A man, a plan, a canal...

This week I've been preparing for a trip to Panama, starting this Saturday, so I'll be away from the blog (even more than last week!) until November. Once I'm back, I expect most every aspect of my life will get less hectic, and I can go back to plugging my shows (Nov. 8 Nov. 8 Nov. 8) and catching up on the October blogosphere. Two music-related conferences happened this month, one about the evolution of ideas around intellectual property and copyright, and the other a (presumably) more general, state-of-the-industry conference sponsored by the Future of Music Coalition. In related news, the call for papers for Seattle's spring Pop Conference went out this month, which is an eye-opener for any of you who are skeptical about the academic depth of pop music critical theory. I've provided links to all three in case ya'll want to get a head start on me while I'm watching monkeys and speaking bad Spanish. Hasta luego!

Insert Your Favorite Coming Out Word Pun Here

Happy National Coming Out Day! A bit of queer culture for you today. This is a day that began as a great organizing tool for students on college campuses that got co-opted by the Human Rights Campaign like so many of the causes they put token support behind. Huzzah for co-opted holidays! To be fair, this year HRC seems to have downplayed its publicity (based on their website today) of the day relative to previous years, where you'd never have guessed that NCOD used to be an exciting, student-driven enterprise. When I was a wee little queer in high school, I remember NCOD simply being a suggested activity for gay-straight alliances (and lone ranger/renegade queer students), a cause célèbre that was emailed around listservs and networks of faculty advisors and the like. At my school, we celebrated by being harassed by security guards at 6 in the morning while we chalked LGBT awareness slogans around campus. It was also conveniently timed on college campuses as a great opportunity to find out who the other queer people were, and erego, who was eligible for your dating pool.

Unfortunately, the all-knowing Wikipedia gives credit to HRC for taking reigns of the event, though thankfully does acknowledge the origins of the day as remembering the '87 March on Washington. (I was just turning 7!) I'm hoping that students today are still excited by this tiny act of societal rebellion, and not just watching celebrity testimonials on HRC's website alone in the computer lab.

Music Nachos

Part Three

If you haven't read parts one and two, I've been blogging about Pandora, give part one a skim at least.

The question today is: Does digital music distribution give musicians (independent or just indie-label) a leg up against big record labels?

This question, like the others, can be stretched to apply to the industry-wide musings about the effect that desktop production--and more importantly, distribution--is having on the music industry. Pandora's Tim was a pretty unabashed idealist when it came to the power technology granted musicians, talking about the three major things record labels (are supposed to) do for musicians--record your stuff, then promote it, then sell it--and how technology makes two of those easier. While an entire discussion of how the internet changes the dynamics of this role that record labels are supposed to have, let's narrow this down to Pandora for now. (Feel free to comment if you want to open it up.)

In the musical ecosystem, Pandora is a promoter. They are, when you boil it down, a radio station (albeit a highly technical one), and radio's raison d'ertre has always been to promote music (for better or for worse). Will Pandora, as a tool for online music discovery, give musicians the ability to find their audiences? Tim's feeling on this was yes, and it resonates with the experience of any Pandora user you speak to. Using Pandora introduces you to artists you never, ever would have discovered on your own, period. As evidence, Tim shared with us that Pandora is now the industry standard for TV and film scorers and music producers who want to find emerging artists as a cheap alternative to popular mainstream artists.

But are these artists actually different enough from the ones you already know and love to earn a place on your iPod?

As one listener said, "I like nachos. I don't want to eat them everyday." Many of the hardcore music-lovers at the forum said Pandora is almost too good at finding similar artists, and that once you've given Pandora enough feedback, it knows your music tastes too well to take any risks, creating a homogenous and undiverse mix of songs. There are ways around this, but it does make one wonder if most casual music listeners will find their next much-beloved album on Pandora, or if only music "insiders" (for lack of a better term) will put the effort into it to broaden their horizons.

