Category: Music
America the Beautiful, 250 years!
Fables of the Reconstruction/Reconstruction of the Fables
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
Music markets remain deglobalized
It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.
A similar trend is under way in other countries—and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures…
In 2023 Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva noted in a London School of Economics paper that a number of European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Poland had seen rising domestic shares of their top tens in the preceding decade. Since then the phenomenon seems to have spread. Mr Page, formerly chief economist at Spotify, finds that 55% of streams of songs in Sweden’s top 20 last year were in Swedish, up from 29% in 2019. Norway’s figure rose from 13% to 38% in the same period.
That is from The Economist, and of course it echoes themes from my earlier Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures. And Brazil most of all?
Latin America has gone the same way (see chart 1), Brazil astonishingly so: in the first week of June 96 of the top 100 artists on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian (foreigners included Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). Last year Thailand had a solidly local top ten, while Indonesia and the Philippines each had eight local tracks in their respective charts; Nigeria’s top ten were all local, as were nine of South Africa’s, according to the IFPI, which represents the recorded-music industry.
The same trends are happening for television as well, albeit less radically.
Why drugs are here to stay (from my email)
This is anonymized, I can vouch that the person is very smart and has excellent taste:
Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now
1. Drugs are fun.
2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.
3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.
4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.
5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.
6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.
7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.
8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.
9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.
10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.
11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.
12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.
13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.
14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.
*The Republic of Love*
The author is Martha C. Nussbaum, and the subtitle is Opera & Political Freedom. Martha decided she did not wish to do a podcast after all, so since I put some real prep time in I thought I would offer some thoughts on the book directly, in part because it is not receiving substantive reviews elsewhere. I suspect the number of people qualified to review the book, on the musical and philosophical and historical fronts, is pretty small.
Overall the book is very good, and if you think you might be interested you should buy and read it. It shows a significant knowledge of opera, in part from Nussbaum’s own efforts as performer and singer. Some of the operas considered at length include the major Mozart pieces, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Benjamin Britten (Albert Herring, for one), and John Adams’s Nixon in China. For Nussbaum, “political freedom” is not exactly that of the classical liberal kind, but for at least eighty percent of the book those differences do not matter.
I do have some objections to her points. While each seems to be a smaller matter, I fear they reflect a larger reality where Nussbaum subordinates her understanding of the operas to her broader political and social agenda.
She is highly suspicious of Don Giovanni, considering it a “problem opera,” which for her I suppose it is. She cannot bring herself to admit that fair numbers of women might actually be attracted to the Don, instead suggesting it is their baleful economic plight that leads them into such liasions. That seems to me a grossly rigid misunderstanding of the work, at variance with centuries of high-level commentary on the piece. Kierkegaard’s understanding remains ahead of hers, as does that of the ordinary theatergoer.
More generally, she is highly suspicious of romanticism, and she works hard to resist the notion that romanticism was a natural and perhaps even inevitable outgrowth of the classical spirit in music. Not surprisingly, Tristan is anathema to her — “I think Tristan is a tedious opera and that the view of love in it — all unsatisfied longing and no reciprocity — is adolescent and boring.” I would agree that virtually all Wagner operas, except perhaps Das Rheingold, are too long and thus have an element of tedium. Yet that is hardly an accurate understanding of the libretto or the love connection (no reciprocity??).
One would do well to supplement Nussbaum with Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat. GPT Pro had a good summary of some of Koestenbaum’s quite contrasting perspectives:
“The operatic voice exceeds ordinary speech: it is too loud, too stylized, too bodily, too artificial, too emotional. That excess makes it politically charged because it disrupts norms of restraint, masculine self-control, realism, and “proper” social identity. Opera gives form to things that respectable culture often requires people—especially queer people—to hide: longing, hysteria, theatricality, shame, glamour, grief, fantasy, and desire……it is a place where identity is unstable, theatrical, mediated, and excessive. Opera is full of secrecy, codes, hidden meanings, displaced passions, and voices that say indirectly what cannot be said directly.”
By no means are those entirely illiberal tendencies, but they complicate any identifications of opera with liberalism or indeed any other foundational political set of views. In some fundamental fashion, opera is usually going a bit askew from strictly classical principles.
I take Beethoven to be modestly less liberal than she does, as I am concerned with the repeated sense of “culmination” in his work, and the implied notion of total communal integration as the final good. It is not Beethoven’s fault that even the Nazis staged Fidelio, but it does point to the poliitically Romantic strand in his music, a strand that Nussbaum pushes off center stage.
