As I write this, I am nearly done with my first graphic novel script. I was up all night on Monday discussing it with my collaborator. And I’m really tired, so this should be a short one this week. My apologies in advance for knocking it out in an hour. I’ll be back up to snuff next week. For now, though, a quick look at the first quarter of 2005:

After a slow January, the music starts flooding in on February 22 with Tori Amos’ new one, called The Beekeeper. I have decided to take a different tack with this one, and not compare it to her first three albums. I found that I could only enjoy Scarlet’s Walk, her 2003 document of banality, if I forgot entirely that it was supposed to be a Tori Amos album and listened to it like the work of some new artist. It still sucked, mostly, but I discovered that listening to all 70-some minutes of it didn’t fill me with quite the same rage as it did the first time I heard it, expecting, oh, I don’t know, a Tori Amos album.

Anyway, The Beekeeper is another epic record – 19 tracks over 79 minutes. And it seems that Amos has discovered the Hammond organ, as well, which could add a blues and gospel element to some of the songs. All well and good, but song titles like “The Power of Orange Knickers,” “Original Sinsuality” and “Hoochie Woman” don’t really fill me with confidence. On the surface, it doesn’t look like she responded to the primary criticism of Scarlet’s Walk, which is that if you don’t have 70 minutes of good material to record, don’t record 70 minutes of material.

On March 1, the Mars Volta screams back into record stores with Frances the Mute, another 70-some-minute slab. (Their website notes the running time as “one million hours.”) The difference is, there are only five songs on the Volta’s record, and three of them contain sub-sections, just like all your favorite ‘70s prog records. Wait, you don’t have any favorite ’70s prog records? Then this might not be for you… I’m excited about it, though. The first Mars Volta album was huge and complex, and this one looks like it tries to construct a skyscraper on that record’s foundation. Ambition is a wonderful thing. And besides, I have to hear a track called “Multiple Spouse Wounds.”

Speaking of ambition, two weeks later System of a Down comes back with the first of two new albums slated for this year. Hypnotize is the March installment, and Mesmerize is set to hit in September. System is one of the most original metal bands to come along in ages, and that they feel emboldened to let loose over two discs is heartening. Perhaps the industry’s polarization is a good thing – it might separate the singles-oriented pop stars from the album-oriented artists, and inspire those artists to go for huge statements. We love huge statements.

New stuff for the rest of March includes Moby’s Hotel, featuring his vocals likely ruining nearly every track; Porcupine Tree’s new one Deadwing; Over the Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer; and the long-awaited new Beck beat-o-rama, Guero. The Beck album is interesting – I’m finding that I look forward to his atmospheric, acoustic albums more than his pop-culture-in-a-blender funky-fests, and it’s fascinating to me that he’s divided his catalog so evenly between them. I’ll hopefully enjoy Guero as much as I did Odelay, but I’m happy it’s coming out mainly because that means we’re even closer to another Sea Change.

April kicks off with the second solo album by former Toad the Wet Sprocket singer Glen Phillips. This one’s called Winter Pays for Summer, and hopefully includes a set of lyrics comparable to that on his first record, Abulum. Indigo Girl Amy Ray releases her second solo album, Prom, on April 12, the same day as the fourth Garbage album, Bleed Like Me, and the new Starflyer 59, Talking Voice Vs. Singing Voice. I never got around to reviewing it, but as I expected, most people misunderstood Starflyer’s last album, I Am the Portuguese Blues, which was a collection of older songs re-recorded. This new one should continue their evolution where Old left off.

And then, the really good stuff starts coming. Or, rather, what I expect will be the really good stuff. On April 26, Ben Folds returns with Songs for Silverman, his second solo album. The good news is that it only contains one song from the trio of EPs he released, and that song is the gorgeous “Give Judy My Notice.” The better news is that the single, “Landed,” is lovely – Folds has succeeded again in crafting something deceptively simple that sounds like a classic. If you remember when Elton John was good, well, this sounds like that.

Also on the 26th is Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, a 33-track double album from the Eels. Now, I liked Shootenanny!, the band’s last Dreamworks album, but it turns out that Shootenanny! (I just love typing that title) was cranked out in 10 days while on a break from recording Blinking Lights. Eels frontman E has been working on this thing for more than two years, and he calls it his most personal since 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues, probably his finest record. I mentioned before how Beck likes to divide his more sonically adventurous pursuits and his more emotional explorations. Well, E is a master of combining the two, and it sounds like Blinking Lights could be his masterpiece.

The following week, May 3, brings us the new Aimee Mann, called The Forgotten Arm. Wait… called the what?!? Yep, this is Mann’s first major departure from the low-key sorrow-pop she’s perfected over four previous solo albums. The Forgotten Arm is a concept album set in the 1970s, concerning two lovers who meet at the Virginia State Fair. An Aimee Mann rock opera. Should be fascinating.

And we conclude with Nine Inch Nails, missing in action since 1999’s intense double record The Fragile. Trent Reznor has eradicated the prog-rock influences on the fourth (yes, only fourth) NIN full-length, With Teeth. He’s described it as a bunch of short, explosive songs, which brings to mind his Broken EP. It’s no surprise to me – after The Fragile, there were really only two directions he could go: back to basics, or onward to Tales from Topographic Oceans. We’ll see in May if he made the right choice.

There’s more coming, too, from the likes of Audioslave, Zach de la Rocha, Michael Penn, OutKast, Sigur Ros, Dan Wilson, Weezer, and two albums from the Fiery Furnaces, one of which features their grandmother. Oh, and Operation Mindcrime II from Queensryche, which should be like a really captivating five-car pileup. Don’t ever trust the needle, indeed.

* * * * *

Another year, another Ani DiFranco album.