And all of this assumes that you are in the 33% of unsolicited submissions that the Music Genome Project actually processes and integrates into Pandora. To truly secure your spot in the Genome, users must have searched for your music and come up empty -- too many empty searches for a single artist will prompt the Genome musicologists to add their collection. And this presumes the artist has some amount of name recognition to begin with, or has a very committed fan-base willing to blitz Pandora's search engine.

I'm going to leave these questions/threads open for now, since, to be fair, Pandora is too young to come to any firm answers, but many of them will come into play when I tackle how Pandora will be able to steer clear of the influence of Major Media.

Pandora Part Two

I'm starting with one of the questions I posed in Part One, which is what characteristics of music do most listeners base their musical choices on? Which is clearly a very broad question, so I'd love to get everyone's input on what you, yes you, on what makes you like or dislike music.

More specifically, one of the characteristics that, for me, determines whether or not music has any staying power with me is the lyrics. I pay a lot of attention to the lyrical subtlety and prosody of a song, and even of an entire album, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority in this. Anecdotally speaking it seems most people's taste in music can be pegged by the characteristic described by the Music Genome Project -- the approximate 400 attributes each song in Pandora is rated on individually. So what happens to the lyrics in the Genome?

I asked Pandora's Tim about how lyrics were handled, and he acknowledged that they are a weak spot in Pandora, and in the Genome Project in general. Tim had an interesting perspective on which lyrics elements might determine a person's taste in music, based on his explanation of lyrics in the Genome. Commenting on how subjective they are (agreed), Tim said "one person's happy can be another person's sad." And in fact, lyrical "genes" were once included in the Project, but as the Pandora team came to decide on which genes were useful and which ones weren't, lyrics were kicked off the list because they were too difficult to measure objectively.

While I agree that the emotional content or interpretation of lyrics is far too subjective for something as taxonomical as the Genome project to measure, it did seem to imply that emotional content was all there was to lyrics. Another Pandora listener commented alter that evening that it would serve Pandora well to measure lyrics by more literary attributes, for instance, verse/chorus structure, use of a bridge, etc. The Genome does use basic literary traits such as these, but doesn't measure (as of yet) more advanced critical concepts that may actually indicate a lot about a listener's preferences. These concepts could be things like paradoxical language (typical of Modest Mouse), third person narration (typical of Ben Folds), or adherence to a strict rhyme scheme (any showtune you can name).

So here are my questions to you (the royal you): do these more advanced lyrical traits play a part in your musical preferences? Does much of your music collection have lyrical commonalities on this level? If you looked at the lyric sheets alone, would there be more similarities than if you looked at the genres represented by your iPod?

Geeks and Musicians Unite at Pandora Town Hall Meeting

Part One

Over the next several days I'll be posting reports on the Pandora Town Hall Meeting that took place last night at MIT Building 26 (MIT folks: you people need to name your buildings already, what is this, a dystopian futurist sci-fi novel?). While many of you may still be unfamiliar with Pandora, if you're at all interested in music or technology I urge you to at least give it a try and tell me what you think. Instead of simply writing an extended, serialistic promotion of the service, Pandora and the Music Genome Project open up (like a box, see?) a whole range of questions, many of which were addresses last night by one of Pandora's founders, Tim. And while I'd like to think you would just take my word on that, it's only fair to entice you with a preview:

Does digital music distribution give musicians (independent or just indie-label) a leg up against big record labels?
What characteristics of music do most listeners base their musical choices on?
How can small media outlet companies like Pandora remain neutral of the influence of Major Media?

All of which I find fascinating, relevant, and hell, I spent two and a half hours with the rest of the MIT nerdosphere last night -- I might as well make good use of it. Check back soon for the first part.

In the meantime, go to my show tonight.

High Fidelity Review

It's a musical about a hipster slacker who openly judges your music collection and is bad at relationships. Of course they would cast an Oberlin graduate in the lead role.

The musical adaptation of High Fidelity had its world-premiere in Boston last week. Three things usually happen to movies that are adapted to the musical stage, any of which could have happened here:

(1) As a story that is already about music, using it constantly as a cultural and narrative reference point, it had the potential for a high-concept musical, intertwining the book with self-references to the score and reviving old genres through avant-pop tributes (ala the Scissor Sisters and disco, or Hairspray and pop music of the 60s).

