String Theory Media

The Year in String Theory

What were the best and worst things that happened to music in 2005? I don’t mean the best and worst records. Lord knows there’s enough of those lists. I mean to MUSIC – the culture that makes it and supports it.

I’m afraid it’s easier to think of setbacks than progress off hand, but probably because of Hurricane Katrina’s biblical body blow to America’s greatest music city. We still don’t know a lot about how New Orleans’ oddball diaspora of musicians will reconstitute, but we know something very special will never be the same. Moreover, the breadth of destruction between Katrina and her devil sister Rita across bayou and prairie and coastal towns spelled doom for, if not an entire musical culture, then certainly dance halls, fiddles and record collections. There will never be an accounting.

Another ghastly scene that comes to mind is the metastasizing of the cancer known as 50 Cent from music and videos to video games and feature film. You’ve really got to be a avaricious psychopath to want to be the planetary face of thug life, but this is what 50 does for a living. You’ve really got to loathe your own community to commodify and merchandize race, fashion, violence and  music as coldly as 50 Cent has to whites and blacks alike. After public protest, the rapper withdrew one or more billboards in the summer that depicted his muscled back with arms splayed Christ-like with a microphone in one hand and a handgun in the other. It was one of the most unholy and despicable manipulations of music since Hitler discovered the narcotic effect of an oom-pah band.

But it wasn’t all bad by any means. The digital music marketplace matured like a colt. Subscriber possibilities expanded in number and catalog. Vast archives of music went truly portable with Napster-to-go and its imitators. The cost of learning, making and recording music fell to new lows. The iPod nano instantly became the best portable music solution ever invented. I gave one to my sister a third full of hand-picked music.

(Here's a fine story from the UK about how digital progress led to better music overall.)

I suppose this gift, which included no more than three tracks from any particular album by the way, will disgrace me with my songwriter friends, several of whom are able and influential representatives of creators everywhere. And I absolutely support the right of creators to get paid for their work. I support it so much that I’ll write it here (also my trade and craft) with no hope of any compensation. And I’ll furthermore say, free, that on balance, the intellectual property situation got a bit worse in 2005. And the problems aren’t as much about piracy as about who owns what and on what terms they're willing and able to circulate and market that content. It's about licensing and paying in ways that are fair, consistent and transparent. It’s a whole ‘nother entry, but it has to do with very large companies owning most of our cultural artifacts, stories, recordings and documents with no economic incentive to let those works be promulgated. I’ll have more on this later.

This is all that comes to mind right now. Please offer contributions to the blog.

Triksta

I’ve finished a book that must just be hitting the bookstalls now, a powerful and painful study of poverty and hip-hop that is as sensitive to the nuances of the music as it is dismayed by the pit of intellectual and social despair from which it emanates. “Triksta” by Nik Cohn describes the author’s disillusioning relationship with New Orleans’ obscure but feisty rap scene, such as it was before the deluge that wiped out one of the book’s settings, the city’s long-troubled Ninth Ward.

Cohn, a sixty-ish rock writing veteran originally from Northern Ireland, doesn’t just fall in the thrall of New Orleans street music and go to JazzFest like so many pilgrims, he dives like a reporter/artist/entrepreneur into the deep end of the Crescent City’s “bounce” scene, its boisterous, competitive, sexualized and very regionalized take on hip-hop. He worms his  way improbably into the inner city labyrinth of what in any other  town would be called gansta rap. He tries to make records, scout talent on behalf of a major record label (he has connections) and, with a Quixotic purity, tries to improve the music. He meets and introduces us to strikingly square, responsible, earnest, sincere and socialized rappers, each as eager to make a mark. And he meets punks barely able to communicate with anybody outside their ghettoized peer group, including the very elders in their family, who think that a ubiquitous form of communicative jousting is the only ticket to the coveted life of bling.

Cohn demonstrates that in this one very special city at least, my own most dismal fears about hip-hop have come to pass. Not hip-hop the clarion spoken word or music genre, but hip-hop the fashion-industrial complex that has annexed the brains of so many who need so much. In his remarkable chapter 4 history of hip-hop from street renaissance to commodified hate, Cohn writes that when white consumers began adopting black style without knowing anything about its origins, “casually, as if by divine right, black reality had been kidnapped and turned into a video game.”

“Call it Niggaworld. A virtual ghetto, where killing and bitch-baiting scored bonus points, and when you were shot, you jumped up unharmed and kept on firing. Because they had so much spending power, the players dictated where rap went and how it was marketed. They neither knew nor cared about hip-hop’s past, the aspirations it had once had, or the strength and beauty it might still possess. All that mattered was maximum splatter. When a new rapper appeared on the scene, he was no longer judged by his flow or what he had to say, only by his police sheet, the number of bullets he’d taken, how many notches were on his Glock. Was he a real nigga, or fake? That was the one question that mattered.”

A few days after I finished the book, I saw stories about a dustup in Los Angeles where protests had led to the redesign of some billboards for 50 Cent’s new movie “Get Rich or Die Trying.” I don’t know what exactly was on the banned billboards, but one ad I saw in New York contained the most reprehensible image I’ve perhaps ever seen associated with pop music. The muscled and tattooed back of this blank-souled rapper was spread in a Christ pose with a microphone in one hand and a handgun in the other. That’s a kind of unholy I can do without.

Cohn’s description of the new hip-hop zombie army is so new that it cold very well have been written after 50 Cent emerged, but he offers subtle analysis of gansta casualties like Tupac. In any event, he says that by 2000, “the worship of brain-dead thuggery had hip-hop by the scrotum.” Somebody who loves this mucic as much as Cohn needed to say this. Because it’s Black America’s loss, a black hole (awful pun invaoidable) in the history of black American music, which   has otherwise been such a poem, such a tribute, such a victory.

Read this book. There’s some kind of crazy roadmap back to soul music buried deep inside it.