Or: On a lifelong dichotomy discovered via Fitter Happier.
Or: Happy 29th birthday to me!
I’ve learned that, while neither pragmatists nor idealists tend to be more or less happier than the other, idealists are invariably more empathetic. When an idealist is happy, they are utterly blissful, and when an idealist is sad, they are abysmally depressed. The pragmatist is perpetually cynical, while the idealist is perpetually disappointed. The idealist’s horizons are broad and distant, as in a dream, while the pragmatist’s roots dig deeply into the fertile soil of tradition. So, you who are now approaching 30 and the end of our generation’s new decade dedicated to finding one’s place in the world: Choose, and don’t look back.
Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they are never disappointed. Blessed are those who lust for quality, not quantity. Blessed are the pragmatically idealistic, and for Pete’s sake someone give them a pillow or something because that shit sounds exhausting.
Finally, blessed are those who remain true to themselves, who learn from and don’t deign to cover up their mistakes, and who raise their children out of love rather than dashed hopes and dreams. It may be a sallow credence, but it’s all we’ve got. Peace.
Over the past year and a half of working on music full time, I’ve noticed a number of interesting quirks about my creative process. I work better in the morning, after I’ve brushed my teeth but not necessarily after breakfast. Considering how generally ravenous I am, this was a revelation, and the bonus is that if I hit a creative block, eating a meal or taking a shower like a normal freaking human being usually rewards me with a new idea or solution. My brain and I get tired of living in abstract space, but a brief return to reality to tend to terrestrial needs like eating, grooming, and pooping is surprisingly revitalizing.
I also can’t be creative — writing, drawing, or music — if there is a bright lamp shining in one of my eyes and not the other. I know, that’s odd, but the brain is an odd thing, and that moment of thinking about the brain is exactly where I intend to begin this meditation on spirituality in music.
There’s a lot of beauty in the world. You know, sunsets, waterfalls, the smell of jasmine, the laughter of children, Scarlett Johansson, Wendy’s Frosties, that sort of thing. There’s big beauty (like the Milky Way) and little beauty (like ladybugs). There’s even all-encompasing beauty, like the Mandelbrot set and Beethoven’s Ninth and Guernica and the human adherence to “love” as more than an abstract concept (despite all the evidence to the contrary). But, even better than all of that, the most beautiful thing in the universe is the human brain.
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” – Carl Sagan
Compared to the lifetime of the sun, us human types may not seem like such a big deal. But compared to the lifetime of, like, a mayfly, we totally rock. If being a cool living organism was a contest, we would totally win against everything, even sea turtles (by a nose). And why? What makes our brains so special?
For the same reason this guy is special:
We can talk.
And we do it way better than dolphins. See, we have this handy little thing called metacognition that allows us to “know about knowing”. And right after talking (and a long time before writing), we were singing.
In a loose sense, writing came about even before Sumerian Cuneiform in 4000 BCE. It cropped up in both China and Mesopotamia about five centuries prior in the form of bone counters for gambling and bookkeeping. I find it highly significant that writing stuff down first came about because of commerce, not religion, because clearly the specificity of writing makes it more inaccurate when discussing such non-specific things.
The oldest bone flute we know about comes from 37,000 BCE. And I can guarantee you ancient humans had discovered the Banging Rocks Together Drum long before that. Furthermore, contrary to the bestially grunting things we see in every movie ever, evidence suggest that Neanderthals probably had gorgeous singing voices and used them frequently. And they were hanging around 35,000 to 200,000 years ago. They were also arranging bones in neat-o patterns and burying their dead. They were having dreams and telling stories around the fire. And it’s a short cry from storytelling until animals, plants, really cool rocks, the laughter of children, and probably Scarlett Johansson were given religious significance. And, though they couldn’t write about it yet, and they didn’t think of cave painting until about 32,000 BCE, they could sing about it, at least, and thanks to the bone flutes we know they did.
The older a religion is, the less hubris it is guilty of. Starting with Hinduism and ending with, oh I don’t know, Scientology, each progressive organized religion has to claim it will solve even more of your problems than the last one. They do this simply because it is a tried and true business model. And each new organized religion will do its best to build upon the old ways in a newly assimilated fashion, and you are essentially born into a regional lottery as to which you will swear to your deathbed is true. But you will do this only if you value nostalgia over accuracy.
“Sacred” used to be synonymous with “beautiful”. The western world has lost this. In fact, you might define “western thought” as the denial of this. But if you travel around the polytheistic world, you’ll see that Gautama Buddha only dug really beautiful Naturalistic things. The Big 3 have Notre Dame, the Qaaba, and the Shlomo Glick, but what do Buddhists and Shinto have? They have waterfalls and the Himalayas and really, really nice trees. They have rainbows and canyons and pack animals and the sun. And while each of the monotheistic traditions accepts that those things are beautiful, they are not sacred in and of themselves, but are vicariously hijacked to prove the glory of whichever deity whose name they were taught as children.
So, where does spiritual accuracy lie? The nice thing about rigorously searching for truth is you can apply it to anything, not just those subjects best represented by rigid double-blind experimentation. Research! Yes! How about we start with a dictionary? Okay, go!
Spirituality – Anything of or relating to the human spirit.
That right there, Mr. Oxford Dictionary, is one hell of a vague definition, so let’s keep digging.
Human spirit – The spiritual or mental part of humanity.
What the hell? How is this helping? This is like defining “quixotic” as “of or relating to Don Quixote”.
Spirit – The nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character; the soul.
A-ha!
Soul – (Wikipedia) The incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object.
(Oxford) The spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. Also African-American culture or ethnic pride.
You win this round, African-American culture and ethnic pride.
Further down the etymological rabbit hole:
Incorporeal – Without the nature of a body or substance.
Immaterial – Hilariously, this means both “spiritual, rather than physical” and “unimportant under the circumstances; irrelevant”. Six thousand years later, and the the bone counters’ protests still resonate.
Speaking of resonating, you can see how these definitions would all snap back and forth at each other like rubberbads, forever. So, skipping ahead, here is a translation of the tattoo I have on my leg about the ineffability of spirituality:
“What cannot be spoken in words, but that whereby words are spoken.
What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think.” – Keno Upanishads
Sure it’s sounds all deep and crap, but I particularly like it because it’s also the world’s oldest joke. Here’s why: 3000 years ago, some holy Brahman guy had an epiphany. He was meditating or eating mushrooms or both or whatever, and suddenly it hits him:
“Holy crap!” he thinks in Sanskrit. “God is so darn ineffable that you can’t even write down how ineffable he is!”
And what’s the first thing he did when he thought of that?
He wrote it down.
It’s three millennia later, and here we are still singing the same old tune. We’re all still trying to write down how hard it is to write stuff down. Brahman guy probably even stole his idea from the Neanderthals. It’s enough to make you want to give up, and yet, for some strange reason, some of us don’t. Weird, right?
Only one major thing has changed since Holy Dude was the first to write it down. We have now split our way of not quite getting right into two distinct camps: Religion and Science (or perhaps Religion vs. Science is more accurate). We’ve got these two extremes now, and while science is clearly more correct than, say, Catholicism (partly because there’s so much less power/money/ego involved, and partly because of this inconvenient little thing called evidence), as a musician I feel it’s unfortunate that the word “spiritual” has been hijacked by a bunch of superstitious quacks trying to argue that there’s an afterlife but only for them, ha ha ha.
