A few months ago there was a quick going around Facebook where you could find out how much of a music snob you are. I didn't too badly, something in the 50%'s I believe. A music journalist friend scored up in the 70's I think, and lodged and objection that too many of the questions were US-based (like have you attended Coachella, that kind of thing). My boyfriend scored something like 85%. One of the things he got points for and I did not was the statement, "Agree or disagree: I have skipped seeing a band that I like perform live because I wanted to wait until I could see them in a smaller venue." That is him all over. His ideal perfect concert situation is to sit in the front row of a show at a coffee house or small room or basement where the performer is about three feet away, and ideally there are only about ten other people in the room, although it might be even better if none of them were there at all.
I am different, because I have long loved being part of a big crowd of people all doing the same thing at once. That's one reason I love large sporting events, and I'm sure it's one of the things I love about the church where I sing in the choir. But I especially love it as a way to listen to live music.
I grew up in large stadiums. My college wasn't in a big city, but during high school I was able to see a fair few bands perform in big venues, and I've been able to see a few here and there since then.
Last night, I was transported back to that time. The band Heart played at our local Performing Arts Center, a 2000-ish seat theater that is usually host to touring Broadway musicals, and is the home venue for our local Symphony. It has white walls and brass trim and red plush seats, so you wouldn't immediately think of it as a rock venue, but it was perfect.
The stage was fairly spare, just a drum kit and a keyboard and stacks of amps, low-lit in blue as we all took our seats. The crowd was all exactly my same age, dressed in what they wear to go see an 80's cover band at a bar. We looked good, but let's face it, we're all a bit older. There was no opening act, and the whole show was finished by 9:30 pm, which is good for a Sunday night because we all had to get up and go to work today. A local DJ came out and greeted us, and introduced the charity to whom a donation was being made from the night's proceeds. People filtered in, and the ushers futilely tried to them them not to take pictures with their phones.
When the lights went down, though, and the white streaming sunburst of stadium-style lights swept down, and then up, we were all on our feet, and the sound we made was one I haven't heard in years and years. It was dark, so you couldn't see the plush seats or the brass railings. You could only see the rock and roll stage and then the crowd of people with their hands in the air, as one. I was exactly transported back to McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado, where I last saw this band in August of 1980, according to some Googling I did today.
My boyfriend beside me did very well. He is a bit younger so he doesn't identify with big 1970's stadium rock as personally as I do (I remember being swept away with nostalgia and passion one time when my guitar teacher's band performed their cover of Photograph by Def Leppard, and I turned back to catch his eye and share the moment with him, and also my sister who was also there and is also younger but not as much as he is, and both of them just stared at me, clearly feeling nothing at all, they could have had the same expressions while listening to Hold music while waiting online to talk to their bank or some government agency. How is that even possible, for them not to hear it, not to be moved in the same way? The sounds are just out there, for everyone equally to hear!) and during the first few songs that Heart played he was standing with arms crossed in front of him, but by the time it was done he had grabbed me in his arms and swayed along with one of the power ballads, and cheered, and was certainly smiling along with the faithful who had just seen a wonderful show.
This is where I come from. I grew up in that space that I was once again in last night, and it was such a privilege to be able to be in it again, so exactly.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Born to Dance
A song from my boyfriend's past emerged in my own life a few weeks ago, and in my ensuing obsession I watched a YouTube clip of a news story originally broadcast on local TV in Champaign-Urbana, in which an earnest young reporter declaims straight to the camera that music was in trouble, dying even, but that the bands in her college town have rescued it and brought it back.
Each member of the band is interviewed, intercut with performance footage of them at an iconic local bar, including the song in question. One of the band members points out that one of the things that had been wrong with music (remember the times, and think bloated proggy FM-friendly groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Eagles on their bad days) is that you couldn't dance to it, and that his band was bringing dance music back.
I have been thoroughly saturated in Garage music since the second half of my college years, the original stuff from the 1960's and the second wave of it from the Paisley Underground in the 1980's, and for me it's the core of everything, and anchors everything else about music for me, but I never especially appreciated it as dance music. "Dance" usually refers to either disco or electronica, neither of which were central to me or in my wheelhouse at all, ever (if my parents had been a bit more lax about language standards, I would have had a "Disco Sucks" t-shirt in junior high and high school, definitely). Also, I have mainly appreciated the Garage genre in the privacy of my bedroom, with headphones on and the album cover gripped in my hands, reading historical liner notes and lyrics and what have you.
