The Power of Love: or, How I Learned to stop worrying and listen to Springsteen

 

 

My parents owned Born in the USA when I was a kid, but it was on Vinyl so I never heard it played. Our turntable was long since broken by the time I was born. When the music of Bruce Springsteen filled our halls, but it was the sound of Born to Run, Tunnel of Love and the Essential on compact disc (Born to Run had the distinction of being owned on both formats, Darkness, sadly, only vinyl).

Since then, I've been building my Springsteen library, and it wasn't until today that I heard the eighth track on Springsteen's most popular record for the first time.

And lo, came the tears from a dormant part of my brain that I had nearly forgotten existed. A vault of adolescent loneliness and abandonment was breached by a thirty year old song. Such is the power of Springsteen.

Growing up, I had three best friends: The first, was my neighbour, who didn't go to the same school as I did, didn't really have any of the same interests as I did, and whose friendship was based almost entirely on geography. The second, was my best friend from school -- Laura -- who was funny and energetic and strange in all the ways that I was. The third, and most important was my cousin, Victoria. She had a single mother, and no idea who her father was. It seems like she spent other week at my Grandma's house around the block, and consequently we were nearly sisters. There were sleepovers almost every weekend during the school year, and in summers by the lake we took joint responsibility for looking after our unruly younger boy cousins. Thick as thieves.

In high school things changed, and until yesterday I understood these changes solely in terms of how they made me feel about my friends. Best Friend #1 and I drifted apart, starting a little before high school. We never had much in common, so it wasn't really surprising, and I didn't give it much thought.

Friend #2 went to the same high school as I did, but decided early on that I was not cool enough to be her friend, which is baffling still because she was not cool. She was never cool. Our joint un-coolness was what drew us together in elementary school. But, when high school began and it was apparent that I did not represent valuable social real estate she moved on. I remember with striking clarity the day I found myself sitting alone in the cafeteria. It was the first day of a new semester, and  the handful of friends I usually sat with now had a different lunch than I. Laura approached and I, breathing a sigh of relief, waved to her. I wouldn't have to sit alone after all, thank goodness. She saw me, then pretended she didn't. I was hurt, angry and I never tried to engage her socially after that, except perhaps a little bit some mornings, when my mom drove her to school! I had all kinds of opinions about her after that.

Friend #3 --the best friend, the family, the close-in-age sister I never had, topped them all for cruelty. She'd had a difficult life, in case you didn't pick up on that in her introduction as the bastard child who spent every other week at her grandmothers. Her mother was sick a lot, and depressed. Her family moved out of the city when she was just about to hit adolescence, finding herself in a brand spanking new subdivision where every house looks alike and she had to make new friends. When she did find out who her biological father was, it was a major disappointment. Any one of those factors would be enough to make a teen act out. Together, they were an H-bomb on her self esteem, and she acted out in ways we never would have thought possible - Stealing, lying, running away - the most egregious act of betrayal was falsely accusing her loving step-father of beating her, and taking that accusation to the authorities.

I can trace the trajectory of my feelings for her, like lines on a map: from concern, to anger, to pity, to relief, and finally to forgiveness (this is over a ten year period - and I'm happy to report that all's well that ends well and I'm going to be her maid of honour next year). I can do that for friends #1 and 2 also.

But until yesterday I never gave a thought to how all of this made me feel about myself. Which is where Springsteen comes in. Bobby Jean tells the story of a boy learning his best and only friend has left town without saying goodbye. "I wish I could have called. I wish I could have talked to you, not to change your mind, just to say good bye, Bobby Jean." Listening to it was like meeting my younger self, for the first time.

I spent a lot of time thinking about other people - how they were selfish, or stupid, or whatever - but I never had the perspective to see myself for what they had made me - alone. As far as I could tell, I was still the same person. It was them who had changed - who had sold out or betrayed me, who were selfish or superficial, but I never appreciated just what it did to me, how important it was to have one close friend, how empty we become when they're gone, and we're listening to the radio alone.

Something about this song took me back - A place, a time, a fully realized moment that I thought was lost to me, but got the chance to revisit. I listened to Bruce Springsteen and met myself.