I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t an afterlife. At some point you’ve got to stop being wishy-washy about it and just put your foot down. Bam! No afterlife. Whew, it feels good to get that off your chest, doesn’t it? We don’t get reincarnated and we don’t go to Heaven or Valhalla or whatever. Not only is the idea really silly if you think about it, but there’s plenty of evidence to support that when you die, you might get a little biofeedback and then you just sorta black out. I know, it’s really sad. Sigh.
Except it’s not sad. It’s actually kinda cool. Because here’s everyone running around trying to eff all sorts of things that aren’t even remotely -able, and we do it for no reason at all besides this one big, overarching, neverending quest for Something Beautiful.
I mean, not everyone, to be fair. Kids can generally get at it because they have the luxury of not really having to decide anything yet, but eventually people’s personal growth plateaus and they give up. At some point you have to decide that either nothing is beautiful, or everything is so gorgeous you want to cry. You have to decide whether nothing is sacred or everything is so holy you might explode. Either it’s all magic, baby, or nothing is. Exhausting, right? So you choose to cry and explode and carry on despite the difficulty, no turning back… or you don’t. But once you choose to believe in the abstract, amorphous magic of the world, you don’t really have any other choice but to try and be a part of it. It’s simple as that.
It all boils down to this: People think there must be a power higher than humans because they aren’t giving themselves enough credit. What both Oxford and Wiki fail to mention is that the human “spirit” is not immaterial and not incorporeal, merely inexpressible in the mode of communication they’re most accustomed to, namely, casual conversation.
Humans will never get over this obsession with spoken language, because our brains are just wired that way. But, consciousness-wise, language is at the top, if you follow me. Stacked below it are things we won’t ever get quite right just by talking plainly about them. And what’s funny about that is, although these deep truths are so difficult to access, they are also universal, not just outwardly but inwardly, too.
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” – Neil Gaiman
What Mr. Gaiman is describing (only slightly metaphorically) and what I’m trying so feebly to get at myself is the existence of the unconscious universe, that mysterious certainty, and the sole method by which we can access it, which is via the imagination.
If the mind we can’t control is an ocean, and the language centers of the brain is the boat floating along on top of it, then our imagination is this:
And sometimes this:
And sometimes even this:
Imagination – The ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses.
There is this wonderful thread in the writings of current English greats like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Alan Moore wherein they nudge the definition of the gods as not from the imagination, but as the two things being one and the same. It’s not such a stretch, is it? If we have the imagination to thank for God, then we have God to thank for the imagination, too. Do you see? We invented an explanation for how we invent things. And by believing in our inventions, they became real. The fabrications became truths.
“Life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.” – Bill Hicks
Because all we are ever doing is pursuing beauty, because the beauty is in the idea, in the creation, in the defiance of all this futile mucking about, and there’s no other way to express it than to just do it, because to just say it out loud makes it a thing you can poke at and draw a chalk line around and surround with police tape and point at it to your children and say “No! Bad! No touchy! Here there be monsters!”
Those English authors have found outlets by which they can orbit interestingly around deep truths by way of stories that speak to us universally. It resonates like myths through the ages, just like the bone counters. And we react to it, because we’re all just little boats floating on the same ocean, peering into the depths, waiting for the universe to know itself.
So, what’s the secret, then? Is it a painting? By accessing the brain through the eyes via color, is that the secret?
Books? By accessing memory through words denoting concepts, is that the secret?
Science? By cataloging the connections within the brain itself, is that the secret?
Religion? By studying the history of our world’s attempt at explaining the inexplainable, is that the secret?
And, is it music? The arrangement of soundwaves in time to denote the interactions of patterns at different frequencies? Is that the key that unlocks the universe?
The answer is no, not any of them, not by themseles. We are deeper than all that, but together they become the holy grail, that in which the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. They come become life in its entirety, deep life, what we always feel is there but can’t quite grasp. And each of those aspects of the mind maps out a different subset of our psyche, an endless ocean, with little bits of buried treasure here and there no matter what manner of submersible you choose to use to reach it.
We creative people don’t know where our ideas come from, but really that isn’t true. Our creations are about where our ideas come from. Every time someone asks me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I just want to say, “Look, didn’t you just listen to it?” or “Didn’t you read the story?” But you can’t say that, because it’s mean and unfair. When someone asks me that, I just smile and say “I don’t know”, but what I’m thinking is, “I guess I didn’t quite get the idea across in that one. Next time I’ll do better.”
And whether you find a name for it you like (like Bach, Handel, or Bobby McFerrin did) or whether you are comfortable with the boring reality of the biological consciousness, the truth is that it doesn’t matter. You keep going just because, and I couldn’t stop making music even if I wanted to, and at some point you stop being so self-interested and start wanting to show people about how we’re all connected and how as long as you’re breathing you’re not alone. And that means love, and that’s the sun on a stained glass window, and that’s the deep emotional well that makes us who we are, and, hell, it might even be Scarlett Johansson.
All I know is, we are here to either celebrate or destroy the human spirit, and I’m solidly with the following genius quote on this one, because it sure as hell can’t be both at the same time:
“It’s a celebration, bitches. Let’s dance.” – Rick James
If you Google the phrase “design vs content”, your search will yield a long list of web design articles insisting that content always wins in the long run. This is because the word “design” is actually half of the phrase “graphic design” already, so if someone decides to write an article about this, it’s probably because they’re going for the less obvious approach here. Also, being that articles are generally written by writers, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose from stressing this whole “content” thing.
The more inspired/experienced writers will hit upon the basic moral, which is this: Design gets people interested, but content keeps them interested. No matter how much an amazing design introduces people to your project, once there they need a reason to keep coming back or the novelty will soon wear off.
Though I have many interests, music has always been my main filter for understanding life. I both learn about the world and attempt to explain it via music. My friends are well aware that I talk this way. For example, how we spend a night out is usually defined by a genre. Are we going out to leave subversive art installations at the promenade? We’re punk rocking it. Are we going to buy the cheapest wine we can and sit around eating Trader Joe’s edamame and make fun of whatever’s on TV? We’re indie rocking it. Are we dressing up fancy and going to an overpriced bar? Eighties night.
It goes well beyond that, however. For example, my idealist friends are more likely to listen to instrumental psytrance. My corporate friends probably really dig Bruce Springsteen. And if someone prefers the Bob Dylan of All Along the Watchtower to Jimi’s, then I know that in the Design vs. Content debate they are overwhelmingly, even tragically on the side of “content”.
To define “content and design” musically is not so cut and dry as in web design, but the parallel is pretty uncanny. Content on the web comes from the writers, while in music it comes from the lyrics first, and then probably harmonic structure, and so on down the list to the drums, which is the most visceral and design-y part of any recording or performance. And, as every thoughtful musician will tell you, no matter how good a song sounds, how sick the beat is, or how wicked the wanky guitar solo, after the initial excitement it’s the lyrics that keep the audience hitting repeat on a track over and over and over again.
