Diatribe of the Day: We Don't Need A Flag

Recently, Creative Loafing published a year end piece about the Atlanta music scene. You should probably read that first since this is a response to it. The message of the piece was that Atlanta has "long suffered from an identity crisis" relative to other cities that have become national music epicenters in pop music history. Atlanta doesn't have "a discernible flag" of sound or style to rally around. While bands like Deerhunter, Black Lips, Mastodon, and Snowden blow up the city, there is no one aesthetic that you can label Atlanta's music scene with.

Over the holidays I talked about what I call "The Silent Revolution". What I see in the universe of music is a new ethic that challenges the conventional ideas of genre. There is a common idea that bonds today's musicians together, and that is diversity. Everyone is pushing the boundaries of music as far as they can and creating new sounds or combining old styles together in different ways. Human beings all have different tastes, and they like having as many choices as possible, and with the aid of the computer age, people can now seek out the flavors they really want, or taste a new flavor every day instead of the old times when you were being force fed what a few individuals thought was best.

The reason that Atlanta is becoming such an important city in this movement is precisely because the musicians here are so diverse and different from one another. You can find great artists on just about every end of the sound spectrum in this town, and it's not a liability, it is an asset. The music revolution going on doesn't have a real flag to rally behind, it's just happening. It's under the radar, but it's growing bigger everyday.

There are specific causal forces that have lead to Atlanta being so on the forefront of this revolution. I attribute Atlanta's superiority in sonic diversity to geography and demographics. Atlanta is the fastest growing metro area in the US during this decade. Altanta is a metropolitan island in a sea of rural rednecks. If you grow up in the deep south, like I did, and you weren't about killing deers, wearing camouflage, and waving confederate flags, the closest big city to escape to is Atlanta. Atlanta has an entire region of this nation to mine talent and creativity from, unlike, say, in the Northeast where there are so many major cities so close together. Atlanta is also one of the only major cities on the east coast with warm weather, so we get urbanites from up north who don't want to freeze. I'm not saying we're bigger than New York City yet, but relative to our size, I don't think anyone is squeezing out better stuff.

It's a new era and those hip to it know what we're doing. This generation doesn't have a flag, it doesn't need a flag, and neither does our city. It may be "confusing" to the dinosaurs that can't think beyond the box of conventional wisdom, but just go ask some record company executives how well conventional wisdom of the music industry has been serving them this decade.

Diatribe Of The Day: The Silent Revolution

The one central thesis I have on the state of music, and my primary inspiration to do this blog, is that I believe in the grand history of music we are at a very unique and overwhelmingly positive time. Over the course of most of this decade, there has been this slow and steady renaissance of great music happening, and unlike the advent of Rock 'n' Roll or the early '90s Grunge movement, the regular joe average person has no idea that it even exists. I've referred to it as "The Silent Revolution" because of the fundamentally different nature of what is happening now relative to those other major turning points in recent music history. There is no explosion, there is no easily discernible pop culture impact that can be neatly identified. But, there is an era of music and new rules and philosophies being carved out aided almost entirely by the Internet. An outsider who isn't hip to what is going on would look at the state of music now and think we are in a horrible time, but everyday someone new discovers this alternative dimension where people have the power to find the music that best satisfies their personal taste, rather than a world of music where a few elites control access and dictate to the masses what they should listen to. At the beginning of this decade, music had become almost entirely a commodity where the Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys reigned, and it was difficult to find music as art. Just seven years later so much has changed. Forces are in motion that cannot be stopped in the short term, and although the long term future is any one's guess, I remain very optimistic.

