Quotulatiousness

December 2, 2023

Shane MacGowan, RIP

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Pogues, and Shane MacGowan was the original lead singer for their first several albums. His lifestyle and undependability brought about a break with the rest of the band who continued on without him. I rather lost track of him soon after his next band, the Popes, had one okay album that showed MacGowan hadn’t shaken his demons. I still post his duet with the late Kirsty MacColl every Christmas. In The Pillar, Ed Condon remembers MacGowan:

Shane MacGowan performing in Japan on an unknown date.
Photo by Masao Nakagami via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday Shane MacGowan, lead singer of the Pogues, died at age 65.

He was, in every sense, a living legend of Irish music — so much so that many people, sincerely, expressed shock that he was actually still alive. [NR: Literally the words out of my mouth when Elizabeth told me he’d died.]

Most people, at least in this country, know him best for his fiercely melancholic Christmas ballad “Fairytale of New York”, though the Pogues albums Rum, Sodomy & the Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace with God firmly fixed MacGowan as the living conduit of a musical tradition all too often dismissed as a postcard anachronism, created to appeal to tourists.

There was nothing contrived, though, about MacGowan, who was the living embodiment of the distinctly Irish contradiction of “fierce melancholy.” An incredibly gifted writer and poet, he wrote, performed — and lived — with a kind of burning urgency that seemed at once self-consuming and yet in him, rather than from him.

It would be easy to dismiss the riotous drinker and singer, whose punk-inflected incarnation of Irish ballardry seemed stoked with some terrible ferocity, as just an eloquently wounded product of a now nearly vanished Irish society. But what marked him out, to me, was that he was driven by something from within, not without.

Born on Christmas Day in 1957 to Irish parents in England, he spent his early life back in Ireland, living in a family cottage in rural Tipperary, where the children slept three to a bed, there was no running water, and the family cooked on an open fire.

According to his parents, music and storytelling were the focus of their family life in those days.

“It was basic and beautiful,” he said of his childhood. “It was the end of an era that I just happened to catch. And I’m glad I caught it, you know?”

[…]

“All I ever had were happy times,” is how MacGowan described his childhood in Ireland.

This deep understanding and love for his own history and where he came from, which John Paul II also wrote about in Memory and Identity, suffused MacGowan’s music.

But even as he became a kind of living totem in his home country it was clear he loathed the spotlight, writhed during interviews, and fought, often unsuccessfully, to balance his natural reticence with the convulsive need to make his music.

It drove him to at times terrible self-destruction, but the defiance and desperation of his singing seemed always directed back within himself. And it was a great comfort to read his family’s announcement that he’d died with the last rites imparted.

He was a man for whom the words of Jim Harrison, another great poet, seemed to be written:

    Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legend.

Rest in peace, Shane.

December 1, 2023

Gregorian – “Stairway To Heaven”

Filed under: Germany, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

gregorianmusiccom
Published 20 Jun 2015

We proudly present the new fan-video “Stairway to Heaven” performed and made by members of the Gregorian-music.com fan club.
(more…)

November 19, 2023

Ted Gioia wonders if we need a “new Romanticism”

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He raised the question earlier this year, and it’s sticking with him to the point he’s gathering notes on the original Romantic movement and what it was reacting against:

The issues that enraged the original Luddites certainly have many modern echoes.

I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.

  • Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution — and people started resisting the forces of progress.
  • Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories — a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
  • Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism — Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide [Wiki], the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories [Wiki], and all those gloomy Gothic novels [Wiki]. What happened to the Enlightenment?
  • As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives — an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
  • Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments — embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

That’s the world, circa 1800.

The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out.

Resemblances with the current moment are not hard to see.

    “Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance. Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”

These considerations led me, about nine months ago, to conduct a deep dive into the history of the Romanticist movement. I wanted to see what the historical evidence told me.

I’ve devoted hours every day to this — reading stacks of books, both primary and secondary sources, on the subject. I’ve supplemented it with a music listening program and a study of visual art from the era.

What’s my goal? I’m still not entirely sure.

October 30, 2023

The rapidly fading market for “song investing”

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia called it over two years ago, and now it’s coming true:

The collapse finally came.