There is certainly, and will always be, people who hear the words first and music second. I am not this way, and to this day I sometimes have to remind myself to consciously listen to the lyrics of a song, or I’ll just hear them as a string of phonemes. I’m of the opinion that I do this as a result of listening to my mom’s Arabic music as a kid, which I couldn’t understand, but the point is that everybody’s ears are different, and there’s no way you can change that. In my experience, music has always been the most subjective form of creative expression, and exhibits the greatest dissension as to what makes “good” good. There is certainly a sort of collective consciousness that trends one way or another, and I think one of the great quantifiers of this over the years is the design/content dichotomy. In other words, you can chart massive trends in popular music over the decades by how the scale was tipped toward either design or content. I can bet you’re already doing it in your head, but let me break it down for you with some gratuitous over-generalizing:
Sixties: All Content (singer/songwriter, folk, torch songs)
Seventies: More Design, Less Content (disco, motown, prog rock)
Eighties: All Design (Hair Bands, Boy/Girl Bands, New Age)
Early/Mid-Nineties: More Content, Less Design (coffeehouse, early hip hop, grunge)
2000-2004: Mostly Content (hip pop and reality television on MTV)
2005-2010: Mostly Design (the emergence of electronica pop, peaking with Muse and LCD Soundsystem, jumping the shark with Lady Gaga)
Current: Sea change toward content (indie rock emerging as a valid pop force)
And so forth. “But wait!” I can hear you shout. “What about the Beatles? Michael Jackson? Led Zeppelin? David Bowie? [Insert current reference here]? They had/have both!”
That is exactly correct, and drives home the single idea that I harp on more than any other in this blog: The merging of dualities is the secret to being a successful human being. Anytime anyone says “this vs. that”, you should always try to think of a situation where both happen at once, and if you can’t, create one.
You see, starting in the late nineties, things really started to speed up. Our musical trends don’t move in decades anymore, and it’s frankly confusing as hell. In fact, as society gets more and more connected and the pace of entertainment speeds up, I predict a future in which people will think fondly about the Roarin’ First-Half-of-Last-Marches and so forth. But if there’s one thing that can be said, it’s that we are coming to the end of an extremely design-oriented phase and landing on a bit of content, which is a huge relief to this writer if he doesn’t mind saying so himself.
In music, at least, design trends generally come alongside a technologic breakthrough. Think of the phonograph, the electric guitar, the synthesizer, the ready availability of home tape and then digital recording, and currently Youtube. On a smaller scale, take freaking Auto-Tune. T-Pain’s music was based solely on design, because it seemed he could churn out lyrics about pretty much anything (and by that I mean generally the same thing) and as long as it had that particular sound, which was oh so novel at the time people went nuts for it. “I’m On A Boat” was the culmination of that trend, and I ascribe more cultural significance to that than to any actual T-Pain song, actually. Because at least it made us laugh, and thus made the lyrics worth going back for.
In the True Greats I mentioned a few paragraphs back, we have proof that it is indeed possible for music to possess both good content and good, zeitgeist-defining design, with folky lyrics and all the newest-fangled technology that money can buy or download or steal. And when that happens, it lasts, and probably will until the end of time as we humans reckon it. Just look at Palestrina.
But the content is the key, really. There’s no formula for that, no plugin you can download. Content is timeless, and technology is fleeting. So practice that, forever and for always. No matter how good you think that track you just produced sounds, trust me, friends, in another ten years they’ll be making stuff that sounds far better for way cheaper. So, sure, spend as much time as you want on that drop, and throw in all the latest wicky-wah bass riffs you can, and the world will dig it, for a while. But if that’s really all your music has really got going for you, then next year those highly-crafted tracks will likely just be another footnote in the annals of music The Black Keys sold better than.
The follow up question as we try to define music is Weapon vs. Opiate for the Masses, but that, friends, is another entry entirely.
All musicians should be familiar with unconventional time signatures, and bands like Radiohead, The Frames, the Gorillaz, and so forth have shown that this is not just for practice, but these are truly relevant time signatures in today’s desperate music scene. The more you listen, the more you’ll internalize, and the more your audience will appreciate the variety. I had a great time listening around to songs in quintuple and septuple times today, and will share a few shortly, but a quick thing about the really fun ones first.
There are plenty of songs in far crazier meters than seven and five. Some of them are cheating, though, i.e., if your song is in 10/4, it’s almost certainly just 4/4 to 4/4 to 2/4. Which is totally awesome, I’m just saying, it’s not really the same thing (yes, I’m looking at you, Thom).
There are also the crazy something/8 bars, which will always remain close to my heart even if they’re never really convincing as a groove or jam. Even the Grateful Dead’s The Eleven is only slightly more brilliant than it is obnoxious. Bela Bartok has some pretty great folk rhythms he uses, including super heady (to our Western ears) gypsy groupings in 8/8 like 3-2-3, 3-3-2, etc. These will blow your mind and probably also annoy it. My pianist friends would be the first to admit his Six Bulgarian Dances are more fun to play than listen to.
Moving on: This song’s got a wicked little jump, which convinces the odd meter by nothing short of brilliant, ingenius, leading-humanity-on-to-the-promised-land conga playing. It is actually in seven, not in some repeated rotation of 4+3, but manages to maintain accessibility despite all the jazziness.
My next pick is a very palatable five, which sounds like 6/8 to 2/4 (another example of the same grouping would be the Mission: Impossible theme, as opposed to the 3+2 in a little track called Take Five). This song is beautiful, and I chose it in part because the lyrics actually back up the choice for 5/4, which has a perpetual unfinished feel. It always makes me think of a blob lurching forward, plopping down, then lurching forward again. Howard Shore apparently has the same issue with trolls marching.
You can also look up this medley of Jim Hession/Unsquare Dance Pussy Wiggle Stomp, which does the more conventional 4+3, and just for laughs here’s Dream Theater’s ridiculously proggy Erotomania, which according to Wikipedia starts out “5/4 + 5/4 + 5/4 + 9/8, then 5/4 + 5/4 + 5/4 + 3/4 + 3/4 + 2/4, then 11/8 + 10/8 etc.”
The new 2011 sampler from Lujo Records is pretty outstanding. The overall impression is one of purposeful eclecticity, which is a word I just made up. There is a definite shape to the sampler, and I’m proud of them for putting the more genre-bashing electro stuff first.
Tracks one and two come from Bluebrain and John LaMonica, respectively, and feature the coolest beats.
The third track comes from A Lull and has the best overall sound. If you ask me, this is the band to keep an eye on. Their debut album “Confetti” drops April 12 (their video for “Weapons For War” is at the bottom of this entry).
In a very close second comes “Trampolines” by Yourself and the Air, which many people probably prefer over the A Lull track. It has stronger and more discernible lyrics, but I personally prefer head-bobbin to indie. That’s just me though.
Next comes Enlou with the track “Amphibians”, which is the last of the truly strong tracks on this sampler. After this Lujo takes you through a few sine waves of fun, going super-ironic with The Torches and Baby Teeth, then out with some raw rock/strummy stuff that holds its own in authenticity. Favorite moment of the second half is probably the first third-ish of “When You Were Young” from Discover America, though I feel the song drops off in quality after the first chorus comes in.
