Musical Inspiration

The Truth Can Only Show Through Art and Music

My father has always enjoyed music. He is a 63-year-old chemical engineer with a heart of gold and a very specific taste in music. He enjoys Blondie, Boston, Eric Clapton, and many other artists that I have never been able to string together with a genre other than maybe “oldies”, which I find to be a little vague and possibly a bit belittling.

As my father has fearlessly battled cancer for three years, I have noticed how important the context of music can be in art and representation. The subject of death for example, is uncomfortable and depressing for all of us. It is easy for people to dismiss the dying because it is a difficult topic to think about. We like to think that dying people are old, serious, or whatever else comes to your mind. So, when my father was forced to spend more of his time than he ever would have spent in bed, I was forced to see how music can bring a reality to situations that people are not often willing to see.

My father is strong, kind, and incredible, with a pretty fantastic taste in music. So, when I watched him in his hospital bed, with his battle scars striped across his bald head, wearing loose pajamas instead of blue jeans, instead of seeing the cancer patient in front of me, I heard Eric Clapton grunting about cocaine or Blondie belting out about perseverance. Every time I am confronted with the sometimes unrecognizable image of my father, the music he listens to outshines this and casts a picture of who he really is and will always be in my memory.

This same concept is applied in classic films like Coffee and Cigarettes. I believe that good art can show one image, while making you feel something completely different. In my last post I talked about 80’s music and how it has been reinvented through the genre of vaporwave. This is another good example of taking an original expected emotion in a period of time and making it completely different, or even exposing what one individual may feel about something that the vast majority of a culture does not understand. I think this is a great way to bridge gaps between cultures, generations, and emotions. Although the preconceived images that people are confronted with on a daily basis about other cultures, generations, and emotions are strong, I think they can definitely be overridden with the truth through art and music.

Computer Music Is Boring, But It Doesn’t Suck

In my last blog post I talked about music that is made by computers and how in jazz or typical music genres it can degrade the quality of the music. To offer up some opposing points of view on that matter, I think that computer music does have a place on its own, specifically in a genre known as vaporwave.

I was first introduced to vaporwave this year by my fiancé, an artist and notorious nerd. At first, I thought what I was listening to (Macintosh Plus – Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing) was an obscure artist from the 80’s. I quickly realized it was not and assumed it was a joke song until I loved it. I downloaded the full album and my family was soon cursed by Lisa Frank 420.

Vaporwave was established as a genre in early 2011. It is typically made from distinct sounds and commercials from the 80’s and 90’s or mixed from a combination of elevator music and smooth jazz. However, these sounds alone are not what create vaporwave. Vaporwave is the distinct sound of these songs and genres being slowed down, sped up, or re mixed in a “low quality” way. This is reflected by low quality, psychedelic cover art that is mixed up with memorabilia from the 80’s and 90’s including tropical backgrounds, Japanese culture, and marketed products. The genre is almost completely anonymous due to copyright reasons, and it is also the first genre to be entirely based through the internet. This makes vaporwave the first entirely globalized music.

The inherent value of vaporwave is that although it takes the most capitalistic and reminiscently consumeristic sounds from the 80’s and 90’s, take “Saint Pepsi” for example, it makes something totally different out of them. For example, a lot of this art style shows purples and neon greens. Vaporwave takes these same colors and makes them pastel, ultimately removing its context and exposing the genres tendency towards consumerism.

Beyond its original intention of exposing consumerism, it is also easy listening. The genres popularity stems from the amount of creativity within the genre as well as its audience’s enjoyment from being able to work or study while it plays. In other words, it’s catchy without being distracting. Vaporwave is good computer music because it not attempting to be any other genre. It fully embraces internet culture, has a clear message, and can be taken at face value.

Why Computer Music is Boring

Music is all about context. Just like anything else, you can’t separate people from their social and cultural context. For example, the 1970’s were about people discovering the world, protesting, and standing up for beliefs. John Denver was a musical artist who produced music incredibly relevant to the world around him. His music is powerful because of the world he lived in. He produced peaceful and revolutionary music from what was being produced before him. If his same music were produced today, it would not resonate with people because the social context has changed completely from what it was in 1970.

The point about music being contextual is important when judging the quality of a song because some decades have contexts that do apply to our lives today. John Denver’s song “Looking for Space” is about discovering yourself and who you are as well as where you belong in the world. Although this song was relevant in general in the 1970’s, it strikes a chord specifically with college students today who are discovering themselves and their place in the world as if it were the 70’s all over again.

John Denver’s music in general is timeless because it is mostly about feeling and human emotion, which tend to remain the same. Even though his music applied to his world at the time, it can still be considered a good song because it is well done in evoking the emotions of a lost college student and all the struggles they endure. Some more examples of culturally contextual and timeless artists are Cyndi Lauper, The Beatles, and Aretha Franklin.

