Apple, U2, and Hubris

By most accounts, Apple and U2's release of the new U2 album during Apple's Watch announcement was a disaster.

Now, a few weeks later, we can safely approach the wreckage. Surveying the smoking ruins, one comes away thinking "It didn't have to turn out like this."

Instead of being excited and grateful about a surprise free new album from one of the world's biggest bands, the media and public responded with a sense of outrage.

Instead of thanking Apple and U2, people demanded ways to purge the gift from their collections, and Apple dutifully responded.

10 years ago, Apple and U2 had a similar team up and event, based around the announcement of the U2 iPod. It was sort of weird, but still made sense, and was far more successful.

What happened? What's changed?

10 years is a long time for a person. It's even longer for a pop act or a company. In that 10 year period of time, Apple went from being a scrappy underdog having success in the music business to being the music business. Apple rose to be the best-funded company in the world, and has become the dominant market leader in a number of categories. And Steve Jobs died.

U2 went from being a band with a promising late-career comeback (started with 2000's "All You Can't Leave Behind) to a typical late-period band appealing only to its hardcore followers while mainstream audiences move on.

Perhaps more importantly, the world changed around Apple and U2, and they were both blind to the implications. They've both become out of touch with the world around them.

The result was that Apple and U2 made some obvious, avoidable mistakes.

Mistake: No reason for this collaboration other than promotion.

When Apple and U2 collaborated last time, there was a new U2 album and a special hardware product. That sort of project would have been perfect for an album giveaway, especially back 10 years ago when purchased downloads were less commonplace than they are today.

This time around, there wasn't any clear connection. Apple announced some software upgrades and a watch. There was no U2 edition of the watch, or anything else. It was just bizarre: "here's the exciting product you've been waiting for...oh, also, here's U2 playing live and a free album."

People instinctively understood this was empty spectacle. Apple probably expected the performance and free album giveaway would attract lots of attention (and it did, just not the kind they wanted). U2 probably expected everyone to be grateful or thrilled they were getting a free album, and U2 could claim they shipped 500 million copies, just like Jay-Z went immediately platinum thanks to Samsung.

But there was no obvious connection between the two events, and that made it seem cheap.

Mistake: They didn't ask permission. 

Both Apple and U2 assumed that people would be thrilled with having the new U2 album inserted into their collections. 

People weren't thrilled. People felt violated and creeped out, as if Tim Cook and Bono had broken into people's homes and left a copy of the album on their pillows with a note that said "We are watching you. Enjoy!"

Early on at Rhapsody, it became clear people considered their virtual collections and disk space (PC and mobile) to be their property. People became really angry when that property was tampered with. I find it astounding that Apple, with all their research and "understanding what users want", did not see this coming.

That forcing of the gift not just onto people, but into their library, chafes. It's like coming back to your car and finding flyers under your windshield wipers. Or having people on the street pushing brochures at you. You feel as though your personal space is being violated, and you immediately discount whatever's on offer.

I likened it to how many San Franciscans feel about the SF Examiner, a paper that seems almost maliciously delivered every Sunday, and cannot be stopped, short of legislation.

The easiest solution is also rather simple, and what's known in the industry as an "opt-in": They should have offered the album to people for free, and had users that wanted it to click on a button in order to get it.

They didn't do this. Probably because they wanted the bragging rights of "moving" 500 million albums. Or possibly because they were just tone-deaf, and assumed "of course everyone would want the new U2 record!"

Mistake: Insufficient Messaging

I actually like U2, and was really excited to hear the new album. I am also something of a digital music business expert. I started iTunes and went to the store to look for the album. It wasn't available in the store. I couldn't even find it on the home page of the iTunes store.

It took me about 20 minutes of poking around before I realized that Apple and U2 had literally just "added it to my collection", and on my work machine, that's over 6000 songs. There was no playlist or badging or other indication. It just magically appeared, and then got lost with all my other music.

And if you weren't someone who actually followed Apple's press announcements (but left your iPhone and iTunes at default settings), the album's songs would be mixed in with whatever else you were playing in shuffle mode.

This is a terrible experience, across the board. Why give someone a gift without explicitly handing it to them, wrapped up, with some ceremony? Did Apple and U2 really believe they were so important that all 500 million people would be paying attention to these announcements?

This could have been mitigated with email, in-store messaging, and perhaps some other in-iTunes guidance for how to find and play the new record.

Mistake: Totally Free * 500 million copies = 0

There are plenty of artists and pundits who claim the "music business" has been devaluing music for years.

Here comes Apple and U2 - a company that represents about 2/3 of the music business now, and one of the world's biggest bands. They immediately take a record with clear, tangible value - 5 years of work, from a major artist - and dump 500 million copies on the world. That's like 5-10 times the number of copies Michael Jackson's "Thriller" sold. Should be great, right?

Well, for one thing, they immediately demolished the concept of scarcity. There was nothing to be gained by saying you heard the new U2 record. You literally couldn't get away from it. It's already on your phone. Just like everyone else's. If everyone has something, it is literally commonplace, unexceptional, mundane.

It has been said that what is free has no value. Apple and U2 took a new album by a major artist and made it feel about as valuable as a piece of junk mail. This is devaluing music taken to a new level. If U2 won't charge people for its new album, why will anyone pay for anyone else's record?

Rumor has it U2 was paid about $100 million for the album. At 500 million copies, that's 20 cents a copy. Think about that, all you struggling artists. That's the bar now, lowered by these 2 industry titans. How's Spotify looking now?

I'm not sure what the bigger mistake was: giving it away for free, or giving away 500 million copies.

Mistake: No matter how good the album was, it felt disposable.

All of this completely obscures any reasonable comment one could make about the album. U2 instantly forces people to grade them on a curve: is it good or bad "for a free album"? Is it even a real record? Most of the charts services say no!

Regardless, since this was delivered to people unasked, it feels inconsequential and trivial, perhaps not even worth the time it takes to listen to it once.

The result here is that the only people who will buy this new album are the die-hard fans...and U2 has even alienated some of them, because many people buy their music in digital form. And those people already have a free copy.

Most phones and other devices people buy come with some free intellectual property. Phones often have 10-30 songs by no-name aspiring artists, or credits to download or stream some barely recouped almost-blockbuster movie.

People typically recognize this for what it is - cheap content filler designed to raise the perceived and marketable value of the phone. But nobody cares, because it's unasked for and inessential.

Courtesy of this promotion, Apple and U2 immediately made U2's new work feel just like that.

Hubris

Both the teams behind Apple and U2 were likely convinced they were going to succeed, that these big expenditures were worth it. They never questioned whether or not the rest of the world felt and thought like they did.

Apple is no longer a scrappy, rebellious, cool company. They've grown up, and become a kind of fascist gray monolith. Their recent acquisitions of companies like Beats and fashion designers suggests they are moving in some very different directions. For one thing, they believe they can talk you into wearing a $350 calculator watch because they say it's cool.

U2 is also long past their prime. I am sympathetic. It's hard to have a long career being creative, relevant, and popular. They've done about as well as anyone could. As a fan, I'd love to hear new music from U2 that excites me, since the last record of theirs that I really loved came out in 1997. Still, their last several moves (including relocating for corporate tax purposes) seem really at odds with the image they'd like to project.

I can see how Apple and U2 thought this would work out, as they sat in fancy conference rooms hammering out their spectacular deal. A combination of "aren't we clever and brave", Shelley's Ozymandias, and a genuine desire to do something fun and cool.

Instead, it felt like your out-of-touch grandparents giving you a terrible CD for a birthday present because they heard you're into rock music.

I watched the whole thing live. With the sound off, it looked like a bunch of old white men desperately trying to remain cool.

Ferguson, 9/11, and Police

The events currently unfolding in Ferguson are astounding and revealing. While race is a major element of the problems there, the situation in Ferguson has also made dramatically clear how far the United States has moved from its theoretical ideals of liberty and freedom, and how broken policing has become.