All in all some really exciting stuff, Lujo Records! Looking forward to more.
Or: Hipsterdom Reaches Critical Mass
Or: They Don’t Die, They Multiply (and That Totally Kills Them).
Webcomics. Social linking sites. Fashion magazines. The term “hipster” isn’t just for twenty-five cent zines at the Bikerowave anymore.
If you’ve heard the term “hipster” anywhere lately, chances are it was while someone was discussing one of three things: (1) Whether they exist at all, (2) how to spot one if they do, and/or (3) where the hell one might buy the latest in fashionable plaid-wear.
The answers to these questions, respectively, are:
1. Yes, but in such numbers they’re hard to spot.
2. The ever-growing lexicon of retro aesthetic.
3. Every clothing store in Silverlake.
Just like your English teacher taught you, the above section was the introduction of this essay. Next I will have a body expounding upon my three main points in the order stated, followed by a brief conclusion in which I summarize and restate. Just keepin’ real here, people.
1. They Don’t Die, They Multiply
On this first point, allow me to briefly qualify myself. I was writing about hipsters back when they were on vinyl. Just kidding; it’s honestly a subject I’ve tried to avoid writing about in the past. But I did banter around hipster circles for about six months back in 2007, when I left my corporate Hollywood job and began work as a studio engineer for the Dust Brothers. The Boat, which has since been bought by Flea (who totally fired all my friends, by the way), is located near Hyperion and Griffith Park. Try and count all the ironic neck tattoos in that area on a Friday night and you’ll run out of toes. While working there I had a weird haircut and at one point dyed my hair royal blue. I never dressed right and was always a little outcast. In short, I didn’t “get it”. Not at that point in my life, anyway.
There are just a few things you need to know about the hipster-as-myth argument. Firstly, if someone opens with this question, and they are under thirty, they probably are one. They are likely not a Strong Hipster, who have taken the concept of self-awareness to such an extreme that their irony meter has gone full circle and made them simply honest people. The far more common Weak Hipster is in denial, and may even refer to themselves as “scenesters” instead.
We are forced to break the hipster phenomenon down further and further into categories because there are just so damn many of them now. To a hipster, this is an extremely strong argument in favor of the hipster-as-myth, because hipster communities are highly self-contained. They rarely leave their bubble for the same reason any other clique sticks to what they know: the outside world is scary. This is true for hipsters, desert ravers, and the extreme bourgeois alike. You always feel like the whole world is the same as you, because, as far as you can see, it is. However, they are wrong. The world is bigger than that. There are plenty of twenty-somethings trying to get into big business, or who are creative but not retro, etc., it’s just that the various scenes don’t generally mix. Which brings us to the next section of the body portion of this essay.
2. Hipsters Are Strictly Retro
This is your first clue when hipster-spotting, which is sort of like Trainspotting minus Ceiling Baby. As hinted above, there is a sliding scale on which we can rate a person’s placement in the hipster spectrum. There are those who are both hipsters and modern gamers (i.e., play Call of Duty or WoW in addition to obscure games on the SNES you’ve never heard of). There are quite a few who don’t dress like that at work, or have tattoos not visible in business casual. But the thing that you must realize is this: They must be retro. If they are not retro, then they are not hipsters.
The five eras most commonly seen in hipster communities are: Grunge, New Wave, Dada, Beat, and Post-war. I am of the opinion that the further back one’s style harkens chronologically, the more likely they are to be a Strong Hipster, with the pin-up girls at the top of the pyramid and the Nirvana-grunge wearing males being the lazy ones at the bottom of the heap. This is not always the case, however, as an example of a grunge era offshoot would be the hipster cowboy, who is generally well-respected in his field and does not necessarily have to have a Hank Williams concert screen print on his wall. You will also see the pseudo-Ginsbergs/Dalis/Basquiats/Bowies aplenty, and you will know that they art hipster.
But this is not their mark. These are merely clues. This third point is the clincher:
3. A Winking Inauthenticity
Okay, I lied. I apologize to you, Mrs. Bivins, for deviating from my bullet points at the top of this essay.
The third point I want to make is straight from the Wikipedia entry on hipsters. There is a reason the parlance for not identifiying with the aesthetic is the same as one who doesn’t laugh at a joke: “They just don’t get it.” I have heard some slightly older people (generally early thirties and upward), claim that “hipster” is synonymous with “poseur”, but this is not correct. The former is an evolution of the latter.
You see, the irony is a defense mechanism against poseurishness. By being self-aware, the hipster is afforded the luxury of low-risk artistic expression. The phrase “admiration by imitation” best describes the artistic output of your average hipster. By purposefully applying a laundry-list of trends from certain historic grassroots artistic movements, one does not have to actually be talented, merely authentic, thus inspiring a cerebrally nostalgic sentimentality for a time when Art Was Real, when the World Wasn’t Wrapped In Plastic, when Artistic Freedom Ran Free In Free Places Which Was Everywhere. It is a representative aesthetic which requires only that one’s expression be (to paraphrase Mike Patton) valid, but not necessarily good. Deep down most know their nostalgia is contrived, but isn’t that why it’s so funny?
I have always respected the hipster community for the ability to laugh at itself. As hipsterdom garners more attention from the likes of Vogue and Vanity Fair, it grows obvious that it is well on its way to dying by way of intense propagation, much like our favorite graduation song that made our left eye tic involuntarily after the thousandth listen. The flow of history, however, is not circular, but helixed, and I am one of those paltry few who believe that the human race is moving upward, not downward, in quality. No matter the atrocities committed by the status quo while in their death throes — and I’m speaking here of the RIAA and popular radio, of course — the accessibility of knowledge is spreading like wildfire worldwide, and thus will power continue to flow out of the establishment and into the hands of the young, the downtrod, the impoverished, and those who at least pretend to be impoverished even if their parents are actually paying the rent.
I believe I’ll conclude with what I hope the world will learn from the Hipster Era:
1. There is great value in artistic truth.
2. That, as fun as Gaga is to dance to, in the end it’s The Black Keys we can listen to repeatedly sans eye-tic.
3. And, finally, I hope we remember how important it is to not take ourselves too seriously. After all, it’s all just one big joke anyway, right?
Get it?
Paul Matthis is a writer for nobody and doesn’t have anything impressive to say here.
I don’t sleep much and I’m pretty active, so by way of compensation I eat enough food for two or three people per day. I’m also solar-powered, but I’ve found you don’t really need more than ten minutes of direct sunlight to recharge the battery cells. Anything more than that and I start to hear my DNA complaining.
I’m also constantly, exceedingly, headcrushingly broke at all times. Besides rent, my biggest expense by a long shot is food, but I’ve been able to pare that down quite a bit by developing a short list of basic and efficient foods. There are a lot of cheap ways to skimp on food for a while, but few are long-term, and this one will actually provide everything you need to sustain life and sanity for a much longer period of time than a month. What most people consider to be “absolute cheapest” either taste terrible or are really bad for you, so they’ll cost you in the long run. This makes them inefficient.
