21 March 2011

Regarding the mystery of Andrew W.K.’s identity [ex. A, ex. B, ex. C]:

My preferred theory is that the young Andrew Wilkes-Krier wrote some great party anthems and devised a frontman persona, but didn’t want to actually spend years going in public as ‘Andrew W.K., superhero,’ incarnating the vision. So, after having received label interest on the strength of some very fleshed-out demos, he and his consultants recruited a  similar looking, beefier singer-actor to go on tour and appear in Andrew W.K. music videos, which is most of what the public saw from 2001-2004. Given accounts of the young Wilkes-Krier, this was likely his own preference, and not a fiction devised by Island. The latter day, leaner Andrew W.K. is actually the original guy behind the music, the guy whose face appeared on the cover of ‘I Get Wet.’ I think the “Party Hard” video may, crazily enough, actually show both the 2001-2004 stage actor W.K. (miming with the band) and Wilkes-Krier (in the form of the album cover image on a giant banner behind the band) in the same frames, cementing the illusion. This blew up in late 2004 with the Steev Mike threatening websites and the subsequent legal dispute. The man performing to a tape and giving motivational lectures since 2005 has been Wilkes-Krier.  If true, it’s been a Derren Brown-level experience.  Just a radically more thorough version of what the Beach Boys did by touring while Brian Wilson stayed in the studio making ‘Pet Sounds.’   If someone wants to go on tour as the singer of the Empty Mirror, doing exactly as I say, of course, I’m game.

8 December 2010

I was a guest on the latest podcast by Smashing Pumpkins fan site Hipsters United.  Click on one of the visual aids to hear my analysis of Billy Corgan’s 44-song opus-in-progress Teargarden by Kaliedyscope:

Update (12/10):

Corgan likes the colorwheel.

“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?

“Mean as a Postcard from a Candy Shop”

To fans of the Empty Mirror,

If it soothes the pain of our separation…
I offer you these recordings from the early days:

Jackpot

Grand Canyon [Magnetic Fields cover]

Erosion of the Will: Video Games

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

-Seneca, from “On the Shortness of Life”

I once had a profound, or at least a fanatical, appreciation for video games. My summer of 1994 was spent in pained anticipation of the Super Nintendo release of Mortal Kombat II, mowing lawns for cash and practicing every character’s special moves on an unplugged controller. By the time I could actually touch the game, I was deadly. I wept after beating Lavos in Chrono Trigger, as I watched the game’s generous ten-minute credit sequence unfold before me. In sixth grade, I gained notoriety for playing two days of hookie after the Nintendo 64 hit store shelves, but the truth of the matter was worse than that: I had willed myself into a genuine illness so I could stay home and explore Princess Peach’s 3D castle.

Today, I regard video games as a profound threat to the maturation process of my fellow young men.

“Take Off”

My multi-talented cousin Dan Valdes has released a new album:  Take Off. I played guitar on “Mr. Policeman” and this song:  “Love of My Life.”

“Once Revealed, Never Lost”

The Empty Mirror has ended. I will continue making music, as will Pete Steffy, Kerry Kallberg, Justin Pascua, Bill Kim, Ante Ruich, Demetri Skokos, Michael Hayden, and every other fine young man who has ever taken part in this project.

I believe the concept of the rock band has become democratized, compromised, dumbed-down, paralyzed, and an overall hindrance to the further evolution of Western music and, with it, human consciousness. I believe in the dignity of the artist. None of us needs hide behind a Warholian façade. Go to the mystery.

And know this: The Empty Mirror has partially recorded two distinct song-cycles. I promise to see these through to completion and release them when the time is right.

Every note counts. Every minute counts. Don’t waste them waiting on your call from L.A.

-Gv

“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:

“Consider Now the Charms That You Hold”

This piece, “The Smashing Pumpkins:  The Last Great Romantics?”, was originally published 23 February 2008 at the old Shoestring Century.  Since then, Mr. Corgan has given plenty of insight into how he sees his world, via the fine Everything From Here to There. I have altered the original text to replace disingenuous uses of the term “The Smashing Pumpkins” with the more accurate “Billy Corgan.”