Within the last few days, freedom has been erased, dissent has been suppressed, journalists have been detained for no reason and assaulted and/or threatened by police. From where I sit, police have become unrecognizable.

Look at this now-famous photo:

What do you see?

I see white men pointing weapons at a single black man. I see soldiers, not police. I see hidden faces for authority, which means no accountability. I see overwhelming force being deployed inappropriately. I see at least 2 assault weapons pointed at an obviously unarmed man with his hands up. I see a man retreating while authority advances on him.

There's another photograph taken from behind the guy in the blue shirt which shows there are actually even more police pointing their guns at him, and in every direction.

Who are these "police" keeping safe? Who are they serving and protecting? It sure as hell doesn't seem to be the residents of Ferguson.

It is not much different than what happened with the Occupy protests in Oakland and elsewhere. But unfortunately at this point, the disproportionate military-style response to protest seems to be the default, rather than the exception.

Masked, militarized police firing teargas and pointing weapons at the Occupy Oakland protestors

A few days ago a man claiming to be a police officer wrote an astounding Op-Ed piece basically saying "if you don't do what I say, expect to get a beatdown." This disgustingly ignorant and inappropriate view of police power is not limited to the police. Many citizens -- especially those who have had run-ins with the police before -- have the same viewpoint. The (ignorant) media even espouses this reaction.

So even though We The People have rights in theory, in practice we all start to believe we should just shut up and keep our heads down. Well, the whole point of having rights is not theory, it is that you can exercise them in practice.

How did we end up in this kind of America?

We built this dystopia ourselves.

In the wake of 9/11, America had a full-on freak-out. Whether justified or not, the panic and fear in the people and the leadership started America down a path of rolling back liberty in the name of security.

Within a decade, the government started openly torturing people, suspending habeus corpus, ignoring due process, spying on its citizens, killing its citizens without trial, and militarizing police forces.

Because We The People said nothing and did nothing, we condoned this behavior implicitly. In some cases, people encouraged it explicitly. In our terror, we ran to our appointed leaders and said "do whatever you need to, just please, keep us safe!"

Do you feel safer yet?

Do you think the citizens of Ferguson feel safe? The police threaten to kill them. The police roll through town in tanks, blasting Orwellian proclamations that "your right to assembly is not being denied", while demanding people get back in their homes. And then shoot teargas at their homes. And then, not long after that, the police do actually remove the right to assemble.

Do you think the people in the Occupy protests and the cities that hosted them feel safe? While some protests turn(ed) violent, the role of the police in escalating the situation cannot be understated. The police didn't arrest people en masse. They turned up in their riot gear, turned on the klieg lights, and started firing tear gas.

Did you know that tear gas is technically a chemical weapon, and that it is not "allowed" for use in warfare?

The police claim everyone is "resisting arrest" or "going for my gun". Uttering these magic spells now gives the police the power to do anything: detain you (without charges), beat you, or just shoot you dead in the street.

Do you feel safer yet?

Cameras everywhere are not the answer, though many think they are. Cameras only provide selective truth. Relying on cameras reduces or negates the value and truth of eyewitness testimony. We enter a world where it's only true if it was recorded (pics or it didn't happen!). And cameras don't protect. They just document the damage after the fact, which is cold comfort if you're beaten or shot. Cameras address a symptom, and not the problem.

The right solution is stopping these problems before they start. People shouldn't need the Panopticon or the eye of God on them to behave. Cameras everywhere corrodes liberty.

The police have lost the trust of the people, and the people have lost the trust of the police. I have no solutions to offer, but I am sure that mutual trust will take a long time to restore.

Every time we shut up and do what the cops say without asking questions or exercising our rights, we embrace tyranny. Every person out there who blindly supports the police without knowing what their rights are is quite literally an enemy of freedom, an enemy of the founding fathers' America. Every time we allow this behavior, we move closer to being the next target on the police's list.

Soon, even questioning any of this becomes cause for suspicion, and eventually, a crime.

Maybe you can look the other way for now because you've got the right color skin, or because you've got money. But sooner or later, it will be your door kicked in by the SWAT team, you looking down the barrel of those guns, and you being shaken down for cash. Will you feel safe then?

Robin Williams

I met Robin Williams once.

He was in Jamaica, shooting "Club Paradise" at the resort where my family happened to be staying.

I went up to him one night and I said "Hi. My name is Anu. You made my life very difficult."

Without missing a beat, he smiled and said "Sorry. There's a lot of kids named Mindy who had problems, too."

Thanks for the laughs, sir.

The Sharing Economy Gives Me The Jim-Jams

Would you get into a car driven by a total stranger? Would you give total strangers keys to your home while you're on vacation for a few weeks? Would you like The Internet to tell you what it thinks of who you are and how you live your life?

Most reasonable people would say "No!" But the new sharing economy says "LIKE!"

Share Your Disruption

Over the last few years, several new "disruptive" businesses have emerged, with variations on a business theme. Companies including AirBnB, Uber, and Taskrabbit have emerged. Along with others, they've been lumped into a movement known as the "Sharing Economy".

The sharing economy is creepy, dystopic, and it gives me the jim-jams.

These sharing companies all have a few things in common:

• They use mobile phone apps and websites as their method of access
• They all act as "clearinghouses" or dispatchers, skimming profits off of every transaction while steadfastly ignoring or denying most liability and responsibility, and not actually "employing"  any of the people or owning any of the assets used. They're middlemen.
• They typically ignore, avoid, or subvert regulations and laws that have constrained similar businesses.
• All the hype aside, none of these companies are really "tech companies". Their innovation is typically limited to cute names and nice-looking app design. In other words, the emptiest of marketing, coupled to a billing platform.
• You could get most of what they offer done with a Craigslist search. 

What's Wrong Here?

Recently, the CEO of AirBnB appeared on the Colbert Report. He told a mildly charming story about how he founded his empire: He and his roommate were short on rent in San Francisco, so they (almost certainly illegally) sub-let their apartment during a convention. The proverbial lightbulb went on, and AirBnB was born.

These guys straight-up broke the law. That's not uncommon for young people desperate for cash. But is that model (breaking the law!) and mindset (do whatever you need to for cash!) something we should scale up?

Disrupting Regulation By Ignoring It

The most immediately contentious element of most of these new sharing businesses is their disregard of existing regulations. Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and other car-sharing services are taxi or limousine services in every way that matters. They refuse to admit it publicly. Privately, they morph from one thing to another depending on where they're operating and which officials they're talking to. They'll claim to be one kind of service in one city, and then claim the exact same business is a totally different kind of service in another, just to avoid regulation.

There's two problems here.

One problem is these regulations the sharing services are ignoring were put in place for a reason. Maybe society only wants a certain number of cabs on the street, or wants the drivers tested, insured, and certified. Maybe you don't want a hotel (or several) on your block or near your kid's school. As a democratic society, these regulations and laws were things We The People wanted, voted for, and implemented. If we don't like the results, change the laws.

It's as though the AirBnB CEO said "my roommate and I were having a hard time making rent, so we sold drugs. It was awesome and we made a lot of cash. So we started an app for people to buy drugs from us!"

To be clear, the new sharing economy literally makes you agree they have no liability for your injury or death. And when you scratch the thin veneer of cute-and-cuddly-and-harmless-and-hip these companies all desperately try to project, you will see the same corporate law-speak and cash-think underneath. They aren't in this to make your life better. They're in this to make their lives better, chiefly through taking your money.

Government moves slow. It hasn't cracked down on some of these businesses because of bigger problems, the sudden massive scale of the opportunity, and short-term thinking about how some of this business might be "helping" people get by. It's not wise, and sets a bad precedent of ignoring law when it's convenient.

The other problem is this selective law enforcement is patently unfair to existing players in the market. The taxis, hotels, and restaurants that followed existing laws at great expense and inconvenience are now having to compete with a flood of new players who haven't made those kinds of investments and don't feel bound by such old-fashioned concepts. How is that right? Why does booking through a website or iPhone suddenly change the rules for some people?