But they're right. It's very hard to dance to Yes, but it's easy to dance to the Vertebrats, even if you're mainly just hopping up and down in the one spot.
This hopping up and down is one of the native dances of my people - I remember being smushed into a big crowd under a hot big-top tent at Sydney's Homebake festival, hopping up and down along with the band members onstage of Regurgitator (trying to keep track of my backpack which was on the ground at my feet, cumbersome but good for surviving an all-day festival). The other involves kicking your feet out and swinging the opposite arm, like you were running but in place, and perfected by Belinda Carlisle in the early career of the Go-Go's.
I have been in groups who grew up moving to different music, and you can really tell.
One time was at a friend's birthday party at the Greek Club in Brisbane, Australia (the story about this party led to a running inside family joke*). After dinner, there was plate smashing - the friend had wanted to hold her birthday here partly just for that, I think because she'd had a recent relationship disappointment and wanted to get her feelings out in the white pottery shards. And then there was dancing, which I remember being in a circle. It wasn't especially fast, but was a little bit complicated, and the regulars helped us learn the steps. We stiffly staggered around the circle like puppets made of boards and springs, but I remember watching the Greek ladies. Older ladies, dressed all in black, with sensible shoes, but these ladies could move. They just had a smooth, fluid way of doing things. You could see how, if you really knew how to do this, how sexy it was. We all laughed at ourselves and felt humble, and talked afterwards at length about the Greek ladies, and how they moved, could just move, and how really you have to grow up doing this to be like that. We were all stunned by the difference.
A second experience, exactly the same observation but this time it was a Sales and Marketing team from Latin America. I was at a world-wide Sales convention for a global software company that I had only just joined. The Sydney office was in a region that had previously been called "Rest of World", showing how strategically important and central it was to the company's mission, but under an inspiring leader we had become an actual defined region and tight-knit team, the "Asia Pacific and Latin America" region (I think they used the acronym "APL" at that point, and very soon after that we became "AMPACA", same region but reporting into a differently structured team at headquarters, and now I don't know what they call it, I've been away for quite a few years). As part of one of the big dinners at the meeting, they gave out awards to different teams, and the teams had to come up to a stage at the front of the big hotel ballroom where we were dining. We were a software company, remember, so the first few sets of nominees were all awkward tech types. I can envision white short-sleeved shirts, and grey slacks, and slumped shoulders, and downward glances when accepting the award. In part I'm sure to cover some of the awkwardness, the ceremony included loud music played while teams walked up to the stage, and during the presentation of the award certificates.
Then there was an award for which the Latin American Marketing team was nominated. The team gathered on the stage, and as one started moving to the accompanying music. Their hips were moving, they were swaying and bobbing up and down, it was as if they couldn't help themselves. And then, when they won, they danced even more. Found a groove in the loud corporate music and carried it onto the ballroom floor all the way back to their seats.
Later, a band played and there was more general dancing, and since I was a new team member, one of the Latin American team members invited me to dance. I have always been a quick study of dance moves, and consider myself fairly rhythmic and coordinated, but I realized that I could not dance at all, compared to him. Again, I felt like that wooden, sprung puppet. There were gyroscopic directions my hips were supposed to go that they just didn't move that way. The experience was humbling, and astonishing, and impressive.
Again, it really helps to be born into it and do it all your life. There's just something different about it.
*Family inside joke: The other reason my friend cited for wanting to have her birthday at the Greek Club was that they served grilled octopus. I was describing this to my sister on a long-distance call after the event. My sister was in the US and I had lived in Australia for about four years at this point, plus San Diego for about four years before that, so about eight years all up in the Pacific Rim. "They served grilled octopus," I said to my sister on the long distance phone, "and they were octopus legs, not the little octopus, you know, like in salad." My sister paused a beat and said, "Excuse me?" Salads with little baby octopus in them were not as common in the parts of the US she had spent her whole life in, and once she pointed this out I realized how bizarre my statement would have sounded, and we must have laughed for five minutes straight. So, henceforth, "You know, like in salad!" has become family shorthand for anything that someone else would find completely alien and bizarre but you've become used to.
Each member of the band is interviewed, intercut with performance footage of them at an iconic local bar, including the song in question. One of the band members points out that one of the things that had been wrong with music (remember the times, and think bloated proggy FM-friendly groups like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Eagles on their bad days) is that you couldn't dance to it, and that his band was bringing dance music back.
