Via the Otus Shrine, I came across this new illustration by Erol Otus which depicts the guitarist Tom Morello jamming out with monsters not of this Earth. It was commissioned by Morello’s friend Dan B. Weiss as a gift for Morello’s 60th-birthday. Appropriately, it distorts my sense of time in a way that feels impossible.
Continue reading “The strangeness of the living present”Tag: music
AV Undercover lives!
On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.
The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.
As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.
Music is weird again
The YouTube show Blind Covers is back!
I blogged about the show years ago, before their long hiatus. Since that post, I wrote a whole book about cover songs in which I elaborate my principled refusal to define cover. But I totally understand if you want to say that new music for old lyrics isn’t a cover per se.
That tracks
In arguing for the exclusive primacy of the studio track as the work in rock music, Theodore Gracyk points out that the Beatles stopped touring as they became fixated on sophisticated albums. I heard an interview with Michael Lindsay-Hogg today which upends the example.
Continue reading “That tracks”Listening habits
I posted recently on Mastodon that, when I hear new material by a musician I like, I often have to give it a second listen before I can tell what I think about it. Good or bad, it lacks the familiar and nostalgic contours of their old stuff.
For music that doesn’t command an antecedent commitment, I probably won’t push through and listen enough to acquire an appreciation for it. I only listened to Taylor Swift enough to have opinions because I was thinking about her project of recording. And I only listened all the way through the new Beyoncé album because I was thinking about genre.1
Lots of things bounce off because I only give them half a listen. That’s always been true to an extent, but moreso these days. Being able to stream almost everything has the up side that I can make a deep dive into anything. But the down side of that same availability is that anything new-to-me has to compete for my attention against literally everything else. There is not even the inertia of changing the channel or swapping out the disc.
Whence genre?
At the Guardian, Rhiannon Giddens denounces gate-keeping around country music which snipes at Beyoncé’s recent forays into the genre. Yet, in the course of it, she denounces genre as a capitalist scheme to monetize art and enforce racism. She writes:
Genre… is a product of capitalism, and people with access to power create it, control it, and maintain it in order to commoditise art. In the 1920s, recording industry executives quickly realised that in order to maximise record sales, they needed to market them. In order to market them, they needed to create categories where they could reduce the totality of the American experience to a few buzzwords, and because this is the US, our cultural lenses are conditioned to project racial categories on to everything.
Surely genre can be an imposition of record labels to market music. Sometimes that is explicit. The genre world music, initially at least, was just a catch-all category agreed upon by record labels to sell albums from around the world that didn’t fit into an existing sales category. Our genre categories have been significantly shaped both by the recording industry and by services like Billboard that rank music in genre-segregated lists.
Nevertheless, the rise of recorded music did not just create an opportunity for the music industry. It also created a challenge for music listeners. There’s just too much music. Nobody can listen to everything, and most of us wouldn’t want to even if we could.
Continue reading “Whence genre?”Cover shift
On his blog, Brad Skow discusses Theodore Gracyk’s account of cover songs. He gives a fair summary of Gracyk’s view, according to which a version is only a cover if reference to the canonical version is part of its artistic content. So (on this view) you can only appreciate a cover by taking into account the canonical version. In contrast with common usage, Gracyk holds that any version which lacks this referential structure is a remake instead of a cover.2
With all that in place, Skow notes that Taylor Swift’s remakes of her own work seem designed to efface the originals rather than refer to them. So he suggests we might call them anti-covers.3
The problem is that one familiar function of so-called covers has been to crowd another recorded version out of the market. This is often given as an explanation for why the word cover was used in the first place: They were meant to cover over or cover up the originals.4
Continue reading “Cover shift”Two drafts about music
I’ve posted two draft papers,written with different collaborators, addressing different issues in the philosophy of music.
- Tell Me Why This Isn’t a Cover: A paper with Cristyn Magnus, Christy Mag Uidhir, and Ron McClamrock, using lessons from the philosophy of cover songs to think about Taylor Swift’s project of rerecording her earlier work.
- Music genres as historical individuals: A paper with Evan Malone and Brandon Polite, arguing that genres are historical individuals in a sense. That qualifier “in a sense” is carrying a lot of weight.
Parallel thinking about rap and injustice
On Cardiff’s academic blog, Tareeq Jalloh blogs about his work on drill music and epistemic injustice. The post summarizes a recent paper of his about the way that, in the UK, lyrics from drill music are interpreted as confessions of criminal activity. In the US context, this has been called the rap on trial mentality. Evan and I take it as our speciment example in our recent paper.
Continue reading “Parallel thinking about rap and injustice”How it might have ended
I’m sorting through some old documents, and I came across an unused draft for the Epilogue of my book A Philosophy of Cover Songs.5 This draft was a bit ponderous, but I still like the last line.
Continue reading “How it might have ended”