They Gave a Pulitzer to Hip-Hop: OMG or AFT?

I don't normally pay attention to who win the Pulitzer prize in music; I don't even know what the criteria might be, eligibility; anything like that. Some of the winners I know of, some I have no idea, but this year they gave it to the Rap/Hip-Hop artist, Kendrick Lamar for his album, Damn. 
It's caused quite a bit of talk, controversy; which I guess should be expected.
Traditionally, the Pulitzer has gone to Classical or Jazz artists, those who have, for the most part, defined musical educations. The assumption is that Kendrick Lamar does not, that he comes to his musical understanding by other means; I doubt Hip-Hop songs are charted out, however in this day and age of Pro Tools and plug-ins, beats, etc, it may simply be the creative melding of existing sounds and sampling, and I assume some performance, into something unique.
Now, I'm not ordinarily an aficionado of Hip-Hop, but I figured the smart thing to do would be to listen to the album, and I did, and it's very good. It grooves, it's got things to say, messages; all the things us oldsters remember the social critique albums of yore having.
Whether adding popular music to the mix in awarding Pulitzers is a good or bad thing I don't know. Does it diminish those who spend years learning and perfecting the classical canon of musical composition and theory and then trying to create and then compete against the titans of those genres for ear time? It might, but that's been a concern for some time.
The other comment made on this asks whether there is a racial component here because classically trained and educated musicians tend to be white, predominantly due to accessibility and wealth; music school ain't cheap!
To me the question inevitably goes to the value of a fine arts education, whether it's music, writing, or the visual arts. When everything is judged based on "Market Value" or what's popular at any given moment, its value will always be subjective even as debt is not. Whether the debt is worth the personal subjectivity is an individual conundrum.



This week's song is from Apologia,

Imperfect Touch. It's about love as a concept versus love as it really exists. The point that compromise and concession are inevitably the only way that love can work between two people no matter how they may wish it could be. Musically, the song came about from the drum track and the synth pattern derived from playing with it. The guitars are mildly distorted through the Effectron, and I pushed to vocals a bit.
Yo can hear it at mrprimitivemusic.com.
©2018 David William Pearce

Which is Better, New Stuff or Old Stuff?

A question for my many fans: Is Apologia better than We Three?

I ask the question because I was listening to a podcast recently and the woman interviewed, the writer Lorrie Moore, stated that she didn't read her writings from days past. I found that odd but not particularly surprising; it is an affliction many artists suffer from.
But not me.
My affliction is that I am quite critical of my craft as I work on it and spent many hours wasting much needed effort-that should be directed to other pressing affairs-believing it's all for naught. It's my own personal defect.
Time, however, suppresses this foolishness. There was a time when I did not think particularly well of Apologia, or the other albums I made in the 80's. Most of the criticism revolved around the fact that I was limited in what I could do and therefore would not create a masterpiece, or something resembling the noise on the radio.
I now think the albums are pretty f**king good all things considered.
Now I have all the processing power I longed for in ye good old days and am occasionally perplexed that I'm not creating masterpieces with my recent albums. On the plus side I don't care if they don't sound like what's on the radio. That's not necessarily a diss; I just know better.
So, is Apologia better than We Three or vice versa?
They are different, but that could be credited to the fact that they were made 30 years apart; perspectives change, musical direction changes, abilities and desires change.
And unlike Ms. Moore, I do listen to what I've recorded and as I made it primarily for me-that way if it's disappointing to others I have an out. So I listen to the differencesand marvel that it did turn out as good as it has given the limitations of my abilities and the equipment at my disposal.

If you wish to judge for yourself, the albums can be heard at mrprimitivemusic.com. Just go to the albums section.

Speaking of mrprimitive.com,
This week's song is from Apologia, Man On The Box. The song deals with pedophiles and the lengths they go to to excuse their actions while knowing it's wrong. I don't remember exactly what made me write this, but it was probably on one of those talk shows where people were rationalizing their addictions and their inability to stop even when confronted with being ostracized and jailed. It is also a meditation on how society sees runaways, street kids as afterthoughts and the detritus of broken families. The music, which like almost all of my songs came first and started with the drum pattern. The solo is my favorite part- I like the guttural tone that came from the Rat distortion box and the Effectron II delay.