I have little sympathy for the government here as well. Instead of moving swiftly to prosecute flagrant violation, most governments have waited too long to maintain any moral high ground, and then in the face of a small group of loud people, bent and tortured laws to find a way to say "well, maybe if you cut us in". It's the worst possible outcome.

Professionals Still Win

These services are being pitched as ways for "regular people" or "hard working families" to make "extra money" or, in the inevitable press releases, to "make ends meet".

But these are cherry-picked anecdotes, and the reality is the professionals are rolling in and will dominate the space. Some hotels are already putting some rooms up. There are already cases where traditional rental units are being yanked off the market for far easier and more lucrative "sharing". The people who do this full time are thrilled - less regulation, less oversight, less hassle, more money.

Same goes for the car services. Not everyone has an Uber Black-ready ride. I guess you can always strap a moustache on and go on Lyft. Still, the closer you already are to professional grade at what you do, the more business you're going to get.

Ultimately, this economy will be like any other economy. Aside from a few outliers, the winners will be companies who leverage resources you don't have to push you to the margins.

Even if you "win", it's still a far cry from an actual living.

Reputation Sucks

Reputation is a terrible and creepy way to measure anything. Reputation isn't built on facts.

Reputation is literally "what a bunch of other people say or believe about something". In other words, it's not the truth, it's Family Feud.

Reputation can be easily gamed by those with a lot of cash and few scruples. Think about the problems with eBay, or the accusations of extortion or gaming leveled at Yelp. Now imagine those weapons being trained on you, because the guy you took to the airport wants a discount.

It will be bad enough when you can no longer trust the reputations of the services or businesses you patronize through these new apps (because they're paying firms to game up their scores).

It will be worse when or if you decide to participate in this new economy yourself, and find yourself with no reputation when you start out (if you're lucky), or more likely, with a negative reputation built on terrible and totally false feedback.

As Joan Jett said, "I don't give a damn about my bad reputation". But in the brave new world of the sharing economy, you won't be able to participate casually. You'll either be completely excluded as a buyer or seller because you have no reputation, or you will have to invest significant time and effort into "reputation management", and the sketchy, shady world of borderline extortion that accompanies it. (Note to self: next million-dollar idea is "Better Business Bureau", but for people).

Managing your public reputation is different from investing time in actually being a good customer or vendor. You will be expending resources simply to adjust what other people think of you, or what other people think about what other people have thought about you.

It's inefficient, and it's creepy.

For example, here's a new app that lets you avoid neighborhoods with a bad reputation. People are saying it is racist, partially because it is based on reputation and not facts (though I suspect it probably doesn't matter where the "data" comes from).

Go read any site built on reviews. There's always someone with a one-sided tirade about how someone done them wrong.

Shadow Work

In 1981, Ivan Illich coined the term "shadow work" for unpaid labor in the form of self-service. The classic example is self-checkout at the supermarket. This is a job that (until recently) people were paid to do. When you choose self-checkout, you are doing that job yourself, for free. The workers don't get paid. And you don't get paid for performing said labor. Once you start looking for shadow work, you will see instances of it everywhere.

The new sharing economy takes shadow work to a new level. Now it is not enough to own or have something like a place to sleep or a form of transportation. Now you must become a rental agency for said assets, or you'll be "missing out".

How do you feel about that? Only the very wealthy will be allowed the luxury of owning things and not renting them out to strangers on the side. The slightly wealthy will hire people to manage the renting for them. It's still work, either way.

You can expect some...interesting experiences, or at least memorable ones from your new job(s).

From Optional to Mandatory

In the post-World War II economy, some households became 2-income families. These families enjoyed some prosperity relative to single-income folks, for obvious reasons. And for several decades, this was a path families could use to add greater flexibility or wealth.

But over time, the world changed and this became expected, and then for many, required. And one day, people realized that instead of having "one job to stay afloat, and one job as backup", they had "two jobs required to stay afloat". No backup. Now you're at risk all the time - you need both people to stay healthy and working.

The two-income household became mandatory, not optional.

This is the future of the sharing economy for many, especially at the lower end of the economic spectrum. You'll be balancing multiple part-time jobs just like today, but now you'll also be balancing "sharing" any asset you can get your hands on and maintain.

And you'll be competing against the professionals (who will be more experienced, more skilled, and have lots more positive reviews) in an unregulated, reputation-based economy. Good luck!

The End of Privacy

Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, I read this article. The author understands (and shares) the concerns I am stating here. However, they come to a different and somewhat more disturbing conclusion, which is that you might as well rush out there and embrace all that shit, and get ready for the trolls, because once they've doxxed you and are calling your house and harassing you 24/7 online, you'll be stronger, baby!

And once we've all given up privacy and are sharing everything we do with the entire wide world, well, then the world will just be a way better place, right? No. Not at all.

Aside from a complete loss of privacy, you'll also be facing the entire world as a mob all the time. Large mobs are not known for tolerance, clear thinking, or standing up for the outsider. They're violent, reactionary, and frequently target the wrong things for the wrong reasons. And now they're your judge, your banker, and even your boss.

The Jim-Jams

Perhaps it's just a passing fad. Maybe a few more bad stories and things will correct a bit. The sharing economy will be constrained and fill some market niches without swallowing everything.

I don't know. Maybe people want to pay $470 for an 11 mile cab ride during a period of peak demand.

But in America, where poverty is frequently framed (if not perceived) as a deficiency resulting from laziness, people will argue the best solution to poverty is to simply make it easier for everyone to work harder, and in ever "innovative" ways. That has not worked out so good yet for the workers, and has become an excuse for the plutocrats to become wealthier, even as we all work longer and harder for less pay. The thought of that mindset reaching further into our cars, our homes, and our very lives is chilling.

Musicians and other artists have seen what happens when big business shows up with a package marketed as "sharing". How did that work out for them?

The new sharing economy companies are directly and indirectly attacking industry regulation. Maybe you think that's a good thing. Maybe a little of it even is. But I would prefer that we all have a voice in those regulatory changes. Those laws were all passed for a reason, and I'd trust We The People over any of these companies any day of the week.

The new sharing economy gives me the jim-jams. It won't be optional. It will become compulsory, both to stay afloat, and because not participating will starve you of precious "reputation". Without avid participation, you will enter a downward spiral.

Participation itself will erode your autonomy, your privacy, and your ability to be yourself. What is at risk? Literally your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Gotta go, my Uber is here!

45

Patience.

The 12 months since my last birthday split into two halves: "hurry up" and "wait."

The hurrying up came to a close at the end of 2013, a particularly challenging year.

In 2014, the waiting started.

Some of that waiting is about to end, so that a different kind of "hurry up and wait" can begin.

I have been carrying a tremendous weight on my shoulders, particularly the last 6 months. I am not allowed to discuss it. Along with the problem itself, the forced silence means I cannot turn to anyone for support, inspiration, or solace. In some cases, I have to deceive people I care about.

That burden has negatively affected nearly every part of my life.

I am smart, and I have the merciless, pitiless gifts of insight and memory. I catalog the mistakes, missed opportunities, flaws, gaffes, moments of laziness, all I've done wrong. What else could I do? What could I have done? When will it get better?

"That's what they pay me for."

***

I go stand-up paddleboarding for the first time. I am nervous, worried about falling in. But balancing turns out to be easier than I thought. I glide across the ocean, calm enough to be fun but choppy enough to remind me to be careful.

I move past the harbor seals, pungent and still in the morning air. I look at the odd collections of houseboats and stare across the bay, with clouds reflected in the water.

The weight begins to lift. Under the clouds, there is an epiphany: It is not all my fault, and not even about me. Really. I am a small bit of flotsam in the midst of the larger tempest. The wind and waves push against you, and maintaining your forward momentum can be difficult. Sometimes it is all you can do to not fall in, sometimes you can barely move forward.