(2) Working off of the soundtrack to the film, it had the potential to follow in the footsteps of Mamma Mia! and other shows that kidnap pop songs from Top 40 radio stations and force musical actors to essentially sing two hours of cover songs inbetween scenes that attempt to tie the numbers together in something that pretends to be a plot. Or even a theme.

(3) As yet another musical adaptation of an original film (like, oh, say The Producers, Hairspray, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Color Purple, The Lion King, etc. etc.), it had the potential to be filled with numbers that took three or four lines of dialogue from the original and stretched them into long, predictable songs that come off as trying too hard and pale in comparison to the original.

What happened in High Fidelity was a mix of 1 and 3. (As for #2, the music is all original, which is admirable, but unfortunately pales in comparison to anything on the original soundtrack, and is forgettable to boot.) The moments when the music is used to flesh out a character (option 1) are the show's best, and actually justify the adaptation of the film. But more often, High Fidelity falls into option 3, and the cast becomes a cover band for John Cusack et. al.

And I'm not talking Cake's cover of "I Will Survive." I'm talking Madonna's cover of "American Pie." You know, when it probably sounded good on paper, but when Madonna gets into the recording studio, and you're the producer, you should really be saying to yourself, "B-side"? High Fidelity the musical is a really good B-side to the film, but it doesn't make a good album.

Shortbus Review

[I'm assuming most of ya'll are reading this on Monday -- sorry for the late reviews. I'll post my Shortbus review now, and will save my thoughts on High Fidelity for Tuesday.]

Last Thursday night, some twenty-odd gay men in jeans and sports jackets pulled up to the Loews Boston Common theater in a short yellow bus. This happened three or four times, with some insisting to "Liz" -- the woman with the clipboard -- that they were "on the bus." A student from Emerson with a fake German accent pretended to look for the bathroom behind Liz three times before he gave up. Liz disappears and returns 10 minutes later with another gay man in jeans -- this one short, in a plain flannel shirt and a blue hoodie, without any hair product.

Quite a change for the man who sported a foot-tall blonde wig and sparkle-lipstick in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

And after John Cameron Mitchell (JCM) was shown into the theater, me and a dozen other fanboys and fangirls at the front of the line were let into the theater for the advanced screening of Shortbus, his new film that begins its Boston run on October 13th at Kendall.

If you haven't heard of the film, JCM's manifesto of sorts was to have actual, real sex on screen, to use "the language of sex" as JCM put it, to tell a story. While I was skeptical when I first heard this of being the basis for entire film, JCM's fascination with bodies is an apt followup to Hedwig, which explored the looseness of gender and identity with an
"anatomically incorrect" protagonist. Meditations on the body are familiar territories, then, for JCM, and this comes through vividly in Shortbus. At the center of the film is a salon of the same name (welcoming all of society's "gifted and challenged") where the characters go to get their underground film and music on (and cannabis popcorn, or "potcorn"), and to get in touch (so to speak) with their sexuality. As JCM described it in the Q&A followup Thursday night, it's a place where art, music, politics, food, and sex all exist with the same level of importance.

JCM brings the same sense of humor and humanity that he brought to Hedwig to his merry band of sexual players in Shortbus, which results in a fun and funny perspective on sex. It almost became easy to forget I was watching people actually have sex in front of me, until I realized the actors I was watching were so much more spontaneous and natural than any film I'd seen in a long time. Of course, the actors worked with each other for two and a half years, which helps, but that doesn't diminish the intimacy -- both emotional and physical -- that comes across in every single scene. And as you would expect, for me this made the characters more endearing, until the sex wasn't even conspicuous anymore. The film passed that ultimate test of presenting characters you would want to spend an evening with, even if you don't typically spend an evening at an art-fuck in lower Manhattan. (And who isn't spending most of their evenings like that nowadays.....)

It was fitting that JCM introduced the film by saying, "Yes, there's lots of tits, dick, and ass, but those are attached to other things, and we call those things 'people'."