A year ago this month, the Little Folksinger That Could released Educated Guess, the first album she made after dissolving her band. She’d painstakingly assembled that band, debuting them on the not-bad-in-retrospect jam Up Up Up Up Up Up in 1999, and they became the perfect extension of her experiments in folk-funk. The horn arrangements, especially on her double-disc opus Revelling/Reckoning, grew to titanic, dissonant proportions, and her vocals took on scat-singing elements, complimenting her slap-bang guitar playing. It was quite the evolution, culminating on 2003’s fittingly titled Evolve.

But DiFranco has a history of taking evolutions as far as she thinks they can go, and then trying something else. Educated Guess erased the slate, stripping her sound down to nothing but guitar, bass and vocals, all of which she performed herself. It sounds like a great idea, and hopefully it was a fine experience for her, but the album itself was a dismal listen, full of go-nowhere songs and demo quality arrangements. That’s the downside of owning your own record label – no one can tell you not to release records like Educated Guess.

Now here’s Knuckle Down, DiFranco’s 15th full-length, and it’s very nearly the exact opposite of its predecessor. Where DiFranco performed every part on Guess, here she is joined by a dozen other musicians, including pianist Patrick Warren and violinist Andrew Bird. Further, she has invited another musician to co-produce this record with her – a first for Ani. That musician is guitar chameleon Joe Henry, and Knuckle Down’s most glaring flaw is that he never plays a note. Still, his presence behind the boards is a whole new level of openness for DiFranco, almost as if she’s done proving her independence, and is strong enough now to let people in.

That newfound sense invigorates the songwriting as well. DiFranco has long eschewed big choruses, and it’s been a long time since she’s made easily digestible records, but she just may have written a hit with “Studying Stones.” It wafts in on DiFranco’s guitar and Bird’s lovely violin, and spreads its wings like few songs she has written since the days of Little Plastic Castle. Some fans will claim that it goes too far in the adult-pop direction, but I think it’s the sweetest thing she’s done in years.

The prickly side of DiFranco rears its head more than once here, don’t worry. “Manhole” pops and crackles, and “Lag Time” has a nifty syncopated melody that takes a few repetitions to sink in. But overall, Knuckle Down is just this side of accessible, especially on “Sunday Morning” and the sprightly closer “Recoil.” Lyrically, it’s an album full of hope breaking through loss, and she confines her political ruminations to “Paradigm,” a story from her childhood about working in a campaign office with her mother.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Ani DiFranco album if she didn’t throw a curveball, and Knuckle Down has a doozy. “Parameters” is a spoken-word piece about fear and the after-effects of an assault, and it is utterly captivating. In the past, the poetry sprinkled throughout DiFranco’s albums has been little more than a speed bump, and sometimes has even destroyed the flow completely. “Parameters,” on the other hand, is an undeniable highlight, and in some ways, the rest of the album can’t compete. It is her most successful spoken piece, and I won’t ruin it here by excerpting.

Knuckle Down is a confident, assured record, one that finds Ani DiFranco back at the top of her game. It still feels like a step in a new direction – she’s arranged strings here for the first time, for example – and there’s no doubt that she’s continuing to evolve. But for an artist who often makes difficult albums on the way to sublime ones, DiFranco has turned in a delightful surprise here, one that reaffirms the rewards of following her twisty, idiosyncratic career.

Next week, Bright Eyes.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Like many people my age, I swore I would never get old. And now that it’s happening, I’m constantly surprised. The number of questions I ask myself these days that can honestly be answered with “because I’m old” is staggering.

I’m trying not to let my advancing age render me obsolete, especially in the world of new music, about which I care deeply. I vowed many years ago never to turn into an old person, one who has his old favorites from when he was a kid, and lets new stuff pass him by. “I don’t know what the kids are into these days, leave me and Tony Bennett alone.” You know, those people.

But I’m finding that my favorite bands from high school (the Cure, the Choir, the Alarm) all still hold positions in my pantheon, and new acts have to be absolutely amazing (Ben Folds, Rufus Wainwright) to join them. My favorite album of 2004 is technically 38 years old, and this year more than any other in recent memory, the top 10 lists of my fellow critics were stuffed with names I’d never heard, attached to albums I’d never sampled. I’ve lost touch, somehow.

So here I am at the beginning of a new year, once again catching up with all the new records I missed. I know enough about myself to know which ones I will not like at all, just from descriptions and reviews, but I usually find a few I want to hear, and during the course of the year, I usually pick up a few more. This year, I’ve found three that passed me by – and admittedly, I’d heard of all three before seeing them in critics’ lists, so I think I did pretty well. I owned eight of Pitchfork’s top 50 of the year before reading the list, including two of the top 10, which for me is a really good average. (I had three of 2003’s top 50.)

This is usually an exercise in depression for me, as I try to figure out just why certain discs get so much acclaim. But this year was apparently so good for all kinds of music that even the scrappy indie and rap records I have chosen made me varying shades of happy. Not SMiLE happy, by any stretch of the imagination – none of these three are in any danger of bumping any of the records off my top 10 list, or even the honorable mentions. But happy nonetheless.

Let’s start with the Walkmen. Their second album is called Bows and Arrows, and I hated it upon first listen. The songs are simple and noisy, the production is intentionally muddy, and lead throat Hamilton Leithauser has no business being a professional singer, so out of tune and sloppy are his caterwauls. The first few times through, this album is a total mess, and not worthy of release, never mind your 10 to 15 bucks.

But give it time, and the record stops sounding so prickly and lets you in. After a while I stopped bitching that “The Rat” is so dirt-simple and let it take me, and it worked. Same goes for the oddly atmospheric “No Christmas While I’m Talking” and the at-first dismissible piano ballad “Hang On, Siobhan.” Given some time and an open mind, I even stopped thinking of Liethauser as ridiculously untalented and started admiring his emotional delivery and raw power.