This is why love music. This is why I pay money for music, and rant about how the industry has taken over the art. This is why I'm a true believer. If you're not, I feel sorry for you.

Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.

 

You may not have realized it yet, but you're living in a bad neighbourhood.  We've turned a corner with the attack on Sony Pictures. Hacking is hitting us where we live, and that new real estate happens to be in the virtual realm.

It’s not the distopia that many a sci fi writer would have you expect. Diminishing social skills, increased anxiety and twitter may suck, but Snow Crash this ain’t. When you consider the North Korean hacking an act of terrorism – that is, an action that leverages fear to advance a political agenda, which it most definitely is – this almost seems like a step in the right direction.

There are no burning buildings, no shrapnel in the spectators. Hack attacks are real, but this is an epoch where reality can simply be turned off.

Consider, for example, the mass celebrity hacking last summer, when stars like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton had nude photos from their phones hacked out of the cloud and displayed on the internet for all to see.

From different corners, the scandal simultaneously inspired mass outrage and apathy (after the sound of fapping had died down). Victims called it a “sex crime” (which it undoubtedly is), while the less sympathetic noted that if the best way to prevent having nude photos stolen from your phone is to simply not take nude photos with your phone. That logic is infallible, but when Ricky Gervaismade the argument he was met with cries of victim blaming. A few people on twitter went as far saying, “That’s like saying if you got raped it’s your fault for wearing a short dress.”

No. It’s more like undressing in front of an open window. There shouldn’t be anyone with their eyes pressed up to the glass, but of course there is. Now, peeping is a sex crime. It’s shameful and cruel, but it can’t give you a venereal disease, can’t get you pregnant, and most likely won’t cause P.T.S.D. Welcome to the internet. It’s a rough neighborhood, but not that rough.

By participating in online life, you are buying some shady real estate.  Think downtown Manhattan in the eighties – what you gain in convenience you sacrifice in security. Even respectable sites like facebook and ebay fall prey to hackers – the celebrity photos allegedly came from Apple’s cloud. It’s something the users of the internet have not quite been able to grasp, and it’s also an oddly unifying concept: no matter how well off we are in physical reality, we’re all more or less equally vulnerable to cyber attacks (the wealthy might actually be more at risk). This is something people are only beginning to grasp, and though I agree we should treat each other with love and respect, I can also mediate my expectations a little bit.

21^st century connectivity has thrown the best and worst kind of people into a slop and asks us to fend for ourselves. The hackers I have spoken of do not pose a credible physical threat – not even North Korea, but these days they don’t have to. It turns out smearing someone’s reputation with a cluster of embarrassing emails or a nude photo is enough to scare them off course these days. Destroying someone online is like the equivalent of destroying them in real life.

When I learned about the Amanda Todd tragedy, the uncharitable thought came to mind that she should have just deleted her facebook account. The bullying she endured was mostly online, so you’d think she could have just turned it off, tuned out and carried on. It would have been lonely being the only young person not plugged into social media, but it would still have been a life.

Yet if there's anything these hacks and the reactions to them have shown us, its that people seem oddly unable to keep perspective on their virtual world.  For now, being destroyed online is the same as being destroyed in life.

 

Snow Crash, indeed.

*Just in time for this post to go to print, Madonna blessed us all with 6 new completed songs of her new album, following another hack wherein 13 unfinished demos were leaked onto the internet. Commenting on the leak, Madonna says, “W don't put things up on servers anymore. Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we're not on WiFi, we're not on the Internet, we don't work in a way where anybody can access the information. Hard drives of music are hand-carried to people.”

There you have it. I sense the golden age of the internet is over, and the smart money is on scaling back our dependence on it. We’ll see where that takes us.

Music / Industry

Taylor Swift makes it in under the wire with 1989, and 2014 finally has one (1) album go platinum. The music industry isn't dead yet, but spectator's say it's breathing is pretty haggard. I disagree. The music industry is fine. It's the music that died. The internet may have ended the golden age of record buying, but the funny thing about money is that it throws its weight around the most when there is less of it to be had.

Now, every era has its talent and its hacks. Nostalgia has a way of buffing out the shitty stuff and convincing our parents that they really were the hippest generation, when in fact the number one song of 1967 was "Sugar, Honey Honey" by the Archies.

