dimanche 14 octobre 2007

Me and some mates: latest listening... After an entry about some of the research that interests me, I must get on with my explorations. But to keep track in the meantime, another of the kind offerings from Last.fm -- known as a "widget" than seems to work with most Net browsers -- is fun and allows people to see what like-minded listeners are up to there. It's fed from our iTunes and iPods or whatever, but can hardly capture what's on my CD deck: As for what is in my CD player... it's a secret somebody wrote just for me. That's only ever happened twice in my life. 8:12:54 PM  link   your views? [] Monitoring my migrations ... some hot 'songbird' books This artist chart -- which gets regularly updated like my personal one below shall -- presents Last.fm's group choices of people like me. We enjoy the place's gathering on the Ectophile's Guide to Good Music, which has become one of my favourite sites. I find the skeletal background (a contribution by Last.fm user Mbiscan) most appropriate to my work on the roots of music, which is well under way. One research book I'm reading, along with those about women that have mostly arrived now, goes right back to 'The Singing Neanderthals' by Steven Mithen. Humanoid bones can't get much drier than that, can they? Mithen himself can't help but sometimes be heavy going, but he's taken on a tricky task in going back as far as he does and draws on the mind sciences as well as ethnomusicology to do it. People in the past have described my own passion for music as an "obsession" if I browbeat them. This can be because I am unable to listen to it while concentrating on other things. It has to be one or the other, except when mood music really is on low at dinner parties and the like. Even then I find myself straining to hear it at the expense of others focused on the chit-chat. I have never understood why my brain needs to shut out either the music or the company if the former grabs my attention. Mithen is among those explaining my sometimes antisocial quandary to me. He also puts it into an evolutionary context at a time I believe we need one, after a century of quantum physics you can't confine to the labs any more. There are people who have simply stopped doing this. While many of them are quacks and charlatans, I have been trying to find books by a few that aren't because "minds are changing", and I'm now aware of an evolutionary process that I'm often arguing elsewhere has affected very many people for at least the past four decades. An ailing world needs paradigms now that successfully reconcile science with the sacred, but without nonsense in a "spiritual" guise. I know that I need one myself, after a culmination of events this year that make no sense in a purely four-dimensional and conventional approach to the world and some of our art forms. In music, I read Mithen as a convert to his cause in advance, since I have since my teens in the late 1960s been open to notions that music is central to all our cultures. It's the most comprehensible to me of the unspoken arts, when it comes without words, though I find it hard even now to articulate exactly why that is. So I've turned to the scientists and shall later try to wrap my head round Daniel J. Levitin's 'This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession' -- those are my italics, evidently. Chicks between the covers by my bed What I can do is follow several books at once. The ones about women to land up on the part of table that passes for a shelf or by my bunk right now are almost all by women. What with one or two comments from the stubborn sceptics among my colleagues who want to see what's in the parcels I unwrap, this leaves me feeling like a minority man within the minority female field of women in music! There are still men I work with who can't reconcile rock and a girl with a guitar. I don't think ill of those who make rude comments at names like Tori Amos and would voice many more were I to reel off scores of other names from the letter A all the way down to Zazie and Zita Swoon, a Belgian indie rock band that can sometimes grab my ear. But I feel they're missing out when it boils down to the kind of misogynist prejudice interestingly explored and turned upside down by the one man whose book is in the pile. He is Simon Reynolds, for 'The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'N' Roll'. I say often that there's no arguing with personal taste, but don't like it if people judge others purely by their sex or on the strength of only a tiny part of their work when countless musicians like Amos and Kate Bush have evolved if you listen to the whole body of their opus; it's a part of their changing lives, abilities and outlook. It's fairly recent news to me just how instrumental women were in the early days of the blues and other music that gives us what we've got today. Some of the misogyny might have set in both sides of the Atlantic when the record companies that are now huge majors even once paid a small handful of those no-nonsense pioneers better than the men way back when. Of the books I've begun by women, one claims to be "the definitive history of women in rock, pop and roll". It's Lucy O'Brien's 'She Bop II' and this hefty but not academically weighty tome is indeed so highly readable that I find its often anecdotal approach a good bedtime tale. O'Brien is full of fascinating biographical