Dial "M" for Musicology

Zen Friday

Phil Ford

I got nothing. And now I embrace the nothingness and discover the nothing that nothings eternally.

Hey, that sounds a little like Ken Nordine! Man, I love Nordine. He is, with the possible exception of Fred Astaire, the illest motherf*&^er in human history. 

So what happens when you put Fred Astaire and Ken Nordine together?

TEH COP SHOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"My Baby" was a number from Nordine's 1957 Word Jazz, which has been rereleased, along with the other original "word jazz" albums, in a reissue anthology called You're Getting Better: The Complete Word Jazz Dot Masters. One of my favorite tracks on it is a number called "Charlie Zen," which is Nordine's outer-space prose-poetry accompanied only by a gong of unearthly resonance. It's a bonus cut for the anthology, apparently recorded for one of the original albums but left unreleased until now. Here's a taste.

Yes, I know, very Dharma Bums, very 1950s-hipster/1990s-New-Age, this thing for Zen. But still. Someone somewhere should write a cultural history of Zen in America; a lot of interesting Zen-influenced art has been made here in the last fifty years. And Zen notions are interesting, and, even to my rather religion-averse self, satisfying to contemplate, though I admit I know very little beyond Alan Watts' book The Way of Zen. Watts is probably single-handedly responsible for much of the enthusiasm for Zen in the West. Watts was a wonderful writer and talker, very good at making abstract things concrete, which has earned him a certain amount of suspicion from those who like their mysticism mystical. Among other things, he wrote a very sharp-eyed piece on the hip embrace of Zen in the 1950s, titled "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" -- one of the best things written on the Beats in the 1950s.

Jonathan and I had a little punch-up over American popular culture this week, with me digging the Usbybay Urkleybay and Jonathan hatin' (or at least dissentin'). I wrote a comment to Jonathan's post where I came up with what I think is a new hypothesis in American popular culture: we might call it Theory of Pop Culture Complementarity. You can't have just the smart without the dumb, the tasteful without the vulgar, Jon Stewart without Paula Abdul. They are necessary to one another: what pop giveth, pop taketh away, and vice versa. Dumb pop culture gives you the hermeneutic tools to take it apart, which transforms it into smart pop culture. And vice versa. For years we've been hearing tirades against South Park—it's vicious, crude, foul, and wrong, etc. (You say that like it's a bad thing!) And guess what the South Park guys are doing now? Making gentle, intelligent cartoons to the Zen teachings of Alan Watts. Here are a couple, the first of which is called "Life and Music," the second "Prickles and Goo."

 

 

There are more at Soul Jerky, where I found these clips. Watts loved music, and I like how he so often resorted to musical metaphors in talking about Zen. Have a good weekend.

"My Humps": The Definitive Remix

Phil Ford

Galen Brown, in addition to being a Dial M regular, is a composer and blogger at Sequenza 21, a superb music blog I haven't mentioned often enough. Anyway, in response to my swipe at Dvorak, he pointed out his own remix of the "New World" symphony with the Black Eyed Peas' horrible "My Humps." This is too good to let languish below the line:

O Mighty Forces of the Blogosphere, I Summon Thee!

Phil Ford

A Friday grab-bag: news, a joke, and  a bleg. (Remember blegs?)

The news: last night I heard a lecture by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, whom I have mentioned here before, and afterwards went out for a beer with him and some folks from the Harry Ransom Center. Cop show! The lecture itself was stupendous, and I'll write something about it later when it's all settled a little more firmly into my skull. I introduced myself afterwards in the most embarrassing way possible, with the gushing and the simpering. (I think I actually used the words "I'm a huge fan." Argh.) But he was cool. Anyway, I now want to have someone custom-make me a bumper sticker, or maybe a T-shirt, with the cover photo from The Production of Presence . . .

. . . next to the slogan, WWHUGD?

Anyway, the joke. A musical joke. I'm probably the last person to see this, but on April 1 Alanis Morissette released a video parody of the obnoxious, stupid, inane Black Eyed Peas video "My Humps." First, see the original. ("Lovely lady lumps?") And now the sensitive piano version:

As Julian Sanchez writes, Morissette's parody "deserves an extra nod for managing to simultaneously be hilarious as a satire of both Fergie's and Morissette's own styles and (just to twist the knife) actually a substantially better piece of music than the tuneless original, low a bar though that admittedly is."