There is a peace and stillness within and without, and a beautiful moment of clarity. I hear the water slapping the underside of the board.

My arms are tired, but I feel good. Try new things. Stretch. Get out of your head. This is good.

***

My wrist buzzes at 5 am and I slide out of bed as quietly as possible. Iran is awake, and gives me a smooch.

"Happy birthday!"

I fix an espresso and then head out for a pre-dawn run. My shoulder has been killing me the last few days, and raising my right arm is difficult.

I try not to think about it as I run intervals for an hour. It's not hurting too bad today, but it has been a few days with no obvious injury source, and I'm getting a little worried.

Later, there are birthday sweets at work and a fun lunch with the team. I laugh and smile, and I realize it feels like forever since I last did that.

The remainder of the workday, I am mostly busy enough to be distracted. I leave at 6:30 for a nice intimate birthday dinner, my shoulder complaining as I weave through rush hour traffic on the motorcycle.

I am worried about being late, but arrive just on time, with Kojak parking as a birthday bonus. Took a while, but it worked out OK. No need to be anxious, right?

***
At last, Atlas. Alas!

Atlas was the primordial Titan who held up the celestial spheres. Not just the earth. The whole universe.

He fought the power, and he lost. Bearing the weight of the universe on his shoulders was his punishment.

He is also the titan of astronomy and navigation.

Atlas governs the moon, which is important to Cancers.

The "Atlantic Ocean" derives from his name.

He is a symbol of endurance.

***

Maintaining your forward momentum can be difficult. I haven't recorded an album in a few years. I haven't performed in a long time. I haven't even written anything here for months. I've been doing stuff — playing games, writing manuals, noodling around. Thinking. Waiting. Sometimes that's just what you have to do.

At a certain age, you begin to realize you must be careful — you can push too hard, carry too much. There are consequences.

A friend of mine 10 years younger than I am suffered an aneurysm. He's in the hospital right now. I can barely stand to read about it. I send a nice card. And money.

"My life isn't so bad". I try to remind myself of this.

How we handle the struggles we have — big or small — isn't that what defines us? Isn't struggling the essence of being alive?  We already know how the game ends. The odds are against you and insurmountable from day 1. How will you play? Will you play at all? Be a sore loser?

In the face of adversity, all you have is the elegance of your behavior.

***

The anti-inflammatory medicine destroys my sleep. I know it's not a mechanical problem. The muscles just aren't firing. Research and testing quickly provide a solid diagnosis, which awaits a likely and perfunctory confirmation from a specialist.

I think about all the possible root causes. Was it the constant weight on one shoulder? Paddleboarding? The pull-up stretches? Sleeping wrong? Too much computer? Bad posture? Carrying too many heavy things overhead?

I catalog my life, wondering what I should have done differently, or in different quantity to prevent this.

Will I get better? Probably. But with this kind of injury, you just have to wait. Might be a month. Might be 2 years.

"One day you'll wake up and be just fine."

Or maybe not.

Patience.

We're all DEVO

1. The Sunset Strip
"Here's to Bob Casale." Michael and I clink our glasses of infused bourbon, a few doors down from The Roxy and what used to be Tower Records. Bob Casale died today. As I read about this at my work computer, I am moved nearly to tears.

I never met Bob. But I did meet Mark. And Gerry. Back when I sold audio gear for a living. Somehow I managed to get a meeting with them at their house studio up in the hills, before they moved to Mutato Muzika. I remember they had a Fairlight in the hall and bits of it in the bathroom. They were super nice. They gave me a copy of Hardcore Devo Vol. 2 and signed it.

Michael and I catch up. We talk about music. We talk about our music-related jobs. When we first met, we were both aspiring musicians, flush with youth and our own mutual darkness. That was...20 years ago. At least. Now our blackness has faded to gray. We've got some divorces between us. But we're still playing and perhaps more confident as musicians than ever.

After dinner I drive east down Sunset, past the giant tennis-ball green building that used to be Mutato Muzika (and was a bank before that!). I want to stop and take a photo to memorialize Bob. But it's a nightclub now, and there's no parking to be had, and no photos to be snapped. That's OK. Dr. Tahuti Bonzai took a much better one than I could anyhow. Funny, I met him around the same time I met Michael. Life moves in circles sometimes.

I got up at 3:45 this morning. I'm in town for about 40 hours. Got a lot to do. Last time I was here, I ended up leaving without my singing voice. Oddly appropriate, I suppose. Things are mostly better now.

2. DKO

I think of my brother's band, Don Knotts Overdrive. Favorably compared in the late 90's to DEVO, one of their many high points was contributing a cover of "Snowball" to the "We are not Devo" compilation.

I think Alexandra Patsavas helped get that project off the ground. She's the hottest music supervisor in the business now.

I bought it, I listened to it. DKO kicked everyone's ass on the disc, just like they did on the Exene-helmed one where they did "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

For a good 5 minutes or so, DKO was the hottest band in Los Angeles. Old story. They got signed, made a record, got sued by the record company, broke up. The end. But before that, they played almost every stage in LA.

I walk and drive past some of them. The Roxy. The Whiskey. The Teaszer (now a dead restaurant). Doug Weston's Troubadour. Lucinda Williams is playing there tonight. I'm sure nobody remembers DKO in this town. Today, though, most bands are at least paying some lip service to DEVO.

3. The 80s
It's the pre-internet age. The time when blurry dubs of VHS tapes and cassettes were how most culture disseminated. Slowly. You'd hear about celebrity deaths first as rumor, before confirmation by Entertainment Weekly or Tonight or Rolling Stone or Spin.

DEVO is mythic. You don't hear them on the radio. Their records are hard to find. A few kids might have one on vinyl. At a party, someone is showing their video. It's riveting, even more so than the girl in the sweater I'm trying to put the moves on. The imagery is primitive, but somehow they manage to convey so much about sex and life that other artists barely get to.

I'm still learning to listen to music, to understand how artists can mean more than one thing at a time, and how they can mean 2 contradictory things at the same time. Devo helps me understand how music can be silly and serious, mean and funny, pop and weird, commercial and a failure. Maybe I learn these lessons too well. Or not well enough.

But whether they sang about sex or politics or whatever specific things they did in Reagan's America, they are hooky and catchy and different and weird. And I love it.

4. "The Future"
DEVO was often lumped in with Kraftwerk as part of some "synth pop future". Both bands had strong visual aesthetics, wore costumes, and made "concept" albums with strong themes.

In the decades that have come along, Kraftwerk's star has only risen, despite them not making new music for years (and that a pale shadow of their classic albums). Kraftwerk plays "serious" art galleries like the Tate, with only 1-2 original members, playing their old repertoire and showing self-consciously primitive videos.

DEVO was considered the joke band. Wacky hats! Look at those funny moves! Comedy!

Yet as I look at the 2 bands now, Kraftwerk increasingly seems like the joke band, as their "vee ahr robotz!" shtick ossifies into self-parody. They haven't made any great music in 30 years, and at this point, we are chronologically as far from Kraftwerk and their innovations as Kraftwerk was from Glenn Miller when they started.

Devo, on the other hand, look more like prophets every day. Their bitter espousal of "devolution" seems all too accurate in a world where a majority of Americans literally reject evolution.

As we rush headlong into the hot, gassy future we've prepared for ourselves, the surviving members of DEVO take no pleasure in being right.

6. Are We Not Men?
When I met Mark and Gerry, I said something to the effect of "nobody really got you guys. The mainstream never understood what you were really saying."

Gerry quickly corrected me. "They got it," he said. "They just didn't like it."

Their loss.

Thank you for the music, Bob.

Music Business Thought of the Day: Look to the Book

Been reading this New Yorker article about Amazon and the discussion around book pricing.

Reminds me a lot of the endless music debates.