I bring this up now because as I'm bored and insomniacing, I decided to check the OiNK webpage randomly and they have a link to an amazing article that I think explains the distribution side of this revolution more eloquently than I could. Go take a minute and read this tremendous article:

When Pigs Fly: The Death Of Oink, The Birth Of Dissent, and A Brief History Of Record Industry Suicide

Diatribe Of The Day: The Sopranos Ending

Since i posted an article hyping HBO, I figured I was required to respond to the Sopranos final episode. If you haven't seen it and somehow haven't heard what happened, maybe skip this article. Although, it would be hard to not know what happened if you turned on your TV or read a newspaper yesterday. It was amazing to watch everyone go on and on about it on every show imaginable. Even ESPN shows were talking about it around the clock; Jim Rome had a roundtable discussion on it for crying out loud. So, it's time for me to put my opinion down.

When the ending happened initally, I didn't really know what i thought about it. The American Beauty ending meets Rules of Attraction ending ending caught me by surprise just like everyone else. Now, I could intellectually explain all the different things the ending accomplishes that I appreciate, such as the multiple interpretations of what happens in the scene (do the sopranos get assassinated, did a terorist bombing just happen, do they just live and prosper?) or the "whacking" of the audience. But really, there's one real reason I think i now love the ending, and that's cuz it pissed off everybody.

It takes a lot of balls to take a pop-culture show like the Sopranos and play a practical joke on your audience. As i watched every talking head on television yesterday cry about what they wanted the ending to be and everyone i know and on message boards so upset, I realized they did something no television show has ever accomplished, a reaction so huge from a fictional work. I mean if anything, people stopped talking about Paris Hilton for a day. Maybe it is the inner-asshole in me that loves this ending so much, but I also feel like there is a more central conflict here at play, and here's where this discussion bleeds into music; the paradox of the sometimes opposing values between entertainment and art.

The Sopranos always operated on many different levels, and the one thing i probably enjoyed the most about the show was the mocking of human idiocy that was always threaded into every episode. Watching Tony hear some phrase from his psychiatrist and then repeating it wrong to someone else, watching Christopher try to be a writer with such terrible ideas; the show intricately satired bigotry, arrogance, hypocrisy and especially the pop-culture masses. That was always the biggest appeal to me was that the show could appeal to a mass-media audience, while sort of making fun of them the entire time. The mob plot lines were more of a setting to achieve other things.

So, in my opinion, flicking off the audience at the very end was the most appropriate thing i could imagine; one last mockery of a people who want the same old thing fed to them over and over again. The Sopranos was always art and entertainment at the same time and I'm happy they didn't betray that in the end. Whether you liked the ending or not, you reacted, and that's what art is all about. Sorry suckas, if you want gratuitous violence without meaning or nuance, there's this Fox show with a third tier Chuck Norris that is probably right up your alley.

If you still have a bitter taste in your mouth, here's some tracks off of the Six Feel Under soundtrack, probably the best ending of a TV show ever:

• Cold Wind (Arcade Fire)
• Direction (Interpol)
• Feeling Good (Nina Simone)

Diatribe Of The Day: Bonnaroo Is Only One Week Away!

We make a big deal about Bonnaroo here at Ohmpark. For me personally, it is the highlight of my year, the thing I look forward to constantly, my Christmas. It's more than just a festival that puts together amazing line-ups every year. It is one of the most important and influential institutions of music this decade. Every year it means something different and serves as a barometer for where music is going in times that are very different than the rest of rock/pop music's history and fairly mysterious as to where things are going to go next.

Luckily for me, I've been able to attend every year of Bonnaroo so far, and I thought I might tell some tales from those 5 years here as I get hyped up for next week. When I first came to college I hung out with a lot of hippies and got turned on to jambands fairly early. It was just pure chance that I ended up going to the first one, because it was advertised almost entirely by word of mouth. Phish had been blowing up and that scene was at a watermark so high that they could literally get 70,000 (give or take) people in a field to party through nothing but email. It's kind of cliche' to say how the first one was so much different than the rest, but it's the truth. There were literally tables set up in the campgrounds with huge bags of weed and scales sitting right out with a crowd of customers hovering around to buy it up. Laws ceased to exist almost entirely for 4 days in Tennessee. The festival was the pinnacle of the post-Grateful Dead jamband scene (with the exception of maybe Phish at Big Cypress) and was a once in a lifetime sort of event. I don't know if you could compare it to Woodstock because the cultural significance of that single festival was so broadly spanning into pop culture, but there is something almost more special about that first year of the 'roo because it occurred in such obscurity; The greatest party of the millennium happened and no one would really even know about it until years later, except for those of us who went.