Finally, the bleg. Commenter Roxanne Rieske wrote to ask what we'd suggest she could do to learn more about music history that doesn't involve going back to college. It's a good question, or at least, now that I think of it, I have no idea what to suggest. What good intro books are there that aren't textbooks? Or miserable piffle? Book People in Austin, which is a good bookstore but which reflects the general Austin indifference to classical music, has a pathetic section that's mostly "Dummies Guide to Classical Music" sort of things, but I've never looked at them to see if they're any good. I suspect not. I summon the awesome power of the blogosphere! Fellow music geeks, what would you suggest?

Actually, I just had the greatest idea. Roxanne, I urge you to buy the DVD box set of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. Don't let the name fool you, it's not just for kids. This is the greatest tour-de-force of music-appreesh pedagogy of all time. It is COP SHOW in the biblical sense. I watch this stuff for fun, because Leonard Bernstein, like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, is the man. He's so huge he is, in fact, The Men.

A clip from the very first one, in 1958:

Bernstein is so emo. Geez, when's the last time you saw something like this on CBS? In prime time?

I just plugged in the categories that correspond to the uncoordinated bits of this post, and I see that it says "Life, Teaching, Humor," which sounds awful, like Mr. Holland's Opus or something. OK, I added "cop show." That's better.

Washington

Phil Ford

Because I'm in full headless-chicken mode, I'm offering a Presidents Day post a day late. This video courtesy of Youtube (where else?), in praise of the most cop show of U.S. presidents. Just how cop show? Just look. A warning: lotsa cussing, probably not safe for work.

Copper Shower

Phil Ford

I lied; I still have one more post to write this week. Can't help myself. A couple of good comments have been posted in response to my earlier "cop show" post. This calls for linkage!

My colleague, music theorist Byron Almen, deserves credit for some of the R & D that went into the whole "cop show" concept. Although I coined the term, Byron came up with the "cop show" version of the high-five*, as well as a number of suggestions along the lines of Kip W.'s "lawyer show." "Game show," for example, might be what you say if something is actually pretty lame. "Gun show" might work best in rural areas. "Saturday morning cartoon show," while prolix, might have a certain cachet among the under-12 set. Really, it's a pretty elastic concept. But folks that know are gonna be saying "cop show" before the end of the year. Bringing up Chow-Yun Fat, as Michael M. does, just clinches the deal. In fact, the played-out term "phat" could be reinvigorated if we all started calling things "chow-yun phat." But perhaps I'm reaching.

I forgot to mention that interested parties can see a full discussion of "cop show" and related matters at Unfogged, where Ben Wolfson kindly linked to this post. 289 comments on that thread. Can anyone doubt the eventual supremacy of "cop show"? Ben also perpetrated the first blogospheric use of "cop show" on his own blog. The main bulk of his post, though, is a meditation on one of the pitfalls of free improvisation -- figuring out how to end. Ben writes:

One of the things that most frequently bothers me at such concerts is the problem of ending a set.  A few times in Berlin it would transpire that one or two players would gradually decrease the volume or intensity of their playing, and I'd think, ok, we're winding down, soon this bit will come to a close.  But instead the player would keep going just a little too long, and one of the other players, apparently thinking things were set to continue just a bit longer, or wanting to get his own piece in, or finding the first musician's continuing without support unbearable, or god knows what, would join in, but not in any way that provided a basis for the music as a whole to pick up, just a little bit of sympathy for the first.  But then a vicious cycle is embarked upon, and the thing limps along forever, going nowhere, doing nothing, always half-ended.  No one, seemingly, can think of anything else to do, but neither can they just actually stop.  This is very annoying!

This one of the pitfallls of the whole free-improvisation-as-a-synecdoche-of-life thing (and, by extension, the whole avant-garde breaking-down-the-barrrier-between-art-and-life thing). Life itself is sometimes pretty boring. Our conversations sometimes diesel on in exactly this way, with everyone sort of standing around hoping something will happen and trying, ineffectually, to make something happen. Which reminds us of one of the reasons we decided to have art in the first place: it gives us the opportunity to experience conversations (real and metaphorical) where everything is cop show all the time.

