Category: Music

If you aggregating a lot of binary opinions, I vote yes you should buy it.  It's more accessible and less mysterious-sounding than their usual fare, which you may consider either a plus or a minus.  If you're wondering what my underlying stance is, a few days ago I said to Brian Hooks something like: "I'm glad I've never really been a fan, that leaves me free to enjoy them without feeling threatened by what they stand for."

He's one of the few musicians I've been listening to since I was six years old.  I've long thought I Want You Back is one of the best songs, period.  She's Out of My Life has for a long time been a personal favorite, as is Girlfriend.  Billie Jean survives being overplayed on muzak.  Off the Wall is an underrated album, as is History.  His personal legacy is perhaps a dubious one, but he was one of the great dancers and entertainers of his century and it is a shock to read of his passing.  The J. Randy Taraborelli biography, despite stopping in the early 90s, is very good.

Today was not a good day for the 1980s (Fawcett, McMahon).

He [Moby] promoted his latest, Wait for Me, by booking a spa so that journalists could listen while getting massages.

That is from Hugo Lindgren, here is more.

A sarod player, he was one of my favorite musicians.  Here is one obituary, noting his father made him practice for 18 hours a day.  Here is another obituary; he once wrote: "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after
20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30
years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many
more years before you finally become a true artist — then you may
please even God."  Here is evidence that Khan understood the Romer model.  Here is my favorite Khan CD.

There are many injustices in the world, so it is good that we have people willing to speak out against them:

Media regulator Ofcom today said it had received nearly 350 complaints about the weekend's Britain's Got Talent shows – but fewer than 20 were about the treatment of runner-up Susan Boyle, who was admitted to a private medical clinic on Sunday suffering from exhaustion.

Ofcom
said most of the complaints, 331, were about 10-year-old singer Hollie
Steel, who broke down in tears on Friday night's Britain's Got Talent
live semi-final.

The story is here.

From Mark Blankenship, here is one stab at the question:

No matter how much we mock those we consider beneath us, it's much more satisfying to be reminded that everyone has dignity.

That's because when we laugh at someone for being a freak, we're
laughing out of fear. We're laughing because we want to prove that we
are not like that loser over there. If we can shame the people who don't belong, then we can prove that we do.

When we embrace an outsider, though, we're paving the way
for our own acceptance in the future. Eventually, we'll all feel like
outcasts, and none of us wants to be laughed at. The Susan Boyle Story
suggests we won't be. Instead of fearing for our own eventual shame, we
can count on society to hear what's beautiful in us. We can trust that
if we just show our true selves, we will be embraced.

Whether or not that moral is true in the real world, it's alluringly
true in the Susan Boyle Story. By participating in the narrative that
television has constructed for her, by cheering her on and watching her
video over and over, we can not only feel good about graciously
welcoming an outsider, but also feel relief for helping create a world
that will someday welcome us.

I thank Mary Anne Sieghart, at TheBrowser, for the pointer.

From Freakonomics blog:

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and
theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations
and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?

What are the options?  You might argue that older people are less grumpy but I'm not sure that approach will succeed.

"Signaling refined taste" comes to mind but that, taken alone, requires some negative feedback as well.  Try listening to what informed viewers say to each other in art galleries.  There is plenty of negative mixed in with the positive, even if you think the blend is a phony one.

I believe that the opera-going demographic wishes to signal "magnanimity."  When these high-status people are slighted, as they might be by a bad performance, their privately optimal response is to ignore the slight.  Reacting to the slight suggests that they have let it bother them; it is a sign of low status to be bothered by what are ultimately low status entities.

Magnanimity is an underrated concept in signaling theory, in part because it has such quiet manifestations.  It is Holmes's "dog that didn't bark." 

That so many people signal magnanimity in the very public opera house, but less so in the private art gallery, is a telling indication of how you should interpret much of the positive public feedback you receive.

How many of you are into signaling magnanimity?

Robin Hanson proceeds with "Who Likes Band Music?"