I would bet that the Walkmen are a pretty impressive live band, in fact, and that Bows and Arrows is an attempt at capturing that live sound on record. It’s incredibly messy – the guitars and organs bleed into each other, and the drums sound like they were recorded from five miles away – but after some time with it, those qualities become attributes. The blatant Dylan-ness of “New Year’s Eve” is a speed bump, but the band recovers amazingly well with the anthemic “Thinking of a Dream I Had,” and the concluding title track is probably the closest this band will come to an epic track.

Do not expect brilliance or anything resembling polish from the Walkmen, and you’ll be all right. Let it wash over you, and try not to think about it. This is a band that thrives on an emotional wave, and if you let yourself be carried by it, then Bows and Arrows will work for you. If not, you’ll probably be turned off by the thick, noisy mud and the deranged special ed student yelling atop it. Just warning you.

Mike Skinner fares quite a bit better, but to be fair, he doesn’t try to sing. Skinner is the sole member of the Streets, the celebrated British rap outfit, and his second album is called A Grand Don’t Come for Free. I avoided Skinner’s debut, Original Pirate Material, for reasons I can’t recall. It may have something to do with the fact that any given rap album has to work 30 times harder than any given pop album to grab my attention.

Well, Skinner works hard, and he deserves all his accolades. A Grand Don’t Come for Free is ambitious in ways that rap rarely tries to be – it’s a full-fledged concept record, a day in the life of a ne’er-do-well, full of clubs and drugs and missing money and cell phones and cheating hearts. It has a cast of characters, and sets them in orbit about each other masterfully. Skinner’s alter ego (and who knows how autobiographical this record is) starts his day by losing a thousand bucks and meeting a girl, and by record’s end he’s found the one and lost the other.

Skinner tells the tale in British slang, which I only know from British comics and Guy Ritchie movies, but he carries you along despite some confusing terms. “Fit,” for example, means “very good looking,” apparently, but the context of “Fit But You Know It” clears that right up. Skinner wanders all over this record, almost in a stream of consciousness, delineating his character and his relationships through a harsh inner monologue, and it’s captivating, especially in his thick accent, incongruous for those of us used to American rap.

The first half is less successful than the second, with “Not Addicted” and “Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way” as low points. But “Blinded By the Lights” points the way to the superb second half – it’s terrifically produced, deep and groovy. The record takes off with the single, “Fit But You Know It,” which gallops along on a cool guitar riff, and from there it’s dramatic and powerful to the end. The plot comes to a head with “What is He Thinking,” leading to the half-ballad “Dry Your Eyes” and the huge “Empty Cans.” The story even has two endings, separated by a rewinding sound.

It’s a little depressing that once again, the Brits have co-opted an American art form and done it better than the majority of Americans, but here it is. A Grand Don’t Come for Free is the most imaginative and well-made rap record I’ve heard in ages. The secret, I think, is that the story is so ordinary. Most American rap is about escalating violent reputations, and hence is just over the top with tales of guns and pimps. A Grand Don’t Come for Free is just about a regular guy, so oblivious to his own life that it dissipates before his eyes. It’s almost not deserving of a full rock opera-style album, and that’s why it works – it’s a collection of moments, small and sweet and oddly moving.

And speaking of oddly moving, there is the Arcade Fire. My third pick comes straight from Pitchfork – I almost always buy their number one record of the year, and while I’m often disappointed, this time I’m grateful. I may not have tried the Arcade Fire without those crotchety indie snobs up Chicago way, so I owe them a thank you.

The Arcade Fire is a five (sometimes six) member collective, and they’ve called their first album Funeral, which should tell you about the emotional content. It was written in the wake of several deaths, mostly of band family members, and the whole thing has an undercurrent of hopeful sadness, of working through real pain and depression. The record is also a well-written indie symphony, covered in strings and xylophones and pianos and (of course) loud, lovely guitars. Everything is balanced, yet sounds fittingly ramshackle – it’s an album for the college kids and the Brian Wilson fans.

I think that when people describe Modest Mouse as expansive and grand, the Arcade Fire’s sound is what they mean, and what they wish they were hearing from Brock and his group. Funeral opens with a five-part suite, four parts of which share the name “Neighborhood.” The second part is the ultimate Modest Mouse song, floating on lovely vocals and accordions and a killer melody. A quick break into “Une Annee Sans Lumiere” and we’re off into the second half of “Neighborhood,” and it’s just as propulsive and powerful as the first. The record carries you with such force that you barely realize that it’s half over.

The second half is highlighted by “Rebellion (Lies),” a true powerhouse of a song that captures the anthemic explosion of U2 without the bombast. The album ends on a graceful note with “In the Backseat,” about stepping forward and learning how to drive, metaphorically speaking. The song is lovely, with an extended coda that lingers just long enough. The Arcade Fire is a band worth watching, and Funeral is an album worth hearing, one that combines the textures of pure pop with the energy and punch of alt-rock to come up with something that grabs you at the start and doesn’t let go. Rarely has an album about death sounded this alive.

Or, to put it more personally, rarely has an album about death made me feel so young.

Next week, maybe Ani, maybe a double dose of Bright Eyes.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So, okay.

My friend Mike Ferrier is a technology nut with very little interest in music. I, of course, am a music geek with very little interest in technology. What follows is a conversation between us on the merits of digital distribution and the state of the music industry. We have exchanges like this all the time, and I thought, given the subject matter, you might like to read this one.

It started with a link I sent Mike about a computer used by the music industry to predict hit songs. You can find the original article here. I think I titled the email “This is What I Mean When I Say the Music Industry is Dying.”

I have a tendency to get pumped up and sometimes talk out my ass when discussing things with Mike, so beware – pontification ahead. That said, my comments are in italics, and Mike’s are in plain type. And away we go…

* * * * *

Wow that’s pretty neat… it confirms your hypothesis that outside of some subjective “do I like it” factors, musical appeal can be broken down into objective measures… and who better to measure them than a statistics crunching computer?