Always-wonderful MetaFilter offered me this comment (via user mittens):

"...The insistence on seeing books as a high-margin item is damaging, both to the book business itself, as well as to readers, and literacy generally. Libraries, used bookstores, and thrift shops are full of people who are proving the point that new books are priced too high...and those are just the people who are committed to finding the book at that low price point already, it doesn't include all the readers who could be enticed to buy at a cheap enough point if wide selection and ease of ordering were also guaranteed."

Substitute "music" for books. What's different?

Departures, Returns, Treadmills

End

A year of loops, analemmae, routines. Departures and returns. Treadmills metaphorical and literal.

At times, even the most remarkable things seemed mundane, and the most mundane seemed remarkable.

I was fortunate to spend time with family and friends on my trips around the world. Happy to even take said trips, even as the pace and schedule grew punishing. I have particularly treasured crossing the finish line in mid-December and spending some time at home, doing not much more than cleaning, sitting, reading, playing video games, and updating computer software.

I lost my voice for nearly 5 months. It came back.

I went to the gym. I came back. I went from being the heaviest I'd ever been in my life to being as fit as I was at my mid-20s rock star peak.
I lost 20 pounds. I hope they don't come back.

I went away - SFO, LHR, NRT -  and came back more times than I can count. 

I lost my temper more than I would have liked. It came back, too.

I regret not spending more time on music this year, but something had to give, and once my voice was gone, it was easy to make that call.

I am particularly happy to have spent time with my friends at home - this was a year of building friendships old and new, and spending time with people I enjoy. More of that in 2014, I hope.

Middle

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” 

- John Cage

Every repetition brings with it the possibility of new discovery, and with each repetition, subtleties become more and more important.

I learned a lot about myself this year. I am growing older, for better or worse. More gray hair. Slowing down. Some things become more difficult. Some become impossible. And that's OK. A very few things get easier.

Just because you've seen the clouds at 30,000 feet a few times doesn't make them any less beautiful. Sometimes they are transcendental, even when everything hurts and you're tired.

Every run, every mile feels different, even when it's a route you know well. You return to where you started, changed by the journey. The Anu who walked off all those planes was always different from the Anu who walked onto them.

Beginning

The computer on my wrist gently pulses, waking me up. It is dark. Wherever I am, it is probably between 5 and 6 AM. I was sort of awake anyway, and still tired.

I get up and fumble into my workout gear. Within a few minutes, I am on a treadmill. Wristband, headband, Jawbone Up, Polar heart rate monitor. A scrap of paper with scribbled numbers.

Beep beep beep. Whamp whamp whamp. Sweating and breathing.

I am at the airport, in the short line. I look up at the vast ceilings, the glass walls. I have time to marvel at all of it.

I am in the lounge, typing on a computer. Listening to music.

I am in a business class seat, feeling the rumble of the engines. 10 hours remaining. I am so tired, but I have so much to do.

I am in a hotel room, somewhere. There is a tray of demolished room service food. Sweaty gym clothing hangs in the bathroom. Showered, I sit in a chair and type on the computer. I look over at the bed, and count the hours until I can sleep again.

Numbers

195,000 air miles flown

89 days on the road away from home (11 weekend days!)

17 business trips

950 miles run, about 20 per week

20 pounds lost from February to November

10 minute mile averages

5 pounds maximum differential before and after 10 mile run

2013 in Music

2013 was a great year for music. I heard more things I liked than in many previous years, and I bought a lot of music as well, including more vinyl than in the last several years combined. (This should not be construed as an indication that vinyl is a superior format - it's like the candles of audio. It is a cozy and pleasant format with very nice packaging!)

2013 Album of the Year

Mark Kozelek and Jimmy Lavalle "Perils From The Sea"

A surprise, and a treasure. Normally I find these two artists a little on the boring and predictable side. Kozelek (who also records as Sun Kil Moon) is an impressive lyricist, but he tends to write some samey melodies and use his limited vocal range with just an acoustic guitar. For me, it gets old fast.

Jimmy Lavalle normally records as The Album Leaf, and basically makes new age for hipsters.

But the combination is magical. The soft electronic beds Lavalle offers provide a nice contrast for Kozelek's half-spoken, half-sung slices of life.

The lyrics are beautiful and relevant, given how many of the songs reference the Bay Area, air travel and its accompanying woes and joys, and a particular point in one's life. Examples:

from "Somehow The Wonder Of Life Prevails"

"Every day, I get out and I walk.
Every day, I get on the phone with someone and I talk.
It's good to have friends who love you, care and understand. Who have your back and don't judge you, criticize you, or make demands.
Every day, for miles I walk along the Monterey Pines, the Marina to Aquatic Park.
And I look at the Marin Headlands, Tiburon, Sausalito, Angel Island, from the end of fishing pier.
I couldn't ask for more.
My eyes couldn't ever want for more.
I watch the seagulls fly.
For half my life I've watched the ferry boats and the barges go by"

from "By The Time That I Awoke"

"I met the most beautiful lover,
Walking along the San Francisco Bay.
She guides me through the perils,
Through the long, unlit hallways.
Below the surface, beneath the distractions
Beneath the dumb, knee-jerk reactions.
It's to her I owe everything,
It is for her that my heart sings." 

It can be a little "sad old bastard" at times, but in 2013, well, so could I. Strongly recommended, and well worth a listen or two.

The Two Icy Jessies

My appreciation for great pop songs grows yearly. I still love "challenging" music and listened to plenty of it, but I also found myself really enjoying some more mainstream sounds. Two women named Jessy/Jessie delivered in 2013.

Jessy Lanza "Pull My Hair Back"
Pop futurism, mysterious, sexy, hooky, and icy. Lanza has a breathy, feminine voice, and owes an explicit debt to various 80s R&B singers.

The production of the record is somewhere between 80s synth sheen and 21st century techno-pop. I love it. There are surprising elements and lots of empty spaces. I want my next record to sound like this.

The songs are pretty good. Lanza has a strong feel for melody. The lyrics can be hard to make out due to the production and delivery, but what you can hear is earnest, mysterious, and sexy. She accurately describes them as a "cohesive mumble".

The record works best as an album, starting with the percolating opener "Giddy" and then moving to, well, "Keep Moving" to the great closing "Strange Emotion".

There's something about her icy-hot vibe and delivery that reminds me of Sade at her best. Her cover of Phyllis Nelson's "Move Closer" doesn't appear on the album, but is a great summation of what I find compelling about her sound.

Every time one of these songs came up on shuffle for me, I listened. No skipping. That's some high praise in 2013. I look forward to hearing her next record.

Jessie Ware "Devotion"
Ware was a professional backup singer for a long time. "Devotion" is her breakout effort. It originally came out in 2012, but I didn't really hear it until this year when it was re-released in a slightly different configuration.

Another strong, polished, adult pop record. But where Jessy Lanza is mysterious and subtle, Ware is direct. This is a big pop record aimed at the charts, and at the same time, doesn't really sound like it belongs on the radio in 2013.

The album had what was probably my favorite "single" of 2013, the perfect and appropriate "Running", which featured harmonized electric guitars coupled to a great melody and a euphoric bridge.

But there were plenty of other great songs, including "Wildest Moments" and "Night Light", both of which could easily have been on the radio in the 80s or 90s, sung by any of the big pop divas at the time. There's something charming about something that is so "retro" that isn't simultaneously trying to cash in on retro.

This is definitely a pop record, and anyone expecting depth or noise or weirdness is going to be disappointed. Ware isn't perfect - she lacks a bit of personality that will likely come in time, and when her material isn't strong, the record falters a bit. She has a great voice, though, and with the right material, shines bright.

Best Victory Lap/Best New Album by Old Musician

David Bowie "The Next Day"
It's an imperfect record. It's not as good as "Heathen". But it has some really great songs on it, and some junk. It heavily, consciously references his own earlier work and life. He's entitled to take it easy a bit, and if this is the last album he ever makes, it's still totally respectable. That said, the critics all went overboard for it. It's a few songs too long, and lacks the crazy inventiveness that marks so much of Bowie's work.