To be efficient, a food must meet three criteria:
1. The food must taste good.
2. The food must satisfy a daily nutritional requirement
3. The food must be modular.
By modular I mean that it must have the ability to interact with as many other foods as possible. For example, a grapefruit would meet requirement 2, and some crazy people even say it meets requirement 1. But you can’t really do much with a grapefruit besides cut it in half and stick a spoon in it. Which, trust me, only sounds like fun until you’ve tried it.
By contrast, let’s check out a crowd favorite: Peanut butter. Otherwise known as Deus ex legumica, nine point nine out of ten imaginary people agree peanut butter is delicious and a little magical, because no matter how many times you tell people, no one really believes you can just ground up the figure eight things and get an oily paste. Peanut butter is popularly known as a good source of protein, but it’s has iron, some nice oils and a little bit o’ calcium. We’ll get to the oils in a bit.
As you’re probably already thinking, peanut butter is quite modular. Of course it goes really well with jam and some bread, but it also goes with apples, vegetables, and if you get the natural kind you can seriously eat the stuff on a spoon for a quick pick me up. And, while all the foods I’ll list here are going to be cheap, peanut butter is really cheap, clocking in at about 16 cents per ounce at Ralphs. It’s little light brown gold, s’what it is. Never buy so much as a carrot stick from Ralphs unless it’s on sale, and anything you buy from Whole Foods that doesn’t require black plastic tongs or a ladle should be judged with great scrutiny.
The following is a list of other efficient foods I’ve taken a liking to, and they all fit in my minifridge, which I bought off Craigslist for $35. I’ll talk about each individually, but the basic guidelines are fiber in the morning, many snacks throughout the day, a well-rounded lunch, and a heavier dinner.
Cereal – If I can afford it, I buy Kashi Go Lean because it has more fiber, iron, and protein than many of the other cereals combined. To make it last longer, I cut it with the (much cheaper) flavor of the week, which tends to be generic versions of cinnamon toast crunch, raisin bran, apple jacks, and frosted mini wheats, all in bulk. Never buy Go Lean Crunch, because it has less of the aforementioned nutrients. I really suggest you rotate regular milk (Vitamin D has the most nutrients) with soy milk and almond milk, because no matter how much research I do it doesn’t seem like one is particularly better than the other, only different. Almond milk is the most expensive of the three, but if you buy the boxed stuff you can store it for months, so you can live off of one payout for much longer. You can also make your own granola, which frankly is still more expensive unless you make it really boring or make a lot. Oatmeal works too, although I personally can’t stand the stuff.
Yogurt – I buy the Mountain High 2lbs Original Style vanilla. I’d buy other flavors, but they’re pretty hard to find. Most of the world laughs at America for its addiction to low fat yogurt, and I’m right there with ’em on this point. I do count the pounds, but the other way. I try to get as much fat out of my foods as I can. Perhaps this is because I exercise and rarely eat fast food. I might be wrong, but I’m probably not. I mix honey, jam, an available berry, or all of the above with my yogurt, which is so good for you I won’t even bother to explain why. Eat yogurt every day, and later come back here to thank me.
Apples and bananas – You gotta have fruit. Buy other stuff when apples go out of season. Bananas are always in season. ’Nuff said.
A massive block of cheese – For whatever reason, the two pound block of Tillamook Sharp Cheddar is always on sale at Smart ‘n Final, and it lasts even me two weeks. It goes on crackers, sandwiches, salads, and soups, and most things you’d have for dinner.
Split top wheat bread – It’s very cheap and has plenty of fiber and iron. Various types of sandwiches are an obvious reason, but also spread some butter and jam and you’ve got breakfast toast. Will increase efficiency by sopping up leftover soups and salad dressing. It’s also cheaper than the wheat bread with its top still intact, and no one seems to be able to tell me why, so if anyone reading knows please illumine me via comment!
Jam/Jelly – Goes with the peanut butter, goes with bread, goes with yogurt, and supplies much needed sugar. We dig jam ’round here.
Butter and olive oil – Because not all of us can afford Omega-3. In America it’s the former, in Europe it’s the latter due to all that readily available wine/olive country. You’ve gotta have some kinda fatty oil in your diet, because your body uses those for some incredibly disproportionately important life functions. I always have both of these on hand, basically because olive oil tastes better on salads. You can use these in everything from soups to rice to bread, and leads directly to my next food.
Onions – While these go with stuff raw, I use them almost exclusively for cooking. I’ve yet to find a simple one pot dish that isn’t improved by sauted onions in butter and garlic. Speaking of which…
Garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, chili powder, curry powder, bay leaves – You can also throw in basil and oregano for good measure, but I personally didn’t buy more when I ran out. You can buy these spices crazy cheap from the farmer’s market, and toss them into all sorts of concoctions with wonton abandon. You’ll discover a lot of fun combinations, some better than others, and then later impress people by never measuring anything while you cook. And for the love of all things good and holy, buy the damn cloves and crush them your-friggin-self. Thank you.
Soy sauce, teriaki sauce, A1, worchester sauce, vinegar, etc – There are literally hundreds of cooking/flavoring sauces and everyone’s got their own personal tastes. You can put them on everything from meat to salad to stir fry and buy them in bulk or for really cheap. Extremely essential.
At least one condiment – I choose spicy mustard. Don’t judge.
Sandwich stuff – I won’t presume to tell you what to put on your sandwich. Something green and leafy, something proteiny, something cheesy, and the condiment(s). Beyond that, knock yourself out. The protein is usually where you spend most of your money, but I get so sick of processed meats I’ll still splurge on the deli section at Whole Foods most of the time.
Leafy green things – Don’t buy iceberg. Just don’t. It’s a waste of money. All it does is make things crunchy, which broccolli does more cheaply and with more purpose. Whole Foods or your local farmer’s market will have an excellent selection of spinach, spring mix, kale, and arugula in bulk prices that will blow your hungry little minds. Which leads us right to…
Salad stuff – You are going to have to take up salad making. Honestly this is just good life advice in general. I buy whatever greens I want as long as the word “spinach” is involved and throw them in a big pile. Then I add whatever other vegetables are at my disposal. Then I add cheese, and something solid and probably glazed, and then I drench it in olive oil and balsamic. Sometimes I’ll add crushed, hard-toasted, olive oil-soaked bread, or slices of green apples or pears, or carrots, and voila! world’s cheapest delicious salad.
Potatoes – They’re cheap and filling and go with a lot of other things. Plus you get cred in Ireland and Boise, which are two places I feel we’ll need it when the revolution comes.
Sour cream – A list of what not to put it on would be shorter. I was frankly astounded at how many dishes sour cream improves. Also works for dipping veggies.
Rice – I’m sure many of you were waiting for this one. “But, Mr. Jawshack, which one?” you might ask. Well, I’ll tell you: Golden Rose Brown Rice. Good price, good flavor, and most nutritious. Boom.
Lentils, garbanzo beans/chick peas, black beans, red beans – There’s no substitute for a good bean, and these four are what I stick to. If you’re worried about gas you can soak the harder ones for a day, or just put a little GasX powder in there and it should be fine. Beans really are the magical fruit: The more you eat, the more you don’t suffer from anemia and rickets. Mix the various beans with the rice, the veggies, the spinach, the sauces, the bread, the cheese, the sauted onions and spices, and man you can have a different dinner every night for a month!
