the Jackson music family. Yes, The Jackson Five's music was aggressively marketed to children, but nonetheless Motown Records built the Jackson's catalog with the same approach which had made the Supremes, the Temptations, and Stevie Wonder household names. Where other bubblegum productions often used session musicians, Motown threw the Funk Brothers into the mix. Not many bubblegum tunes get played on oldies radio, but songs like “ABC” and “I Want You Back” (most notably covered by British pub-rocker Graham Parker) have stood the test of time. Samples from Jackson 5 records have powered many hip-hop tracks.

I was never a big fan of Mr. Jackson's later releases after he'd grown, though I must concede that I never gave his all-but-pivotal album “Off The Wall” an adequate hearing. Its sound set it squarely apart from the avalanche of cookie-cutter disco of the era in which it was produced. I scoffed at his 1980's efforts like Beat It, though I thought his collaborations with the pop icons of earlier decades, Mick Jagger (State of Shock) and Paul McCartney (Say, Say, Say) were rather brilliant.

Michael Jackson to me epitomized everything that was wrong with the music business. His concert ticket prices were among the highest in the industry. A rock critic who attended three Jackson shows on three consecutive evenings noted that each show was literally identical to the last. Every second of those shows, including things that were supposed to be spontaneous, was in fact scripted and acted out to a fare-thee-well. His appearance at the White House with then-president Ronald Reagan, a Doctor Feelgood who massaged the egos of American voters while his administration did its best to undermine the social progress of the previous two decades, was as grotesque to me as Elvis Presley's impromptu photo-op with Richard Nixon.

And then there was his appearance. As a young man, Jackson was an attractive African-American. In recent years, he became a grotesque parody of himself. He bleached his skin almost white. His facial features, the product of several plastic surgeries, some of which his doctors actually advised him against, made him look. androgynous and almost mannequin-like. And that voice. How did the pipes of that sweet little boy, that handsome young man become transmogrified into the alien, robotic whine of recent years?

Much – let me correct that, not enough has been said about Jacko's terrible childhood. Yes, the kid had talent, industrial quantities of it. But when any kid gets pushed to succeed as Jackson was, you've got to wonder what's going on when the camera lights are off and the microphones are closed. According to various sources, his father, a brutal taskmaster, would literally whip the preadolescent Jackson into line by among other things, holding him upside down by one leg and beating him on his back and buttocks. There were also allegations of sexual abuse. And according to Wikipedia, the elder Jackson had other interesting pastimes: One night while Jackson was asleep, Joseph [Michael's father] climbed into his room through the bedroom window. Wearing a fright mask, he entered the room screaming and shouting. Joseph said he wanted to teach his children not to leave the window open when they went to sleep. For years afterwards, Jackson suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his bedroom.

Now the man who embodied incredible talent combined with incredible excess is gone. We shall probably not see his like again. The tragicomedy of Michael Jackson's life is over, at what's usually referred to as “midlife”.

That's sad.

Great Moments in Advertising (second in a series)

During the years of the “sexual revolution”, the exploitation of sexuality for commercial ends went super-critical. From myriad permutations of the word “intercourse” (for instance, a radio program from that period called “Interchords”) to full-page ads in magazines for a certain brand of blue jeans, which showed only an attractive young woman riding a bicycle, in the buff (not showing the product in the ad? What were they thinking?), things went from mildly amusing to absurd faster than a space shuttle blasting off for the Van Allen Belt.

The proprietors of the electronic emporium being advertised here obviously had no use for subtlety, preferring instead to go as close to the line as they possibly could without landing in court for “obscenity”, no small matter back in those days. The “feet” motif shown in this illustration continues to adorn things like aftermarket auto convertible-tops to this very day.

(Click illustration to enlarge).

Everything I know I learned from record shopping,Part 2

Photo Creative Commons by Ivan Zuber

You cannot tell how a record will sound by looking at the cover art, reading the list of musicians, or checking out which studio it was recorded at or when. The only way to know is to put it onto a turntable, put the needle on it and listen to it, however briefly.

Just because "everyone likes it" doesn't mean that it's right for you.

If someone tells you that something sucks (or is fantastic) without offering a solid, rational explanation, that's proof that you need to check it out for yourself.

Oldies radio reminds us that a little nostalgia can be fun, but living in the distant past isn’t good for you.

You can hear something that everybody's raving about and wonder what the big deal is. You can hear something that everyone makes fun of and not think it's so bad.

The mainstream is like an 8-lane highway; big, straight, flat, efficient and predictable. And it seldom goes anyplace interesting. Cultural side roads can be much harder to navigate, but you'll probably find much more interesting and rewarding experiences on them.

The Way He Walked...

Photo Creative Commons 2008 by Yves Lorson.

It has come to my attention that a great punk icon has passed away.

Those of you who are familiar with The Cramps know of Lux Interior’s snarling, piercing vocals. You know of his original songs (co-written with his wife Ivy) with titles like “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?”, his almost parodic treatment of dusty pop war-horses like “Lonesome Town”, or his band’s thrashing reading of Hasil Adkins’ “She Said...” which outdoes Mr. Adkins’ bloodcurdling original, no mean feat.

I remember hearing The Cramps’ debut 12-inch, Gravest Hits back in ‘79. I was suitably impressed to say the least! The record sounded to me like it had been made on a thrift-shop cassette deck using the cheapest grade of tape available. The reverb on most of the tracks was the classic Lincoln-Tunnel variety. All the previously-buried 1950's rockabilly cliches had been newly exhumed, hosed down and given a fresh coat of red-lead paint. In an age of Teflon-slick FM rock with synthesized orchestras and 20-minute drug-fueled guitar solos by people who flew to gigs in Lear Jets, The Cramps’ gritty back-to-basics style stood out.