When I analyzed the song buyout mania, led by the Hipgnosis fund, back in June 2021, I predicted that this ultra-hot investment trend would “come to an unhappy end”. And now the collapse has arrived.

We’ve reached the endgame. The song fund’s share price has dropped 50% since I made that assessment — and now shareholders have voted to dissolve or reorganize the investment trust.

But where do we go from here? What are old songs really worth? And who will end up owning all these old rock and pop tunes?

Below I offer 12 predictions.

Much of what I have to say is harsh. That’s unfortunate — if I were a real judge, I’d err on the side of leniency. It’s never fun issuing such hardass verdicts. But if I claim to be the Honest Broker, I really have to stick with truths, even when (as in this case) they’re painful truths.

(1) Many musicians still want to sell their songs, but it will be hard to find generous buyers.
Bob Dylan got out at the top, but the times are now a-changin’. Musicians won’t get the big payouts available back in 2021. A telltale sign will be more deals with “undisclosed terms” — because nobody will want to brag about these lowball transactions.

(2) Professional financiers have finally learned their lesson.
The two big finance outfits promoting song investing, Hipgnosis and Round Hill, have faltered and will now sell the songs they bought. Sophisticated investors no longer believe the hype. So don’t expect to see the launch of new song investment funds any time soon. The remaining buyers will be bottom fishers and the terminally naive (described in more detail below).

[…]

(5) Look out for these vultures in all sectors of the music business.
When private equity firms knock on your door, it’s a sign that you’re already half dead. These folks actually enjoy picking on carcasses — which is easier work than hunting for live prey. I tend to avoid name-calling, but there’s a reason why some folks refer to them as vulture capitalists. That’s their specialty and their economic model is built on bottom-feeding. This is why private equity firms bought up lots of failing local newspaper, struggling local radio stations, etc. Guess what’s next on their list? Expect to see these tough hombres play a bigger role in all aspects of the music business over the next decade.

[…]

(7) This whole situation is a case study in misallocated investment capital.
There’s a general lesson here too. I realized, early on in my consulting work, that the single biggest mistake large corporations make is investing too much to keep their old business units alive — when they would be wiser putting that cash to work in new opportunities. The major record labels in the current moment are poster children for exactly this mistaken sense of priorities. They will support the “old songs” business model at all costs — it’s a core part of their self image — but return on investment will be dismal.

October 15, 2023

QotD: The two eras of Jazz

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In many ways, and for many people, jazz ended in the early Sixties, when Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor suddenly became the avant-garde; in fact, almost everything that has happened to jazz in the last 50 years could be called “post-Coltrane” in much the same way that people use “postmodern”. Obviously, jazz was “free” and difficult (mad-looking Belgians with crazy hair, billowing luminescent smocks and angular, clarinet-looking instruments) or else it was nostalgic (Harry Connick Jr et al). Ironically, for a type of music so obsessed with modern and the “now”, jazz has always been preoccupied with the past, so much so that during the Eighties and Nineties it became less and less able to reflect modern culture. Everyone wanted to sound like Miles or Dizzy; either that or they went fusion mad and ended up sounding and looking like Frank Zappa on steroids.

Dylan Jones, “The 100 best jazz albums you need in your collection”, GQ, 2019-08-25.

October 14, 2023

Ray Manzarek – “Riders On The Storm”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

EliasIak2011
Published 30 Nov 2012

“The Doors: Mr. Mojo Risin’ — The Story of LA Woman“

September 29, 2023

QotD: Collecting jazz

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So how do you build a collection? What do you do once you’ve wandered off into the jazz section. What do you buy? Not only is there just so much … stuff, but it’s an ever-expanding world. I mean, even if you knew everything there was to know about jazz, how could you possibly own it all? There are nearly as many jazz albums as there are women in the world and how could you sleep with all of them? As with any other type of music, there are some classic records you’d be mad to ignore, but with jazz you really have to plough your own furrow. The jazz police are a proscriptive lot – look to them for recommendations and they’ll tell you that Norah Jones and Stan Getz aren’t jazz, that Blue Note shouldn’t have signed St Germain and that Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is only ever good for paint commercials. However, these are probably the same people who, 40 years ago, would have told you that Abba don’t make good pop music or that punk was a flash in the pan.