Why so little Rossini in this book? (He gets a brief mention on pp.303-304). He is arguably the essence of opera, and the carrier of the Mozartean tradition, yet he also was a supporter of the French monarchy and its restoration. Even Verdi was a conservative and monarchist, which puts his Don Carlo in a slightly different light. I am reminded of Carl Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism, namely that it could transfer loyalties so readily from revolutionary republicanism to reactionary monarchism. 19th century opera is not altogether innocent of this charge, and a deeper look at the material would have confronted this issue. Mazzini wrote a whole book on opera and saw it as supportive of nationalism above all else. A look at the history of Auber’s La Muette de Portici, the performance of which spurred Belgian nationalism and a revolt in 1830, is consistent with this view.
Nussbaum is too concerned with her own classificatory impulses, and insufficiently aware of how much opera itself — most of all the music — keeps on diverting our attention in other directions.
Overall, this is a very thought-provoking book, full of deep knowledge of both opera and philosophy. If it is afraid to follow down the path of where the music itself — and most of its major purveyors — were leading us, that makes it thought-provoking all the more.
Can liberals be pacifists?
This is mostly a podcast about Benjamin Britten, and in particular his War Requiem, with Rebecca Lowe (former singer and conductor, in addition to philosopher and also her current role at Mercatus).
Here is the YouTube, here is the transcript and further listening links. Excerpt:
LOWE: Yeah, so we should think about what it means for a conscientious objector to have written this work, which is supposed, in some sense, to maybe pay tribute to the soldiers. Maybe, in some sense, it’s supposed to play some role in the British response to the war. At a time when, of course, conscientious objectors had been seen as maybe betraying the nation. There are very interesting, tense questions about the choice of Britten to compose this work.
COWEN: And Benjamin Britten himself, he described the work as a reparation.
LOWE: Yes.
COWEN: Paid to the dead soldiers.
LOWE: That’s right.
COWEN: I think in some ways, he always had World War I more in mind than World War II. But other parties involved, of course, didn’t see it that way.
LOWE: That’s true.
COWEN: But Wilfred Owen was a World War I poet. And that was the formative experience for him, was World War I. And also, the Spanish Civil War influenced him greatly. So, he wanted to do this work, and I’m not sure he ever found a way to make it succeed with World War II. That, to me, is one of the drawbacks of the work.
Definitely recommended, it is fresh material throughout. Can you find a better podcast on Britten and his War Requiem, arguably his greatest work? And here is the Rebecca Lowe Substack and podcast more generally.
What should I ask Chase Koch?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Chase and Charles Koch have a new book out, namely
My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.
Excerpt:
SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.
Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.
And this:
COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?
SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.
And:
COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?
SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.
What should I ask Martha Nussbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Most of all focusing on her recent book The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom.
So what should I ask her?
What makes art great?
That is the title of the new and very stimulating essay by Nabeel Qureshi. It is difficult to summarize, but here is one excerpt:
2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.
This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.
Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:
“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)
Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.
In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.
Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.
To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15…
Do read the whole thing. And here are some comments from Henry Oliver.
What should I ask Bob Spitz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, Wikipedia here. I very much enjoyed his new book on the Rolling Stones, plus he has many older books of note, including on the 1969-1970 Knicks, Woodstock, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Julia Child. All good books! He also for a while worked as manager to both Bruce Springsteen and Elton John.
So what should I ask him?
My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
COWEN: Sure.
Interesting throughout.
Ryan Hauser interviews me in print
Here is the link, here is one excerpt:
What was your path into AI, and what are you working on now?
I first became interested in AI when I saw the chess computer Tinker Belle wheeled into a New Jersey chess tournament in I think 1975. I followed the Kasparov matches closely, and the more general progress of AI in chess. I read chess master David Levy telling me that chess was far too intuitive for computers ever to do well. He was wrong, and then I realized that AI could be intuitive and creative too. That was a long time ago.
In 2013 I published a book on the future of AI called Average is Over. I feel it has predicted our current time very accurately. I also taught Asimov’s I, Robot – a work far ahead of its time – for twenty years.
Right now I am simply working to keep afloat and to stay abreast of recent AI developments. I blog and write columns on the topic frequently, and have regular visits to the major labs. I encourage universities to experiment with AI education.
I mention William Byrd and Paul McCartney as well.
Little Darlin’
By The Diamonds. The video is not what I was expecting.