And even if record companies and radio stations use this to choose their songs, I don’t think there’s much to worry about… those kinds of monopolistic distribution channels seem to be fading out anyhow, as mp3s, blogs, XM radio, etc take over…

It also confirms that the record companies are looking for music that mimics music that has succeeded in the past, not new sounds and styles. This computer’s criteria is a compendium of everything that has done well, and it rates songs against the average of 30 years of hits, thus statistically rubbing out the fluke hits that don’t use the same chords and production techniques.

Yes.. it confirms that the record companies are big businesses, concerned primarily with making money.

That’s not my point, entirely. I think, for example, that no one would accuse Microsoft of being anything but a big business that is concerned primarily with making money. But Microsoft innovates – they come up with new ways to do things, and sometimes come up with new things to do, things that people didn’t even know they needed. And then they market these things so that they can make a lot of money.

The music industry is not this way – this article supports my long-standing gripe that the industry at large is really only concerned with repeating past successes, not forging new ones. Music is like technology – it keeps progressing along hundreds of straight lines, each innovator coming up with better and better ways of springboarding off the last. And they bring these innovations to the companies most able to distribute them widely, and those companies say, “Oh, sorry, that doesn’t fall within our extremely narrow success parameters.” And since those narrow parameters are all that people get to hear, thanks to the labels’ ownership of the radio stations, most people equate them with goodness, and instantly recoil from other music because it’s not what they’re used to. And then the sales charts reflect exactly what the labels have dictated they would, and they keep on using the same criteria for “sellable.” Seriously, the breakfast cereal industry innovates more than the music industry does…

About the music/innovation and Microsoft comparison… I think they’re quite different.

Microsoft’s realm, software, fills a large variety of human desires, from recreation to word processing to storing photos. Innovation leads to ways of filling the old needs better, and filling untapped desires that no one else has filled yet. So Microsoft stands to massively increase their revenue by innovating.

Music I would think is more like film or literature or any other art when it comes to innovation… I agree that it develops along paths, each cutting edge artist building on the innovations that came before. But in the end most people will remain happily oblivious to these developments, passing over the latest in great literature for another formulaic Danielle Steel retread, passing up the artistic evolution of film in favor of the latest Armageddon-love-thriller, etc.

Music addresses several basic human desires… the aesthetic appreciation of its patterns and sounds, the emotions it evokes, the cultural cohesion it promotes, the delightful combination it makes with dance, and probably more. But these were filled by ancient music as well as modern music, and the “evolution” of music is an interesting path for a minority (especially people involved in creating it) to watch and participate in… but it doesn’t result in better and more effective music, just in new and different music. Software is constantly addressing new needs… there are no new needs for music on the horizon, music will not suddenly begin to taste good or help us jump higher. And the evolution of the cutting edge in music, as in any art (including software design), is irrelevant to most people.

So my point is that while innovation is in the best interest of Microsoft’s bottom line, the tried and true is in the best interest of a record company’s bottom line.

Interesting takedown of my analogy. Let’s see if I can build it back up a bit. I think your argument about the minority not being interested in the evolution of music has only been true for a short while. In the 1950s, rock and roll evolved from the blues thanks to artists like Bill Haley and Chuck Berry, and the public was with them every step of the way. In the 1960s, the Beatles showed up and rewrote the rule book for pop music, and the public responded by making them the most popular band in the world. And the 1970s found rock and pop evolving even further, spearheaded by some of the most widely regarded and commercially successful bands – Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. Each of these artists used their position in popular culture to fund and publicize further innovations in composition, production and performance, and each were rewarded with deserving accolades and public support.

Now, the argument can certainly be made that the stylistic leaps of the Beatles did not quantifiably make music “better” or “more effective.” But their popularity has yet to be equaled, and in the later years, when they were controlling their own image and refusing to play live, that popularity was based primarily, if not solely, on the music itself. You’ve heard Sgt. Pepper – what world-famous, staggeringly popular band would dare release something like that now? It would be considered commercial suicide.

Which, to me, does not mean that the audience for truly innovative music is not much more widespread than we are led to believe. That music has just been quarantined in the subculture ghetto for so long now that the mainstream has missed out on several steps of its evolution. But you said it best – innovation fills untapped desires that no one else has filled yet. The rise of non-traditional distribution methods and satellite radio should be a decent test. If I’m right, the most successful artists of this new paradigm will be the ones who fill in the gaps for people, bringing them up to speed with new sounds and handing them off to established innovators. And I think that if the industry at large had just kept pace with music as it evolved, instead of cynically deciding that people would only like what they’ve already liked, it would have been even more profitable.

Good point about the Beatles. I actually think they were a true innovation, in the sense that they filled a previously untapped desire – not so much because of what they did musically, as that they were the first to do what they did with the new capabilities provided by the latest distribution technology. The 30’s through the 60’s, roughly, was a period when new technological developments (radio, record players, television) opened up new possibilities for music. Glen Miller, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Elvis… all accomplished feats of popularity that would have been impossible previously, by finding ways to connect with new audiences via the new distribution technologies. For instance, would the throngs of screaming teenage girls have gone nearly as mad, had they not first seen those charming young faces framed in rebelliously long hair, on TV?

So it could be that the Beatles held on to their popularity even when they tried new musical experiments (whereas Pearl Jam’s popularity slipped away when they tried something different) because they were the first (and for a while the only) band to meet that desire and connect with that audience. Now when a new band grabs attention, there are instantly dozens of copycats looking to share the pie… so Beatles level popularity may be a thing of the past.

The changes in music distribution over the last 35 years have been relatively minor… until now, with digital distribution. I think we can expect some new great successes in the next few years, as new musicians are the first to meet desires that simply couldn’t be addressed before the technology was in place. But the nature of this new technology might (hopefully) spread the success among a much wider group of musicians, since digital distribution can be much better tailored to the individual listener than can radio, television, and CD distribution.