Is he really a Romantic?  A Romantic might say this:  ”I have no problem telling you I am also a world class musician, and one of the best songwriters alive. If I said those things in an interview, I would be mocked, not because those things aren’t true, but because I shouldn’t be the one saying these things.”  But one would never, in the same essay, renounce “the illusion of independent thought [that] sustains the momentary peace of believing, ‘Lucky me, I am in control of my world.’”  The Romantic, the acme of the Western man, is in control of his world!

In the history books of Western music, Romanticism is regarded as a dead idea, something that went quietly into that atonal night of 20th century.  Everything resembling it since seems to be a Postmodern tribute, such as a John Williams film score, or a flat-out misuse of the term, like a “romantic” Coldplay ballad.  Yet I would argue that, by some historical anomaly, Romanticism’s ideals live on in the compositions and the career of Billy Corgan, a century after the death of the last great Romantics.  Based on the blues, rock has never really been a Romanic form, but Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlain and Co. have managed to transform it into something so grand, expressive and virtuosic that it warrants our consideration of whether or not the band should be thought of as the heirs to the legacy of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Frederic Chopin.

Let’s look at some of the defining traits of the old Romantics, to see just how well Corgan keeps the flame alive, intentionally or not:

Populism

The Romantic period was the first time that musicians could play directly to the people, traveling Europe and selling reams of sheet music thanks to new technology, instead of writing for the ears of dukes and churches.  This certainly calls to mind the mutual indifference between the Smashing Pumpkins and the music press.  The band only provided one magazine interview upon the release of Zeitgeist, choosing instead to directly answer fans’ questions through YouTube.  Seven years before Radiohead’s much-ballyhooed web release of In Rainbows, the Pumpkins refused to play courtier to Virgin Records, and gave the uncompromising Machina II/Friends and Enemies of Modern Music straight to twenty-five of their biggest fans.  In another symbolic act, the band members finished a 1998 performance of “Pug” on Brazil’s Programa Livre by handing their instruments to shivering, star-struck teenagers.

Virtuosity

The Romantics were the first to celebrate the virtuoso onstage, through improvisation and inhumanly complex arrangements.  On that note, I’ll never forget the glee on my friend’s face as he proclaimed, in the middle of an extended Corgan 2007 guitar solo, “Man, I would never accept this shit from anyone else!” I agree with him on principle – there’s too much jamming out there.  And yet Corgan’s wild improv held thousands of us transfixed.  That’s real virtuosity.

Chamberlain’s drumming virtuosity is likewise beyond question.  In live performances, he tears into the kit with the same semi-improvisational abandon that Liszt, the first great concert pianist, brought to his instrument.  Corgan revealed in a 2007 interview that Chamberlain laid down his take for the searing, nine-minute-and-fifty-three-second “United States” in one go (barring one “small” mistimed hit).  The experience of a non-stop, sweaty, three-plus hour Smashing Pumpkins concert is not so different from the recitals in which a frail Chopin collapsed onto his piano keys following one last cascading, fifteen-minute number.

Wild Ambition

This is my term for the Romantic’s desire to master every known form and length of musical piece.  This stems from the 18th century’s surging belief in the individual’s abilities – no longer was the composer a humble servant of classical dogmas.  In today’s pop climate, Corgan rejects the Postmodern idea that every possible genre has already been done, or the traditionalist’s (i.e. the blues man’s, the punk’s) notion that a band should serve one sound.  Corgan has shown a mastery of the whispered and spare (“Black Irish”, “Blank”) as well as the vast and thunderous (“Thru the Eyes of Ruby”, “Behold! The Night Mare”).

And I don’t believe Corgan was ever truly psychedelic, despite the paisley shirts.  That’s just what people say nowadays about guitarists who try to wring every possible tone out of their instrument.