I have been thoroughly saturated in Garage music since the second half of my college years, the original stuff from the 1960's and the second wave of it from the Paisley Underground in the 1980's, and for me it's the core of everything, and anchors everything else about music for me, but I never especially appreciated it as dance music. "Dance" usually refers to either disco or electronica, neither of which were central to me or in my wheelhouse at all, ever (if my parents had been a bit more lax about language standards, I would have had a "Disco Sucks" t-shirt in junior high and high school, definitely). Also, I have mainly appreciated the Garage genre in the privacy of my bedroom, with headphones on and the album cover gripped in my hands, reading historical liner notes and lyrics and what have you.
But they're right. It's very hard to dance to Yes, but it's easy to dance to the Vertebrats, even if you're mainly just hopping up and down in the one spot.
This hopping up and down is one of the native dances of my people - I remember being smushed into a big crowd under a hot big-top tent at Sydney's Homebake festival, hopping up and down along with the band members onstage of Regurgitator (trying to keep track of my backpack which was on the ground at my feet, cumbersome but good for surviving an all-day festival). The other involves kicking your feet out and swinging the opposite arm, like you were running but in place, and perfected by Belinda Carlisle in the early career of the Go-Go's.
I have been in groups who grew up moving to different music, and you can really tell.
One time was at a friend's birthday party at the Greek Club in Brisbane, Australia (the story about this party led to a running inside family joke*). After dinner, there was plate smashing - the friend had wanted to hold her birthday here partly just for that, I think because she'd had a recent relationship disappointment and wanted to get her feelings out in the white pottery shards. And then there was dancing, which I remember being in a circle. It wasn't especially fast, but was a little bit complicated, and the regulars helped us learn the steps. We stiffly staggered around the circle like puppets made of boards and springs, but I remember watching the Greek ladies. Older ladies, dressed all in black, with sensible shoes, but these ladies could move. They just had a smooth, fluid way of doing things. You could see how, if you really knew how to do this, how sexy it was. We all laughed at ourselves and felt humble, and talked afterwards at length about the Greek ladies, and how they moved, could just move, and how really you have to grow up doing this to be like that. We were all stunned by the difference.
A second experience, exactly the same observation but this time it was a Sales and Marketing team from Latin America. I was at a world-wide Sales convention for a global software company that I had only just joined. The Sydney office was in a region that had previously been called "Rest of World", showing how strategically important and central it was to the company's mission, but under an inspiring leader we had become an actual defined region and tight-knit team, the "Asia Pacific and Latin America" region (I think they used the acronym "APL" at that point, and very soon after that we became "AMPACA", same region but reporting into a differently structured team at headquarters, and now I don't know what they call it, I've been away for quite a few years). As part of one of the big dinners at the meeting, they gave out awards to different teams, and the teams had to come up to a stage at the front of the big hotel ballroom where we were dining. We were a software company, remember, so the first few sets of nominees were all awkward tech types. I can envision white short-sleeved shirts, and grey slacks, and slumped shoulders, and downward glances when accepting the award. In part I'm sure to cover some of the awkwardness, the ceremony included loud music played while teams walked up to the stage, and during the presentation of the award certificates.
Then there was an award for which the Latin American Marketing team was nominated. The team gathered on the stage, and as one started moving to the accompanying music. Their hips were moving, they were swaying and bobbing up and down, it was as if they couldn't help themselves. And then, when they won, they danced even more. Found a groove in the loud corporate music and carried it onto the ballroom floor all the way back to their seats.
Later, a band played and there was more general dancing, and since I was a new team member, one of the Latin American team members invited me to dance. I have always been a quick study of dance moves, and consider myself fairly rhythmic and coordinated, but I realized that I could not dance at all, compared to him. Again, I felt like that wooden, sprung puppet. There were gyroscopic directions my hips were supposed to go that they just didn't move that way. The experience was humbling, and astonishing, and impressive.
Again, it really helps to be born into it and do it all your life. There's just something different about it.
*Family inside joke: The other reason my friend cited for wanting to have her birthday at the Greek Club was that they served grilled octopus. I was describing this to my sister on a long-distance call after the event. My sister was in the US and I had lived in Australia for about four years at this point, plus San Diego for about four years before that, so about eight years all up in the Pacific Rim. "They served grilled octopus," I said to my sister on the long distance phone, "and they were octopus legs, not the little octopus, you know, like in salad." My sister paused a beat and said, "Excuse me?" Salads with little baby octopus in them were not as common in the parts of the US she had spent her whole life in, and once she pointed this out I realized how bizarre my statement would have sounded, and we must have laughed for five minutes straight. So, henceforth, "You know, like in salad!" has become family shorthand for anything that someone else would find completely alien and bizarre but you've become used to.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Deep Listening and being a Music Explorer
The story goes that experimental musician Pauline Oliveros was experimenting with a reel to reel tape machine, and at one point hung both the microphone and her head out the window of her New York apartment. When she listened back, she was astonished at what more the microphone recorded than what she had heard with her ears.
