Selling Subversion by the Pound
Selling Van Gogh's madness, Ted Gioia, MIDI update, WGBO woes, TikTok on the clock, prog princess Peakes, the ghost in your, RIP Ivan Kral, Andy Gill
The cleaning up of culture, the sanitizing of art and even of the lives of artists themselves is an ongoing part of the Disney-fication of our cultural heritage, our birthright. Musicians and other artists come along, transgress the limits of their chosen form and at some point they undergo an image reform so that their work can be consumed by the masses. Or, if not their work, the fictional hologram we have replaced them with.
Part of the argument of Ted Gioia's new book Music: A Subversive History is that this process is not an aberration, it IS the real history of our musical culture. He writes about how Beethoven was despised by the greatest composer of the previous generation, Handel. Yet Beethoven continued to gain in popularity, managing to influence the music of his time as well as generations following.
The outsider arrives, is persecuted, perseveres, and eventually succeeds in having their artistic vision validated.
Think Ornette.
Think electric Dylan.
Think Van Gogh.
In his classic liner notes to the Velvet Underground 1969 Live album Elliott Murphy writes:
"I'd have to say the Velvet Underground wrote and played sad music. When I listen to either, I think about people I won't ever see again. But that's the story of the world of art. Van Gogh cuts off his ear, and parents sign permission slips for field trips to museums."
It's telling that Murphy uses Van Gogh as his example, for like Beethoven the painter has been the subject of one of the greatest feats of cultural storytelling ever. We've whitewashed and romanticized his mental illness and misunderstood his art.
Joni Mitchell, who is as much a visual artist as a musician, paints herself as Van Gogh, complete with bandaged ear, on the cover of her album Turbulent Indigo. The title track illustrates much the same point as Murphy:
Brash fields, crude crows
In a scary sky
In a golden frame
Roped off
Tourists guided by
Tourists talking about the madhouse
Talking about the ear
The madman hangs in fancy homes
They wouldn't let him near!
Mitchell presents the paintings as objects that are framed and roped off--in other words they are 'finished' pieces. They have imparted the shock of the new, startled the world into noticing and now they are little more than artifacts illustrating biographical highlights.
But they are anything but artifacts. The paintings seethe with life that cannot be contained, that spills out over the edges of the canvas and pulls us into Van Gogh's experience of the world.
The wheat fields Mitchell mentions are depicted in “Wheat Field With Crows” and “Wheat Field Under Thunderclouds”, depicting a darkening sky that suggests a coming storm. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to understand the suggestion the painting makes regarding Vincent's mental state at the time.
On the morning of July 27, 1890, Van Gogh worked on a painting known as “Tree Roots” that is very focused and possesses a busy, chaotic structure that is beautiful and ominous. The painting is both similar to and unlike the artist's other work from this period.
The sense of motion in the wheat fields, of teaming life in “Tree Roots”, is beautiful as a captured image on a canvas, but imagined as an animated photograph, always in motion, always filled with kinetic energy, it's and not difficult to understand the possible feelings of being suffocated.
I've sometimes felt the same feeling, to a much more manageable degree, in meditation exercises that emphasize the interdependency of life on our planet. Reading some Buddhist scriptures or other spiritually influenced writing can make one keenly aware of the life that the planet teems with, that the Earth itself is alive with organisms busy being born and busy dying, busy breeding, busy eating, busy eliminating waste, busy breathing.
Wherever you go there is always life, life seeking life. The love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love. And, man, that can be overwhelming and it can make you feel like you can't handle it, your being cannot contain it all.
When I look at “Tree Roots”, I see the beauty of the images of tree roots that foreshadow some of the artistic movements to come, but I also see what can appear to be a growth process gone out of control, much like the chaotic cell division and growth that accompanies the development of cancer.
We should be cautious, though, about interpreting Vincent's paintings too literally. Yes, he shows us the way he sees the world, the way that his mind and his mental illness influence what he sees, but it's important to remember that he managed to create so much artwork--75 paintings in the last 70 days of his life--in spite of his illness, not because of it.
The unique artistic vision is his, it doesn't belong to his illness. In his sentimentalized song about Van Gogh, "Vincent," singer/songwriter Don McLean presents him as a tragic, misunderstood figure whose work now speaks to us in a way that we never allowed the artist to speak to us when he was alive:
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
It's true that Van Gogh is showing us his vision of things, he's using his advanced artistic technique and all of the skill he can bring to bear on representing the state of his mind, the state of his life, visually.