Nationalism

With Zeitgeist, flanked by a drowning Lady Liberty and deadened black Stars and Bars, the Smashing Pumpkins embody that last defining element of Romantic music: nationalism.  Before you recoil in horror at the idea of a goose-stepping Billy, let me quote Chopin biographer Benita Eisler’s definition that nationalism, for the Romantic, “breathed the poignancy of exile from which a patriot artist… affirmed ties to a violated country.”

Are all of these parallels deliberate?  Does Billy Corgan yearn to be seen as a Romantic in an age of Postmodernism?  I diagnose here a clear, incurable outsider:  Corgan was born around 150 years too late.

Remember these lines from The Gay Science:   “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence.  Whether that is what he desires is immaterial; that he can do it is what matters.”  The proven, indestructible greatness of Corgan’s career thus far is antimatter to Generation Y postmodern detachment.  This is why Corgan offends.  He stands unashamed as a great man, humiliating the lesser — the scenesters.

26 October 2009

These songwriting luminaries have been trying to start a conversation, but the music press hasn’t, by and large, picked up on their cue….

Andrew W.K.‘s official biography mentions that he started taking classical piano lessons at age four, and that he enrolled in the The University Of Michigan School Of Music Pedagogy program at age five.  His latest release, 55 Cadillac, is collection of improvised piano pieces.

Elliott Smith appended the subtitle “Honky Bach” to his song “In the Lost and Found.”  Smith was caught on film performing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor.  He called his version “Punkrockmaninoff”:

Billy Corgan was asked this question in 2007:  ”Of all the artists out there living, living or dead, if you had the opportunity to choose one to cover a Smashing Pumpkins song, which artist would you pick and which song would you have them do?”  Corgan replied, “I would choose the as-yet unreleased version of ‘Gossamer’ to be covered by Bach…. good question.”

Matthew Bellamy ends the recording of Muse’s “United States of Eurasia” with a rendition of Chopin’s nocturne in E-flat major (op. 9, no. 2), which the trio rechristened “Collateral Damage.” Bellamy can be seen playing one of Liszt’s Paganini etudes in a video on YouTube.  His band’s latest album concludes with a three-movement “symphony” titled “Exogenesis.”

Spencer Krug, who studied music composition for three years, had this to say about modern music criticism:

Music journalism is really irresponsible right now and it won’t really take its role seriously if not challenged. They make jokes and make elaborate metaphors; like this Vice magazine bullshit, it’s funny on the first read but it doesn’t actually mean anything; I’ll read Vice magazine just like anyone else on the toilet or whatever. Music journalism doesn’t seem well thought out or in-depth. It’s so many wisecracks and plays-on-words, and it’s just piled onto the pile of shit that has already been written about art. And a lot of music journalists right now aren’t doing their jobs, they aren’t contributing to the back-and-forth of culture in a positive way. Music is important, music journalism is important, like criticism is important to art, but it should be used to propagate banter in society, and to further culture.

The above musicians are telling us that they have a living relationship with the Western art music of earlier eras (also known as “classical music”).  Why does the music press not follow up on this fascinating angle?  Are the interviewers insecure about their own relatively limited knowledge of the canon?  There’s no shame in that – simply let the interviewee take the lead.  Think of how informative it would be if every contemporary songwriter was at some point asked the following:

“Who is your favorite classical composer and why?”

Not every songwriter listens to classical music, but I’m guessing most do.  It is absurd it is that we don’t have an answer to that query for most of our era’s top songwriters, some of whom have been asked dozens of times to hold forth on politics, drugs, jet lag, record sales, and all subjects non-musical.  That this hole in our cultural knowledge goes unfilled and unnoticed should tell us how segregated youth culture is from the multigenerational process of real culture.

The above figures clearly want (or wanted) to talk about classical music.  Through the simple act of letting them do so, we would advance our understanding of contemporary music, classical music, and, I think, our era’s place in the timeline of history.  We would let our artists teach us.