Cheap whiskey – Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: You’ve been doing just soooo good with your food budget, and suddenly it’s Friday and you go out with your friends. Where should we go? How about a bar? Yay, a bar! What a good idea! Boom, next morning you wake up and wonder where that last $80 went. Here’s some advice: Stop frigging going to bars! And if you can’t do that, buy a flask and a coat/purse with big pockets on the inside. Drinking Guinness slowly also helps. Problem solved.
Last but not least, Tea – Like the oily stuff, scientists vaguely think they might know why, but they all agree that drinking a cup of tea every day is definitely a good thing. For the opposite effect, see coffee.
If you’ve noticed, there are things in this list that are not included in this list. That was a weird sentence. Anyway, I call such things “dessert”. You may think of dessert as something bad for you that you eat after every meal, but I think of it as overpriced delicious things. Blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, grapes, ice cream, brownies, soft drinks, candy, these will all add flavor to your life, but not much else based on our criteria for efficiency. In this category also goes steak or frozen burritos. However, if you don’t treat yourself to such things you’ll go insane and break down and everything will go to hell, like that time you vowed you’d never drink tequila again during freshman year of college, and then that time you broke that vow later that same freshman year, and drank more with less of a tolerance than you did the last time.
I tend to try and make my desserts the efficient kind. Glazed walnuts and feta cheese are good examples. A simple chocolate bar or a bunch of berries will usual win out over ice cream, even though I love me some tasty chocolate dutch. But, like the whiskey, swearing off certain things is not only difficult and impractical; it’s just plain no fun. As you can see, I have a lot of fun with my diet, which is nerdy. I am this way because I have to be. Folks, meet the broke foodie.
And, finally, just listen to your body. It’ll tell you what it wants. I used to be a little bothered by the fact that, after a year of not eating the stuff, I literally could not eat fast food without feeling sick afterwards. To guys, this is a big affront to our machoism, since we pride ourselves on our strong stomachs (This is also why fewer women enter hot dog eating contests, among other reasons). I made peace with this fact because, (A) I couldn’t quite get myself back to eating the stuff regardless, and (B) I decided this was an indication that I was more finely tuned. I figured “finely tuned” was macho enough. Just give me that one, please.
This is my method. There are thousands of others. Please feel free to leave yours in the comments, and thanks for reading.
Something happened to me today at an intersection. As a guy whose brother is well on is way to his doctorate in cognitive science, and also as a guy who read almost 180 pages of GEB before conveniently forgetting to re-check it out from the library, I can safely say that my qualifications when discussing the science of consciousness are absolutely zilch.
But the cognitive sciences are a study not of the brain but of the mind, which sounds a lot like the opening credits of the Twilight Zone, and I’ve watched like seven Fourth of July marathons so I’m going to go ahead and talk about it anyway. But first I’d like to say a thing or two about party games.
I like parties so much I sometimes even go to them. Even though I live in a cave, I still go to the library often enough which means even I can’t avoid daily Facebook updates which seem to always involve event invites. I sometimes think I have more invites to friends events than I do actual friends.
I don’t know about you, but just because someone is a good friend of mine doesn’t mean I happen to know or particularly like their friends. This is not generally a problem until birthday season comes around (end of Spring, don’t ask me why). There are some friends whose birthday invites you just can’t turn down. You have to make an appearance and buy them at least one, two, or possibly eighteen shots just so they know ya’ll still cool.
My life and living situation is by all accounts unique. The usual icebreakers of “Where do you work? Where are you from? Where do you live?” all fall impossibly, embarrassingly flat. My work is lonesome, and I moved around a lot, and when you say you live in a cave with an electrical outlet people start edging away pretty fast. I can’t really blame them, so I’ve worked out a couple rock solid icebreaker party conversations to smooth out those kinks. You just have to ask one good question that every human being on earth can relate to that they’ve never been asked before.
One that never fails is this: “What position do you sleep in?” This works for several reasons, the first of course being that everybody sleeps, and second being that alcohol is involved. In addition, this question involves the word sleep, which you do in a bed, which is very close to a subject quite a lot of people at parties are quite keen on. Also, people just like talking about themselves, and they’ve probably never been able to impart this particular quirk to anyone besides their bathroom mirror. People will open up and tell you all sorts of stuff about themselves that frankly has nothing to do with their sleep position. One time this guy opened up to a crowd of strangers about his rough life as a kid, which blossomed out of his confession that he can’t sleep without hugging a blanket, pillow, or person. And, I swear, everybody sleeps in a different position, and some are pretty darn entertaining. Once this completely mainstream, unassuming girl said she sleeps on her back with her arms crossed over her chest like Dracula. Which is awesome, alluring, and slightly creepy.
Another great party game – which will eventually lead us back to the main subject, I promise – is “Impersonate your inner monologue.” It is always best to start off by describing your own so that people know what you mean, and maybe a few favorites you’ve heard in the past if it’s not your first time asking. For example, I have a friend whose internal monologue is voiced by Insecure Pimply Guy From the Simpsons. Imagine a puberty-ridden voice saying, “Oh my God everybody’s staring at me what do I do she’s gonna think I’m weird or that I’m crazy what did I say oh my Goooood!” A girl back in Tennessee says hers is a chorus of British children constantly echoing whatever she says in a singsong, sarcastic voice, making her sound completely crazy. Which isn’t really funny until you hear her do it, and then it’s hilarious.
In the heat of conversation and booze, people understand this question at once. If you were standing around the office water cooler, sure, you’d get that look people usually spare for the smelly guy on the Promenade who talks to lamp posts. But once they get rolling people can’t wait to chime in with their own inner monologue, eager to talk about themselves in such a revealing and unique manner. Almost everyone will come up with a voice even though they’ve probably never thought about it before.
I’ve always called mine Second-Guessing Micromachines Guy. For those of you who don’t know, in the early nineties there was a voice actor who was famous for being able to talk incredibly fast. He did a voice on the Transformers cartoon, but he was best known for doing these commercials for tiny collectible toy cars. This guy talked so fast he could practically fit War and Peace into a 30 second commercial spot. My inner monologue has always been that guy, talking crazy fast, expressing confusion at the world, wondering if how I was acting or what I was doing was correct or weird or possibly morally reprehensible. Not sure about the mustache, though.
But today at this intersection, something had changed. I had a pretty creatively productive day today, which I chalk up to waking up on a boat after a good rest and reading Discworld in the sunshine next to a beautiful girl. I could be wrong, but I’m probably not.
Anywho, when the ideas are churning I usually turn off the car stereo so I can, so to speak, hear myself think. At this intersection, I noticed that my inner monologue had changed. Second-Guessing Inner Monologue Guy was still there, but he had been pushed way in the background. Speaking softly but still overpowering him was someone who sounded a lot like me.
Now, here’s the thing. I’ve asked the inner monologue question at scores of parties, and no one ever, ever says their inner monologue sounds just like their speaking voice. First it’s boring and it goes against the rules of the game, and second people just don’t talk like they think. This is generally a good thing. But this new voice sounded almost exactly like mine, if a little breathier and maybe a semitone lower in pitch. I call this new voice the Explanatory Monk.