OK, still not buying the whole "cop show" thing? Here's more evidence that cop show is the new awesome:

1. "The Boss," a cue from Orson Welles' 1958 film noir Touch of Evil. Films noir count as cop shows -- just old, really cool cop shows. In this case, we have bongos, ostinatos, and screaming trumpets. But we don't have an irregular meter, for which we need . . .

2. The main title theme from Johnny Staccato, by Elmer Bernstein. 5/4 meter, ostinatos, screaming trumpets, and John Cassavetes in the title role as a jazz-loving gumshoe in a late-1950s TV cop show series. I've never seen the show, but the soundtrack is swingin'. The show is apparently pretty silly, but it's worth noting that without the money Cassavetes got from playing Johnny Staccato (and who wouldn't want to play a character with that name?), he might never have made Shadows, which is usually hailed as the first masterpiece of American independent film. Goes to show you that the line between beat and beatsploitation is pretty thin at times. Maybe all the time.

3. And one more for good measure: Rack 'Em Up, from the soundtrack to The Pawnbroker, a mid-1960s movie about a holocaust survivor who runs a pawnshop in Harlem. Quincy Jones scored this one, which has cop-show-type tracks on it, even if it is not, technically, a cop show. But we have irregular meter, a bass ostinato, bongos, hipster mouth-jive (don't quite know what else to call it), AND Quincy Jones, so who's complaining? By the way, the bass ostinato is the exact same one (with the same bass-and-piano unison scoring) as what we hear when the Sharks and Jets break into their first rumble in West Side Story. Here's a bit of transcription. Cheers! See you next week, for real now.

* Step one: Raise your fist in black-power-salute fashion, but do not raise your fist above your head. Step two: move your arm from a vertical position to a 45-degree angle in front of your face. Step three: yell "cop show" and bump your arm with someone who is similarly disposed.

Cop Show!

Phil Ford

We who till the fields of music scholarship -- music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, to name the three main tribes -- are used to a certain degree of obscurity. AMS, SMT, and SEM added together do not even come close to making one MLA. We find ourselves mocked by our eye doctors and hair stylists when we try to describe what we do for a living. So it's kind of surprising that my ethnomusicological brothers and sisters have managed to insinuate themselves into the national political discourse and become the butt of a certain strain of leaden political "humor."

A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan posted a link to the Society for Ethnomusicology's statement against torture. Sullivan, one of the most influential political bloggers in the U.S., is also one of the loudest voices raised against the Bush administration's torture policy. His single post has therefore created its own meme. As Sullivan predicted, the bloggers at the National Review Corner have started cracking wise. Cuz there's nothing funnier than torture. Torture plus ethnomusicology? Laff riot.

You know, musicologists and ethnomusicologists have had their differences over the years -- this is why they have separate scholarly societies and hiring lines and academic journals. And the quarrel between the disciplines has sometimes been acrimonious, not least because their differences have often been framed in moral terms. Like, if historical musicology focuses on western art music at the expense of other musical traditions, it's imperialism. Or, if ethnomusicologists focus on the social rather than aesthetic dimensions of music, it's because they're a bunch of philistines.

But all that is forgotten. C'mere and let Phil give you a big ol'hug. You guys are awesome. I'm just proud to see some music scholars telling it like it is -- torture is wrong -- and getting noticed for it. And if you annoy a few torture-hungry freaks in the process, then that is totally COP SHOW.

Yes, cop show. That's my new slang term for "awesome." I've been worried about "awesome." It's getting clapped out, and I don't want to be the last guy to use an outmoded piece of slang, like some loser wearing a leisure suit in 1982 and saying "groovy." (Of course, "groovy" is now OK.) Now, it's not easy to make a plausible bit of new slang. And whatever is going to take the place of "awesome" has some pretty big shoes to fill. But cop shows embody a certain all-American swaggering cool that anyone who has been the Beastie Boys video for "Sabotage" will immediately recognize. Cop show cops have savoir-faire, derring-do, and telegenic brutality. Yes, I'm contradicting my own anti-torture flexing in the previous paragraph, but consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, etc., and anyway, it's just a show.