Still, you'd have to be a fool to pretend 1989 is in even the same ballpark as Sergeant Pepper, or The Wall, or even Rumours. There is no version of 2014 where a song like Neil Young's "Ohio" becomes a top forty hit (as it did in 1970), let alone captures the zeitgeist enough to change popular opinion about a major historical event. No matter the quality of popular music today, it is no longer important.

Money, on the other hand is always important. It has a way of exacting its influence no matter what. So when sales dry up, that's when the Industry roars to life and makes its interests clear. People aren't buying music anymore, so the Industry stopped selling it.

They're selling artists - no, not artists, personalities- to plug into the more lucrative game of product placement. The most obvious example is Beats, which has sponsored almost every major music video in recent years - at least every one with any kind of budget. You're supposed to look at Nicki Minaj and think: "If I own these speakers, I'm almost like a famous person." For the record, listening to mp3s with expensive headphones, is like buying an HD 70" flat screen so you can watch the Blair Witch Project in all its grainy glory.

Once again, commerce beat common sense. Dr. Dre is now a bazillionaire and Rock and Roll is dead.

I'm not here to rant about artists cashing a cheque. I'm sure Katy Perry works harder than anyone I know personally. I'm here to remind you that the Industry is a force of nature that even when incomes shrink - especially  when incomes shrink - cuts the fat and protects itself.

Beyonce got paid a reported $50,000,000 for her Pepsi ad (which, while I'm on it, "Embrace the past but live for now"- really? All that money and they couldn't come up with a better line?) So someone's making money.

And people are still making real music, but its not getting promoted, because the Industry knows no one will buy it. So they attach music to things that people do buy, and take a percentage.  Art and commerce are not making the sweet sweet love they used to, and we the public are getting the shaft.

There is great music out there: Phosphorescent's "Song For Zula" is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. Do yourself a favour and click "Play" so you can listen as you read:

 

But no matter how great a song is, it's never going to hit the mainstream unless it can be used as an advertising jingle. How else can it recoup the cost of promotion?

Listening to Janelle Monae's Metropolis Suites is like meeting the lovechild of Peter Gabriel and Star Wars - after that lovechild was abandoned by the side of the road then nursed back to health by Andre 3000.* It's amazing. But its no coincidence that the closest that album got to a hit single was the song used in a Chevy ad.

So what happens when artists, who might be legitimately great, have to cow toe to their sponsors? What happens to society when our culture is dominated by advertising, an art form explicitly dedicated to promoting mindless consumption over independent thought? The revolutionary spirit of Rock and Roll has been squished under the rock of commerce, and if that doesn't scare you, let me answer the above question for you:

Twenty five years ago, Madonna - peace and blessings be upon her - released the video for Like a Prayer:

 

 The video involved burning crosses, controversy, and the end of her endorsement deal with Pepsi. It is also one of the great artistic coups in the history of pop music. Corporate sponsors would be weary of her edginess from then on out, but losing endorsement deals didn't matter, because she was selling millions of records. Back then it paid to shake up the system.

Would Madonna make the same decision in a world where she couldn't count on music sales to pad her fortune? We don't need a parallel universe to answer that question. All we need to do is look at Beyonce. Pepsi's latest fly-girl is always polite, always perfect looking, and never controversial. It no longer pays to be a revolutionary, but that doesn't mean that we as a culture don't still need them.

My parents had Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and, yes, Madonna. Are millennials capable of staring down a social problem and turning it into a hit song like their parents were? The Industry's not going to take a chance on finding out. Where's the top forty hit about Trayvon Martin?

I don't want to live in a world where the Like a Prayer video gets pulled in favour of this inane Pepsi ad, but that seems to be the direction we're heading in.

Alas, you get what you pay for.

*And seriously guys, get hip to the Archandroid already!

Ali for Hitcheddesigns: Booking the Band of Your Dreams

 

My personal favourite of all the articles I've written (for money):

 

For most, the question of music at a wedding boils down to a simple either/or: Hire a local band or find a DJ to play your favourite hits.

