Happy Halloween

My fellow Reagan babies may remember this from elementary school:

The Shamisen Redemption

One of my students is the curator of an art museum in my city.  We were talking the other day about the idea of Western art as subtraction stories as opposed to the idea of Japanese art as functional.  As Japanese society changed in response to contact with the West and people stopped using swords or wearing kimono (because it is so expensive), much of Japanese art also "died" - or was at least frozen in carbonite.  This works as a general overview to Japanese art history.  

Due to the nature of traditional Japanese arts as functional, there was never any concept of art as aesthetics until that idea was introduced by Westerners.  Japanese visual artists today have to walk a thin tightrope between the absurdity of producing traditionally Japanese, functional works of art for revisionist aesthetic reasons (since "art" has been de facto defined as aethetics) and appearing to do little more than copy Western modern artists.  Accordingly, creating good modern art is more difficult for Japan than it is for the West, since everything Japan's artists produce will ultimately be seen through a lens of Japaneseness.

What I mean by Western art as a subtraction story is that Western art has a history of the gradual removal of constraints - the opposite of Japanese art as necessarily bound to the constraints of function.  If we look at the history of Western poetry, for instance, we still see with Shakespeare and Marlowe a general reliance on the iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the ancients (even though those standard rhyme patterns and meters emerged from another language and culture entirely).

Fast forward to Walt Whitman and poetry becomes all about breaking "suffocating" rules of rhyme and meter whilst yawping barbarically.  This idea of directionless rule-breaking would find its most absurd expression in E.E. Cummings, who wrote about extremely conventional subjects in extremely unconventional ways.  

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Rock and the Divine

First Things editor Joe Carter suggests Creed is superior to Led Zeppelin after Creed supposedly saved a Norwegian boy from a pack of hungry wolves last week.  I posted the following in response:

Since Led Zeppelin is far and away my favorite musical act of all time, I often find myself defending the group from casual listeners who are more or less sick of classic rock radio stations overplaying Stairway to Heaven, one of the band’s more mediocre songs (although Led Zeppelin definitely has no duds.)

From the start, Led Zeppelin cared more about its own artistic mission than impressing critics. Originally called The New Yardbirds, the band, like Democritus and Siddhartha Guatama, was born into royalty, which it soon forsook. The group could have ridden its name to commercial success, but chose not to. The group changed its name following a famous dig by famous pervert Pete Townshend, who’s band The Who was famous for being loud. Townshend famously said of The New Yardbirds, “this band is going to sink like a lead zeppelin.” The group’s members agreed to change its name as a star-spangled middle finger to the decadent rock establishment.

Led Zeppelin I and II generally concern the band’s attempts to popularize blues songs it liked rendered in its own distinct, hard style, which is like that of no other band before or since.

While Led Zeppelin was so way far ahead of its time that it was ridiculed by the mainstream rock press and the 1960s Woodstock establishment, the band developed a cult following, which it then completely forsook with Led Zeppelin III, an almost entirely acoustic album. The band found its voice with Led Zeppelin IV, widely considered one of the most important albums in rock history, and the next album, Houses of the Holy was even better. Just to show that there was plenty more where that was coming from, Physical Graffiti was a stellar double album. This was followed by Presence, featuring the group’s best song, Achilles Last Stand. Finally, In Through the Out Door was chock full of tracks which we are all still trying to process as a civilization.

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Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

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The Latest in Totally Lame JPop

JPop is infamous for it's lameness.  But this video takes the cake:

Closing Pandora's Box: Music After Napster

A debate has brewed on the internet this week about intellectual property law, starting with Matt Yglesias's post about declining music revenues.

It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening... But I don’t know anyone who would seriously argue that a music fan in 2010 is in worse shape than a music fan in 1990 was. It’s much, much, much easier to find and listen to a wide variety of songs from all over the world.

I agree whole heartedly, the convenience of digital music stimulates the demand side, in consumption if not in price, even as the cost of producing music has plummeted with digital recording techniques leading to a huge increase in the availability and variety of music.

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Dear Wikipedia,

"I have deleted the sentence 'Led Zeppelin is widely regarded as the first heavy metal band.' for the following reasons: (1) the citation is to someone else's opinion, which is not a citation at all; (2) 'heavy metal' is an arbitrary label critics have created ex post facto; (3) the hard-rock-heavy metal debate is absurd by its very nature, because both of these terms are arbitrary in the said aforementioned manner; and (4) Led Zeppelin's music predates the term 'heavy metal' by over ten years.  In summary, calling Led Zeppelin's music heavy metal and citing the song "Black Dog" is akin to calling The Beatles's music 'heavy metal' and citing the song 'Helter Skelter'.  To that, saying Led Zeppelin was the first heavy metal band is saying hip hop and electronica were respectively founded by Keith Moon (since hiphop repeats rock and roll drum breaks) and Bob Dylan (who's plug-in helped fuel the critical popularity of electronic instruments).  In actuality, music (and human cultural institution in general) is best-described as an irregular and complex continuum, not unlike natural history: Apropos, songs become popular by human artificial selection.  'In this world in which we're livin' ',  it has always been the mission of the least discerning to group and classify the unclassifiable and thereby make it easier to understand.  But this is spurious.  Those whose mission it is to classify Led Zeppelin as 'heavy metal' seek only to cite a widely-respected group for the sole purpose of bringing respect to a widely and justifiably unrespected genre, besides Whitesnake of course. 

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All Profits Go to the Devil Himself!

While watching this video for the Insane Clown Posse’s “Gathering of the Juggalos,” which is hilarious for a million reasons, it occurred to me how incongruous an infomercial for “the most controversial music festival in the world!” is.  This event, which is for people who are on the periphery of society, and probably pretty comfortably so, is a sort bacchanalian festival of low-brow fun.  Now, far be it from me to judge other people’s hobbies- every so often I sit in Barnes & Noble and read an entire graphic novel or two, but the juxtaposition of the all of these stridently offensive activities with the most banal of huckster mediums is just ridiculous.

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Hova Makes His Move

When one of my favorite bloggers, Marc Lynch, talks one of my great loves, hip-hop, my ears naturally perk up. However, while he is characteristically insightful, I think he misses a few key nuances in his analysis of the hegemonic Jay-Z.

Hova is clearly the most powerful man in hip-hop today, but his power is wasting, like Pentagon assets unsuited for future battles. Even though he is the most famous, wealthy, and, as the former head of Def-Jam, powerful rapper, he has never been regarded as the best or most authentic rapper. Without soft power there is no longevity in the game, which is why Jay had to quickly come out of retirement. He was unable to create a legacy that would last when he was gone. Thus, his power play on Nas was an attempt to shore up his weakest front, his street cred. Unfortunately, Nas murdered him on “Ether,” and Jay’s eventual co-option of Nas into Def-Jam was using strength in one area to make up for weakness in another.

So Jay is a hegemon, but with weak soft power, who must rely on a super abundance of hard power. This analysis ignores that Jay’s success is itself a form of soft power, especially in an industry that constantly name checks girls, cars and chains. Every rapper wants to be in Jay’s position, even if many of them think they are better rappers. Similarly, even when America’s global influence reached a low point with Bush’s disregard for the international community causing a backlash, the proof of its material dominance was attractive enough that its economic model was still spreading.

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