What Did You Do To The Site?

I want to apologise for the past few days of graphical mayhem on the site. I think the storm is mostly over. It’s not the result of any nefarious doings or some vast interweb meltdown. Nope. Just me dickin’ around.

As some of you are aware, I am constantly making small changes to the web site. I try to ‘slipstream’ these so that they are largely unnoticeable as they happen, but over time the site slowly morphs. And all the while, I try to keep ‘the brand’ consistent.

And then there is the occasional tweak that has, what they call over at BP Oil ahem ‘unintended consequences’. And then what you end up with is, as they say in the old country: A lotta tsuris is what you’ve got mine friend.

OK, maybe they say only that in the circumcised bits of Ireland.

Just so ya know… I keep trying to make the site easier to use for people with disabilities and small displays such as iPhone users. (One might say that many of you smartyphone users are by definition disabled with digital smugness but that’s a rant for another day.) Anyhoo, I keep working on various lo-tech solutions to getting a better look, with less scrolling for simpler displays and sometimes? I mess up.

You might be asking yourself why the heck spend so much time on this sort of crap. It’s a fair question. Frankly, when I see a musician’s web site that looks too good it pretty much means that he’s really a web designer—but who spends his nights posing as an artiste with a baroque web site. In fact, there is growing evidence that there may be a law of physics whereby the quality of a guy’s music is inversely related to the quality of his website. I look at it as a tool—it’s the primary way I interact with y’all. It’s my business card. So I take it personally. But I never want to convey the impression that the form (the site) matters more than the substance (the music.) Hopefully the occasional disaster such as you’ve seen over the past two days is reassuring that such is definitely not the case.

And fair warning, this may not be the end. There are a couple of tweaks remaining that you probably don’t notice but which are driving me nuts. And then there is a whole bunch of fantastic new content I’ll be posting in the next few weeks to roll out the Re-Mastered Positive. (Yeah, it’s really happening.) I’m pretty sure that this new content will roll out looking good. Like most problems in life, the sort of site chaos you’ve witnessed recently usually only happens when one is not expecting it. The stuff you’re actually looking out for usually work out OK. Right?

Getting People To Dance: The New Download Scheme

Been doing a lot of dance gigs recently—building the ol’ chops to play live again. And I’ve been wondering about why people dance to some songs and not others. There are lots of songs that we’ll play that are just slammin’ but the dancers? Ho humsville. Then other songs, that everyone in the band feels totally ambivalent about? The dancers lose their minds. There is a middle-aged stampede to hump the stuffed tiger. (Don’t ask.)

Now you could say that the above situation is because ‘the band’ likes songs that are more musically interesting than the dancers, but this is only partly true. Though I would agree that there sure is some perverse (and inverse) correlation between musical quality and general dance-ability, this is not always for certain; not by a country mile. In fact, I can’t figure it out. All I can say about it is this metaphor:

I’ve railed against Lady Gaga’s lack of musicality before. But since then I’ve learned something else: people think she’s seriously hot. I mean, teenage girls have told me in complete seriousness that they believe her to be one of the truly beautiful women that ever trod the earth and drew breath. And I think she’s a serious candidate for a collar. And a licence. If you take my meaning. So there must be some generational thing, governing everything from the ears to the eyes to the schwanstücker that makes it almost impossible to figure out what people outside your tribe like or want.

Which of course, explains completely why I changed the Freebie Song Download scheme.

You see, people were downloading songs in records numbers—not paying for them in any higher numbers, mind you, but it actually has taken a slight bite outta the number of illegal downloads I’ve seen in the past six months. Cool. But the thing is, I was so eager to embrace this whole ‘free’ thing (which I think is a total crock o’ shit, by the way—see above discussion of generation differences—I forgot to throw ethics in that list.) So I changed it up slightly. I’m makin’ ya work for it a bit.

What I’m asking for is that everyone who wants a free song submit—the interweb’s term, not mine, to being a part of my mailing list. (Getting back to the ‘submit’ thing, I could make that work for me. ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES!) OK, maybe not.

Anyhoo, it seems reasonable to ask y’all to be a part of things, at least a little, in return for some free samples. I’m gonna change up the list of freebies frequently to highlight tunes that most people never get to check out unless they break down and get the CDs.

And I’m gonna track who keeps comin’ back to the well (something marketers call ‘conversion’.) This is all not so much because I have pretensions of major sales increases, but rather just because my curiosity gets piqued. Like the dance music I spoke of above, I’m interested in predicting which techniques will motivate people best. And like the above, the hope of course, is to find a system that I the musician find helpful to achieving my goals and that you still find enjoyable enough to dance to. I think Dick Clark woulda called that… oh… about an 85.

But Lady Gaga probably has no idea who Dick Clark is. Is Dick Clark still even alive? Perhaps just his hair.

At any rate. Please let me know what you think of the new download scheme. And the tunes you download, of course.

OK, It’s August. So Where The Heck Is Positive Re-Mastered?

