Dr. Rat

Reports say there is still dispute about his level of musical skill. --eric

He was supposed to buy me lunch. ← So you are not on the qui bono list? --eric

The Gallison/Peyroux album is actually pretty good (different, but not patently inferior as claimed in the article) and has gotten a fair deal of listener response here, to both the Gallison stuff and the Gallison/Peyroux stuff. --eric

A couple of traditional solos I like a lot: Don Byas, Harvard Blues (w/ Basie) Frankie Newton, Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave to Me

I'm thinking that as various "similarities engines" and peer referral systems are perfected and as high badnwidth internet becomes more omnipresent, we'll begin to see that internet browsing can serve the same function as real-life function, and perhap be even better. --eric

It is of course also Armstrong's self-made image of the dope-free crusader for a clean sport. His little speech against all the cynics and the sceptics at the end of this year's tour somehow lost lots of its impact. He told us to believe in the athletes, that there are no secrets, and that it's all just about hard work. Sure Lance... ← OK. I suppose if he's being self-righteous about it, he's asking for it. --eric

I think the answer is "It depends." Depends on what purpose or audience jazz would be OVERintellectualized in regard to. For the typical musical buyer? Yes, probably a lot of jazz is too sophisticated for those folks. For me? Yes, some jazz is too "intellectualized" for me if by that you mean in the musicians' shop talk sense. There seems to be a fair deal of "music for musicians" out there. But is that a sin? No, there's at least as many musicians out there as there are ex-grad student rat enthusiasts who like songs about food. At least last I checked. Too sophisticated to be a popular music. Yes, probably, but we passed that gate about 50 years ago. Too sophisticated to survive in the present form (supported by school programs, artistic institutions, grants, etc., etc.)? Maybe. --eric

Retail is a tough business, and they and their stockholders are looking at overhead and how much money their clearing per square foot of retail space, so scaling back on jazz and classical has actually been a longer time coming than I expected. The costs of offering an obscure title on the Internet are different. They've essentially got to be able to sell a unit box at a cost high enough to cover the costs of warehousing and throwing the thing up plus overhead of maintaining the database. All in all the overhead per item online is a lot lower, and the potential market is pretty big, so the same factors pushing toward smaller stock aren't really at work. --eric

This, though, he's been relatively honest about, hasn't he? I think I remeber some American journalist asking whether he thought himself the "greatest cycler ever" and he mentioned exactly this (Something like "I'm not really a cyclist in the sense that people like Delgado or Indurain are. I just do the tour.") --eric

My own feeling on this has always been that Armstrong doped. Of course he doped, because everybody doped. But there's something . . . unhealthy? in the European fixation on the topic. There is definitely a witch-hunt feel to it. Who cares very much if he doped? Who cares very much if he lied about it? The newspapers sound like the Clinton-obsessed tabloids here in the US back in the heyday of Monica Lewinski. Reasonable people didn't care whether he had sex with that woman, and didn't care if he lied about it later. As for Armstrong, unless and until somebody can show that he doped when the competition refrained . . . it just doesn't matter. --eric

Surely no one would be so stupid as to suggest that music can do anyhting whatsoever to change society or people's outlook on life. --eric

And don't ferget to request Freebird.

Yeah, but the Punks were mostly white. That means that their angst was valid. ← One thing it does mean is that these folks had a lot more to lose, and that the angst was just a show for the most part and by 1989 they were mostly trying to figure out how to get gigs at the Mercantile Exhange. --eric

Who said there's not a problem? Not me. But blaming the music and/or the media is the same old "blame the messenger" game, which is, of course, good for opportuniosts and demagogues, but not much else. It's not like people are being forced to make, buy, and enjoy this stuff, and it's not like everybody who does buys wholesale into the "lifestyle". Far from it. For plenty of people, it's just a soundtrack for the moment and not too much more. But for those who do buy into it to any degree, you gotta ask why they do it? It must meet some kind of a need that's not being met otherwise. And what that need is, why it exists, and why it's not being met otherwise is a lot more pertinent than blaming the media and the music for creating social decay. The music and the media ain't created nothing,m they merely capitalize on a pre-existing opportunity. When "the people" feel the need for romance and hope over hedonism and nihilism, they'll buy that kind of music in quantity. It is being made. Until then, jazz causes sex crimes, and rock-and-roll causes juvenile delinquency. The music creates the behavior out of nothing rather than the behavior latching on to a partial element of the music. Of course. ← I am in total agreement both on the importance of a "demand side" perspective on what's going on and about the demagogues. Just I think a) there are peolpe who can do a lot better than they are on the supply side, they could be leading demand rather than following it; b) we're better off not ceding this issue to the windbags and demagogues . . . or perhaps i should say "you are better off . . . " --eric

I think you're only saying the same thing I'm saying from a musical perspective. I say black culture used to get played out in a much more stable and encompasssing social context, you point out the fact that this is the first black music not to partake of church music. Sounds like a two sides of the same story to me. Well, ok, but "sociological" and "musical" mean two different things to me. And to that end, I'd suggest that it's not jsut "black culture" that's getting "played out in a much more stable and encompasssing social context". Far from it. You think that all the debilitatingly whiny and/or screaming white rock bands are stemming from a "healthy" environment? I think not! ← Agreed. --eric

