Sam (Hambone) is a friend to multiple wholly and partially owned subsidiaries of the Sippican Conglomerate. By that, I mean my older son plays gigs with him, and Sam has helped me move furniture.
I had no idea he was a musician when I first met him. The Heir showed up with Sam in tow one time to move furniture out of our (recently sold) home in western Maine. Sam’s a barrel of monkeys, in addition to helping people he’d never met before move a sofa or two. I was mildly astonished to hear him play and sing some time later. He’s naturally gifted in both departments.
I’m not sure what category you’d put this song in, but I think Curtis Mayfield would approve. Rock on, kids!
That’s Eddie Harris and Les McCann performing “Compared To What” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in June of 1969. People who don’t know who’s who often assume that Eddie Harris is the piano player, because he’s the star of the show in this video. But Eddie Harris is the saxophone player. It’s his trio, so he gets top billing. Les McCann is the guy pounding the horse teeth and singing. The song had a little revival when Scorsese put it in the soundtrack to Casino. It’s not listed on the Soundtrack album, but it’s in the movie. The video also features Benny Bailey on trumpet, Leroy Vinnegar on bass, and Donald Dean playing drums. I remembered Leroy Vinnegar’s name from his tenure in the Jazz Crusaders, but if you look at his Wiki page, he played with an amazing list of jazz artists beside them. He’s even playing on a Van Morrison record somewhere.
I rather enjoy the song’s generally disaffected outlook. Then again, the topics broached in the song are 55 years in the rear view mirror. Still, generally disaffected is about the only way to get through this life. If you’re not generally generally disaffected, I don’t think you’re paying enough attention.
By the late 1970s, rock music couldn’t figure out which way to turn. Its original daily drivers, blues and country, with the occasional music hall fenders, had run out of gas. Guys with Irish Setter hairstyles and Selleck-staches were busy touring arenas and writing one song after another declaiming that tonight they’re really gonna rock you tonight. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. It was dumb fun, and the fellows had finally learned how to play their instruments properly and sing in key, more or less, unlike a lot of the sixties stuff that preceded it:
It was inevitable that the blues-based authenticity myth would collapse under its own weight eventually. The blues dudes came a cropper before the rockers did, when they ran out of ways to tell you that they woke up this morning. The rockers not long after. The time was right for something — anything, really — new. Art school geeks took over, and had themselves a New Wave.
There was a more or less clean handoff in 1978. Mark it on your calendars. Well, that old Snap-On calendar, featuring fully clothed women for some reason, that’s still hanging in your dad’s garage. First, the last gasp of AOR rock credibility showed up. Dire Straits released Sultans of Swing, which was the last memorable, unironic, nostalgia-themed, guitar hero song before the walls came crashing down on the genre (My friend Gerard (PBUH) and me had some fun arguing about that one).
At the same time, this appeared on Saturday Night Live, which means it hit the mainstream in a big way, right away:
It’s telling that Devo chose a hoary rock hit like Satisfaction to deconstruct and make their pop culture bones. They’re using irony, parody, and repetition instead of anything close to virtuosity. They’re not defining popular culture, the way the Stones did. They’re taking pre-cooked popular culture and using it as raw material. It’s not pop. It’s meta-pop, art-school style.
That’s what art school was churning out in spades back then. I’m not sure exactly what it’s churning out now, but I imagine it’s going to take a bigger sewage treatment plant working around the clock to handle it. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, art school’s main product was musicians. I know this for a fact, as my own brother is one. Here are his RISD (the Island School of Road Design, natch) classmates in the same year:
One notices a certain, erm, shift in the topics considered apropos for rock music in that video. The Talking Heads must be the ultimate example of art school kids who dominated the New Wave, but there were innumerable examples.
Lene Lovich, anyone? She might be the ur-example of an academy person who disappears entirely into a persona. She’s got art school, and many other things, written all over her. She’s not performing. She’s a performance.
So no more guitar heroics, please. Clapton is God, the old folks said, but a new generation of Art School Nietzsches said God was dead. New Wave musicians deliberately looked different, sounded different, and performed differently than their predecessors. They smushed high and low culture together and treated their identity as a constructed object, not a personality cult like a guitar hero or a pompadoured hip shaker would cultivate.
Speaking of pompadours gone supernova, here’s Liverpool College of Art alumnus Elvis Costello, also from 1978:
There’s many more examples of New Wave artistes from artsy schools. Musicians as disparate as Joe Strummer of the Clash to David Bowie came up with their very different styles out of their tenures at art schools. Herman Brood was an artist. Joy Division and Ultravox had guys who would have had paint on their smocks, if they ever attended their college courses instead of playing in bands. It might not immediately come to mind, but rock groups like Pink Floyd and The Who had art college backgrounds. That’s how you end up with rock operas with Ann-Margret dogpaddling in a puddle of baked beans, and concept albums like Dark Side of the Moon.