The Rest

Savages "Silence Yourself"
I expected this to score higher on the critics' lists than it did. It's pretty cool, a kind of distaff Joy Division with various post-punk influences. Harder and more abrasive than Interpol's take said revival, which is also why I probably didn't like it as much. Still, they're great live. Looking forward to hearing what they do next.

Haim "Days Are Gone"
These young ladies write their own material and play their own instruments. And when they do it, they are clearly loving it and full-on rocking out. It is hard not to be caught up in that exuberance, and they do a lot of things I like (swapping vocals, for example). A disposable confection, and a little too much demographic pandering (the Eagles sample! The Fleetwood Mac references!) but that just means they're good businesspeople, right, Sid?

John Foxx and The Maths "Evidence"
Electronic rock. Mostly notable for "Changelings", a great and moody track. The rest of this release (which sits between album and EP in scope) is a combination of remixes of earlier tracks, a few decent-but-not-great new tracks, and a neat cover of Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar". Like their other records, works best as an album experience.

Robert Hood "Motor: Nighttime World 3"
Abstract-ish techno. Great sounds, great cover image, great work from a master of the genre.

Julianna Barwick "Nepenthe"
Sort of like a one-woman version of Eno's "Music for Airports". A dream in fog, beautiful, and then gone.

Junip "Junip"
Sort of a downtempo The Moody Blues with 21st Century neo-folk influences. A little soft rock-y, but that also makes it easy to listen to. Songwriting is pretty good, but the album is a few tracks too long. I like that they don't have to yell.

Young Galaxy "Ultramarine"
A great indie-pop album, with strong songs all the way through. I didn't listen to this a lot, but I enjoyed it every time I did.

Karl Hyde "Edgeland"
Half of Underworld makes a record that sounds like Underworld with acoustic samples instead of synthesizers. Not bad, but not great.

Goldfrapp "Tales of Us"
Neat concept - a record all about specific people. It's beautiful and cinematic and slow. A bit too samey by the end, but really nice all the same.

Julia Holter "Loud City Song"
This would be my "Scott Walker award" record, for something weird and interesting. Way less scary than Walker, though.

Disappointments

Elvis Costello and The Roots "Walk Us Uptown"

Man, I really wanted to like this record. How could you not? And yet I didn't. I will give it another try, but it's just not catching for me, and all the references people talk about make me feel like I have to do homework before I can appreciate it.

Janelle Monae "The Electric Lady"

Monae is super-cool. She's got a great look, a great voice, and a great concept and story. But she's got no great songs, at least not to my ears. Another record I really wanted to like (and which everybody else really did).

Tim Hecker "Virgins"

I like Tim Hecker. I didn't like this record much at all. However, the critics disagreed, with many claiming this was his best yet. I didn't get it.

Vampire Weekend "Modern Vampires of the City"
I'm admittedly not a fan of this band, but this album was without compelling songs, and chock full of what felt like pandering to particular demographics. It sounds amazing - the mixing and production is top-shelf. That just serves to emphasize how limp the songwriting is. Overall it is totally inoffensive. The sort of "rock" record that old people buy and tell themselves they're still hip because they like it. For better or worse, Vampire Weekend truly IS the Graceland-era Paul Simon for this decade.

Kanye West "Yeezus"
Again, not a fan. Some of the best production in hip-hop coupled to completely inane songs. Few records have made me wish the songs were better/less awful than this one.

The Knife "Shaking The Habitual"
This record was awful and wildly overrated. Noisy and annoying and not in good ways, just lazy ones.

Neon Neon "Praxis Makes Perfect"
Another concept album from the guys who did that great record about John Delorean. This time it was about an even more obscure figure, and the songs weren't any good.

Daft Punk "Random Access Memories"
Marketing overkill. Celebrity walk-ons. A complete lack of urgency and a kind of queasy entitled quality to the anointing of "Get Lucky" as "2013's song of the summer". Fact is, "Get Lucky" was a pretty good chorus coupled to verses I would have rejected, and a vocal performance I'd call perfunctory. I'd write this record off completely, but it did get people paying attention to Nile Rodgers again. Nile's great. This record, however, is boring. Hard to believe 2 French guys could make such a wad of American cheese.

Depeche Mode "Delta Machine"
Nine Inch Nails "Hesitation Marks"
Highly anticipated new albums by legendary, innovative bands. Both felt uninspired and sort of tepid when they should have been confident and fiery.

Depeche Mode's Martin Gore continues in his "Biblical allusion autopilot" mode. Trent Reznor tones things down a bit, which is welcome and appropriate, but it also feels like leftovers.

Ken Kessie

There's nothing quite as sobering as saying "Gee, I wonder whatever happened to..." and then doing some Google and finding out they died last year.

Ken Kessie in his element

This evening, while doing some research on gear for a friend, I remembered a microphone I have that I haven't used in a while. It was given to me by Ken Kessie, a producer I met through my then-girlfriend Anne Kadrovich when I was living in L.A. in the 90s.

Ken was a record producer and engineer with a pretty impressive discography to his name. Mostly known for R&B stuff, but he really wanted to do rock.

He used to drop by my makeshift garage studio in the valley. Sometimes he'd ask to hear what I was working on, and would make helpful production suggestions, even going so far as to do some mixes with/for me. I learned a lot from him in a short period of time.

He also gave me gear. Stuff that he didn't want or need, but that made a big difference for me. A R0DE NT-1 microphone. A really fantastic Zoom reverb (which sadly died shortly before I left L.A.). A Moog 3-band EQ.

He was a complex guy. Like all of us, he wasn't perfect. I remember him smiling and laughing, though. That was his usual state.

I don't have any other details, but then, none of them would matter anyhow. He was here. He made some music. He touched some lives. Now he's gone. I thought I would run into him again some day.

Thank you for the music, Ken. And thank you for the advice, the knowledge, and the gear.

Some Guitar Heroes

A while back, one of my co-workers (who is also a serious musician) asked who my "important" guitar influences were. Sure, there are a bunch of people who everyone cite all the time. But on reflection, there are a handful of players who really affected my personal style. I will fully admit that many of them may not be the "originators" of what they're doing, but they were the ones I heard first and most.

The players below are generally not idiomatic "rock" players - they almost all use a combination of tone, effects, note choice, and technique to produce something that can rock, but is usually different somehow.

Stuart Adamson of Big Country

1. Stuart Adamson of Big Country
Album: "The Crossing". 

Great textures, inventive sounds, and detailed parts. A guy who eschewed the barre chord in favor of riffs and parts. Ebow! Guitars that didn't sound like ordinary guitars. I am still learning how to play his parts. The first "guitar" music I loved. And I still love it - I listen to his music every year.

2. Edge of U2 
Album: "War". 

Redefined what rock guitar could be. Yeah, maybe he doesn't shred - but that's kind of the point. And he wasn't the first guy to use a delay, but he was perhaps the first to hardly ever not use delay, and to turn it into a signature.

It's not fashionable to like him now, but he created a distinctive sound that left a lot of space, and is now copied by many. Probably not intentional, but effectively crystalized the serious art music "minimalism"of the 70s and translated it into rock music.

3. Eddie Van Halen of Van Halen
Album: "Fair Warning". 

His playing sounds so easy and effortless that you go "this doesn't seem that hard" and then you try, and of course, it actually is pretty hard. His rhythm playing is underrated, loose, groovy, and funky. He's not just a barre chord + low string thumper. He plays like a classical violinist - all double stops and interesting theory things.

He also had great guitar tone, both distorted and clean. Plus, he actually gave me a guitar once.

Robert Smith of The Cure

4. Robert Smith of The Cure
Albums: "Standing On A Beach" (cheating, because this is a singles collection)

His sounds were an updating of psychedelia, and his playing evolved from punky minimalism to a fairly specific personal style, incorporating lots of effects, unusual chords and voicings, and rare instruments like the Coral Electric Sitar and the Fender Bass VI.