I think you're only saying the same thing I'm saying from a musical perspective. I say black culture used to get played out in a much more stable and encompasssing social context, you point out the fact that this is the first black music not to partake of church music. Sounds like a two sides of the same story to me. I'm certainly not suggesting that we lose our heads over what hip-hop might be depicting. I'm just saying that it doesn't get off the hook just because prior generations of adolescents may have had similar sex fantasies. I'm very resistent to the line of argument which seems to run: "well, it's popular with black youth, therefore it gets a free pass." I'm just saying the possibilty that there might be a problem should be entertained. Nothing more. It's not as if there aren't plenty of practioners of the art form who would say there's a problem: problem being that if mass media has taken over some of the role of declining institutions like the black church, people producing it should be mindful of that fact, and they often aren't. --eric

On the third point: The parallel between past youths and today's "hip-hop" culture diverges when we start having a hard look at the 1960s or 1970s fantasy vs. 21st century reality. The trouble today is we got the same adolescent fantasies, but they get realized with an ease undreamed of in prior generations. The big difference being that adolescent fantasies used to exist in a world of adult rules and adult control. Now that's not true to nearly the same extent. So explicitly playing out the same semi-barbaric adolescent fantasies on TV and in hip-hop . . . well it's a different context. --eric

Hope she don't try busqueing here -- it gets cold. Seriously, I hope taking a pass on the promo crap doesn't derail her career completely. --eric

Demographic research is . . . not particularly good at telling your anything about individuals (say yourself). For instance, I subscribe to The Atlantic, and I would never consider buying 90% of the things advertized in it. NEVER. So why is this. Because I am strange by Atlantic standards? Maybe, but mostly it's because a lot of the stuff advertized is niche stuff, so Chrysler might get some data saying that an Atalntic reader is 10x more likely to buy a 300 in the next year than your average Joe. Well, that probably means maybe a dozen or two Atlantic readers will buy a 300. The vast majority of readers say "look at that goddam huge grille" and continue on to the next page of their article. For niche products you practically never are able to present your product to an audience where the majority of the folks are actually interested: you just have play the numbers as best you can. If you look at the Prizm numbers for your neighborhood, you'll see some pretty absurd stuff. I will exaggerate to illustrate. In my neighborhood, people are 100x more likely to own horses than average. Are there loads of horses by me, does everybody have a horse. Not by a long shot, but a few people have horses, and that's a hell of a lot more than average. The percentage nationwide is .005% of households. In my neighborhood it's 5%. But if you make bridles, my neighborhood is a horse-owning hotbed, so I get horse-related mass-mailers. --eric

If you eat like me, it ought to be. --eric

Ok, so now you got it, what did it say? --eric

All much more interesting than rap. ← But no less repetitive. I would rather listen to seven minutes of DJ Shadow's Changeling than Feldman's entire 6 hour String Quartet #2. ← I'd still rather listen to Morty, but I think I've only heard #2 all the way through once. ← Someone simply must jump on this. --eric

I'd give it a good listen, for sure. I'm not a fan, but I'd love to have a bit more to go on when I'm talking to some of the younger djs around here. --eric

But music doesn't always "do something" with all of these things. It works actively with some of those variables, and it just flies on auto-pilot with others. A lot of times when someone says "it all sounds the same" or "it isn't music" they're just focusing on the wrong elements. And when a genre completely throws over the arbitrary distinction between "musical" elements and "other" elements, like rap does, it makes it difficult to evaluate. You can't just trot out the "musical yardstick" and see how it measures up, because your musical yardstick is irrelevent. So there is a real question as to whether the statement beginning "As music rap is . . ." is a great deal more meaningful than a statement beginning "As novelty meat product, rap is . . ." --eric

Well, I wasn't presenting that tune as some sort of be-all and end-all... I think it's funny and it does give an idea of the range of the form. Saying it's loud and in your face is the equivalent of saying it's rap--that's the style. If you come looking for vocal subtlety when someone's rapping as fast he does, you aren't going to find it very often. And it is a new form, and part of that form is exactly the pastiche element that you so vigorously decry. They don't want someone to come in and play the Bach piece, they just want the flattened out snippet because it's there mostly as a reference, anyway. A lot of this music is less "in itself" and much more embedded into an entire way (actually, I should say, entire ways) of life, with all kinds of contextual references running through it. Which is one big reason the culture / music question is so slippery when dealing with this genre, because it isn't "just music" the way, say, a Mozart opera would be just music today--an aesthetic aretefact with few contemporary referents out there, and those rather abstract and high-falutin'. You are applying standards to this form that just don't apply in the way that you seem to think. Kind of like taking a collection of really groundbreaking news articles and complaining that the prose and imagery just doesn't compare to Annie Proulx. --eric