The granddaddy of art school chic is likely Roxy Music. They were already weirding out at the turn of the seventies The Beatles were art-adjacent, of course, and earlier. Original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe went to art school, and Lennon fancied himself an artist. But their Pepper period is more like a stoner’s version of the British music hall than atelier rock. I don’t know exactly what Roxy Music was, but it sure was something:
Bryan Ferry, front and center there, not only went to art school, he had paintings hung in the Tate Gallery at one point. He was an art teacher, actually, for a short stint. Well, that’s if you call teaching ceramics at a girl’s school teaching. Got fired, too. That might not sound like a rock ‘n roll pedigree, but it fits just fine on a New Wave resume. Over on the left side of the picture is Brian Eno, another art schooler. You may remember him from his solo album, Here Comes the Warm Jets, with the hit song The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch. Or maybe not.
Roxy Music had a big hit with Love is the Drug in the seventies, and got big in the eighties, making more or less uncharacterizable music and putting on offbeat stage shows. Viz:
So Sir Oswald Moseley and Long John Silver had a love child, and he sang a weird song about the kind of love de Sade would recognize, backed up by a couple of off-duty stewardesses and a bubble machine. All in a day’s work for Bryan Ferry, who held glamour in a pit in his basement, and told it to rub lotion on its skin from time to time.
But wait, there’s more. You can’t fully understand art school’s reach until we visit Dusseldorf. You don’t come up with concepts like this by attending agricultural college:
I once wrote that all current music is either Kraftwerk or James Brown. I stand by that comment, mostly because I forgot about country music at the time. On the other hand, they put autotune on everything now, so maybe I’ll forget it again.
Eventually the art school weirdos made the world safe for people with the same aesthetic, but who found themselves a little short on art school tuition. You can’t tell me that this isn’t directly downstream from the art school rendering plant. even if it’s the GED version:
You could easily slide Grace Jones into the conversation here, too. I don’t know what kind of schools they have on Saturn, or if she attended. She simply hired out the art school chores to Jean-Paul Goude, didn’t waste any money on singing lessons, and saved herself four years of skipping art classes.
MTV rewarded artists who had a profound visual appeal. Art rock was perfect for the multimedia world of Max Headroom and Grace Jones.
Then, if you were really into the art school scene without ever attending, probably by listening to your sister’s Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees records, and you got to reading Lord Byron and Shelley and Baudelaire while as stoned as Coleridge, you might gave birth to another downstream side effect of Art Rock: Goth Rock:
So everything changed from that moment when Sultans of Swing ran into the back bumper of Devo driving the art school bus. Roxy Music gave birth to glam rock and hair bands. Punk bands were all style and no substance, on purpose. Goth rock gave us metal bands with spidery logos. I don’t know what Grace Jones gave us, but I assume I’d be afraid of it.
Devo on SNL. It was the moment when something that looked ridiculous replaced something that suddenly looked ridiculous.
Reader and commenter Gringo is a national treasure. At least in Sippicanville, surely. He’s reminded us that Tom Lehrer, another national treasure, at least once composed a Christmas Song. There may be others, I dunno. I’m not sure that Spending Hannukah in Santa Monica would count, but I guess it’s jubilee-related.
Tom had a great 97-year run, but his bones, if not the funny ones, ran out of gas this year. God rest ye, merry gentleman.
When you ask “Chad” (as we refer to Chat GPT, or any LLM) to make an image, a video, or write you a story or something, this video is a great approximation of what’s happening behind the curtain. Kutiman had LLMs figured out 16 years ago, although LLMs didn’t exist back then, and he had no inkling what was coming down the pike. Then again, it doesn’t matter why someone is right. There are no style points in right/wrong questions. Kutiman took bits and pieces of the internet, and made something transformational out of them.
There have been plenty of lawsuits filed against LLM outfits over copyright and trademark infringements. They’re all losers, at least to date. Don’t be misled by a ginormous settlement by Facebook for $1.5 billion or so, paid to a gaggle of authors. That really wasn’t a lawsuit based on LLMs scraping the internet and re-using what they found in amalgamated forms. Facebook got caught using libraries of pirated books to train their bots, so they lost the case. Legally accessible stuff has never gotten a plaintiff a copyright win against any Chad that I know of, probably won’t ever, and shouldn’t, at least in today’s legal landscape.
The Fair Use Doctrine comes into play here. Fair Use is a legal principle in U.S. copyright law. It allows people to use copyrighted material without permission in certain situations — typically for purposes like criticism, commentary, news reporting, scholarship, or research. It’s easier to skate on Fair Use if you’re futzing around with factual stuff, and/or the output is educational. Using only modest amounts of any particular pillaged work helps. If the final product isn’t likely to harm the value of the original work, you’re probably golden. But the key detail is that the output has to be transformative.