©2018 David William Pearce

Ah, the Playlist is Back in Vogue

I am a long time playlister. Back at the dawn of time, I began making cassette tapes filled with my favorite songs from my vaunted LP collection. One reason was simple, mostly; there was not and there is still not, any phonograph that will work in a motor vehicle. Plus, I got to put on what I liked and not be subjected to the stuff I did not like. I grew up with radio, but inevitably grew tired of the following: the same rotation every day for commercial radio or hearing a great song that wasn't popular enough to be played more than once or twice a day and not being around when they played it, or I'd hear a great song on college/alternative radio and might never hear it again. Then there was all the music I'd read about that never got played on any station I'd ever listened to.
I also got heavy into Walkman's and you gotta have tapes for your Walkman.
and I made a bunch,

These are but a few.
I also created lists for the many iPods I've owned over the years; some habits die hard.
It is for this reason that I find the list-mania so interesting. I f you haven't heard, lists on streaming sites such as Spotify are the big thing and in order to be anybody you've got to get on the lists generating the most streams. Never mind the noise about labels and other big players buying spots or creating lists and then creatively covering their tracks, although I don't know why, being a corporate giant doesn't quite have the villainy it once did.

so for fun here's the latest playlist I put together (I set 20 as the song limit per list):
1. Free as a Bird, Lennon and the three other fabs; I know, I know...
2. Let Love Rule, Ledisi, R&B, totally grooves.
3. The Air That I Breathe, The Hollies, greta harmonies.
4. Rock Candy, Montrose, classic 70's rock.
5. My Baby Left Me, Elvis when he was a punk, love it.
6. Looking Forward to the Past, Tommy Immanuel with Rodney Crowell, the kinda country I love-greta tune, great guitar work.
7. Somebody's Baby, Jackson Browne, love it because it's not your typical JB tune.
8. Nobody, Doobie Brothers, first hit, classic Doobie's sound.
9. Candy, Nat King Cole, love that voice!
10. Highway Tune, Greta Van Fleet, the new alternate Zeps.
11. Seven Bridges Road, Eagles, yes, I'm trapped in the 70's, plus I love the harmonies.
12. Hey! Ya You, The Elwins, heard the band a few years ago at the ASCAP confab, quality Canadian pop.
13. You Oughta Know, Alanis Morissette, pissed at an old flame? This is your song.
14. When Will I Be Loved, Everly Brothers, classic plain and simple.
15. Mother Freedom, Bread, their only rock hit.
16. Lady D'Arbanville, Cat Stevens, I've always liked his early stuff.
17. Big Noise, Kyle Eastwood, thumping jazz.
18. Working Class Hero, Jon Lennon at his most acerbic.
19. Solitary Man, Neil Diamond, one of my favorites.
20. Muzika Dyla Fil'ma, Persephone's Bees, rocking indie band from Oakland, sung in Russian.

This sort of list is common for me and you'd never hear it on the radio or I wager on Spotify.
©2018 David William Pearce

So Close

I am, occasionally, asked if I ever think of selling my songs or I'm told that a particular song would be great for such and such a performer. I'm flattered, but I'm less inclined for a number of reasons, but mostly because I've found that a certain rigidity exists in those who pitch, or are pitched to, when it comes to song structures, lyrical content, and the like.

But I'm not one to completely disown any idea, so as an opportunity to expose my pre-existing biases, I submitted one of my songs in a contest recently. The songs was Do You Still Love Me Now from the We Three album I released a couple years ago.

You can here it at mrprimitivemusic.com; go to Albums and Music, click on We Three, and scroll down to the song. You can also hear it on Spotify or Apple Music, if you prefer.

The Music City SongStar Awards was the event and I am sad to say I did not win, or the song was not chosen. I was informed that a critique would be sent to me in the coming weeks and I received it a week or so ago.

I was so close!

I had to laugh at that, but I was not surprised. Here are their categories and comments:

Clear theme or cohesive idea; I scored well on this.

Clearly identifiable sections (verse/chorus,etc.); good job.

Lyrics evoke emotional response; another good job (I've had people tell me the song makes them cry!)

Lyrics are singable and memorable; good work.

Music/melody adds to the theme or emotional impact of the song; they reiterated the category and said to keep it up.

Music keeps listeners engaged; well done.

From here it gets more to the heart of the matter.

The dynamics take the listener to a satisfactory climax or conclusion; they felt I had but I should play with it a little more.