So I would think that over the last few decades, the novel styles that captured the popular attention were relatively few, making it in the best financial interest of the record companies to stick with what they know works, rather than pouring their money into untried experiments, most of which fail. And yes, it makes sense that the record companies (like McDonalds) would work to maintain the homogeneity. Fortunately, digital distribution is gradually wresting this power away from the record companies altogether.

The last time I can remember the major labels being well and truly blindsided was in 1991, when Nirvana came out of nowhere and redrew the map. Nirvana and Pearl Jam all but created a new genre of music marketing and radio called (ready?) “alternative,” which used to mean innovative stuff on little labels, but got co-opted to mean stuff that sounds like Nirvana. And what did the industry do with the Nirvana sound? They copied it. Exactly. Note for note. And they keep on cloning it to this day. You mentioned Pearl Jam – you don’t hear much about them anymore, because they refused to play ball and carbon-copy their surprisingly successful debut record. Hence, their marketing budget disappeared, and they dropped from their major label, and the industry knocked itself out to come up with bands (and prefab studio constructs) that *would* play ball. And it worked. They’ve even co-opted the rebellious attitude of punk and post-punk and turned it into a marketing niche – “Buy this mass-produced product and assert your individuality! Nyar! Two fingers to the man! Drink Coke!”

I agree, the co-opting of punk and alternative was very amusing, and sad.

Occasionally someone will come up with a new style that will catch on with the masses…. but most new styles don’t, and people don’t need a new style to keep buying music, so I suppose record companies find it in their interest to stay with what sells until a new style catches on through someone else’s effort, then go with that.

I actually think it’s more insidious than that. I think the industry goes out of its way and does everything it can to prevent a new style from catching on, so they don’t have to shift their business practices. And I think they learned that lesson with Nirvana and the Seattle craze in the ’90s. Nearly overnight, all of the hair-metal bands and pre-teen pop acts that had ruled the airwaves in the late ’80s fell out of favor, and the industry scrambled to keep up with the public taste. Since then, how many totally new forms of music have caught the public wave? None that I can think of, and I believe that’s down to the industry’s choke hold on media and distribution outlets. They learned their lesson, they won’t get fooled again. These days, if they can use the same production team to create nine different artists’ records, they will. And if one falls from grace, another will rise to take his/her place, crafted by the same team of marketers. They even put the auditions for company-molded superstar on television…

In short, I think people are going online to find new music, because it really is a need that has not been filled by the record industry.

That makes sense… it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Even as the FCC’s rule changes allow the big media conglomerates to all merge together, creating basically a single monolithic media behemoth with one voice and one message, digital distribution is undercutting this, letting every small voice be heard. If Big Media can’t somehow get the government to impose legal restriction on digital distribution, they’re in danger of getting marginalized into oblivion.

As a non-musical aside, I’ve noticed a downside to the many-voices approach, in the world of news. Monolithic voices that are trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience will often be much more educational than narrow voices. Newsweek, Time, the BBC, and their American “counterpart” NPR actually talk about the various sides of each issue. Yes, monolithic voices are subject to bias, propaganda, and dumbing down (eg., People Magazine) but is that worse than the alternative… Fox News telling conservatives what they already think they know, Air America doing the same for liberals (I was really disappointed when I listened to that recently… it seemed just like Rush Limbaugh, but for liberals. Maybe I didn’t listen enough to get a full picture though.)… each blog talking to its true believers, and no one learning anything that challenges their beliefs or helps them understand people who think differently. It seems to me that digital distribution will just continue to amplify that trend.

Anyway, I expect it will be left to the smaller venues that actually like music (your column, for instance) to expose the potentially successful statistical anomalies to the masses.

Agreed. What we need, though, is a larger venue that likes music, and that isn’t concerned with crafting images and then convincing people that anyone not playing to these images is weird and not worth hearing. Most people I know assume, sound unheard, that my CD collection is full of strange stuff that could never sit comfortably on the airwaves, and they’re often pleasantly surprised to find these “weird” bands not only listenable, but enjoyable. My 60-year-old aunt just heard and liked the Lost Dogs, for example. We need radio stations that actually do play everything, and not specialized marketing niches that pit rap fans against hip-hop fans against crunk fans, as if there’s a sizeable difference between the three.

Once there are enough radio stations, and even personalized radio stations, that’s possible. Yahoo’s online streaming radio is very neat. When you hear a song that you really like or don’t like, you tell it. It then brings in songs that other people with similar tastes felt similarly about. This doesn’t always work of course, but it often does. This type of personalized delivery is becoming more and more common (as technology fills a previously untapped desire, by the way), and hopefully will give small new artists a means to break out and find an audience.

Ultimately though, I think a majority of music listeners will never be much interested in the artistic depths of their music, and will be quite content to hear the same few things, and copies thereof, over and over. This might seem like a crime to you, like these people must be freed from their horrible prison. But think about how you feel regarding food… quite content to have a few variations of the same few sandwiches over and over. Many, many people take food very seriously as an art form, and put as much interest in its evolution and subtle qualities as you do into music’s. Ketchup is a threadbare chord progression. But you couldn’t care less. (Neither, of course, could I.)

Actually, I hate ketchup.

And melted cheese, too… are you even American? 🙂

But that’s really not the point you were going for, is it? That analogy sounds about right to me, except for one thing – while it’s true that most people don’t care about the mechanics and the subtle qualities of either food or music, they know when they like something, even when they don’t know why. That’s part of the theory behind McDonald’s brand marketing – associate good and pleasant experiences with McDonald’s food and people will think they like it, even if they don’t know why. But taste something prepared with vigor and love and real skill, and the comparison is just silly. People like good food. They just can’t get it, because fast food places have taken over, and people don’t have time to wait for skillful preparation.