So what qualifies as transformative, you might ask? Well, I am not a law talking guy, so I’ll keep it as simple as I am. If you transmogrify the original work to say or do something new, add commentary, change its purpose, or make art out of the artless mess you found, you’ve transformed it. You’re probably in the clear, legally. Although if Disney sues you, being technically correct is no longer the best kind of correct. The kind of correct with 400 lawyers on speed dial is the best kind of correct these days. Remember, the courts can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Facebook found that billion-and-a-half in their couch cushions. I doubt you can pull off that trick.
Regular humans don’t produce anything artistic or intellectual in a vacuum. People are just like LLMs. Everyone is magpie for information their whole life long. You might get your information in the library, or by watching Two Broke Girls, but whatever you know, someone else has already known it, unless you’re John Von Neumann, and he’s dead. Or maybe Tarzan. But even he picked up stuff from the apes, including fleas. Everyone spends their whole life integrating disparate, already experienced things into their daily activities. Intellectual work is no different than shoveling the driveway. You don’t invent a shovel before putting on your mukluks and heading out. And all your curses have been uttered before, believe me. By me for certain, and probably by several other people who slipped on the ice.
So now LLMs can synthesize all sorts of inputs and produce all kinds of output much faster than homo sapiens, or whatever species they hire to write the New York Times. I really can’t keep up with the pace of it. Here’s a video produced with a suite of AI tools from about five months ago:
There’s a heaping helping of uncanny valley in there, but the days of putting 13 fingers on two left hands is pretty much over. Homages, riffs, and little bits of ephemera are giving way to full-blown productions. That was inevitable. It’s a cinematic Rubicon, the same sort of paradigm shift that self-publishing books produced. I never would have been able to publish a book unless I could pull the self-publishing end-around on nineteen women named Heather at Simon & Scribner Random Penguinstein and Co., all chanting Boxwine Über Alles while typing my rejection letters. And, no, “the end-around” is not a euphemism, although it has plenty of potential.
Just a month after that last one, someone else posted a short Sci-Fi film that looks miles more detailed:
LYRA is a haunting, beautiful glimpse into a future where humanity is gone, and a lone robot walks the Earth. Prompted and produced by Top Notch Cinema, this 3-minute cinematic short was created using a suite of cutting-edge AI tools including MidJourney, SeedDance, 11Labs, Adobe Firefly, and Kling. This film explores themes of identity, memory, and what remains when everything else is gone. As AI tools evolve, we’re just beginning to see how creators will harness this power to tell deeper, more meaningful stories. This is just one example of what’s possible.
If you’re one of the nice folks hoping that any obvious synthetic qualities of AI-generated video and audio will eventually turn people off, maybe you should review the way the music industry adopted pitch-correction software to make singers out of mumblers. Pitch correction was designed to be undetectable, a Lilliputian fraud on the audience, but it took about fifteen seconds for the talent-challenged to turn it up to eleven, where the effect became obvious.
That example was from 27 years ago, by the way. Everything on pop stations has that robotic twang now. People prefer it, I guess. I think it’s like eating Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, but facts is facts.
Back to the videos. Of course 99% of AI video things are bound to be science fiction, or sparkly vampire bodice rippers. The people who produce them are the biggest consumers of the genres. They are bound to get high on their own supply. But they’re going to have a hell of a time trying to “tell deeper, more meaningful stories,” when they’ve never read one, never mind told one.
It’s a Director’s Cut generation. They will watch endless hours of “cinematic universes” filled with creatures named Glorp or Flapdiddle wandering the actual universe in search of new galaxies and a plot. I have no idea how many version of Star Wars are out there, but at this point I imagine you’re watching droids doing their laundry and defrosting their refrigerators. Hell, even the original Star Wars barely had a plot.
That what Kutiman brought to the table, and why his thang was different than most. He was the first true prompt engineer. Each of the videos in his concatenation was A Thing on its own. He gathered them up, painstakingly I’m sure, because finding particular stuff on the internet sixteen years ago was no picnic. Then he used his own artistic and comedic sense to make something more entertaining than the sum of its parts. His work was transformative. It was His Thing.
Where’s it all going? Probably nowhere very satisfying. The amalgamated output of pablum is more pablum. Good writing is not to be found very often on the internet, or even on the best seller list. You certainly won’t discover its secrets on things like the Hemingway app. And I hate to break it to you, if you need that thing, you’ll never be a good writer.
So Chad is getting really powerful. I know it reads some good writing, because its bots beat the hell out of this website, for instance. But it has no idea what to make of it, and neither do internauts using various Chads to make videos. I explained it to Chad a long time ago, but he didn’t listen. Neither did anyone else:
Granpa told me all about the genie in the lamp.
It’s the oldest story ever and came from the land of the sand and the women with only eyes. It’s in there, the genie of everything, but you have to find him and let him out. Then he’s out and you have to figure what to do with him. Granpa says he’s wonderful but as dumb as a stump, just like all of us. He can do anything but doesn’t know what to do. He needs guidin’. — A Thousand and One
Take that, Kutiman. I wrote that one 18 years ago.
Tag: music
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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