Smiling politely through yet another performance by my son's school
band tonight, I wondered: why do school bands play music so different
from what the kids, or even their parents, choose in their free time? 
Music at parties, movies, etc. is pretty different.  The novels kids
read in English class differ from the novels they or their parents read
in their free time, but most people accept that school novels are
deeper, subtler, etc., so that kids learn more by studying them.  But
do most people really accept a similar claim about band music?  What
gives?

Maybe the point of band music is that many of the instruments are relatively easy to play, or at least they are easy to play poorly.  The noise drowns out the children who cannot play much at all.  More children playing recruits more parental support and also more support from administrators, who like to point to participation.  What numbers would you get if the students had to learn Hindemuth's sonatas for solo viola?  Yes, conformity and discipline have some social value but still this does not look like a Pareto optimum to me either.

It's sometimes called "the most famous chord in rock n' roll."  I have wondered about this question for thirty-four years (all this time I'd been thinking it is an odd hybrid G7/9/13).  Here is a history of thought on the controversy, including a list of nominated chords.  It now turns out there is an answer.  A mathematician applied Fourier transforms to break the sound into its constituent parts.  Here's the bottom line:

The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note,
impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting
chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and
scores for the song, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings
garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only
mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine.

Here is a pdf of the researcher's findings.  I thank Eric H. for the pointer.

The old rating system granted up to five stars but now the maximum number of stars is ten.  This signals that they wish to start exaggerating the quality of the product.  When there are only five stars you know that they are laying their reputation on the line when they grant five stars to a new CD.  (Michelin of course won't give a restaurant more than three stars.  They don't calculate out to the fourth decimal place along a scale of one thousand.)  If the music isn't good you can decide to stop trusting them.  But say they give a new release eight, nine, or who knows maybe eight and a half stars?  What exactly are they trying to say?  Yes they are putting their reputation on the line when they give ten stars, but this will happen so infrequently that it will be harder to judge their overall trustworthiness.

Evaluation systems with fewer and grosser distinctions are often more credible because they are easier to monitor.

Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in
April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29.
Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

DRM will change too, here is much more information.  This is first a way to raise prices, yet without the consumer seeing nothing in return.  But it’s also a sign of the maturing of the market.  The most popular songs will be less of a loss leader for the hardware.  Relaxation of DRM suggests that Apple fears long-run competition from less regulated sources, including CD burning from friends.  Most of all this is a sign that the music business continues to experience economic troubles.  You could call it the "do anything to increase revenue now" strategy.  For 30 cents a song you can make your entire current collection DRM-free.

By the way, on DRM and related issues, I recommend the new James Boyle book Public Domain.  The book is free and on-line here.  You can buy it from Amazon here.

I was listening to the new and excellent Vince Mira CD of Johnny Cash covers (some of them in an elegant Spanish), when Yana asked me to explain Johnny Cash to her.  "Does he sing about the South?" was a tough question to answer.  I place the center of his moral and musical universe somewhere between Little Rock, Arkansas and Oklahoma City.  (How about Fort Smith?)  That locale rules out neither trains nor cattle.  That allows him to straddle the South, West, Midwest, and Texas, while retaining the option of a rail connection to the North.  The town even has a prison.  (For the underinformed, here is a list of Johnny Cash songs.)  Is there a more appropriate center?

Addendum: I now discover that Vince is only fifteen years old!

Here is Vince performing "That’s All Right"; phenomenal.  Here is the overall YouTube listing.

My services as an aggregator are probably of most value in this area, if only because there are so few other reliable aggregators.  I very much liked the following:

The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru; I bought it in 2008 at least.

Un Dia, Juana Molina.  Quirky, oddly textured songs from Argentina.  She’s not just a one-trick pony but she now has a string of excellent albums.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumal.  Aboriginal music from Australia, on acoustic guitar, truly moving.  I don’t regret having paid $40 for it.

Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar, by Debashis Bhattacharya.

Anything from Network Medien.  Anything.  They’re the single best and most useful music label today.  The picks on any of their collections are impeccable and always worth the price.  This year I’ve been enjoying their Music of the Americas, Desert Blues (multiple parts), Golden Afriques Part II, and Sufi Music, among others.

Here are other world music picks.

On the popular music front, I’m now listening to Fleet Foxes at least once a day.  I’m also starting to like the new Bon Iver and the new Kanye West.