I found I was narrating the events at the intersection, explaning to myself why people were making each turn in such a way. Micromachines Guy would have said, “Whatsthatladydoing? Ishegoingtoturnorisnthe? Isitmyturnyet? Isthatpizzaguyinabighurrymaybe? Ohmygodtheyrebothgoing! Whatifweallgoandhaveawreck? Ohgeezwhatsmyinsurancecoverage? Aaaaah!”
Explanatory Monk says, “The Domino’s Pizza guy thinks it’s his turn. That’s okay because he’s turning right. It’s early in the morning and the woman in the Jetta is putting on her makeup, but she’s just seen the pizza guy. When she gets through let the truck go by. Now everyone knows it’s your turn.”
And I am not making this up. Those were actually my thoughts. I was calmly explaining to myself what was happening in the world, and reeassuring myself that everything was going to be okay. This might seem like an insignificant revelation to you, but I, personally, was shocked. It was so foreign yet pleasing and entirely in the moment. It was like discovering that my brain had been sleeping with the neighbor’s wife and had finally liquored me up and invited me in for a threesome. The first thing I did was pull over and write about it.
Since those first scribbled notes on which this article is based I’ve mulled it over a bit, and a few thoughts have struck me regarding what this all says about yours truly. I believe, first and foremost, that it’s indicative of my growing lack of confusion as I age. It’s no secret that I’m generally not a confused person. That’s not to say the world isn’t full of wonderous surprises, but as a rule those surprises no longer fill me with the idea that everything I know is wrong. If anything, I’m in a constant state of surprise that just further proves I’m correct when I say I know that I know nothing. And no, none of that was self-contradictory.
Frankly, this all struck me as not really very profound. What then occurred to me, though, was that there was a third thing happening at that intersection that allowed me to notice this second voice in the first place.
You see, when I ask people about their inner voices in a stale and sober situation, they’re generally confused. This is because their inhibitions are fully intact. At a party, drunk on alcohol and laughing with strangers, people don’t think before they respond. They just say what pops into their head. The answer that rides along this wave of conversation is always correct. I’ve never seen anybody go back on it. Sometimes I actually see them pause and play their response back in their head, nod in affirmation, and then carry on.
That pause is this third thing. It’s not even a presence or a third voice, although you might call it a third but silent voice. When we listen to our own internal monologues – not just talk about them or act by them but actually listen to the process of our thinking selves – we are tapping in to what today I’ve decided to call absolute awareness.
Absolute awareness isn’t the same as talking to yourself. It’s actually more like sitting quietly in the corner with a typewriter and recording your thoughts as they play out. It’s thinking about your own thoughts as they happen. It seems to me like this should be impossible, and I certainly wasn’t able to do it for very long. As soon as I noticed my noticing, I no longer was. Maybe a lifetime of Zen meditation would beef that recursive state up, I don’t know. But, even as this state of absolute awareness was retreating, I wondered at how familiar it felt. I soon figured out why.
It’s how I feel when I’m making music.
It’s practically cliche to say that there’s this mysteriously magical place from whence, with much practice and gusto, we’re able to draw all sorts of musical inspiration. The humanistic view, which is what I believe, says that this other place is actually a universal mechanism that we all share that just so happens to be really freaking hard to get to. I think of mine as an ocean with a trickle of idea bubbles, and sometimes it’s more than a trickle, and if I practice for years I can get really good at jumping off the deep end and treading water.
I believe that the many endeavors of a human individual are connected by this place, whatever it is for them, whether said individual likes it or not. I believe that the act of writing stories, and meeting strangers, and composing music all come from, or at least can come from, this secret and sacred place. Athletes, mathematicians, even particularly inpsired stock brokers can tap into this place. I’m telling you, everyone’s got it to some degree.
And, finally, I believe that as we grow older this state of absolute awareness becomes a place of dread. It becomes a distant and desolate land. Like the people who edge away when I tell them about my living situation, we learn to shut this place out for practicality’s sake because awareness brings discomfort and it doesn’t pay the bills. At least, not right out of college it doesn’t. And we’re all in such a hurry to pay bigger and bigger bills, aren’t we? Because, like, hey, did you know you’re gonna die some day? And you don’t want this fleeting life to be uncomfortable, do you? Horrors! I mean, discomfort is synonomous with unhappiness probably! We can’t have one single moment of unhappiness, perish the thought! Get your stupid awareness away from me! It sounds terrible and I want no part of it!
I’ve got something to tell you: I’m pretty fucking happy. And I mean that’s a deep happy. I’m particularly glad to discover that I like where my head is going as I grow older. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, I never even noticed the change until one day I ended up breaded and grinning on a plate with some garnish.
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know how you work. I don’t know if you’re Mocking Choir, or Simpsons Teen, or Dracula Sleeper or what. But I know that living my life simply and creatively has helped me learn about who I am down to my very core, and, holy crap, I didn’t run away screaming from what I found there. Beyond even that, it’s helped me make sense of a world full of people who all have their own little worlds floating around inside them, making their decisions and dreams and destinies happen and doing their very best not to muck up the place.
In short, I’m getting better at understanding. Just plain and simple truth and understanding. To me that’s worth just a little discomfort. Thanks for reading.
Composition means a lot more than just learning scales and modal harmonies. In the vein of Stephen King’s On Writing, I wanted to actually talk about what I do when writing music.
The single most helpful thing I did for increasing output was eliminate setup. A guitarist would probably think of this as keeping your strings in tune. For a long time, every time I wanted to make music I had to go through a minor but annoying connection of wires and controllers and microphones and things. I’ve come to learn how important it is to be able to just sit down, hit a few power switches, and then run with it.
A lot of us are used to writing at night, simply because that’s when we get the time. There’s a reason they don’t call it sunlighting, right? Lately I’ve been fortunate enough (har har) to have freetime every morning, and that has made all the difference. But lately I’ve found, and Stephen King backs me up in his book, along with Bobby McFerrin and a host of other professionals, that being creative in the morning is the way to go. Your mind is fresh and clear from daily strains, and you aren’t constantly battling exhaustion or the threat of imminent dawn.
My current project is a musical/rock opera, which is a first for me. It’s challenging because all the music has to have a very direct purpose and meaning, so I can’t go with my usual method of simply improvising and seeing what happens. So I’ve developed a method I call “The Hypnagogic Method of Composition,” whose sole purpose is to direct my thoughts when I first wake up to a certain creative problem. All you have to do is go to sleep reminding yourself to think about your current problem in the morning, and give yourself a little time between waking and actually getting up. That’s it. It’s a bit like magic, honestly, but it works.
After that it just takes practice. In order for this method to work, you have to be able to start working immediately after an idea strikes. One of the key elements to the hypnagogic stage is amnesia, so unless you start instantly you’ll forget your idea. If you manage to get down your concept/solution/spark of brilliance, later that day you’ll go back and listen to what you recorded and it’ll seem like someone else made it, but that’s the beauty of this method. You don’t think, you just do. It’s also remarkably handy in that you work for a reasonably short time every day, which is far superior to an eight hour session once every Tuesday night.