And there were some things I just didn’t get. Ornette Coleman was one. At the same time Miles Davis was breaking through with modal jazz forms, Coleman invented free jazz with The Shape Of Jazz To Come. Over half a century after the event it is difficult to recapture the shock that greeted the arrival of this record, but it just gave me a headache. Coleman played a white plastic saxophone that looked like a toy, he dressed like a spiv and was a master of the one-liner, the “Zen Zinger” (stuff like, “When the band is playing with the drummer, it’s rock’n’roll, but when the drummer is playing with the band, it’s jazz”), so I really wanted to like his music. But I couldn’t. No matter how much I tried. As far as I was concerned he was improvising up his own sphincter.

Dylan Jones, “The 100 best jazz albums you need in your collection”, GQ, 2019-08-25.

September 26, 2023

“Brothers in Arms” | The Bands of HM Royal Marines

Filed under: Britain, Media, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Bands of HM Royal Marines
Published 23 May 2022

“Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits, arranged by Capt Phil Trudgeon RM, and performed at the Mountbatten Festival of Music 2022 in the Royal Albert Hall, London.
(more…)

September 18, 2023

It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:

Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.

I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.

Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.

As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.

Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.

Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).

Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.

That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?

I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.

The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.

Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.

On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?

But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.

August 22, 2023

Societal norms breaking down even among music fans at concerts

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the increasing number of performing artists on stage who are being physically attacked by their own fans at live concerts:

Consider these recent events:

  • During a Pink concert in London, a fan tossed a bag of human ashes on stage. Pink was totally chill, and on the video of the incident can be heard asking: “Is this your mom?”
  • A fan threw a cellphone at Drake during a Chicago performance — and the singer almost caught it, but it hit his hand instead.
  • Pop singer Bebe Rexha wasn’t so fortunate, and a hurled phone sent her to the hospital in June.
  • Harry Styles has been repeatedly struck with objects while performing — taking on everything from a flying Chicken McNugget to a water bottle in the groin.
  • Country star Kelsea Ballerini was struck by a flying bracelet thrown by a fan in Boise, Idaho. Jewelry is a lovely gift, but in this instance the impact caused the singer to flinch, and stop playing her guitar. A few minutes later she had to leave the stage.
  • An assailant actually jumped on stage during an Ava Max performance in Los Angeles, and slapped the singer, scratching her eye in the process — before a security guard restrained him. The singer somehow managed to finish the song.
  • Rapper Latto got hit with a flying object during a concert in Germany. She responded by telling the perpetrator “I’ma beat your ass.”

It’s a curious coincidence that, during this same period, activists have started throwing things at famous works of art. You wouldn’t normally think of museums and concert halls as epicenters of paintball-esque outbursts. But in the year 2023, they are hot spots for all the worst tendencies.

Of course, there’s a long history of fans throwing things on stage. But until recently, they were usually nice things. Only in the rarest instance — for example, a vaudeville show of embarrassingly low quality — were tomatoes tossed at a performer.

[…]

Our culture has changed, and not for the better. I have come to believe — as I’ve explained elsewhere — that US society shifts between cycles of hot and cool. We are currently approaching the peak of the hot cycle, and this is always accompanied by anger, conflict, and violence.

When I first started to say this, more than 15 years ago, people were skeptical. But who will deny it after everything we’ve seen in the intervening years?

You may think that violence plays out on the battlefield, not at a pop concert. But music has always been a cultural indicator. In some ways, it is our most revealing source of information on society. Sometimes the future shows up in our music even before it gets covered in the newspapers.

So even if I am saddened by the craziness at music concerts, I can’t say I’m surprised There’s something ugly simmering in our society, and it has finally arrived at the pricey front row seats of concerts. All of sudden, fans have decided that an expensive ticket gives them the right to do something abusive to their favorite pop star.

It makes no sense, but it’s definitely part of the zeitgeist. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

But these cycles eventually turn. There’s a law of reflexivity at work. People do burn out on anger, sooner or later. I’m hoping it will be sooner in this instance.