But he wants us to understand that his predicament is also ours. We are all in the same boat. And this message comes through much more clearly in "Turbulent Indigo":
I'm a burning hearth, he said
People see the smoke
But no one comes to warm themselves
Sloughing off a coat
And all my little landscapes
All my yellow afternoons
Stack up around this vacancy
Like dirty cups and spoons
The entwined threads of biography, history, and creation are an issue we still wrestle with today. In fact, it's more difficult than ever in the age of social media, outrage, and cancel culture. Gioia recently told a CBC Radio interviewer:
"Why should I care what Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber's political views are? I really shouldn't care, but we do because all of a sudden [there's] this idea that the music is linked to the life. And it's all blurred together into one mushy hole that's deep in our psyches now. This is the legacy of Beethoven: where the life is the music and music is life" (The carnal exploits and rebellious behaviour of music’s bad boys: Bach & Beethoven, CBC Radio, January 31, 2020)
The idea of the art being linked to the life was there for Vincent Van Gogh, and for Joni Mitchell and Lou Reed. It' s there for every artist who comes after Beethoven, argues Gioia. Perhaps it is unsurprising that Joni Mitchell wrote a song about Beethoven, too.
**If you're interested in Van Gogh and the work he did during his last 70 days while living in Auvers-sur-Oise you should read this BBC.com article written in 2016 when the Auvers work was shown in an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam titled On the Verge of Insanity.**
Now At NDIM
In Ten Tracks: Lou Reed features my list of ten Lou Reed songs that qualify as my 'favorites' or have a special meaning to me. As usual, these tracks don't always line up with his most popular or best-known songs. You can read all of the In Ten Tracks to date right here.
Keith Jarrett Artist Page is now available. Here you can find links to writeups of various Jarrett albums and the feature Keith Jarrett Trio: Setting Standards.
Bonus Tracks
MIDI is receiving its first update in 37 years. The last time MIDI standards were updated, Michael Jackson's Thriller was the most popular record released. Since then the MIDI protocol has determined much of how music is created, recorded, and heard. Because MIDI worked better with keyboards than with strings or woodwind instruments, keyboards have become the basis for most popular music. That could well change with MIDI 2.0, which sounds as though it plays much nicer with guitars and other pitch-bending instruments.
Newark's WGBO is without question the finest jazz radio station in the United States, perhaps the world. Since the retirement of longtime supporter Dorthaan Kirk, the station has reportedly changed its vision/direction and let go of some experienced employees, leading to charges of racism from some in the artistic community. Others argue that the organization needs to act more like a media organization than a radio station. Get up to speed on what's going on with this New York Times article.
Jacob Feldman, a 23-year-old double majoring in music production and music business, had the most played song on TikTok. He hasn't made a penny from it as it was a mash-up. Now the budding producer has decided he'll do his own music and make it go viral on TikTok. In the meantime he consults with songwriters and artists, helping them crack the code of TikTok virality.
Maxine Peakes is a British actress known for her work on stage and on Brit TV programs such as dinnerladies, Shameless, and Silk. Jerry Ewing from Louder.com's Prog site offers this look into Maxine's vinyl collection that includes Hawkwind and Aphrodite's Child.
Chris Rizik, writing at Soul Tracks, touches on a point of anxiety concerning streaming music services. In Goodbye, Friend: Your Favorite Album Has 'Ghosted' on Spotify he discusses the all too familiar phenomenon and how serious music fans insist on physical artifacts for most of their music collection. This is definitely something I'll also be writing about in the near future.
Ivan Kral, who played bass and guitar with the original Patti Smith Group, has died. Kral was an integral part of New York’s punk and artistic/poetry rock scene who played on Smith’s classic albums Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter, and Wave. He also worked with Iggy Pop, co-writing much of Iggy’s Party album and briefly touring with Pop. I saw Iggy touring at the time of Party’s release during the time that Kral was with him and while it wasn’t one of Iggy’s better periods, Ivan did all that he could as de facto music director to bring the band together and harness its energy.
Below is the 1995 Czech Television documentary on Kral, Dancing Barefoot, in its entirety. It provides key insight into Kral’s background as well as footage of him with the Patti Smith Group and Iggy.
I think it's sad, it's much too bad
That our friends can't be with us today Patti Smith, ‘Elegie’
Also deceased this past week is Andy Gill of Gang of Four. Gill was one of rock’s foremost post-punk guitarists who forged a newly percussive, non-chordal style of guitar work that has since influenced groups like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana. Gill also had a leftist political bent that he was unafraid to express. Gang of Four’s early records are like the Political Science lectures you wanted, but never got—To Hell With Poverty, Not Great Men, Capital (It Fails Us Now).
Gang of Four released the album Happy Now about a year ago and Gill discussed his career and the new album in the Orange Country Register. Here is the band performing “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist” from Rockpalast, 1983.
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