My set up is simple. I have one condenser mic, a nice soundcard, and a 49-key MIDI controller. I run that through a plethora of softsynths and ultimately Ableton Live. I use Ableton as opposed to other more technical programs because, since it’s intended as a performance tool, I feel it’s most conducive to improvisational composition. I’ve got a bunch of fretted instruments that I tune every day. This is because I can’t count the number of times I thought I was recording a scratch track, only to later discover that that recording was absolute magic and I’ll never get that sound ever again. If all that went down with out of tune strings, I would be, to put it mildly, displeased with myself.
I’m pretty good at getting the sounds in my head out via Reason and Guitar Rig. I’m most inspired by new sounds, which is why so many people find my music so oddly eclectic. It’s also why electronic music is so valuable to me, because the possibilities are quite literally endless. So I wake up, stew for a while, fading in and out of the real world, then notice something good has floated to the surface. I flip open the Macbook, hit two power switches, and activate phantom power. I open up Reason and Ableton, and either start cycling presets or singing or playing or whatever. Cycling the presets used to take a while, but once I got comfortable with altering parameters left and right I cut browsing time down by something like ninety percent.
In On Writing, King gripes a lot about people asking him The Question: “Where do you get your ideas?” I think the musician’s equivalent is, “What do you start with, music or words?” The answer is almost always, “I dunno, sometimes music, sometimes words, sometimes both.” With the rock opera, I’m trying my best to start with at the very least a title, and even that is sketchy. In the words of David Drederer, music is magic plain and simple, and he’s right. You never know how or when it’s going to hit. All this paragraph is really trying to say is this: The quick setup is essential, because I never know whether I’ll be sequencing, hammering, strumming or singing until about thirty seconds before I’m doing it.
So that’s my method. I just got used to convincing my mind to mull over the correct creative dilemma during that not-quite-dreaming state, and watched my creative output flourish. These days I save my nights for reading books and internet research, or sometimes sketching or design. I watch TV with my friend Matt one day a week, on his DVR. When my brain gets too tired for anything else I watch a movie. Preferably something with a lot of subtitles and flying knee-jabs. Occasionally I even get sunlight.
Whether this method seems brilliant to you or so wrong it makes your head spin, by all means leave your take in the comments.
In the spirit of KCRW’s ongoing Guest DJ Project and also in the spirit of the fact they probably won’t be calling me to ask any time soon, here is a list of ten songs that helped to shape me as a musician.
To make this easier I restricted myself to songs I discovered before college. I also decided not to include any classical choices, because those could easily make up a list of their own.
1. Andrew Lloyed Webber – The Phantom of the Opera
A bit of an embarrassing first choice, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a major influence on six-year-old me. My mom had this on the original vinyl release and I listened to it more than anything else when I was younger. Michael Crawford, regardless of your opinions on his technique, has a hell of an instrument. For me, this song had it all: electronic drums, strings, vocal harmony, minor tonality, and of course a heavy freakin organ. I used to put this on and dance like a villian when no one was watching.
2. Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
As a kid in Houston, I heard a lot of RnB on the bus to school, a fact for which I’m still grateful to this day. Dad had the eponymous album on vinyl. I played it constantly. I think I’ve always been a sucker for strings, and no one I’d ever heard before could sing like that. I didn’t come across Al Green until much later. I blame that Marvin Gaye record for a certain stretch in fifth grade where all I listened to was Boyz II Men.
3. Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal
My uncle Lahab gave us a VHS that had some claymation Mark Twain adventure and Moonwalker on it. Of course, I became obsessed with Moonwalker and I remember one week I watched the Smooth Criminal scene every night trying to learn the dance. I got pretty far into it, too, until the bit where the music stops and the cat walks across the piano. I always hated that part, it bored me to death. It was even worse than the dinosaurs in Fantasia.
4. B.B. King – The Thrill is Gone
My family lived in Saudi Arabia for a while, where the best you could hope for CD-wise was the occasional cool soundtrack. Every summer we’d go back to the States, and all I ever asked for from my parents was more CDs. Once for some reason I bought a B.B. King collection and played the crap out of it. This particular song blew me away. I love the simple arrangement, the way the guitar transitions seamlessly from punchy to wailing to weeping, and the strings filling it all up. Wonderful.
5. Live – White, Discussion
Throwing Copper was the first album I ever bought. I’d heard a remix on the Virtuosity soundtrack and then my friend Mike played the original at a pool party. I bought the CD off him then and there. Everybody has a favorite off of this album, and this is mine. In truth I love every song on Throwing Copper, it’s one of those rare perfect albums.
6. UNKLE feat. Thom Yorke – Rabbit in Your Headlights
I feel clever, because this combines DJ Shadow with Radiohead, thus saving me a spot on my list. I found UNKLE’s debut Psyence Fiction at a listening station while visiting my aunt in California. Mom bought it for me when she saw how excited I was. I listened to it so many times I think it eventually broke in half. This is one of the first really good proggy singer/hip hop dj mash-ups that I’m aware of and definitely the first I’d ever heard. Hell of a music video, too.
7. The Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up
I first heard this in a club in Bahrain, just before my family moved back to the States. It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, and musically it was a really important time for me. I hadn’t wanted to move again and I think my parents pitied me, so they let me buy ten CDs at once on Amazon. I still remember it. It was like Christmas in July. Three of those CDs were Fat of the Land, Crystal Method’s Vegas and Propellerheads Decksanddrumsandrockandroll. I was astounded at the sound coming out of the stereo. That was when I started making my own tracks on our family computer, and I’ve been an electronic musician ever since. I’ve never looked back.
8. Squarepusher – Iambic 5 Poetry
Squarepusher is probably my biggest influence, and I owe his discovery to my small but indispensable group of friends from Franklin, Tennessee. I’m a bona fide Squarepusher fan, so much so that it was hard for me to pick just one song. His sound changes radically from one album to the next, so just check him out. He’s amazing. This particular track off Budakhan Mindphone is really laid back. It’s so different from anything else he’s done, which is probably why it sticks out for me. Because of this song, plus maybe Port Rhombus, I use vibes/xylophone in my music all the time.
9. Benny Goodman – Sing! Sing! Sing!
I played clarinet in the school band for years. My dad bought the Ken Burns jazz documentary, which was full of revelation from start to finish. I’d never heard anybody play the clarinet like that, and the rest of the band sounded incredible, especially Gene Krupa on drums. I came across an old static-y recording of their 1938 performance at Carnegie Hall and it was love. I played it louder than most people play metal.
10. Cornelius – 2010
I hardly ever hung out with the guy who introduced me to Cornelius, so it’s kind of funny that he pretty much changed my life. This quirky, fast-paced track introduced me to Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor, which became something of an obsession for me after high school graduation and well into my freshman year of college. I was originally a biochem major, but for months I sat in the campus chapel every night learning the fugue by ear. When I finally played it for the girl I was dating at the time, she asked my why the hell I didn’t just switch to music already. Two years later when I applied for a transfer to Florida State, I nearly bombed the piano section of the audition until I played this fugue. In large part because of that piece, the guy passed me and I went on to be accepted to the FSU music department.
Plus it actually is 2010 now, so that makes it relevant. Got your own list? Feel free to drop it in the comments below.
