“I Sold My Soul Just to Make a Record, Dipshit, and Then You Bought One”
Today Thom Yorke said, with that glee he sometimes betrays, that it is “only a matter of time — months rather than years — before the music business establishment completely folds.” He has advised young musicians like myself to release records on their own, rather than through the major labels – lest they rope themselves to a “sinking ship.” [Come hear At Peace At Last at GrantValdes.com!] I don’t know about his timeline, but, morally speaking, Mr. Yorke is right.
I have almost never heard excellent music coming from an artist who was “trying to get signed.” That’s just my empirical report. In the age of the dense, stupid, major label monolith, there has grown a vast underclass of what American economists might call “discouraged composers.” I have heard reels of remarkable, gorgeous, insightful, intricate music by these various unknowns: friends of friends, friends of lovers, lovers. They are talented – more talented than any A&R rep – and precisely because they are not writing down to a market, they can freely offer up “to the eyes of God” (to quote Charles Murray admiring the anonymous cathedral masons of the Middle Ages.) I count myself as a discouraged composer, albeit one with the financial resources and self-regard needed to keep writing anyway.
Do you not believe me that these small and perfectly good composers exist? Seven examples from the last few years:
“Rose Garden” by Ghost Family
“Blurter” by Mouseheart Factor
“Faults of Family” by Alicia Amiri
“Welcome to Repeat” by Headless Body in a Topless Bar
“Very Well” by Discourse on Method
“Goodbye to That One” by Go Slowpoke
“Whitetown” by Kerry Kallberg
I believe that an artist needs to be spiritually and psychologically free in order to produce. If he leaves that headspace, the muse leaves him. If enough artists cannot live free, due to political repression, prescription medication, moral decadence, or whatever, a pallor falls over society as a whole. In the repressive fiefdom of the major labels, at least, artistry has all but shriveled into the shadows. It is difficult to overstate the contempt with which this squalid industry views its musicians. Witness the new comedy Get Him to the Greek, in which our hero, a jellyfish henchman of label honcho P. Diddy, escorts a broken and heroin-addled singer to a venue. That’s the whole depressing plot. Funny! I get it! Artists are lost without handlers to ship them from point A to point B! Creators can’t create after all! Don’t worry though, our protagonist is real, he’s one of the good ones, because he name-checks the Pixies, Radiohead, and the Mars Volta, and in the end leaves Los Angeles to move to “East Seattle” – where the “grunge” came from.
Was it acceptable for Michael Jackson to die with several hundred unreleased songs sitting in a vault controlled by a vengeful Sony?
Is it acceptable for Britney Spears, an idol to millions of girls, to glitch out on television like some kind of Project Monarch victim? Is she free?
Is it acceptable that some overeager-to-please young artists who “sold their souls just to make a record,” to paraphrase Maynard James Keenan, may drown with the major labels’ sinking ship? Yes, that’d be fine.
“In a Jacknifed Juggernaut”
I once encountered a homeless man sitting outside of a Barnes & Noble, whose sign announced that he could
Answer any question for 10 cents
Needless to say, this intrigued me. I gave him ten cents and asked him:
Where do songs come from?
Without so much as clearing his throat, he proceeded with a fluent five-minute soliloquy on the origin and the nature of music. This man was inspired. He seemed to draw only from first-hand impressions; he had no system to defend. That may be why his words have stuck with me more than most academics’ and critics’. Amongst other things, the homeless man told me:
If you want to get at the true nature of a song, listen to as many different performances of it as you can.
In that spirit, I illegally offer you these performances of a beloved Thom Yorke composition.
“Airbag”
Radiohead [1997]
The Vitamin String Quartet [2001]
Christopher O’Riley [2003]
RJD2 [2006]
Easy Star All Stars [2006]
Grant Valdes [2010]
What do you hear? Wherein beats the heart of the song?