Similarly with music, I am aware that most everyone I have met couldn’t care less about the specific innovations I go nuts for, but they know when they like something. Problem is, they just don’t get to hear new music that they may like – the industry has decided to make those decisions for them. Radio listeners know whether or not they like Usher, but have they had a chance to make that same decision about Marillion, or Rufus Wainwright, or the Arcade Fire? No. Additionally, the industry has done everything possible to convince radio listeners and MTV watchers that they’re not missing out on anything by sticking to the tried and true. Instead of trying to expand their audience, they have disregarded a big chunk of it, and that chunk has moved to other methods of getting what they need.

I agree that digital distribution will make it a lot easier for unusual music to reach the people who want to hear it, and will greatly increase the diversity of popular music.

But I do think you’re selling short the lowest common denominator a bit. Sure, McDonalds seeks to drill it into all of our minds that we love their brand and their food. But McDonalds’ success grew out the fact that people actually did prefer their food – its taste combined with its convenience – over the other options. Sure I like real good food, but it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me; if it’s a matter of getting food that I like maybe 100% more, but I have to put 300% of the time, effort and money into it, I’ll usually go with the microwavable Lean Cuisine.

I think most people feel about the same regarding music – just not interested in putting the time and effort into finding what they might like a bit better. Digital distribution will decrease the time and effort involved in doing that, so a lot more people will probably try new music.

But unusual music will still have a few hurdles to jump though. First, if a song requires the listener to understand its construction or even just the background upon which it evolved in order to appreciate it, that’s a very narrow audience for it to appeal to. Second, there’s an inherent appeal to the familiar, and I think a lot of people will continue looking for familiarity in their music rather than greatness. And third, music in particular has become associated with personal image and social cohesion for many people, so people will continue wanting to listen to the same music that everyone else in their big social group listens to. (Maybe the record companies helped promote this identification between music and self image, but I think it’s always been there – as far as I know historical groups and classes each seem to develop and celebrate musical styles of their own.)

I wonder, if we each had Star Trek replicators, how many of us would try a new chef and a new meal a few times a week, trying to find new favorites… and how many would hear about a few from their friends and just try those, or even just stick with the old fashioned hamburgers.

You’re probably right about that – given the years of immersion in prefabricated pop, most of it predicated on previously successful pop, there are numerous “old favorites” (chord progressions, production tricks) that the statistical computer will point out as worth duplicating. “Try these, they work every time.” It seems like these criteria would be obvious to anyone who has some musical (as opposed to music business) background, though – the chords to “With or Without You,” as an example, are all but guaranteed to hit the mass pleasure center.

Maybe, but you’re making assumptions about the criteria involved. For instance I’d like to know what criteria the software uses that groups U2 and Beethoven together, or that jazz “crooner” with Linkin Park. Without intimate knowledge of the software it’s impossible to tell how dumb or sophisticated it is, but it’s at least possible that it’s picking up on subtle patterns that fall outside of the normal methods of analyzing musical structure.

The interesting question (at least to me) is one we’ve previously touched upon – are these chords and production techniques representative of what people like, or are they just what people are used to? In other words, are the songs which contain these criteria hits because people like them, or are they hits because they are all that people get to hear? I think of radio as somewhat Pavlovian – we have stuffed the airwaves with just this music for long enough that the very construction of these songs is comforting to people, and if we know how to construct them, then we can make clones of them and get people to buy them because we say so. Hear that A-minor shift? Salivate! Now purchase!

That is an interesting question… one approach to answering it might be to try the music that rates well in our culture, on subjects belonging to a different culture that is used to different music. But the question is probably moot to the big businesses, who don’t care so much why we buy it, as whether we buy it.

Oh, not true, otherwise they wouldn’t go to such great lengths to figure out why we buy it. And then copy those reasons again and again to ensure success. But I get your point. The music industry has, from the beginning, known that it is working in a field full of subjectivity, and they have been trying to determine the lowest common denominator and market that for as long as they’ve been around. It’s just gotten to the point where I’m not sure if they’re analyzing the trends or creating them based on years of exposure to their product. Either way, they control what most people hear, through radio and MTV and prohibitive CD prices, and that’s why MP3s and digital distribution scares the crap out of them.

Well said, and I think all of that can be compared to what places like McDonalds has done with food… are they cooking what people want, or making people want what they cook? Ultimately though, in food and music, the lowest common denominator is what sells. Digital distribution holds great promise for helping “gourmet” music find its audience. Until we all have Star Trek replicators however, no such salvation is in sight for our palates.

I agree the food industry is screwed. 🙂 My hypothesis, though, is a complete refutation of your above point – the lowest common denominator is not what sells, it is what the industry has decided will sell, based on what they have previously decided will sell. McDonald’s sells well because they’re everywhere and they’re fast, not because they’re especially good, IMHO. Same with Usher – he sold millions of his album because his singles and videos were everywhere, and he has nice abs. They are fulfilling their own prophecy by not letting in competition – small labels just don’t have the marketing budgets to compete with the majors. The big guys control the floodgates. I would be a lot more resigned about the public’s apparent choices if I thought they were being allowed to make them. And soon, with digital distribution leveling the playing field, they might be.

I agree that the big companies (in food and music) are promoting homogeneity, but see above for why I think the lowest common denominator would fare pretty well even without their help. Hopefully digital distribution will help diversity flourish much more than it can now in music. But in the end, I think there’ll still be a huge market for copycat superstars with great abs.

* * * * *

And on that depressing note… thanks, Mike, for letting me run this here. This is undoubtedly an ongoing conversation, and I may (with Mike’s permission, of course) update it as it goes along. In the meantime, check out Mike’s online game here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

For Christmas this year, I joined the 21st century.