The second year was when Bonnaroo upped the ante and went from being the greatest jamband fest to becoming America's greatest festival period. They expanded the genre limitations of the first year and paved the way for a world where the multitude of styles could unite under one flag, just straight up great music, anyway you like it. The very last time I tripped in my life, happened to be the very first time I saw one of my now favourite bands, Sonic Youth. That experience will be in mind until I die as one of the best I've ever had. Mushrooms and Sonic Youth are just an unbeatable combination. The afternoon was so spectacular that I decided to never take psychedelics again because nothing could ever top that.

Year three exposed me to amazing artists such as Yo La Tengo, Primus, Wilco, Grandaddy, Praxis, and Danger Mouse live for the first time. The best show of this Bonnaroo for me would be Material. At one point in the set, Buckethead would build up an amazing solo, and right as it exploded, lightning struck, thunder shook the ground, and rain clouds opened up to a pour. It was one of the most surreal concert experiences of my life.

The fourth year (2005) was probably my favourite overall. It started bad as the front gate security took away much of my beer, we got parked in a very far away spot, and the smallest group I had ever taken included someone really lame who wanted to just complain constantly. But it turned around fast. The Thursday night I went to watch my favourite basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs, play the Detroit Pistons in Game 1 of the NBA finals. Of the 500 or so people in the cinema tent watching the game, there were only four of us Spurs fans. The entire game was a Pistons blowout with everyone in the tent going crazy...until the fourth quarter. The Spurs eventually would win the game and was the turning point for the entire weekend. The next day before watching the unbelievably amazing late-night The Mars Volta show, Me, Sleo, and Biggie C were able to "mysteriously acquire" all-access passes to the fest. We spent the rest of the weekend backstage drinking free alcohol and stalking our favourite artists. That weekend was one of the best in my life.

Last year we volunteered to work at the 'roo. We got to start camping on Tuesday on our way back from Coparusa so it was interesting to be hanging out at the fest with only the other employees. I waited 6 hours or so in one spot to watch the epic Radiohead show, but it was a small price to pay. I think last year the most interesting thing for me was to be able to watch how the fest is run behind the scenes. Bonnaroo 2006 concluded with me getting to shake Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth's hand as we both waited to get on stage for the Phil Lesh and Friends show.

I could literally go on for hours and hours about my experiences at this fest. I'll spare you for now, but I urge you to get tickets now if you don't have them. If you can't make it, we'll be covering the fest around the clock both here and at Camura.

Diatribe Of The Day: What Is A Musician?

The night after St. Patrick's Day a couple weeks ago, Me, Ichuda, and some other friends spent the night getting drunk in a dive bar on the beach at Tybee Island. We ended up getting in like a 5 hour discussion and argument about Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I'm not going to rehash this tired debate here, but I am going to address a single element of the argument that has come out in previous music debates. There are certain phrases that people use when trying to make a point about particular music that always bother me. A simple example of this is: "Every *Insert artist or genre here* song sounds the same". When I hear someone make an argument like this, It translates into my head as "I don't know what I'm talking about". The phrase that came up in this argument that I've heard in similar arguments with many different people was "*Insert band or artist here* are/is a great songwriter(s), but not (a) good musician(s)."

I hate when someone says something like this. It really infuriates me because there are a lot of layers to this sort of thinking that I disagree with. First, somehow the word "musician" has come to mean something different to people than its actual definiton. Certain people in this mind frame think that there is a black and white dichotomy between being a song-writer and being a musician. Either you are songwriter, a musician, or both. Not only is this oversimplification lack an understanding of the evolution of music, but it totally redefines the word "musician" to only account for those who can play an instrument technically proficient according to conventional norms determined by some popular thought based in tradition. It basically boils down to, the faster you can play a scale, the better a musician you are.