Do you not see now why "cop show" is the perfect new word for "awesome"? No? Then allow me to acquiant you with The Taking of Pelham One Two Three:

Now, this is cop show: a 1974 thriller about terrorism in the New York subways, with a soundtrack by David Shire. Like earlier film composers (Elmer Bernstein in The Sweet Smell of Success, for instance) Shire wanted to use the jazz idiom to suggest the "organized chaos" of New York City. But he found that what worked best was not jazz as such, but twelve-tone music based on a row whose intervals suggest jazz. Shire said that "it was the knowledge of progressive jazz, in which I had had a lot of immersion in college, that showed me that certain intervals are generally the ones that give modern jazz harmonies their characteristic flavor: the major seventh, the minor third, and their inversions: the minor second and major sixth." Shire created a row in which every note is related to its neighbor by these intervals: A, C, B, Bb, C#, D, Eb, F#, G, E, F, G#. The main title opens with the prime form of this row, laid down over a monster two-note funk groove. Twelve! Tone! Funk!

And if any doubt remains that "cop show!" is what you will henceforth be shouting at sweet touchdown passes, small victories at work, and your friends' weddings, then the main title sequence of Steve McQueen's 1968 thriller Bullitt will surely close the deal.

Music by Lalo Schifrin of Mission Impossible fame. The groove; the guitar; the mysterious black-and-white faces dissolving into shadowed transparent shifting title cue letters -- I don't know what it means, and it won't get any clearer by the end of the movie, but I know it's cop show.

Short Attention Span Theater

Phil Ford

I'm frazzled and burned out and stressed, so this will be a short-attention-span post. First, American Idol:

1. Next week, we're off to Hollywood. Yay!!!!

2. The "other door" trope? Called it.

3. That guy who called himself "the incredible hulk" and who was the cousin of that other guy who sang Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" and actually sang well? Obviously stoned. And sounded like Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants. For once I kind of enjoyed the freak show aspect. He left with a smile on his face, at least, and everybody was in on the joke.

4. I'm hating the fake ginned-up drama -- the judges' badly-acted-out frowny faces of self-doubt, "I think we've made a mistake," the girl called back to re-audition, the redemption . . . I hope they're not going to keep doing this. I like artifice as much as the next guy -- probably more, actually -- but  AI is not professional wrestling.

And that's it for AI. See you in Hollywood, baby!

Elsewhere in the news, there are new entries in my random iPod challenge: Tha Notorious T.R.J. at The Rambler, and the redoubtable Charles Downey at Ionarts. The Rambler's list is the most fearsomely, forbiddingly hip list I've ever seen:  I mean, the guy has Mark Applebaum on his player, fer cry eye. And I had never heard of Frenchbloke, but any DJ who scratches Stockhausen and samples Tom Baker is someone I have to hear. Thanks for the tip, T.R.J. Ionarts' list is especially interesting for its running commentary on why a classical collection is so badly served by the random play feature.  The "random" is really a trope of expression that seems uniquely a part of American pop culture. I think of this often when students (usually non-music-majors in my courses crosslisted with American Studies) write essays that describe some music event or other as "random." My student Leanne (a fellow Canuck) once pointed out that this seems like an especially American thing to say. Anyway, "random" is not a trope in the European scene before the late 1960s, and maybe not even then. Even Stockhausen is a little too purposeful to be random in the true American sense. I'm rambling. Anyway, yeah, classical playlists don't work with "random," and pop playlists do. Interesting. Hey, Alex Ross, are you gonna take the random iPod challenge?

**UPDATE**: Scraps has posted his list. Ultravox, Mingus, Devo, The DKs' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," a song that was once a footnote in a Barthelme short story -- yeah! Dial M has the hippest readers.

Speaking of random, by way of Julian Sanchez comes this post about a bizarre but wonderful situationist street-art . . . . uh, thing.

I still haven't unveiled my new, self-invented slang term for "awesome." I will soon, and I promise it will be . . . awesome.

whoa

OK, I lied. I can't stop blogging when there is so much awesomeness in the universe. Like, uh, the universe 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the big bang. This is an infrared picture of some of the first objects in the universe: huge, extremely bright objects unlike anything in the recent universe -- maybe supercharged black holes, maybe superhuge suns.

I tend to throw the word "awesome" around a lot, but this is literally awesome -- as in, inspiring awe. I have no musical angle on this at all.