I have a bit of a reputation as a luddite, I suppose. For most of my music-buying life, I rejected CDs, preferring to buy cassettes. Yeah, I know, the sound quality is crap, and it’s musical tissue paper, just waiting to be crinkled and crumpled by unforgiving spindles and wheels. But it also presents an artist’s vision in the most uncompromising form – songs are in one order and one order only, and rearranging them takes work and time and effort. Philosophically, cassettes most lined up with my artistic worldview.

That now sounds like horseshit to me too, by the way. As soon as I started buying CDs, I was swept away by the quality and ease of access they provided. I’ve made a lot of mix tapes, and often that process would take upwards to six hours to get right. Mix CDs? Half an hour or so, maybe a little longer if I play around with the sound editor for transitions. And everything sounds so clear, free of the hissy mud that I once professed to enjoy.

I’m actually afraid now. I tend to value principles and ideals, and I have discovered several times now that those principles and ideals that I once loudly proclaimed from mountaintops are easily abandoned in the face of convenience and a sizeable cool factor. Do I not believe in anything anymore? What the hell has happened to me?

To my horror, I got a pair of Christmas gifts that further established me as a world-champion sellout. For years I have railed against cell phones, calling them a virus that’s slowly infecting and choking our society. I may have even intimated that the death penalty was too good for people who answer their cell phones during movies. I might have even hinted that I believe people who talk on cell phones while they’re trying to drive deserve the inevitable brain cancer, and will hopefully die slowly and painfully.

Well, hell with all that, because with my new super-bitchin’ Verizon cell phone-slash-camera-slash-personal data assistant, I have officially joined the enemy. It’s pretty handy, I must say, and I do indeed talk while trying to drive. People can find me if they need to (a definite plus in the deadline-driven newspaper industry) and if I am ever stuck and need directions, I can just call. I don’t even need to pull over. It’s pretty sweet.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that people who answer their mobiles in movie theaters should be unceremoniously shot in the back of the head. Or at least fined, or something. The first movie I saw as a cell phone owner was The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (whimsical and yet desperately sad at its core), and I took inane glee in reaching into my jacket pocket at the appropriate time and shutting the damn thing off. Made me feel oddly superior, like I will be the guy who remains uncorrupted by the evil cell phone industry.

“Sure, I have one, who doesn’t?” I will say, with a snooty air about me. “But you won’t catch me talking on it. Not in public.”

Ah, but my other big gift, that struck to the very core of some of my most cherished beliefs about art and commerce and convenience. I now own an iPod, pretentious capitalization and all. This is the device that allows one to store 10,000 songs and take them with one anywhere, and (here’s the important part) play them in any order. This nifty little machine also obliterates the line between music one buys on compact disc and music one downloads from the ‘net, legally or otherwise. It’s all just info to the iPod.

It’s true that you can use the iPod to play your albums, back to front, and not mess with an artist’s original vision. But where’s the fun in that? I’m finding that using my iPod to create my own personal radio station, one which always surprises me with its next selection but never disappoints me with songs I hate, is immensely enjoyable. If the novelty of this doesn’t wear off soon, I may have to rethink some things about my life. How can I be a snotty, pompous, high-falutin’ snobby-snob if I can’t even stick to my own principles?

The iPod, I’m noticing, isn’t really meant for album listening, anyway. It has no respect for mastering – songs that segue end up with half a second of silence between them as the device cycles. Which means that records like SMiLE and Dark Side of the Moon are basically ruined as complete statements. It’s all about the individual song, and while I don’t plan to abandon my love of the album anytime soon, it is interesting to take this very different trip once in a while.

Still, I can definitely see how this method of storage and transport could replace compact discs in the near future. With fewer production costs associated with liner notes, jewel cases and physical discs, labels could sign more artists, but those artists would probably have to abandon any ideas of long-form narrative in their work – no more side-long suites, no segues, none of the little things that draw you into a record like The Wall or The Fragile. Every album will be just a set of songs, and the most successful will likely be the ones that are able to be played in any order. It will be the death knell of the album revolution started by the Beatles, and the end of something special in the music world.

There. That was suitably snotty. I feel better now.

* * * * *

Of all of my friends and family, only one gave me the gift of music this year. Which is fine, because it’s insanely difficult to buy music for me – the odds that anyone will find something that I a) want and b) do not already have are pretty slim. But Mike Ferrier managed it, and turned me on to a pretty neat band at the same time.

They’re called Girlyman, and Mike saw them open for the Indigo Girls on their most recent tour. Girlyman is a trio – Ty Greenstein, Doris Muramatsu and Nate Borofsky – and they play simple folk music, for the most part. Their album is called Remember Who I Am, and it’s a collection of 11 originals and one neat cover. But it’s not the songs – they’re small, effective numbers with minor changes and sweet melodies, but they’re not exceptional. It’s not the lyrics, either, though they are uniformly terrific, heartfelt little gems.

No, it’s the voices.

Girlyman live must be an interesting sight – these three could not look any more dissimilar, yet their voices intertwine as if they were meant to coexist. Remember Who I Am is chock full of some of the most delightful harmonies you will hear anywhere, harmonies that descend and envelop the room. Just listen to the opening track, “Viola” – it’s spare and lovely, with some minor key strums and pedal steels, but the voices just lift it off the ground and float it effortlessly. I was in love by the third “viola.”

Girlyman strikes me as a true musical democracy, as well, which is always refreshing. All three share songwriting credit, and take turns on lead vocals. They change up instruments, too, switching guitar and percussion duties song to song. The result is amazingly ego-free, as if their personalities mesh as beautifully as their voices do. Even knowing the authors of each song, I can’t pick favorites, either. Borofsky’s “Viola” is just as good as Greenstein’s “The Shape I Found You In,” and Muramatsu’s “Even If.” It’s all nice stuff. They even managed to sucker-punch me with the ending of “Montpelier.”

