What Happened to our Music Scene?

In a short blast, a KUOW reporter asked what happened to the Seattle music scene. You know, the one that produced Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden among others. The answer was that Seattle's too expense, so people are leaving.

I'm not so sure.

Yes, Seattle and its surrounding suburban environs are not cheap places to live, but neither is LA, New York, and Nashville and people still flock to those cities with wide-eyed dreams, mostly because they have the business infrastructure that supports musicians and songwriter/creators. That doesn't mean you'll make it anymore than being here in Seattle.

The article is quite short and pivots quickly from people leaving because housing, studios, and rehearsal space is expense to how to convince the next generation to stay by providing 5G technology etc, as if that's all it takes. And as if those of us already here and making music are a lost cause and dead weight.

Like most of these kinds of quick go nowhere comments, it avoids the elephant in the room, which is how hard it is to be paid period for providing something unique and interesting. Some may argue that point, but having been part of it for a long time and having heard the wide range of talent in this town, young and old, it's apparent that the problem, as stated above, is being able to make a living making music.

Everything else is, in essence, dross. Unless the city is interested in funding and supporting artists to a point where they're earning enough to support themselves or see that support as having a social value, then in the end it won't fix the problem or stem the exodus.

Some of this is self-perpetuating in that any artist life in the societies we've created is predicated on a value often independent of that effort, meaning most artists never make back what they put into it. So it can't be a surprise if after a while, artists will either give up, move on, or move where the possibilities are better.

If you want a vibrant local music scene, you have to support it and in a capitalist society that means paying for it.

It's that simple.

©2019 David William Pearce

It Just Keeps Getting Better...

As frequent readers of this blog will note, I find the whole vinyl craze fascinating, to say the least. Now, I found out, I'll soon be able to manufacture my own vinyl records right in the privacy of my own home! If there's one thing I need, it's a bunch of substandard records cluttering up the house. After all I already have 600 albums that I bought mostly in the 70's and 80's, and I probably have another 600-700 CD's. I think that's a lot, and it doesn't include downloads, but compared to some collections, it's fairly puny.

Who knows how much all this will cost. There's not only the machine itself, a couple of grand-I'm going to assume it also has a play feature-as well as the cost of the vinyl blanks and whatever system it's plugged into. That in itself has costs, but I've gone into that many times before.

Still, it's vinyl, man!

As this article in Fair Observer notes, how we hear sounds matters, that there is a quantifiable difference between headphones and speakers and actually being at a concert where real instruments and voices are not only heard but felt. That in a nutshell is why performance will never die out and may in fact proliferate as AI and other artificialities pervade all of our personal spaces. I whined about this last week.

I realize that there is an esthetic to records, that they require a certain level of activity and care that CD's and MP3's don't. They're bigger, they should be cleaned each time they're played; the cover art and lyrics, if included- not that many artists provided lyric in yon olden days- are easier to see, and they took up a lot more space. But that was a point of pride to collectors, that wall of albums no one else had.

There's also the inherent limitations of the medium and therefore limitations on how much you can shove onto it.

Recording and mastering engineers will undoubtedly be shaking their head at the idea that what I stick on my records through a USB connection-which means digital to analog-will be any good, that instead will produce any number of sonic and space problems, especially where highly compressed LOUD recordings are transferred to vinyl. That assumes that the people making these records are deeply discerning audiophiles.

I'm thinking no. It's a novelty.

Maybe that's the allure of the home make-your-own-record machine. Yes, that wall there is a collection of my records of other people's songs, although there may be my own stuff too. More likely, it'll be akin to all those mixtapes we made before iPods and their ilk made it much easier to put all your music on one convenient device. And mixtapes, like old records, have a special place for those who grew up with them. They also weren't known for their high fidelity, but that wasn't the point. The point was to have the songs you like in the order you liked and not what some radio DJ kept playing which sucked.

Just saying...

As a final thought... I've yet to read of anyone advocating for the multi-stack record players of my youth where the records would be stacked on top of one another and then flop down after the previous record played. While convenient, it was also scratch inducing, which all audiophiles of the time abhorred. I assume they still do. Of course, most of those people who had multi-stack record players didn't save their records anyway.

Just saying...

©2019 David William Pearce

Fake It to Make It...

AI musicians are already here!

Hmmm. At the risk of being redumbdant, I'll say again how fascinating this is. Think about it: people are already following, in good sized numbers, AI created musicians and entertainers. I italicized musicians for the very real reason that they're not! An avatar, hologram, program with a visual interface, won't be dazzling you with their technique while you stand 5 feet away because they don't physically exist...

But that's beside the point.

What is the point is that we humans are so predictable in what we respond to positively and negatively. AI listens to what we listen to, tracks us, and replicates it, time and time again until it knows exactly what we want to hear. And given the power of computing these days, it can be tailored individually.

Huh, huh, huh!

Let's see Taylor or Katy or Lorde do that!

They will, of course, dispute that, saying they're doing their own thing, even though their management, representatives, label use the same algorithms to study their fans in order to keep them buying, buying, buying as the AI created popstars, like Lil Miquela. Now they just have to figure out how to keep from aging out, something their AI competitors don't have to worry about. Lil Miquela may not stay popular, but she'll never be 40 or 50 doing nostalgia shows at a casino. Or like Poppy, they can pretend to be cyborgs.

Am I being harsh, mean?

Sorta, but pop itself is based on fads and stereotypes and the music is hardly nuanced and thoughtful-mostly it's hooks sung over and over until your head explodes. It's aural candy. Like its confectionary equivalent, it can be fun and dancey and mindless. It's not philosophy, but it has no real value, nutritional or otherwise.

So if you're a serious musician or singer or songwriter, all of the above means that your art is what you make of it and the realm of pop probably isn't going to be the land of milk and honey if it ever was.

But it certainly tests the limits, assuming there are any anymore, of where popular music is going.

©2019 David William Pearce

It Was 50 Years Ago Today...

50 years ago, the Beatles Abbey Road was released. Much has been written about the last Beatles album, and for those of us holding on to our old vinyl copies-see above-the obvious opportunity to vouchsafe our good taste and prescient abilities to know well in advance what good music is.

As well as use words like vouchsafe and prescient. Right?

Anyway, I feel quite confident that the "50 years ago today" theme will continue unabated till a good many of us are dead. Why? Because 50 years ago was, and this is considered by many, the beginning of the great age of rock music as it morphed from rock and roll-though many still called it that-into the colossus that we now refer to as ROCK!

And this looking back is most striking from the UK, given that the British invasion was at its zenith during this period.

The question I have is how far into the weeds, so to speak, do you go?

Think about all the significant bands from that period, from '69 to '75, just from England: the Stones, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, King Crimson, Genesis, Led Zeppelin... Then, of course, you have Jeff Beck, Clapton, Elton John, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr, and all the ones I can't think of at the moment but will the minute I finish this post. The next 5 to 10 years can be one album after another after another...

(Please feel free to add your own favorites.)

And then you can argue about punk!

Individually, I'm not adverse to a reasonably amount of looking back; Abbey Road was the final album from the seminal band of 60's and very much a precursor to their solo work. And much from that period, like Exile on Main Street, from the Stones, is considered the apex of their creative output.

For me, these retrospectives should be about how the albums impacted the musicians after them, and the musicians they borrowed from-with examples! As this is the great Boomer look back at our time musically, it ought to be more than a continuation of "ooh, look at us".

©2019 David William Pearce