Dear JC,

On 24 May you wrote that the re-mastered version of Positive would be available by 1 August of this year.
Well, it’s now the fifteenth and I’ve heard nothing about this for quite some time.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that your last record was also delayed. And the one before that. And so was the one before that.

You know I support you, mate. But let me ask you: Why bother telling people about new albums if you never come anywhere near the target? Why not try putting out a new album after it’s done and not talking about it beforehand?

Hoisted on my own blog-petard. How embarrassing.

The raw truth is this: The sun got in my eyes. So it fell out of me bag on the way to school. And my dog ate it. And then things got really tough.

But seriously ladies and germs, there’s been the usual delays which result from trying to do too many darned things all at once and expecting everything to fall into place. Moving is one thing. The rip off of my drum set being another. The ongoing health crap.

That said, these are all just excuses and my correspondent’s points are all well taken. Unfortunately, in order to sell these coasters of sonic platinum, I kinda/sorta have to have goals. I need to set a time-line if only because I am desperately trying to target another frequent complaint from my most loyal fans. Which goes something like this old joke:

“JC, with your amazing marketing skills, if you’d have met Harlan Sanders back in the day? We’d now know the Colonel’s secret recipe as ‘Hot Dead Bird In A Box For Three Bucks’.”

Guilty as charged. I wanted ever so much to make this record different and not keep missing deadlines. Because the real truth is that if I want to sell this thing like it’s got “a secret blend of eleven herbs and spices” I gotta get it out to “the press” at least a month before it goes into production. It’s called lead time and it’s why I can’t just wait until I “get ‘er done, Larry.”

Anyhoo, rest assured things proceed apace. We’re probably looking at an October 1, 2010 ship date—still plenty of time to get ‘er done for holiday shopping and to stage a wee bit of a comeback tour. (Fingers crossed!)

I was gonna put in some specifically cool things I’m working on to make Positive Re-Mastered the greatest thing since this (Insanity or genius? You make the call!) but shame prevents me from making any other claims that may come back to bite me in the ass.

So for now, I’ll simply tell you that I’ll ping you back when I have more hard facts and fewer predictions on offer. I simply don’t want to oversell anymore.

I mean, seriously, if Positive Re-Mastered redefines the outer limits of beauty and profundity in recorded sound, it’s not something that I should be talking about ahead of time. Now is it?

Another Type Of Compression: Or Why ‘Poker Face’ Is The Biggest Thing On The Planet

Steve (Porcupine Tree) Wilson has been writing a bunch lately about ‘the evils of compression in music listening.’ I’ve certainly done my share of ranting on this topic. The thing I rail about now is, to use that oft quoted Marshall McLuhan phrase… “The medium is the message.”

Listening to current music is about as satisfying to me as listening to shopping music back when I was a kid. There are no chord changes. No changes at all. The music -itself- has become compressed. I have heard this referred to this phenomenon as ‘old-fartitis.’ It afflicted my parents when Elvis came out. It afflicted my grandparents when Glenn Miller came out. Every generation loses the previous one due to fundamental changes in music that strike their elders as not a good thing. There’s no bridging the gap simply because the old guard doesn’t agree with the change; not just because they don’t get it.

Listen to most pop music today. Exhibit ‘A’ is Lady Gaga’s Poker Face. Let’s ignore the whole prurient subject matter which makes me cringe when I see twelve year olds rapping to it. (Whoops, slipped into old fartitis mode there. Sorry.) The thing I do want to focus on is that the song Poker Face, is pretty average in many ways. It’s just two chords over and over. There’s really not much change between chorus and verse, other than an increase or decrease in backgrounds. To me this is spillover from rap and dance—their simplistic forms have become normative. Not being judgmental; just tellin’ it like it is.

Now here’s my contention: music has changed in the above ways. But not just because of some zeitgeist of taste, but just as much because simple musical structures sound way better over a crappy MP3 player. In other words, Poker Face sounds great on an iPod. And most people have decided that convenience (portable music, computer speakers) are more important than quality listening, so producers are inclined to create sounds that track well with those transducers.

Because the corollary is that music with lots of subtlety sounds worse over cheap transducers. I mean, ever try listening to real jazz or classical or whatever on an iPod? Yuk. I live for bebop and Beethoven and I can’t stomach it for very long. If that’s the case, I can’t imagine drawing too many young ‘uns to serious music if it can’t be heard well through a one cm earbud.

What’s one of the, if not the most popular vocal technique of the past decade? Auto-Tune. Forget T-Pain. I hear it in country, pop, everywhere. Why? I would contend not that it’s a novel, sound so much but because it reduces the vocal down to it’s most basic components. There’s no bits wasted on nuances which cannot be appreciated on cheap speakers. It not only makes crap vocalists sound good, but it makes everyone fit ‘better’ within a more digital (simplistic) mix.

In short, music today is what it is because anything more complicated is simply wasted bits when yer listening on an iPod. So, why not simply pound out that mad bass, baby.