Considering this, it is reasonable to think there is a formula for bad or forgotten music, specifically “one hit wonders”. When thinking about music contextually we realize why so many very popular songs were hated and forgotten quickly. Weird Al’s “What I Bought On eBay” is a great example of how some songs will almost never make sense again and were pretty terrible to begin with. The only redeemable quality this type of music has is its cultural context. Music can be solely rooted in context, so when it is removed from that context, it falls flat. This is why I think a lot of the music produced by computers falls flat. Computer programs only know how to compose by what they have the most immediate access to, so sifting through useless and flat out boring material is nearly impossible unless it is done by hand.

Back of a Truck

In an earlier post I wrote about how jazz musicians turn off certain parts of their brain in order to fully express their creativity. For me personally, the act of doing this reminds me of childhood. Entertaining yourself with uncontrollable bursts of creativity is an incredibly beautiful thing. Regina Spektor in her album 11:11 exudes the dichotomy between this childlike artistic expression and controlled intentional art. She allows herself to go where her creativity leads her but keeps that in the context of her song. Along with her incredible ability as a jazz artist to do this is the exploration of her voice as an instrument.

In Regina Spektor’s lyrics specifically in “Back of a Truck”, many of her lyrics are simply explorations of the human voice. In other words, she uses words as an outlet only for her voice. Because of this, many of her lyrics are void of meaning beyond sound. Separating deeper meaning from words is a skill that Regina Spektor explores throughout her album, but she does not rely on this totally.

The song “Back of a Truck” is broken up into two sections. The first section is about an “androgynous powder nosed girl next door”, and the second, as she mentions in her song, is about when the “story gets hazy and her hair gets too long” centered around New York. The first part, in the chorus, she creates a setting for herself to play around in the song. She establishes a story that the audience can clearly picture. Then, in the second part, she moves into an abstract expression of New York, which is where the artist is originally from. Because of this, the song has a strong sense of personality. Several lyrics explain various things that you can find on the “back of a truck” in New York, representing false promises and how these look to a native. “And there’s a back of a truck selling smoke free lungs”, “And there’s a back of a truck selling the souls of the dead” are both lyrics that literally represent things people are trying to escape by living in New York. These lyrics are broken up by more obvious cultural absurdities that distract people from being present in their lives like “And there’s a back of a truck selling game show hosts”.

After she makes her point, she describes a man trying to buy a “back of a head” only to find out that it is actually his “back of a head” that he must have lost in the first place. She takes time in this verse to remove people from what they view as a normal situation within city life and replaces it with an absurd version. She also takes the time to explore her voice as an instrument, which makes this verse alone both haunting and beautiful. She then goes back to her chorus with more room for improvisation. She takes the same story of the powder nosed girl next door and adds inflection and power, ultimately building the song.

This entire song, at first glance, seems incredibly strange and ridiculous. However, much like abstract art, you can’t listen to it without thinking. You also can’t listen to it without getting a deeper understanding of the artist as a person, like with her abstract observations about her home town.

Freak Artist Choices

It’s commonly known that women play an interesting role in American politics in the 1960’s. No matter the great feats that women have encountered or their numerous accomplishments, even in progressive circles, there is always inevitably one oddball making fun of everyone. Sometimes these jokes are mean spirited, but in the case of Willy Albimoor’s music and album art, I believe it is more intended to expose the absurdities of 1960’s culture and outlook towards women.

In jazz I particularly enjoy noticing how some view the genre as a wild and ridiculous protest sort of music that facilitates drinking (oh no!) and bad behavior. Others view it as sophisticated music meant for the upper class to enjoy but never play. Willy Albimoor captures this struggle by excluding women from the upper-class sophisticate role. He does this through his music, but more subtly in his album art. The title of one of his albums “Music for Intelligent Young Ladies” seems to appeal to what people pushed women to be in the 1960’s: sophisticated beings for the benefit of men. The album is casting a dim light on a wooden chess board with a classy eggshell font looming over it. Just in the center of the album you notice a white woman with curled hair and delicate red lips. Some people probably even bought this album because it looks classy. The joke is that the woman in the picture was photoshopped into one of the chess pieces.

People could take this in a number of different ways. Some might say it is a deeper analysis about how women are literally pawns to be used. To me, I think it is more of a mockery of then modern-day sophisticates and the ridiculous and arbitrary things they view as important. The role of the perfect, sophisticated woman that a man will want is a pretty restricting role. So, to make fun of this I think could actually be feminist. It is also ridiculous from a visual arts perspective. It violates what people expect and the role that photoshop usually plays in art, particularly in album art.

As for the actual music in the album, it is reasonable to infer that he intended his album art to poke fun at something. For example, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”. Several people analyzing album art have noticed this particular album. For example, another jazz blog I recommend for discovering new jazz artists wrote about the cover in his “weekly odd album art review”. He noted “At first glance, it looks as if this 1963 cover was appealing to smart, discriminating women with sophisticated taste in music. Until, of course, you look carefully and realize that the idiot art director made the woman in the photo one of the chess pieces (note the chess-piece base at the bottom of her photo).” The author of jazzwax seems to chalk this up to a poor artistic choice, but with the amount of debate surrounding the cover alone and the actual content of the album, we can conclude that this was in fact a hilarious and intentional choice