Portal to a tiny Hell
Feb. 8th, 2010 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneDid the people and/or cyborgs that wrote and performed smooth jazz back in the 1980s know they were doing the Devil's work?
Did they not understand that their music would be used as hold music, long after their synthesizers had been made obsolete by toddler-proof versions of the same equipment?
It's 2010 and I'm on hold to an office in Toronto. The hold music sounds eerily like the Rippingtons or some other Windham Hill assault squad. I keep thinking of the scene from Wayne's World 2 where Garth imagines the crowd seated for a Yanni concert, with himself at the end of a row having his teeth attacked by a dentist.
In contrast, the conference line I send to my customers has what I consider annoying but tolerable music: Vivaldi. I don't like most orchestral music because I can only think of the childhood trauma I suffered at the hands of band teachers. How much worse must it be to suffer some conductor with a public ego? I like chamber music -- I can follow the action, I can study the changes and the sonic affects, I can feel it. I even like organ music: one person working a giant machine as if it were a ninety-foot lover.
Smooth jazz is evil. The point has been made time and again, even in the outtakes from Idiocracy. Some part of your soul has to have been yanked out to create the stuff. Most of it has disappeared, possibly because it now sounds technologically dated in a way Moog music and tunes on 78 RPM lacquer cannot.
The technology involved was hardly cutting edge. It's just that you can hear the keytars. You can feel someone pretending to get down when there is no descent happening.
Let me provide a little historical context. Bebop jazz came about at the end of World War II. It came from session musicians for big band jazz, boogie-woogie and other popular dance musics getting together after their paid gigs. These guys already knew a ridiculous amount of the existing popular music and could build other songs from those components. This led to impressive riffs, mostly built from quotation and resulting improvisation.
If you want an amazing example of this, look for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's Town Hall performance from 22 June 1945. Dizzy had been in Cab Calloway's band, where he was the go-to guy for trumpet riffs. All sorts of other amazing guys are on this performance at the very beginning of bebop and it shows skills we think of happening a decade later. Heck, we were still at war with Japan when this cultural bomb dropped! This event was the jazz equivalent of Jacques Derrida speaking at Johns Hopkins at the conference to introduce the New Structuralism to America and instead saying the new movement already dead because its foundation is itself, nothing a priori.
Later jazz mutates again, as musicians spend more time in introspection and on session work in quiet studios. They get to play with more expensive equipment -- nicer dynamic microphones, multitrack tape recording, effects processing, stronger drugs. Unfortunately, some of the original musicians fall out from either the drugs or exhaustion of ideas. Their replacements are fascinated by the equipment but do not have the chops from years of grinding through standards. Eventually we wind up with Spyrogyra (the band, not the organisms with the plus and minus sexings we cannot always determine).
Eventually we get guys born to be middle-aged. They get paid to walk into a studio and play pablum. They're very good at being boring. Thus I'm on hold to Toronto.
The rebellion against this was easy: get people off Quaaludes. You get people playing with more interesting instruments again, such as Bela Fleck. You get infusions of other genres with strong foundations and large repertoires of music, such as hip-hop and blue grass (see Bela Fleck again).
I can only hope I've heard the last of 1987's attempt to poison mankind. While I may dream of Wendy Carlos stabbing some smoothist with a patch cord, I know there are plenty of lazy people with Auto-Tune boxes just waiting to Cherylize the planet.
...but that will have to wait. My customer is back on the phone.
Did they not understand that their music would be used as hold music, long after their synthesizers had been made obsolete by toddler-proof versions of the same equipment?
It's 2010 and I'm on hold to an office in Toronto. The hold music sounds eerily like the Rippingtons or some other Windham Hill assault squad. I keep thinking of the scene from Wayne's World 2 where Garth imagines the crowd seated for a Yanni concert, with himself at the end of a row having his teeth attacked by a dentist.
In contrast, the conference line I send to my customers has what I consider annoying but tolerable music: Vivaldi. I don't like most orchestral music because I can only think of the childhood trauma I suffered at the hands of band teachers. How much worse must it be to suffer some conductor with a public ego? I like chamber music -- I can follow the action, I can study the changes and the sonic affects, I can feel it. I even like organ music: one person working a giant machine as if it were a ninety-foot lover.
Smooth jazz is evil. The point has been made time and again, even in the outtakes from Idiocracy. Some part of your soul has to have been yanked out to create the stuff. Most of it has disappeared, possibly because it now sounds technologically dated in a way Moog music and tunes on 78 RPM lacquer cannot.
The technology involved was hardly cutting edge. It's just that you can hear the keytars. You can feel someone pretending to get down when there is no descent happening.
Let me provide a little historical context. Bebop jazz came about at the end of World War II. It came from session musicians for big band jazz, boogie-woogie and other popular dance musics getting together after their paid gigs. These guys already knew a ridiculous amount of the existing popular music and could build other songs from those components. This led to impressive riffs, mostly built from quotation and resulting improvisation.
If you want an amazing example of this, look for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's Town Hall performance from 22 June 1945. Dizzy had been in Cab Calloway's band, where he was the go-to guy for trumpet riffs. All sorts of other amazing guys are on this performance at the very beginning of bebop and it shows skills we think of happening a decade later. Heck, we were still at war with Japan when this cultural bomb dropped! This event was the jazz equivalent of Jacques Derrida speaking at Johns Hopkins at the conference to introduce the New Structuralism to America and instead saying the new movement already dead because its foundation is itself, nothing a priori.
Later jazz mutates again, as musicians spend more time in introspection and on session work in quiet studios. They get to play with more expensive equipment -- nicer dynamic microphones, multitrack tape recording, effects processing, stronger drugs. Unfortunately, some of the original musicians fall out from either the drugs or exhaustion of ideas. Their replacements are fascinated by the equipment but do not have the chops from years of grinding through standards. Eventually we wind up with Spyrogyra (the band, not the organisms with the plus and minus sexings we cannot always determine).
Eventually we get guys born to be middle-aged. They get paid to walk into a studio and play pablum. They're very good at being boring. Thus I'm on hold to Toronto.
The rebellion against this was easy: get people off Quaaludes. You get people playing with more interesting instruments again, such as Bela Fleck. You get infusions of other genres with strong foundations and large repertoires of music, such as hip-hop and blue grass (see Bela Fleck again).
I can only hope I've heard the last of 1987's attempt to poison mankind. While I may dream of Wendy Carlos stabbing some smoothist with a patch cord, I know there are plenty of lazy people with Auto-Tune boxes just waiting to Cherylize the planet.
...but that will have to wait. My customer is back on the phone.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 12:08 pm (UTC)Saw an amazing analog synth last week.
It's been under construction for several years, lovely anodized blue metal with celtic knotwork amidst the rows upon rows of patch jacks, pots, LEDs and toggle switches.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-09 04:44 pm (UTC)