tidbits about her vast subject matter, weaving these into her historical narrative, and I've forsworn the science fiction usually required before I fall asleep. At about 500 pages, it may seem long, but a claim to be definitive can only be publisher's blurb, when O'Brien has to fit more than a hundred years of creative endeavour and innovation between the covers. After all, she has an eye to music worldwide and that's commendable, rather than the all too prevalent narrow approach to the popular music of the United States, Britain and, occasionally, a European periphery. No work can say it all, but 'She Bop II' is a darned good bid to sum up a complex tale with as many threads as possible, while including the record industry's side of the saga. If this raises the interest of any man, then O'Brien is a woman to dispel prejudice since she appears to have so few herself. Like me, though there's a relatively brief discography, I feel she'd be very hard put to come up with any of those absurd "best of" lists that make me mad. I find it helps to read historical surveys like this in conjunction with ... well, listening, of course, but also at the same time as I delve into the kind of work written by women like a different O'Brien -- Karen -- and Amy Raphael, whose collections of interviews with musicians dating from the mid-1990s you can now pick up from Amazon Marketplace sellers for a pittance. I mean a pittance, having found an only slightly bashed copy of Raphael's 'Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock' for a single penny! The pounds went into the postage and the bloody Frog value added tax... One of the items I'm still waiting for is widely held to be a classic in the historical genre, which was more costly, since I wanted Gillian Gaar's 'She's A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll' new, though I could have ordered it for less than eight quid. Also new and now here is a mixture of feature articles with many superb pictures and interviews by Andrea Juno: 'Angry Women in Rock: Vol 1'. This list is far from comprehensive and since I must also consider the bulk of my CD spree done for 2007, I'm amused, rather than put off, by the Jarboe fan on that Amazon page who loves that particular singer so much, but wrote "to be honest, I have not read [Juno's] entire book since lots of the artists are beyond what you might call 'obscure.'" Well, that's as may be. I know virtually nothing of Jarboe, but do know work by half a dozen of the "obscure' singers. So my mainly 'Voices of Women' wish list at Amazon France has grown to more than 130 CDs, will probably go on getting bigger and is highly likely now I've read the part on Jarboe, to include her, even if she -- like some of the early blues women -- prefers to dress outrageously expensively. In the book she sometimes looks fond of wearing no more than tattoos and snakes. 2:16:37 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 7 octobre 2007

The Last(.fm) Post Now there's been a long entry to tell anyone interested a little of the events of months that took me away from the Log and still do, I'd like to put in a good word for the musical haven where I spend some of my time. And a few other things. I really like the East London-based Last.fm, where it seems that I'm among the oldest members. It's not just my age, which saw another year added last week, but my 1 July 2003 registration date. But I was given the latter since that was when I started using what was then a good piece of software to share listening trends online. Today is Migration Day. This Log can never again be what it has been at least as long as I keep my paid job, while inside and out of AFP I want to be around primarily for people I know rather than readers I've met only online. Some became friends for sure, so I'm sorry to shut down. It's just a matter of time. My life needs rearranging to fit everything in. Sandy and I decided that even the unfinished book we've narrated about her loves and life in music and the "alternative culture" -- her place in the underground -- must go on to the back burner. "I'm not that remarkable," she claims. Well, people know I disagree with her there, but will obey orders to ease off. I'm slowed down by medication I shall always need to take and must learn to live with, grateful that the appropriate treatment for a Bipolar II state can still tire me out but no longer clobbers my creative impulse and desire to learn. My old friend BJ is now retired and fully immersed both in making music and a study of it, setting an admirable example. That has merged with much of what kept me and other friends busy during a time social historians are likely to present as a watershed year in French politics too. I don't like the outcome, having Nicolas Sakozy as president, but way back in April, the woman who ran against him, Ségolène Royal, was late with her own policies and stabbed in the back by her own side, but she did remarkably well because the French woke up and wanted a change. However, to go into that would be a long digression into why this nation might conceivably have put a woman in charge. I wrote plenty about it elsewhere at the time, but it's quietened me down since to put things together in a way that is part of the background to the book. Royal isn't among those I've met, but Sandy's one of the candidates for a bigger book, if ever I did make time, about all my "Meetings