As I’ve been realising lately with my forays into disco madness (I’ve been playing bass in a disco group on the side), there have always been ‘one chord wonders’ like Cameo’s ‘Word Up!’ and so on. But I submit that these used to be novelties. What made them interesting was that not every song was like them. Sure there were a number of songs like that, but it was understood that they were a bit out there.

Now? Tunes like ‘Word Up’ are the standard (Way to go, Larry!) And again, I say it’s because they sound better on a crappy MP3 when yer in traffic than something with lots of nuance.

I believe Mcluhan was prescient, but even more than he realised because his observations carried over with a vengeance into popular music. If we ask, “Is the crappy (overly simple) medium creating the crappy (overly simple) music? Or vice versa?” The answer to both sides of the argument is definitely ‘yes’.

Kill ‘Em All

Everybody has a “kill ‘em all” moment—at least once in a while. Everybody. Mother Theresa had ‘em.

My latest issue of Time Magazine hit my mailbox and the moment I looked at the cover I had one:

Not immediately, mind you. It took a couple of seconds to register. I mean, at first all I saw was a very pretty girl in a beautiful hijab. I mean—look at those eyes! At the same instant I did think (no cliche) “What’s wrong with this picture?”

See it took a couple of seconds because I just couldn’t imagine this. I’ve read plenty of gruesome tales from various histories (Roman, Persian, Henry IV, etc.) where such things happened. But that was like, oh… a THOUSAND YEARS AGO.

It literally took a couple of seconds before my brain would accept the visual information being streamed in through me glassies. I’ve read a bunch of psychology articles which talk about the old ‘deer in the headlights’ deal—people hesitate for a moment or two because they literally cannot process that what they are experiencing could be happening. So they drown. Or fail to duck. The brain just takes time to accept data that has to be absurd or a hallucination because it’s just too crappy.

And when it hit me? I immediately thought: Kill ‘em all. Just kill ‘em. Nuke ‘em. Whatever. They are profligate, unreachable sons o’ bitches who are evolutionarily five hundred years behind some basic norms of human decency. They are like a ten year old who found dad’s gun. They can inflict way more pain and suffering than they are mature enough to be allowed to handle. I don’t care if it’s patronising. Hell, I wish I could be more patronising and actually act like dad and punish ‘em. Because frankly? They don’t think straight. And I’ve heard all the arguments like Thomas Merton and the whole, “you think yourselves so much more moral because you kill your enemies from great heights and don’t see their faces.” Well, ya know what? That sure as shit does make one more moral, pal. Because when you can go right up to a child and cut their nose off like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now? You have reached a whole new level of disregard for human life. Some rationalisations are better than others, mate.

Now, if you’ve read this far, then please understand: this ain’t about politics. I don’t wanna hear about how you hated Bush. Or love Barack. Or whatever. Because frankly? I don’t give a shit about Afghanistan. They’re just some Rudyard Kipling story I read as a kid about weird people in turbans constantly going at it with white people who are in a climate that’s just too damned hot for a civilised Englishman to be fighting over. What—ehverrrr. It’s a nice story, but that’s about it for me. These people have obviously been suffering since before Alexander. And we may have wasted a ton o’ money and time, but whether the USA was right, wrong or indifferent in “goin’ in.” This picture tells me that we haven’t messed things up any more than anyone else has. Or any more than they were already doing themselves. As we say back in Ireland, ‘Different bread; same sandwich.’ We may have changed the flavour of the pain for a while, but these people would be suffering whether we were there or not. That’s what the piccie says to me.

And hopefully, dear reader, I hope you’re mature enough to realise that my initial visceral response has long since passed and I do not seriously advocate doing anything violent because of this young woman’s plight. As I wrote in the first line, everyone has visceral feelings like that. But we’re adults, right? We get past it. And, beyond the obvious ‘wrong’ factor, as I wrote in the previous paragraph, it wouldn’t make any difference anyhoo. Even if I could somehow magically get that young lady a nose job or a plane ticket out? That would probably just incite the locals to do her in. Or her entire family. Hoo boy.

But that’s not what this column is about.

What I really want to say—what I coulda said in a couple of sentences is this:

I salute Time Magazine. This cover is a work of artistic, civic and marketing genius. No exaggeration. I can’t think of the last time I saw one photo that said so much; that not only moved me, but so perfectly summed up a situation; and then kept paying dividends over and over as I keep looking at it. In fact, I cannot stop staring at it. Or thinking about it. (Which is pretty amazing considering how awful it is to contemplate or even look at.)

This image portrays a woman of great dignity and beauty. And then of course there is THE HORROR. How many works of art mesh all three of those attributes. And still make a buck. (Sorry to lower the loft for a minute but the idea is to sell a product, right? If this be sensationalism? It’s sensationalism done right.)

They accomplished what I try to do—take an idea that canot be expressed in even 100,000 words (let alone 1,000) and express it in a way that is even more meaningful. By not using words.

The best compliment I can think of to bestow upon this article? I don’t think I’ll read the actual text for a while. How can it possibly measure up to something this potent and powerful. It needs no words. I wish I could write a piece of music this deep.