Fun with Meter (Part 1)

Back in the early '70s, a concerned music fan apparently wrote into Rolling Stone claiming that he'd done the math, and the world was about to run out of melodies. Seems the total combination of available notes, like drink flavors at a Sonic, was finite, and based on the number of original copyrights, was about to be reached. The end of original music.

Of course, that didn't happen; music is not just random, but subjective. As a musician, I know that a song sounds completely different to me if I just play it on a different piano -- not a different make, even, just a different piano. If you don't call attention to it, you can rehash anything, especially if you don't know you're doing it. This goes for all forms of art, which is why there's only x amount of plots a movie can have. It's the variations, and the context, that matter.

I don't remember, for example, who it was that first told me about the Emily Dickinson / Madonna connection: seems most of her poems have the same meter and rhyme structure, which means you can theoretically sing almost her entire oeuvre to the tune of :"Like A Virgin." Check it out:   

Because I could not stop for Death | I made it through the wilderness

He kindly stopped for me | Somehow I made it through

The carriage held but just ourselves | Didn't know how lost I was

And Immortality | Until I found you 

My friends and I once discovered that you could easily turn the Guns N' Roses' ballad "Sweet Child O' Mine" into the religious standard "Amazing Grace":

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound | She's got a smile that it seems to me 

That saved a wretch like me | Reminds me of childhood memories

I once was lost, but now I'm found | Where everything was as fresh as the bright blue

Was blind, but now I see | Sky...

As a New Orleans native, I myself was pleased to realize that the Big Tymers' geto-fabulous hit "Still Fly" works just fine with the lyrics from a certain legendarily stupid sitcom: 

Gator boots | Gilligan
With the pimped out Gucci suits | The Skipper, too
Ain’t got no job | The Millionaire
But I stay shive | And his wife
Can’t pay my rent | The Professor and
‘Cause all my money’s spent | Mary Ann
But that’s okay | They're all here
‘Cause I’m still fly | On Gilligan's Isle

Sometimes the similarities are intentional, too. '60s songwriter Jack Hildebrand was commissioned to write a "protest song" for the Monkees, so he stole the frame of another social commentary, the Rolling Stones' "19th Nervous Breakdown":

She knows her mind all right, your Auntie Grizelda | You're the kind of person you meet at certain dismal dull affairs

She says she knows my kind, she might, maybe so | Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs

Oh yeah, she's raised you right, your Auntie Grizelda | well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years

You only know the things she wants you to know | And though you've tried, you just can't hide, your eyes are edged with tears

You look just like her, you do | You better stop

I know by looking at you | And look around

That you've been listening to your Auntie Grizelda | Here it comes...

Finally, I was pleased to find a rare double ripoff that works just fine no matter which lyrics you sing to which song:

They're Pinky and the Brain | I'm singin' in the rain

They're Pinky and the Brain | Just singin' in the rain

One is a genius | What a glorious feeling

The other's insane | I'm happy again

They're laboratory mice | I walk down the lane

Their genes have been spliced | With a happy refrain

They're dinky | I'm singin'

They're Pinky and the Brain | I'm singin' in the rain 

(Singing the P&TB lyrics to the Gene Kelly melody is goofy fun, but doing it the other way around sounds just psychotic. Rain, rain, rain, doodly, rain, rain, rain, RAIN.)

One Hundred Bad Drawings: Page 6

EVERY FIFTEEN YEARS
or, the story so far

America said, "You are free,"
and her children believed it.

America said, "Have as much as you want,"
and her children said, "more."

America said, "Don't look at those dirty people,"
and her children went over to dance with them.

America said, "Put on a suit and go to work,"
and her children fucked in the mud.

America said, "Everything is in order,"
and her children formed a pit of thrashing bodies.

America said, "Numb yourself,"
and her children slit their flesh open.

So then America said, "You can't have any more."
And her children came after her.

Black Joe Lewis: Keeping it real, in more ways than one

(The following was written in 2009 for a publication that shall remain nameless. They liked it, they published it, but they never got around to paying me for it. So it's mine now. And yours. Enjoy!)  

Black Joe Lewis has made quite a name for himself and his band, the Honeybears, over the past year by unleashing a potent mix of blues, soul, and rock he calls “garage soul.” Universally beloved by critics for both his incendiary live shows and his recent album Tell 'Em What Your Name Is!, the only question among the rock literati remains: how best to hype him? The new James Brown? The man who saved soul? Iggy Pop wriggling around inside the body of a Texas bluesman? These are the types of notices he's been getting in this, his first year of real fame.

So it's only fitting that his backstory sounds like a rock-star “overnight success,” but with a real shaggy-dog tale underneath. Consider: just seven years ago, Joe was a high school dropout with no marketable skills, recording comedy skits at home into a tape recorder, working as one of two employees in a small Austin pawn shop and knowing little or nothing about the art of making music.

Oh, he’d had an informal education in the art of loving music: his father was an avid fan who gave Joe his first taste of blues in the Austin suburbs. "I was more into hip-hop growing up," he says now, an admission which makes Honeybears titles like "Get Yo Shit" and "Bitch, I Love You" easier to understand. Lightnin' Hopkins came from the exact same area of Houston as Lewis' family, which was one reason he stayed on Dad's stereo so much back then.