Now, I do not disagree that in assessing how good a musician someone is, its fair to take into account how technically proficient that person is. But that is only a part of the greater picture. These classical-rock fundamentalists rob the word of every other meaning and dimension it possesses. Here's some definitions of the word 'musician' that i can find on the web:

Answers.com:

One who composes, conducts, or performs music, especially instrumental music.

Websters-online-dictionary.org:

1. Someone who plays a musical instrument (as a profession).

2. Artist who composes or conducts music as a profession.

But I think I like Wikipedia's best:

A musician is a person who plays or composes music Musicians can be classified by their role in creating or performing music:

• A singer (or vocalist) uses his or her voice as an instrument.
• An instrumentalist plays a musical instrument.
• Both singer and instrumentalist can be improvisers, who create real time music.
• Composers and songwriters write music.
• A conductor coordinates a musical ensemble.

Musicians may also dance or produce choreography. The concept of the musician and the status of the musician in society varies from culture to culture.

You will notice that by definition, song-writing is musicianship. The song-writer is not a separate sphere outside of the musician, but one flavor of musician. You'll also notice that "conducting" is included in all three definitions. A conductor doesn't even actually make any music or sounds, but it still considered a musician. The conductor manipulates the music using the musicians as his instrument. Music is making art with sound. You have to think on that raw, fundamental level to really understand what a musician is. To better illuminate my perspective on these two types of musicians and their importance I think in terms of comic books, The song-writer is the penciller and the technically proficient are the inker. The song-writer creates art and the technically proficient perfect it but there's lots of different dimensions, and variations, and combinations. So arguing about who is a better musician between some who is purely a song-writer and someone who is purely a master of their instrument is impossible on a certain level. That's not to say that value judgements don't exist. The musician who can combine both as well as each of those clearly is a better musician.

Another problem with this argument is the limited conception of what passes for being a master of an instrument. There are classical musicians who believe that jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll aren't "real music" and that musicians in those genres are not as good as classical musicians because they don't do specifically what they are used to. Assuming that particular styles are objectively better than others is something that i will never agree with. As music evolves, styles evolve and just because a particular guitarist hasn't been practicing a particular old style of music over and over again does not necessarily mean they are any less proficient at their instrument. They may be inventing a new style of playing the guitar that the rock dinosaur guitarists could never do. Also, as technology is moving more and more rapidly, what constitutes an "instrument" is changing and a particular musician doesn't have to even touch classical instrumentation. Mastering making music from a computer is just as important as mastering music on a drum set.

The best way i can illustrate how i conceive what makes a great musician is to give an example. I consider Jim O'Rourke one of the greatest musicians of all time because he can play any instrument as good as the best and each with a distinct sound unmatchable, he can write brilliant songs, some of the best lyrics I've ever heard, he has a good and distinct voice, he can improvise at high levels, he has created some of the best pop songs and some of the most challenging and innovative experimental music I have ever heard, he has produced some of the best albums of the last decade, he mixes, he collaborates constantly with great musicians, and he is insanely prolific. The truly great musician to me is the one than can master as many different dimensions of music as possible.

So, I'm taking "musician" back. The next time someone is going on and on about some dude who can shred on a guitar in his sleep but couldn't write a good song, tell your friend "yeah, he's really good at his instrument, but he's not a good musician." and wait for that reaction.

Your reward for reading all of that garbage is a few Jim O'Rourke tracks:

Jim O'Rourke : Insignificance : Memory Lame

Sonic Youth : Murray Street : Rain On Tin

Loose Fur : Loose Fur : Carnival Knowledge

Jim O'Rourke : Terminal Pharmacy : Terminal Pharmacy