For people with an unlimited budget, though, getting the real thing is actually in the cards.
Sadly, I do not know any of these people, nor have I been invited to their weddings, but it’s fun to dream, and thanks to some wily, well-connected folks at priceonomics.com, we’ve got an actual price tag to attach to those dreams. If these superstars are in your price range, visit The Degy Booking Agency for more information.

If not, with tongue firmly in cheek, I invite you to consider the pros and cons of some very well paid wedding singers (all estimated prices exclude expenses and are subject to negotiation with the talent’s management):

The Diamond Circle:

Madonna: $1,000,000

Pros: Imagine, the Queen herself singing Like a Virgin as the garter is tossed! She’s got a huge catalogue with dance hits and ballads. Plus, True Blue and Cherish are two of the happiest love songs that ever existed.
Cons: She hasn’t performed True Blue or Cherish in more than twenty years, and there’s a good chance she’ll do something inappropriate/outrageous that will simultaneously overshadow the bride and infuriate her parents.

Bruce Springsteen: $1,000,000

Pros: Springsteen is the definition of cool. He gives 110% as a showman and his concerts are always great parties.
Cons: Faced with the sheer animal magnetism of The Boss, the bride may have second thoughts about marrying anyone else. In fact, most of his marriage songs are more “soul-crushing-life-of-regret” than “happily-ever-after”. Save this one for the tenth anniversary.

For more, read the whole article at http://hitcheddesigns.com/booking-the-band-of-your-dreams/ and http://hitcheddesigns.com/booking-the-band-of-your-dreams-part-ii/

Ali for Hitchedesigns: In Defesne of Small Weddings

Weddings these days feel bigger than ever before. Not that there are more guests than there used to be (with the rise in popularity of destination weddings the opposite is likely the case), or that they are more expensive (even though on average they are). A lot of weddings just seem to be about more in every way.

Last year I attended a wedding with a photo-booth, an all night candy bar, midnight fish buffet, and a custom pizza bar. All this in addition to a five course dinner in a hall with two giant screens behind the head table so that guests in the cheap seats could watch the (pre-recorded) speeches in all their high tech glory. The wedding invitations and seat assignments had a “tabloid news” theme that screamed your table number out at you like big block-letter headlines. The ceremony itself had a Broadway-style program (also newspaper themed) to introduce the couple and the wedding party, presumably for any strangers that wandered into the church by accident...

For the full rant, visit http://hitcheddesigns.com/in-defense-of-small-weddings/

Ali for Funautomotive:The Self Driving Car

The company behind the world’s favourite search engine has something up its sleeve that’s gonna change the world as we know it, starting with the automotive industry.

For more than a decade, Google has been the leader in its field, sitting on an estimated thirty billion dollars in cash (all in offshore accounts, of course). But ad revenue isn’t growing, so Google’s top minds are trying to develop an actual product that will keep them ahead of the curve once their current (fabulously profitable) business model becomes obsolete.

We’ve all heard of Google glass, a product that seems to have come and gone without making much of an impact beyond tech blogs (most people don’t appreciate technological breakthroughs that have to be worn on their faces). Google’s experiments with hot air balloons bringing internet access to remote areas seems to have merit, while I have yet to hear an explanation for this floating behemoth in San Francisco Bay that doesn’t terrify me.

It seems that Eureka has come at last with the advent of a self-driving-car. You heard that right. The Google car has gone 300,000 miles without any crashes, and now they’ve got one with no steering wheel at all. When it finally comes to market, it will radically change, not just the automotive industry, but also life and the economy as we know it.

To find out how, read the whole article at http://funautomotive.com/introducing-the-age-of-the-self-driving-car/

Ali for Funautomotive: Tesla's Big Shakeup

Last week, Tesla CEO and generally impressive person Elon Musk announced that the Tesla motor company would be releasing the patents on their electric cars and Supercharger stations to promote the electric car industry. On the Tesla Motors blog, Musk claimed that patents “stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors,” and announced their patents would be open to any person or company willing to use them to further technology’s march toward sustainability.

To find out how this will actually change your life (hint: it involves a battery factory), read the full article at http://funautomotive.com/teslas-big-shakeup/