“Arching Among Us”
I know that the Experience Music Project should inspire me as a musician, because press releases told me so as the thing was being cobbled together in my back yard, back in 1999. They told me that success would be someday having my clothes hung on a mannequin within that gaudy, lumpy building. Future teenagers could walk through the exhibits and marvel: “Wow! That’s the pair pants he wore in the Empty Mirror music video,” learning nothing at all. This building is an offensive, squawking albatross — if it were a piece of music, it’d be a freeform, eleven-minute guitar feedback segue on the B-side of some depressed, bloated rocker’s 1975 shark-jumping best-seller. I wonder if architect Frank Gehry understands rock music — does he think it’s characterized by structural incoherence and emotional brattiness? Does he think great rock songs are scribbled on a napkin and then barely revised? He usually seems to try a bit harder, but here he must have taken a cue from one of rock’s Big Lies: that the first draft is always the purest.
If I, as an architect of sound, am to be inspired by a building, it will not be this one. Nature teaches by example. I will be inspired by a tasteful, accessible, structurally perfected work of art that enhances the humanity of those who encounter it. If one walks just thirty seconds past the glistening, shrink-wrapped rubble of the EMP, one will find such a timeless creation. Let me take you on a tour of the beautiful, underrated Seattle Center Coliseum, a building that, like the Space Needle, was constructed for our 1962 World’s Fair. Note how easily I could be describing a well-formed piece of music. Note how the principals of beauty and craftsmanship apply not just to any genre of music but to any form of art.
This building respects the pedestrian. It arouses curiosity and draws you in. Its West side is perfectly centered on Harrison Street:
As one approaches from either the East or West, ripple-like stairs invite one downward into a recessed entrance:
Its support columns are angled very low, so that one could actually walk onto the arena’s roof:
The architect has trusted us to behave civilly and we oblige, staying low on the column if we climb at all:
This public gathering space promotes good behavior and sense of fraternity by having transparent walls:
The Coliseum cleverly draws animal life to it by surrounding itself with vegetation:
These gardens are integrated with the structure. They are not token “green space”:
The trees loom above when one stands at the recessed entrance, inviting the eye upward, integrating earth with sky:
Yet the Coliseum, like a favorite tree, maintains a sense of human scale. One could almost reach and grab onto a corner of the roof:
The Seattle Center Coliseum manages these tricks of proportion without looking like it’s been sent through a funhouse mirror. The construction is delicate where it should be, with its glass walls, gently sloped roof, and vegetation, yet its signature white columns are unapologetically immense and angular as one stands beneath them. As art, it has integrated its contradictions. Furthermore, it is psychologically penetrating. It never forgets that it would be more dead glass, concrete, and stone without the daily involvement of curious, active people who take it in and give it meaning.
What a shame that this magnificent structure is so often buried under nonsense:
“I Was Starving in that Shithouse, the World”
Can one work of art be objectively better than another work of art? Let me rephrase the question: Is the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família an objectively better building than a Honeywell outhouse? While I suppose it all depends on what you plan to do inside the structure, the answer here has to be “yes.” If your answer is “no,” then you, my friend, have lapsed into the dullest sort of nihilism, an existential channel-surfing in which the mundane takes precedence simply because it can always out-vote the exceptional.
By staring at a picture of the Sagrada Família, we can discover something about the grandeur, indomitable will, and invisible intricacies of a successful human life. Now, what would happen if we were equally open to studying the inky blue depths of that outhouse – not as a matter of curiosity, but as part of our basic worldview? As the seconds passed, we would certainly find our resentment and disgust towards humanity mounting, and we would feel a strong urge to get the hell out of there. How do you feel when you look at the day’s headlines?
Murder, bankruptcy, child abandonment, the specter of hyperinflation… only horrors seem to make the cut.
When you find something of genuine beauty, correct yourself to it. Some of our society’s most prominent institutions are rotting from the top down. Don’t let them dominate your horizon. There are signs of a cultural revival in nooks of every city, suburb and town… sometimes stashed in iPods, sometimes lost in the banter of two lightheaded friends. These glimmers of a better way are isolated for now, but they are the cornerstones on which we will build, over the decades, something as monumental as the Sagrada Família, something really worth keeping around. I simply refer to a healthy culture.
There is no youth culture. Culture spans generations. It is found where young people talk with the old. Culture is a group of private citizens choosing to invest their money in the construction of an audacious church that had its groundbreaking in 1882 and isn’t yet finished in 2009.
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