News reports say that Lux died of a bad heart, which makes no sense to me. He and his band had plenty of heart. So long, Lux. It’s too bad you had to split. The music world needs people like you more than ever. My sincerest condolences to Ivy, the band and all of your fans the world over.

Piracy, schmiracy

Lately there’s been a lot of gum-flapping about “music piracy”. The RIAA has put out DVD’s containing lavishly-produced infomercials about the evils of file-sharing and the story of The Kid Who Got Caught who now has to spend the rest of his life flipping burgers to pay his legal bills and fines. Each new major-label release comes festooned with a conspicuous FBI Anti-Piracy Warning (on one such release, the performer printed a disclaimer: “The artist does not endorse the message shown below”). Never mind that traditionally it’s the major record labels themselves who routinely take money out of the pockets of musicians. But I digress.

By now, we’re all familiar Apple placing “digital rights management” (DRM) crippleware into music that it sells via Itunes as well as with SONY and their criminal invasion of innocent customers’ computers with malicious “rootkit” software which they said was only meant to - you guessed it - CURB PIRACY. (Whatever happened to “two wrongs don’t make a right”?) It’s a jihad against fair use and even common sense, and we music consumers are THE ENEMY. How did we come to such a state of affairs? What’s going on here?

Back in the early 80's, cassette gear was really getting popular, largely thanks to SONY’s Walkman series of earphone-based portable cassette players, the granddaddies of the Ipod. Back then in those oh-so-analogue days, people would transfer their record collections to tape in order to listen to them on the go. Sometimes they’d tape copies of their albums for their friends which, whether the alkaloid-powder-enhanced record wonks acknowledged it or not, is how many people learned about new bands and different kinds of music. Then as now, commercial radio was too concerned with ratings and advertising to be bothered with breaking new music, at least not without the imprimatur of the major labels. Not to be denied their virtual monopoly power, the record company wonks swung into action. “Home taping is killing music, and it’s illegal!” trumpeted full-page ads in music magazines and on the backs of records, accompanied by a stylized Jolly Roger showing a cassette tape above the traditional crossbones. The record conglomerates attempted, with limited success, to charge customers a “tax” on tape decks and blank tapes, money to be paid directly to the record companies for music which consumers were presumably going to “pirate” using those items.

Skip ahead to the mid-90's. Along comes this kid Shawn Fanning and his new invention, a peer-to-peer file sharing site called Napster. It’s a pay site now, but back then it functioned a lot like Kazaa, Gnutella or Limewire. The major labels rallied their designer-suited troops just as they did in the early 80's. “Piracy! Theft!” the record executives all shouted when pressed on the subject. “Our jobs! Our limos! Our $500.00 lunches!” they whined softly to each other in private. The labels through their cartel, the RIAA, decided that Napster had to be stopped at all costs, and so the litigation began. This despite the fact that while Napster was going full-tilt, CD sales were actually UP - that’s right, up, by 4% as compared to before Napster’s arrival. According to PC Magazine’s John Dvorak, file-sharing services like the old Napster were proving to be excellent promotional vehicles. Peer to peer services also have the advantage of not being governed by the whims of media conglomerates who don’t know enough to get out of their own way (or as a friend once put it, “How come I can download David Bowie’s latest single on Limewire, but I can’t hear it on the radio?”). Before the shutdown of the old Napster, independent bands were actually using it to get their music out to potential audiences. After the shutdown of Napster, CD sales dropped by almost HALF. Was this what the record conglomerates were really shooting for?

To further illustrate my point: Several years ago, a friend shared one of his new CD’s with me. He did it the old-fashioned way, by sending me an audio cassette of it. That tape stayed in my car’s stereo for over a month. It was that good! So I searched out more releases by that group. In all, I bought 5 titles by that band. Net loss to the band - one sale. Net gain to the band - 5 sales. Who came out ahead in that deal? And if my friend had not “pirated” me their first album, I never would have even known that they even existed and never bought ANY of their releases, in which case: net loss to the band - one less fan.

Why do people still use the peer-to-peer networks? Why risk an unwanted visit from The Men In Black Who Know Everything About Everything That You Do? Well, it’s because the paid download sites are essentially virtual mall record stores. Paid download sites, having none of the space limitations common to stores, are free to host many more selections than a real-world store. Just the same, there are hundreds of songs by obscure or forgotten artists which will never be available on the paid sites. There are unreleased recordings which will never see the light of day except via peer-to-peer. While technology has moved by leaps and bounds, the whims of radio programmers, music marketers and focus groups remain just as intractable as ever. As long as things stay this way, there will always be an “underground” music economy.

For the record (also available on cassette and CD), I believe that downloading and sharing commonly-available commercially-released music is a waste of time and bandwidth. I would much rather use the web to explore music that hasn’t been overpromoted and overplayed. There are independent artists who post their music on sites like Garageband.com and Myspace. Unlike the major labels, these bands very much want people to download their music, not because they’re being charitable, but because they know full well that their chances of being played on Clear Channel radio or showing up at a mall chainstore are somewhere between nil and zip. The Web is the only kind of “broadcast exposure” they can hope for. Sure, a lot of them suck, but hey, so does plenty of major-label product, right? You have to “dig” for the good stuff just as you would if you were pawing through a bin full of vinyls or a shelf full of CD’s. The reward is finding music that you didn’t know you couldn’t live without until you found it.