Also underrated because he doesn't "shred", but he's got more technique than you might think, and he is able to fit his playing into a large ensemble (and probably writes many of those parts)

5. James Calvin Wilsey of Chris Isaak's band Silvertone 
Albums: "Chris Isaak" and "Heart Shaped World".

Wilsey's playing reminded me that I loved surfy, twangy, clean guitars. Originally a punk bass player, in Isaak's band he produced idealized and updated versions of classic country, surf, and early rock tones.

He's a tasty player, too, knowing how to get the most from a few notes. And for someone not terribly "technical", his playing always felt great.

After listening to these records, I got my Strat back and started a cowboy band.

Vini Reilly

6. Vini Reilly of Durutti Column
Album: "The Guitar and Other Machines".

A record that made me start thinking about how it was maybe OK to make "pretty" music using the electric and acoustic guitars.

Reilly is another player who blends effects, technique, and sparse note choice to create something truly unique. Made a bunch of records in a very similar vein.

I've never heard anyone play quite like him - some kind of finger-picking and plucking. I still wish I could play like this. I still try frequently.

7. Daniel Ash of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Love and Rockets
His parts were simple - often just 2 strings, or arpeggiated chord shapes with one finger moving. He had a handful of signature tones: his underweight Tele-through-a-Marshall distortion, his Ebow, and 12-string clean parts. From all that, he created a style that served him well for an entire career.

8. Steve Stevens of Billy Idol's band
Album: "Rebel Yell"

Wasn't quite metal, but was as close as I got for a long time. This guy could play like crazy (and frequently did) but wasn't afraid to use technology, layering, and unusual parts and voicings.

9. Michael Hedges
Album: "Aerial Boundaries". 

I will never be this good, ever. I could listen to the title track for hours. Beautiful, inventive, and incredibly emotional.

A guy with tons of technique, but who deployed it in the service of some very nice compositions. I can't play like this, but his music is inspiring as a composer and as a player.

10. Christian Fennesz 
Album: "Venice", "Cendre" (with Ryuichi Sakamoto). 

A true 21st century guitar player who uses computers to sculpt his guitar into towering walls and pillars of sound. Amazing stuff that made me think about the guitar as raw material for processing rather than just a rock instrument.

Honorable Mention
Post-punkers Chameleons (2 guitar orchestration) and Gang of Four (choppy, noisy funk).

Metallica, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai made me want to practice a lot
There's all the obvious classic rock stuff - Jimmy Page, Keef Richards, The Beatles, and so on.
And all the obvious classic punk stuff - Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, and a million hardcore bands.

Piece of Crap: Banksy, Fame, and Frames

Apparently, famed graffiti artist Banksy set up a kiosk in Central Park where he was selling his artwork. He hardly sold any. One of my New York friends was walking in the park that day and is still kicking herself for not walking by and picking up one.

"Ha, ha", the stories bark, "aren't people stupid? Aren't you stupid? You could have had this great art for pennies, but you didn't bother looking!"

This is just like when Joshua Bell played a million-dollar violin in Union Station and nobody noticed.

Again, the story is framed as "Gosh, people are Philistines!" The Post article's title stops short of calling everyone "swine" for not noticing the beauty and wonder of the playing and the magnificence of music.

But anyone who attended an introductory class on modern art understands this situation.

This is an issue of "framing".

Context

We have all been conditioned that most things people try to sell you are probably terrible. Capitalism starts giving you wedgies and smacking your face pretty early, yelling "Fooled you!" and running off with your cash. As Neil Young sang:

Saw it on the tube
Bought it on the phone
Now you're home alone
It's a piece of crap.

Current street art fashion

Live in any big city and you'll be quickly trained to ignore all of the noise around you and keep going. Most buskers are terrible. Most goods sold on the street are counterfeit, stolen, and/or low quality. Street art goes through fads, with everyone copying everyone (the latest, by the way, is painting on maps). Stopping to look or pay attention is just inviting tedious interaction. 

The savvy, street-wise people never come bouncing in, smiling, saying "look what I bought on the street today!"

You literally "know better than to do that".

Further, the context most people are in when these stunts have been pulled is simply not conducive to art appreciation. When was the last time you arrived at Union Station (or any travel terminal) and said "well, I've got plenty of time to soak up the ambiance and appreciate the art here"? Most people are thinking "I am late, and I need to hustle to get where I'm going."

If you think that is unfortunate, it says more about the state of society and the pace of life than people's ability to appreciate beauty.

Context matters. And the context that museums, concert halls, and other "art environments" provide is some degree of cultural and social safety, a guarantee that "what is in here is 'real art', and what is not in here is not."

This is the same framing that the actual frame around the art and little title card provide, just on a larger scale. Both the frame and the museum tell you "the art starts here and stops there." Or in a concert hall, it's the curtains opening and closing.

John Cage's famous 4'11" silent piece and Marcel Duchamp's readymades cover this same ground.  

When you go to one of these art boxes, you are dedicating time and putting yourself in a space to have an art experience. 

When those art experiences are presented without the cultural and context cues, most people won't be able to parse them as art at all, and will instead assume they are commerce and/or a rip-off.

The Frame Makes The Art

The other important takeaway here: Framing is a more important element of "great art" than most people are willing to admit. 

You can look at this the following way: Maybe there's not much difference between the pros and the hacks. This is the same thing that allows people to look at some great art and say "hell, my kid could have done that." (which, of course, misses several points, including "but they didn't" and "yes, but painting is about a lot more than the paint on the canvas")

This painting of a wine bottle is by
famous painter Magritte.

Banksy's style has been copied and appropriated and duplicated. Banksy himself is likely to say (tongue in cheek) that you might as well buy "street art" from anyone. Is there that much of a difference between Banksy and not-famous graffiti artists other than name? 

And maybe there just isn't that much difference between a virtuoso on a fancy instrument and the typical busker sawing away. At least not that most people can tell.

But, well, yeah, there is a difference. For one thing, they're not Banksy.

The frame - the "story" around the art object - helps you understand why it is or isn't art. Lots of people have written a lot about this, both simply (Brian Eno) and in much more obtuse fashion. 

A recent study demonstrated people liked wine more if they had been told it was expensive. Exact same idea.

Culture is Framing

Really, everything we think of as "culture" is just a big frame or story around stuff that happened and got made: "This over here is good and noteworthy. This other stuff isn't."

And if you don't believe me, well, a bunch of famous people like Theodore Adorno and Malcom Gladwell and Brian Eno say so, so there!

David Byrne Tells Streaming Services To Get Off His Lawn

David Byrne, courtesy of WikiPedia
(which destroyed encyclopedias)

Some days, I feel like I just write the same articles over and over. Sisyphus pushing the rock, defending streaming services. If it's not some random person on the internet, it's Thom Yorke.

Now here comes white-haired David Byrne, shuffling down the sidewalk, yelling about the good old days and the end of the music world.

Byrne was the leader of Talking Heads, one of those moderately successful bands that manages to become influential and is a part of the undisputed "canon of cool" for many musicians. Like with Thom Yorke, it stings a little for me to hear musicians I respect and who influenced me speaking out against my work - work that I have engaged in for their benefit.

Evil?
Byrne asks "Are these services evil?" It's difficult not to respond with something equally churlish and provocative, like "Is David Byrne stupid, or just ignorant?" Probably the latter, as he admits and then demonstrates a lack of detailed knowledge about how the services work.

Still, I am compelled to respond to these uninformed and incorrect assertions.

All Internet services are not the same. Byrne lumps streaming services in with YouTube and Pandora, which is sort of like lumping your bank in with muggers and vending machines. "Well, sure, they're kinda different, but they all take your money, right?"

Byrne asks if streaming services are "simply a legalized version of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay". Nope, at least not in terms of infrastructure and effort. Napster and Pirate Bay don't ingest and host terabytes of music and push it out to CDNs worldwide. They don't provide customer support. I could go on.