The song expresses the theme in a new or fresh way; they felt I was successful, but added I should go further with lyrical pictures that might capture the meaning of my idea. I thought this ironic in that there's no way you could misunderstand what the song was about.

*The song has commercial potential*; here they stated I should be lyrically precise, keep the intro short, play up the dynamic changes, and have hooks o' plenty.

Some final comments reiterated keeping the intro short-country especially, but they liked the song-good melody, lyrics worked well with the song; it comes across as heartfelt. 

They had category levels as follows: "less than good", "on the right path", "so close", and "nailed it". In every category listed the song was ranked "so close". Now I could be snarky and snide, but in truth, given the market-country especially, it would be better to argue that rather than so close, the problem with the song is that it's 30 to 40 years too late. I wrote it as I remembered country songs from my youth when those songs appealed to a much wider age demographic that they do now. People in their 20's and early 30's aren't going to get the song and classic country is content with hits of the past. 

Still, it's nice to know they liked the song.

This week's song, is Life Without Chickens, from the album of the same name:

It is, on the one hand, the oddball of the album, a long, 15 minutes, instrumental in 3 parts, each with a nonsensical title, while on the other, it sets the tone for the rest of the songs.

The 3 parts are:

A. A Ticket in Bill's Shirt,

B. Martians With Guns,

C. A Hymm to Life Without Chickens.

The inspiration came from too many hours listening to Miles Davis' work from the 60's and 70's; he had long pieces that moved from theme to theme. In the case of Life Without Chickens,  the connector is the bass track and the idea was to move from different rhythms within the framework of a simple drum pattern for each section, the bass, 2 guitars, and the synth. Simple as that. It has a lot of open space that allows the different instruments to be heard, which is a theme throughout the album and its successor, Apologia.

It can be heard at the same places as the about noted song.

©2018 David William Pearce

The Album is Dead...Nonsense!

As a reader of most things musical, insofar as music creation and production goes, nothing makes me either smile or roll my eyes like the now frequent declarations that the "album" as a musical construct is dead, done in by the nefarious forces of glassy-eyed internet streaming junkies for whom listening to more than one song by a particular band or performer is like so yesterday.

To this I say: uh-huh, sure.

My apathy is not merely based on my own predilection towards theme based albums, to which my recent releases will attest, but to the overwhelming fact that along with this proclamation of era in finem, are articles of bands and artists discussing their latest releases which invariably are albums! This is not surprising for most artists are thematic, whether rock, Jazz, or Metal.

So what is going on?

Everybody talk about Pop Muzak!

Pop music has always been about singles stretching back to the days of 45's, 78's, and further back if you include that period a hundred plus years ago when sheet music and player pianos were in vogue. Most of us have fond memories of one hit wonders and those bands or groups that were created in our formative years, whatever period that may mean to you-whether it was Bobby Sherman, Kajagoogoo, the Spice Girls, or the latest K-Pop-they were not created for the purposes of thematic music; they were created for mass consumption and as such are best represented by a series of singles, assuming the first gets any traction.

I won't get into the fine art of Pop sensation creation; that in itself would take up an entire column, but will say that, much like the death of Rock-which is somewhat precarious-talk of the death of the album, and certainly the disingenuous posturing that doing one is a waste of time and resources, is total bunk.

Not everyone wants to be the next teen sensation, most musicians and songwriters have stories to tell, loves to extoll or commiserate, and injustices to decry, and even if they are released separately, their songs inevitably build upon a theme; that's how we identify with them; that is their legacy. So just keep truckin' and do your thing.

The Past Never Goes Away

In my never-ending quest for everything to be just so, I was cleaning out the crawlspace and came across a box of textbooks from college and lodged in there with them were these old Musician magazines I'd held onto.

It was beyond interesting to re-read them. They range from the early 80's to the early 90's. I began reading and then subscribing to the magazine in the early 80's and read it religiously till it stopped being published. I didn't save very many, but the ones I did tended to reflect my interests or shocking events; the ones above covering Steely Dan 12 years apart (1981,1993), and the deaths of Zappa and Kurt Cobain not long after this edition came out.
Perhaps more interesting is the world of music at those times. In the early 80's I was getting more and more immersed in writing and recording, buying my Tascam 244 and figuring out how to use it. Unlike today, where just about everything and everybody has a website or Facebook or Soundcloud page, finding new music or what people were doing was generally the domain of magazines, fanzines, and industry newsletters. I'd forgotten how much was jammed into an issue. As an example, the March '81 magazine had interviews with Steve Winwood, coming out of a self imposed retirement, Steely Dan, finally releasing Gaucho after years of legal fighting with their label, John Lennon, this was two moths after his murder and people were still trying to understand why, record business news, Jazz news, up and coming bands U2 and the Psychedelic Furs, a look at the music scene in Austin before SXSW took it over, think eclectic country and what we now call Americana,  music reviews, gear reviews, critical snark; it had it all.
The other trend, if it is that, is the new found love of the old, in this case cassette tapes of which I have a few.