But Joe wasn’t interested. "I didn't really take to that at first," he says now. "But as you start playing music, you start listening to more things. Better things. And I mean, the attitude, what they talked about, it’s all the same thing." "The blues," he muses, "is like the hip-hop of the ‘50s, and rock and roll. Everything came from blues. It all comes in circles.”

For Lewis’ blues intervention, we can thank the Action Pawn chain of Texas pawn shops, specifically the one in Cedar Park. When customers were scarce, Lewis began fiddling with the busted and broken-down misfit guitars in the store rather than speak to the only other person there at the same time – his boss. (“We did not agree on anything.”) Within months he'd trained himself to play, and since he wasn't about to try hip-hop on a guitar, Joe reverted back to his parents' stash: not just Lightnin' but also Hound Dog Taylor and any other blues and soul man from there to Memphis.

Joe still wasn’t a fulltime musician, however. The honor of turning him on to that prospect went to his neighbors, then playing in a band called The Weary Boys. “I was working 50 hours a week,” he remembers, “and they would go see the world, and get to hang out with people, and play music for money. They were like, ‘Man, just start playing the blues, you can have all of that.’ And I had nothing going but a lot of day jobs.”  

So Lewis began to write, inspired by Hopkins’ raw simplicity on vocal and guitar, and his lyrical honesty. But as he tested his material out on some of Austin’s more unforgiving open mic nights, stage fright became a huge factor. “My first show was at a place called Beerland,” he laughs. “Lot of punk rock down there. And I was doing covers, but I wrote a lot of songs back then, and they all sounded like the same four-bar blues. Same progression. Acoustic guitar, really growly sound. And here I am, nervous and shit, so I would get drunk on like 20 tons of alcohol and start cussing the audience. And they actually allowed me to come back. I really appreciate those club owners,” he laughs. (Around that time, he began using the “Black Joe” handle, a remnant of one of those old comedy skits which was done with a friend called “White Joe.”)

 James Brown was also a big influence, as anyone who’s heard Lewis callout to the Honeybears on “Sugarfoot” can attest. But that was born of necessity, according to the singer: when getting drunk didn’t work, he resorted to simply screaming his fear away. “I never wanted to even be the singer in this band,” he claims now. "I just started singing quietly. Now I’m screaming the whole time.”

By this time, other musicians in the club’s orbit began to pick up on what Joe was doing, and after future Honeybear and University of Texas alum Zach Ernst got him to open for Little Richard at the college’s annual Forty Acres Fest, the band naturally formed about him. At first, it was a trio – named after a crate of bear-shaped honey containers lying around in one of their practice rooms. Soon, however, he had the idea of a big band: “We had a lot of horn players; adding horns to what I do automatically makes it a soul band.”

The rest is recent history. The group easily conquered Austin; after agreeing to appear at SXSW in 2007, Esquire listed the Honeybears as one of the Ten Bands Set to Break Out there; they promptly did. This year, in keeping with the band’s blues-rock-soul theme, both Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza snapped them up. And with the fame has naturally come some criticism: specifically, rumbles of protest about Lewis’ attitude towards women in the lyrics of songs like “Get Yo Shit,” where he can’t even remember his girlfriend’s name. Joe insists, however, that it’s all just outsized remnants of his earlier comedy leanings: “It’s all just fragments of stuff that happened. But I was always a big Richard Pryor fan.”  

  

There’s also the question of whether the Bears wear their influences a little too proudly on their sleeves, for example the intro of “Gunpowder,” which hews so very close to the Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” that it can’t be anything but an homage. But Lewis promises the band “wants to keep improving,” and to that end, they’ve already begun writing and rehearsing for the next album. And even though songs like the slavery blues “Master Sold My Baby” point to possible directions of maturity, Lewis also swears to keep it as raw and dirty as his idols. In fact, he still buys instruments from pawn shops. “Hey, we’re not rich yet,” he mumbles. “A guitar’s only 40 dollars, and the main thing you’re paying for is to have it stay in tune. Unless you're using it live, why spend all that money?”

The Third Eye Method

or, how to be a pretentious snot in your spare time

"It was Plato who first put words to the Theory of Forms... for example, there exists in the world of ideas a perfect chair. This is the ideal chair, the chair of which all chairs in our world are dilutions, imperfect variants, and lesser shades of. This is the chair which embodies absolute chairness; it is the reference chair." -- Simon Parkin

"The Blues are beautiful because it’s simpler and because it’s real. It’s not perverted or thought about: It’s not a concept, it is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music." -- John Lennon


As I posted previously, there is such a thing as good taste in music. It can be proven. But having beaten that particular dark horse to death, I'm going to put my lack of money where my mouthpiece is and give you my very own system for rating music. It's one I've been developing for a while, and the good news is that anyone can do it, professional or not -- but the success you have at rating music is, I have to warn you, proportional to just how much music you've heard.