The fact is, when we human beings listen, normally we are attending to one thing, and therefore blocking out any other sound. If I was speaking this out loud to you, you would be blocking out the sounds of the room, or outside, to be able to attend to my voice. Our brains are wired up to work this way for a reason, so that we can function in the world, but the Deep Listening experiment involves reversing it, and opening up your hearing so that you're aware of the entire sonic landscape.
Often this kind of injunction comes across as a criticism, or as a rule for how you should always be - you've heard them before, "Humans only use 10% of our brain," "You should go through your day using Mindfulness: pay careful attention to how the Cheerios feel as you eat them for breakfast, take a different route to work, shop at a different store." "Observe the visual using the right side of your brain." They often sounds like criticism of how you normally live, and injunctions to always drive your experience this other way.
Deep Listening is not like that, because it wouldn't work to always listen this way. It would be as they describe certain types of autism - being confronted by a full palette of undifferentiated sound all the time, and not being able to distinguish anything. It would be worse than impractical, it would be dangerous. So, the injunction is not a criticism of how you've been hearing all your life, it's just an interesting experiment you can do with your attention, it's an alternative experience to try, but we certainly don't expect you to live this way all the time.
So, the experiment is - try to flip your attention, so that you're not attending to one sound and trying to block out the rest of the background noise, but attend to what the whole landscape of sound around you sounds like. I will stop talking. Can you hear the ticking of the clock? Can you hear the ticking of both clocks, the one right here and also the one in the other room? What else? Furnace, bird, car passing by, bubbling fountain?
And then, the next step is, become a sonic explorer. Put your ears in a different relationship with the source of a sound - turn your head, rotate your body, get up close to a hard surface to see if the reflections change the sound. Then pick things up, hit them, ping them, crumple them. What sound does this make?
You can't do this all the time. But we can all do it more than we do, and it opens up, at least during the experiment, a sonic world that is most of the time hidden to us, because of the way we attend, which we can't help doing and is helpful for survival and getting by in the world, but because we can attend, we can also open up, and for a while see what it's like.
The fact is, when we human beings listen, normally we are attending to one thing, and therefore blocking out any other sound. If I was speaking this out loud to you, you would be blocking out the sounds of the room, or outside, to be able to attend to my voice. Our brains are wired up to work this way for a reason, so that we can function in the world, but the Deep Listening experiment involves reversing it, and opening up your hearing so that you're aware of the entire sonic landscape.
Often this kind of injunction comes across as a criticism, or as a rule for how you should always be - you've heard them before, "Humans only use 10% of our brain," "You should go through your day using Mindfulness: pay careful attention to how the Cheerios feel as you eat them for breakfast, take a different route to work, shop at a different store." "Observe the visual using the right side of your brain." They often sounds like criticism of how you normally live, and injunctions to always drive your experience this other way.
Deep Listening is not like that, because it wouldn't work to always listen this way. It would be as they describe certain types of autism - being confronted by a full palette of undifferentiated sound all the time, and not being able to distinguish anything. It would be worse than impractical, it would be dangerous. So, the injunction is not a criticism of how you've been hearing all your life, it's just an interesting experiment you can do with your attention, it's an alternative experience to try, but we certainly don't expect you to live this way all the time.
So, the experiment is - try to flip your attention, so that you're not attending to one sound and trying to block out the rest of the background noise, but attend to what the whole landscape of sound around you sounds like. I will stop talking. Can you hear the ticking of the clock? Can you hear the ticking of both clocks, the one right here and also the one in the other room? What else? Furnace, bird, car passing by, bubbling fountain?
And then, the next step is, become a sonic explorer. Put your ears in a different relationship with the source of a sound - turn your head, rotate your body, get up close to a hard surface to see if the reflections change the sound. Then pick things up, hit them, ping them, crumple them. What sound does this make?
You can't do this all the time. But we can all do it more than we do, and it opens up, at least during the experiment, a sonic world that is most of the time hidden to us, because of the way we attend, which we can't help doing and is helpful for survival and getting by in the world, but because we can attend, we can also open up, and for a while see what it's like.
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