The most important distinction is this: YouTube and Pandora don't need or get permission to offer the music they deliver. Streaming services have to get permission from the artist, label, and publisher. And then they pay huge guarantees and submit to a ton of control from the content owners.

It's streaming or nothing. Byrne repeats the assertion that no one will buy CDs or pay for downloads when streaming is available. But there's literally years of research that show that the most avid streamers still buy music, and buy more music, than people who don't stream. Put another way, for every Spotify user who says "I'll never buy a CD again", I'll show you a Rhapsody user who says "I'm buying more music than ever". Streaming increases sales.

But why would you buy when you can stream? Well, maybe you're trying to give the artist you like more money. Maybe you want a copy to keep. People do it.

Monopoly...someday. Byrne asserts that we'll end up with a monopoly, and that will be very bad. Well, it's been 12 years, and we don't have a monopoly. We have a bunch of struggling services, and tons of competition in most of the major music markets. The USA (the biggest music market in the world) alone has at least a half-dozen streaming services. And Apple and Amazon haven't even entered the market...yet.

Griping about payment size. I've gone into this many, many times. It is true that for some artists, the per-stream payment has been low. That has a lot to do with the artist's deal with the labels. I will also again point out the labels are collecting money from services even when users play nothing. Is any of that money going to the artist? If not, the artist should be talking to their label. And I repeat my favorite question: What payment would you suggest for a single stream?

Go browse a store instead. Byrne says you could just go to Bandcamp instead. Yeah, Bandcamp. A place that has none of the content. Where the artist doesn't get paid at all when it's played. Look, I like Bandcamp. I have some of my music available there. But it is not a good substitute for subscription services for the reasons above. It's more like iTunes, but more fair. Amazon is pretty much the same. And most bands on major labels aren't allowed to put their content on Bandcamp.

People only go to these places when they have already decided to buy something. It is a very different experience.

It's totally true that the purchase links in Spotify and other services are lame. They're in there because the record labels make us put them in there, not because we think they're a good idea.

Great Pull Quote!
Byrne being the media old hand that he is, he closes with the usual "everything will collapse into these services and the poor artists will starve". The pull quote and tweeted memed headline is "the internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left."

Provocative! Exciting! Wrong!
In some ways, this is just an updated version of Sousa's "The Menace of Mechanical Music". But let's look at a similar model: video.

Jack Valenti famously said that the VCR was the Hollywood Strangler. And instead, it grew revenues tremendously. Opened new markets. There are lots of people who subscribe to Netflix. They're also still watching broadcast or cable, going to movies, buying and renting movies on DVD and Blu-Ray and as digital files, watching pay-per-view, and watching free internet video as well. New methods of enjoying art bring more consumption of art in more areas. 

If that wasn't true, then Sousa would have been right, and the dawn of recording would have destroyed music such that people like David Byrne and Thom Yorke would never have had careers writing and performing it.

Look at ebooks. People are buying and reading more books than ever.

It's depressing to keep arguing these points. But there is some hope.

Dave Allen (of Gang of Four and Shriekback) has finally come around. His excellent response is well worth a read, and I'll repeat many of his points here. Mr. Allen and I have discussed these issues in the past, and haven't always seen eye to eye. But he brings some welcome perspective. Some of his strong points:

There aren't enough good rebuttals. The Guardian will print things that Yorke and Byrne say because they're both famous musicians, and their tirades will sell papers. It would be nice for a change to see them either allow someone from the industry to respond, or find another famous musician who will say something positive about these services. In the meantime, I'll keep plugging away.

The old system was as bad or worse. As per usual, people start trotting out how many streams a musician has to generate to make minimum wage, and start comparing it to selling t-shirts or CDs. I will again point out that it requires nearly no effort or upfront cost on the part of the musician to provide that stream - that's the work the service is doing: ingesting content, making it available worldwide, writing client software, and more.

Compare that to lugging t-shirts and CDs around, carrying change, and soliciting transactions. That's why you get to keep more money in those scenarios: you're doing more work, you're carrying inventory.

Making a living by selling CDs is as hard or harder. Fine, ignore the previous points. Focus on the actual statistics:

• There were more than 98,000 new albums released in 2009.
• Of those 98,000 albums, about 2% sold more than 5,000 copies.
• About 1% sold more than 10,000 copies.
• As far back as the mid-/late-90s, the average band on a major label with a national promo push would sell about 1,000 albums

And all those new records are competing with Led Zeppelin IV and OK Computer and Speaking In Tongues.

If you think selling CDs is going to make you more money, you're wrong. Statistically, you're not even making minimum wage.

The current internet alternatives to streaming are so much worse. Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, and other services are paying out 70-80% of their gross income directly to "content owners": record labels, publishers, and yes, artists. iTunes pays 70%. Other internet alternatives like YouTube and 8Tracks pay nothing, and only achieved their current success by either operating illegally (in a "get big, then get licensed and legit" model) or by exploiting a loophole in the DMCA.

Those royalties are cripplingly high. Spotify still isn't profitable. Most of the streaming services are money-losers. Even mighty iTunes just breaks even. These services cannot pay any more than they are already paying...and frankly, shouldn't have to just because artists signed deals with labels which the artist now regrets.

Listeners won't pay more. I've done the customer research many times. The primary reason people don't use these services? Too expensive. And when the free services bloat up with ads, customers turn away and go back to unlicensed services or illegal downloading. Or don't bother playing music at all.

I'll conclude with noting that Messrs. Byrne and Yorke aren't helping the music business, they're hurting it. It's difficult for today's listeners to understand the distinction between legitimate services and piracy, between what pays the artist and what doesn't. And when they attack the services that are doing the right thing, they are sending a message to those listeners that sounds like "you might as well just steal all the music you want, because the artist doesn't get paid anyway." Again, I've done the market research. I've heard it from the music fans

I suppose this constant criticism is a sign of the legitimacy of streaming services, but it sure doesn't feel like a "win".

Life Is Hard
Byrne closes with an appeal that sounds a bit like "won't someone please think of the children???" He notes that life is hard for up-and-coming musicians, and that even talented ones may have to give up if they can't find a way to make a living...and that the future of musical culture thus "looks grim".

OK, three more points and I'm out.

1. It has never been easy to be an up-and-coming musician. It wasn't easy when Byrne was coming up (there are plenty of his peers that never made it big like he did). It wasn't easy when Sousa was coming up, either.

As I noted previously, there were 98,000 albums released in 2009. Recent years have had similar numbers.

That means all those up-and-coming artists have a lot of competition - not only from all the other 199,999 albums released that weren't theirs, but from all the great old records released over the last 50 years, like those by David Byrne and Thom Yorke. It is not an easy job. It never has been. And streaming services aren't making it any worse. If anything, they're offering an easy, low-cost way to make music available worldwide.

2. 98,000 albums. That's a lot of new music, and those numbers keep going up. So even after over a decade of streaming music services, the number of new albums being created continues to rise. If there is some kind of creative apocalypse, it hasn't happened yet. I'd argue we're seeing the opposite - massive growth in content creation.

I also hope Byrne isn't so commerce-minded that he can't see that many artists (as opposed to entertainers) create because they have to, not because it's a good career choice.

3. Look up what "amateur" means. A personal anecdote: I was an aspiring professional musician. I dipped my toe in nearly every part of the music business before Napster came along. It was really hard. And I came to realize that even being talented wasn't enough. You had to be talented and lucky.

That wasn't good enough for me, so I got a day job (making streaming services, it turned out). I still write, perform, and record music. I distribute it worldwide. I don't do it for the money, I do it for the love of music. I am not unique.

I do not consider myself a "great artist", but I am pretty sure most of the folks I do consider great artists create because they love creating first, and because they can get paid second.

It is entirely possible that subscription music is a terrible idea, and one that will become a footnote in history, like the 8-track cassette. But I have a feeling that if it were to vanish, many artists and music lovers would mourn its loss and sing its praises.

That may sound hard to believe, but then who'd have thought David Byrne would be arguing in favor of the past and fighting against the future?