with Remarkable Women". Unlike Barry, I'm already embarked long before I retire on studies of the musicians among them. What will eventually come of it, beyond my daily dealings with friends and colleagues, is a long way down the line, but how the parcels have begun pouring in to AFP! "Are you buying up half of Amazon?" our splendid desk chief Tim teased me last week while he distributed the post. No, but it was agreeable sychronicity to have several hefty packages chucked my way on Tuesday, my birthday. I was a little crestfallen to see that a few books will be even harder a slog than anticipated when I compiled reading and listening lists, then pruned them and finally submitted the orders more often to Amazon "marketplace" sellers than to the stores themselves. Friend and graphic designer Cam has been very helpful in guidance about related work in different domains of art that relate to where I'm headed. I also picked up ideas from Marianne, who took a break from her own studies yesterday to lead me out shopping for her and an Indian lunch she bought me. The young lady thought Dad might like a few CDs instead, but quickly understood when she saw the piles on my table, including a couple for her, that we'd do better to forget more music purchases. Instead, we celebrated both my birthday and her excellent academic results with a good meal before she took me to meet a fellow student she's staying with in Paris. I'm pleased for her about such an ability to share studies and the least I can do is buy her a little music to ease an academic load that will be tough for a long time. There's no music as such in her courses, but we have a common interest in women's studies. While what I'm into is largely in English and hers mostly in her maternal language, I showed her a part of 'Disruptive Divas' in a section written by Melissa LaFrance that made my head spin! "I know," Marianne said bleakly. Like me, she could wrap her brain round some very interesting points, but LaFrance also found it necessary to throw in a chunk of academic prelude of the kind that gives French philosophy a fearsome and sometimes bad name, it's so obtuse. I'll skip those bits, unlike the passages that mean I must refresh my own data base of the rudiments and theory of music. It's been much too long since I sat down at a musical keyboard myself, simply to do this. I'll also skip a tedious list of titles acquired and simply thank Marianne, my mate Freddie and a few people at work who came with excellent ideas of what I'd find worthwhile to fill in my gap years in music itself. I believed I already had while writing 'Voices of Women', but no. With their help, I kept on pruning until I still had several dozen names left as unexplored territory from the early 1980s to the mid-90s. It will take me years to catch up, mostly for the sheer pleasure, but while I listen and read several other books where music is only a part of a much broader context, I hope to be among those who make short contributions to fill in gaps at Last.fm, where this entry began. The reason I so much like Last.fm is that the community is run by music lovers of different ages who cater in various ways they perhaps rightly call a "social music revolution" for what is apparently now more than "20 million active users based in more than 232 countries" (Wikipedia). It's also better known than any blah of mine. It's very user-friendly, comes in several languages, provides an excellent Internet radio station, and allows me to make the final changes to this Log before I set my nose to the grindstone and migrate. I'm glad that a CBS buy-out in May didn't lead to a corporate change of the team that keeps the place going. These people present themselves at About Last.fm, with an invitation to more exploration. "You have to pay. I'm too mean," said my workmate Simon last week, but he isn't. In any event, it comes for free, unless you want the full benefits I enjoy, particularly custom-made radio stations that do an excellent job in broadening horizons based on your listening habits. It costs only 2.50 euros a month and when I show people like Simon what's on offer for download, their tongue-in-cheek mean streak rapidly vanishes. I know musicians use MySpace a great deal, but many of them appear to have been drawn to Last.fm too in a generous way. MySpace has plenty of merits, but the tendency many users there have to post huge illustrations of all sorts irritates me. It's mere clutter, a visual equivalent of noise that gets up my nose. But I'm going to post my own picture, thanks to Last.fm before I disappear. When I'll be back, there's no telling. What I've written today fits into a broader context of family, friendships, work and social issues I'm taking on, maybe at the expense of the Log, but I find that a small price to pay for other features of my study course. I mean the mysterious Underground, stuff I need to know to be able to be of use and help to other people, rather than writing about it in an indiscreet way. I feel that this place may now have served its purpose in my own life at least, though I never expected to say that, but then nor did I anticipate a 2007 that's been such a year of change. My previous entry, though it may need a bit of a rewrite sometime, said as much about that as I could. Not now. Toodle-pip and happy listening. Here are a few musicians I've been enjoying: 6:48:27 PM  link   your views? []