I’m especially impressed with their arrangement of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” a great song by any measure. They open it with a funky bass beat and a repeating acoustic figure, and the shape of the song only becomes clear with the chorus. Harmonized beautifully, of course. It’s a sweet addition to an already fine album. Bottom line: if you’re looking for something challenging and twisted, this is not for you. But if you want music that will surround you and breeze through you, delightfully, then check this out. More importantly, if you want to hear three great voices weave together into one superb sound, in ways that can only be described as magical, then you need to hear this.

Girlyman’s album is available at their website.

* * * * *

Next week, some things I missed during Aught-Four. The following week, Aught-Five begins in earnest with new records from Ani Difranco, the Chemical Brothers and Bright Eyes.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Will Eisner died on Monday.

I hate that I have to start my first column of 2005 with those words. I also hate that most of you reading this will have no idea who I’m talking about. It’s not your fault. Will Eisner spent his whole life working in a field with only a few hundred thousand devotees. But among those devotees, he was revered.

Will Eisner was, unquestionably, the father of smart comics.

And when I say he worked his whole life in comics, that’s what I mean. He started his cartooning career in 1936. He died at 87 years old, having just completed a new graphic novel, The Plot. During that time, he never stopped working, never stopped making comics better by making better comics. Here are some of his achievements:

From 1936 to 1939, he co-ran Eisner and Iger Studios, which gave first jobs in the comic book field to such luminaries as Bob Kane, creator of Batman, and Jack Kirby, creator of and artist on the Fantastic Four and the Hulk and the Avengers and Captain America and on and on.

In 1940, he started The Spirit, a four-page-weekly adventure strip included in Sunday newspapers. Eisner worked on The Spirit until 1952, minus a three-year stint in the military during World War II, and he used it as a thesis on expanding the limits of the comic book form. At a time when even the best cartoonists considered their chosen field beneath contempt, Eisner took comics seriously as an art form, and significantly raised the confidence level of the burgeoning medium. Just the title pages of the Spirit sections alone rewrote the rules of structure and panel. The strip was also clever and a lot of fun.

In 1978, he published what is widely considered the first graphic novel, A Contract With God. Up until this point, comics with spines meant for the bookshelf were exclusively reprints of material that appeared in newsstand comics form. Eisner crafted four serious, grown-up stories, all interconnected, and published them all at once in book form, an unheard-of idea. Now it’s the form most preferred within the industry.

More than that, though, A Contract With God proved that comics were not just for kids. Those of us who have grown up in its wake can’t remember a time when genuine literature and comics were mutually exclusive, but Eisner showed the way. He went on to create a staggering 21 full-length graphic novels since then – staggering because these things take an awful lot of work and time. Eisner was 61 when he released Contract, and his career as a graphic novelist was just beginning.

Among his works are such treasures as To the Heart of the Storm, an autobiographical account of Eisner’s life before World War II; A Life Force, set during the depression; Invisible People, a haunting look at the anonymous and the forgotten; and Last Day in Vietnam, a series of true accounts from the front lines. Throughout his career, he has shone a spotlight on the Jewish experience, and never more so than in his most recent books, Fagin the Jew and the forthcoming The Plot, which revolves around Russian anti-Semites. Always – even in his darkest material – Eisner conveyed a sense of wonder and hope for humanity, and drew with a clean, effective, confident line.

In 1985, Eisner wrote Comics and Sequential Art, one of the first books to take a serious look at the art of creating comics. He followed it up in 1996 with Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, and together these books draw back the curtain and give new artists everything they need. Eisner was all about the new stuff – there are countless tales of him praising new artists, touting new books and showing his genuine love for the medium and for the creators pushing it forward.

Coming from a guy so responsible for the great state of comic art these days, that’s pretty amazing. You want to know just how important and influential Will Eisner was to the comic book field? Every year at the San Diego Comic Con, the industry holds its version of the Oscars, where they award the best stuff in numerous categories. You know what that awards ceremony is called?

The Eisners.

And guess what? When you won an Eisner, it was handed to you by Eisner himself.

I got the chance to meet Will Eisner once. It was at the 1995 San Diego con, and I attended as a pro – I wrote a book called Tapestry for Superior Junk Comics. The con was pretty quiet that year, and Tapestry artist Gabe Crate took several opportunities to pull out the pages for issue six that he was working on and plug away at them.

So Gabe and I are sitting there, him drawing and me watching, when out of the corner of my eye I see this elderly gentleman standing behind Gabe, looking at his pages. It took a minute or two for both Gabe and I to realize that this was Will Eisner, right behind us. No sooner had we recognized him than Eisner said, exuberantly, “I could watch you draw all day.”

He was quickly called away, but Gabe put his pencil down, unable to draw any more. I think we both said “holy crap” seven or eight times. It was an unbelievable high, even for me, the spectator in the story. But that was just Will Eisner, by all accounts. He never made anyone feel less than welcome in the comics field, and he had such amazing energy and enthusiasm for the medium.

Eisner died of complications after quadruple bypass heart surgery. His legacy cannot be overstated for comics fans. Almost single-handedly, he gave comics brains, heart and confidence. His belief in the medium as a true art form translated to the industry’s belief. Without him, we might still be stuck in a four-panel grid, making only tepid adventure tales instead of works like Blankets and Palomar and Berlin and Age of Bronze. He was the grand-daddy of it all, and the world of comics (and the world in general) is greatly diminished by his passing.

Rest in peace, Will.

* * * * *

One year dies, another is born. In one of those bizarre New Year’s synchronicities that tug at my emotions, while Eisner was passing away, my friend Chris L’Etoile and his girlfriend Jamie had their first child. They’ve named him Jeremiah Naos, and apparently mother and son are doing well. Congrats to all. I feel really old…

Next week, a bit about my Christmas presents. Year five is go.

See you in line Tuesday morning.