So what do we look for in a musical piece -- a song or an album? Ratings systems are usually pretty haphazard; they're either unnecessarily complicated or shockingly arbitrary. I've come up with something called The Third Eye Method, which works as a nice metaphor for being able to see things more deeply than others, but is really just a mnemonic that reminds you we're talking about three qualities that begin with the letter I. Diamonds, for example, are judged by four Cs: Cut, Clarity, Carat, and Color. But songs take a lot less time to form than diamonds, so I'm doing it in three: Impact, Invention, Integrity. 


1. Impact.


Any teenager knows impact. In fact, it's most young people's introduction to music: that club beat or guitar riff or crazy vocal that hits you dead in the face, and maybe changes your life. The record industry, ever-mindful of that coveted 18-34 age group, wants you to rock out or get crunk or whatever. It's what drives the money. They know your hormones are caught up in such things like a cow stuck in a fence. It's why rock and roll came along in the first place. Same goes for soul, disco, metal, punk, and hip-hop. Loud, fast, hard, clean.

At the same time, there is such a thing as emotional impact, and this is where pop music rules -- the achingly tender ballad, the sweet love song, the catchy hook that earworms you at work all day. It's the crack, this impact, the drug that makes you come back. It has to move something: your head, your ass, your heart. And it must do so simply and, above all, efficiently. Boredom equals death.

Artists that score high on Impact: AC/DC. Ramones. The Mars Volta. The Sonics. Public Enemy. NWA. Andrew WK. Most hardcore punk and real metal. But Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes hold down the sensitive end.
Artists that don't: Coldplay, Bon Jovi, boy bands, any Kidz Bop song. Anything lame. You'd be surprised what a general consensus the "cool kids" always have on lameness.


2. Invention.

This one's also easy for most casual music listeners. Have you heard something that sounds like this before? If no one has, congratulations, you just scored high on I number two. This is the aspect of popular music that eventually drives the industry, but the changes happen much more slowly. More of a geological movement, really. But slow moving tectonic plates can cause earthquakes. 

Remember that band you heard when they first came out, and for years you went around telling all your friends about them, but no one cared? And then one day, they were all over the radio, or a band that sounded like them was all over the radio? That's the eventual power of invention: the new sound. It's the kind of thing that only real musicians can do, because they have to stitch seemingly disparate ideas together in their heads and make them work somehow. And that takes time. The good news is, if you invent it, you can suck on that tit forever. You are master of your domain.

Artists that score high on Invention: Velvet Underground. Zappa (no pun). Pere Ubu. Hendrix. Coltrane. Radiohead. Mindless Self-Indulgence. Outkast. TV on the Radio. Anything Mike Patton does.
Artists that don't: The bands that kind of sound like these bands, but not as good. The ones that showed up after they paved the way, and got on the radio. The copycats.


3. Integrity.   

This I is the hard one, the one that usually separates the pros from the bros. It has nothing to do with a moral interpretation of music: this is integrity the way it's used in structural engineering, the sturdiness of an object, the strength of it. What is the song trying to be? Does anyone do this kind of thing better? Is the song conveying a sentiment, or expressing it, rather than merely indicating it? Is the epic truly epic? Does the artist's grasp match his reach -- that is, can he/she/they pull off everything they're attempting? Is she making those tricky jumps or falling on her ass? Can he play the damn thing the way it needs to be played? Is this going somewhere? Is there a point? Is it for real? 

You usually have to log a lot of hours to answer these questions. The good news is that there's already a music critic/fan canon full of immortals who cannot be denied, who sink the shot just about every damn time. You don't have to try anything fancy or new, necessarily, but whatever you attempt, you must pull off.

Artists that score high on Integrity: The gods that walk as men. The Beatles. Led Zeppelin. Hank Sr. Metallica. Jay-Z. Beck. Prince. Pink Floyd. The Wu-Tang Clan.
Artists that don't: Pretty much anyone on American Idol. Black Eyed Peas. Any sellouts. Any posers. Michael fucking Bolton. Justin fucking Bieber.      


So you can see that any work of art serves a practical use, just as any work of commerce: it should create an immediate and intense connection with the ordinary man, it should do so in a way that has not been done before, and it should be able to maintain that connection through craftsmanship. In other words,  the chair must be comfortable, new, and sturdy.   


Now the rest is simple, at least the way I do it: Grade each of the Is on a scale of 1 to 100 (no sense in not being as exact as possible), then average the three scores out. Each 20 points is roughly equivalent to a star in a five-star rating system: 50 is 2 1/2 stars, 80 is a four-star album, anything above 90 can generally be considered an instant five-star classic. 

It's not easy, taking such a mercurial construct as music and attaching cold hard numbers to it, and there's no guarantee something which is technically excellent will push your buttons. But it's important to be able to articulate anything that has so much control over our emotions, hell, even our bodies.. Writing about music is not, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture: architecture is rigid yet stylish, like writing. It's more like the other way around. So what you can do is take your knowledge of architecture -- and terpsichore -- and build a museum devoted to dancing. And there's no reason to let clumsy people determine what goes in there.