Like many a poor fool I had a record collection and a tape machine and so, as was the custom, I made tapes for the car and my Walkman. That this would be making a comeback is amusing to say the least, but maybe it's not that far-fetched. Obviously, making lists of songs to share is the happening thing, but often, as one should expect, on many sites it's more and more lists created to push a particular artist or label. And there is the old school notion of actually getting together to listen to each others tapes, or playing them for one another; that human touch thing rearing its head.

As I said, interesting.

This Week's Song: The Concerns of the Holy, is from Life Without Chickens, is something of an elegy to being a holy-man in this day and age; is it for real or is it just a racket to take advantage of a bunch of rubes. Lyrically I tried to play on that ambivalence. Musically, the song is fairly simple, 2 guitars, a synth, and a drum pattern with my usual desire to have them interweave like smoke rising from a flame. 
You can hear it at mrprimitivemusic.com

More of the Same or Something Totally Different?

A common refrain one hears when an established band is putting out a new song or album; this is especially true if there has been a hiatus or a period of separation, is whether it's in line with what they've put out previously. For established groups or individuals who have a easily identifiable sound, think AC/DC, changing direction midstream tends to cause all kinds of backlash and complaining, and many bands after a few tries at something different go back to the tried and true. That brings its own set of problems especially if the past is where their glory lay. This is why the Police did not put out an album during their reunion tour because whatever you do is going to be compared to the golden oldies.
And God forbid if they are pale reflections (or sound like Sting's latest album).
The other problem is familiarity.
I'm a big fan of Joe Satriani; I have all of his studio work, I've seen him in concert, etc., and, if I'm honest, I tend to greet his latest offering, What Happens Next, with a tad bit of trepidation. It's not that the songs are bad, and the playing certainly isn't; I am not anywhere near the player he is, it's that I feel I've heard it all before. And as someone who writes and records, I know how it is to try and come up with new interesting stuff each time out. I'm not saying that to rag on Joe, and I do like the new album, it rocks and grooves and illustrates that if you know what the hell you're doing, a bass and drums are all you need for accompaniment.
It's just...that each song sends me back to other songs on other albums and that leaves me conflicted, mostly as a composer and recording artist because my biggest fear is rolling in the same over and over; having nothing new or different to say. I tend to project that on the players and performers I admire the most.
On the plus side, I'm hardly well-known and can therefore go in all kinds of directions, but you are what you are and it takes a lot of work and a willingness to be critical enough to admit that the new happening tune is a glorified rehash of something you did 30 years ago. It's one of the reasons why I think it's a good idea to learn multiple instruments; a piano plays different from a guitar which is different from percussion. I find they lead in different directions which is what I like.
Plus it teaches you new tricks,
I like that.
*
This week's song is from Life Without Chickens,

Near Kiss/Another Street Prophet, is my one foray into a Reggae beat. The song was created of a series of drum patterns I created using a Drumulator.

It is the drums and percussion you hear on all the albums from what I call the Seattle period, 1985-1991, and it had a great sound as well as individual outs for each sound, bass, snare, etc. This allowed a lot of creativity and it made recording just that more fun. The song is 2 parts, the instrumental to start and then the song proper. Along with the drum patterns, I used two guitars run through a Rat fuzz box and the Effectron II for the echo, and the Korg Poly-800 synth for bass and atmospherics. The lyrical subject was the conflict in our consumer driven-business driven society between self interest and the welfare of others. I posed this by having each verse be in a different position; the first is the street prophet lamenting for those struggling and a desire for us to come together; the second is the indignant response, partly of disdain for not working and for the suggestion that he isn't compassionate enough.
You can listen to it at www.mrprimitivemusic.com and click on this week's song.

©2018 David William Pearce