August 1, 2023

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023

Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
(more…)

July 21, 2023

Country music world (and legacy media) convulsed by country song that isn’t woke

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There’s been a lot of wailing by the usual suspects about a recent video released by Jason Aldean for his song “Try That in a Small Town”, alleging all sorts of horrible things including promotion of lynching, outright racism, and inciting violence:

… writer Zachary Faria notes that the left is rabidly protective of Black Lives Matter. In fact, they’re so protective of it that they’ll take issue with criticism of literally anything that ever even happened at a Black Lives Matter protest.

Entire neighborhoods were burned to the ground? A small price to pay for social justice, at least in their minds.

So the idea of people standing up to them — warning them to try that in a small town — is despicable.

Remember that these are the same people who continue to accuse Kyle Rittenhouse of murder despite having been acquitted of the crime. These are the same people who call the kid a racist despite him having shot three white dudes. They say he acted unprovoked despite one trying to take his gun from him, another hitting him in the head with a blunt object, and a third literally pointing a gun at him.

Through it all, they act like Rittenhouse should have just rolled over and allowed his murder to happen, all because the cause of Black Lives Matter cannot be criticized.

Where Aldean sinned is because he, too, thinks ill of the riots that engulfed every major city in this nation.

He’s harkening back to a time when communities were full of people protecting one another. That’s a very good thing, and I’m someone who would love to see that happen again.

Instead, the people claiming that Aldean’s song is about lynching are telling on themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be any part of the song that says a thing about black people or anything like that. In fact, most of the people involved in the riots, at least as I saw them, seemed to be white. But the fact that this is where the leftists went tells us plenty. It tells us they think the only kind of person who would cross that line is a black person.

June 28, 2023

Ted Gioia’s confession – he’s a Dan stan

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

While I’ve never been much of a musicologist — and definitely not any kind of musician — I admit I had a very similar evolution of feeling toward the music of Steely Dan as Ted Gioia, who charts his progress from Never Dan to Dan stan:

I often make jokes about Steely Dan fans.

They’re bros and geeks and sad wannabes. But the painful truth is that I’m one of them now.

And if you don’t watch out, it could happen to you too.

At least I can laugh at myself. That’s good, because fans like me are the real target of the jokes.

And it’s true — we are a trifle obsessed.

If you’re a Dan stan, you see the band’s influence everywhere. Random patterns take on new Dan-esque shapes. For you it’s just rush hour traffic, but for us it’s a message from the cosmos.

But I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I was a Steely Dan skeptic, a real Dan-o-phobe. I thought I was safe from their pernicious influence, but I was wrong.

This is my story.

June 9, 2023

Rush – The Making of “YYZ”

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

marvincandle815
Published 17 Apr 2011

From the Classic Albums: 2112 & Moving Pictures special. Made some minor cuts to avoid repetition and to keep it under 10 minutes.

(more…)

May 28, 2023

Musical copyrights – crazy as they are now – were far worse in history

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, France, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia outlines just how the concept of musical copyrights produced even more distortions in the past than they do today:

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE

People tell me it was never this bad before. But they’re wrong. The music copyright situation was even crazier 500 years ago.

The Italians took the lead in this, and it all started with Ottaviano Petrucci gaining a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing polyphonic music with a printing press back in 1498. Andrea Antico secured a similar privilege from Pope Leo X, which covered the Papal States.

It’s hard to imagine a Pope making decisions on music IP, but that was how the game was played back then. In 1516, Pope Leo actually took away Petrucci’s monopoly on organ music, and gave it to Antico instead. You had to please the pontiff to publish pieces for the pipes.

Over time, this practice spread elsewhere. In a famous case, the composer Lully was granted total control over all operas performed in France. He died a very wealthy man — with five houses in Paris and two in the country. His estate was valued at 800,000 livres—some 500 times the salary of a typical court musician.

But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”

If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.

But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note. Not even the Marvin Gaye estate makes those kinds of demands.

Tallis died a decade after the patent was granted—putting Byrd in sole charge of English music. I’d like to tell you that he exercised his monopoly with a fair and open mind—especially because I so greatly esteem Byrd’s music, and also I’d like to think that composers are better at arts management than profit-driven businesses. But the flourishing of music publishing in England after the expiration of the patent — when, for a brief spell, anybody could issue scores — makes clear that Byrd did more to constrain than empower other composers.

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