New.

Last year, the blog I had was about Italy. Now that I'm back, I thought I'd stop keeping a blog since life in the U.S. is familiar to most of the people in my life who might have read my blog before. But with the mountain of writing about music I'm going to have to start doing to tackle my thesis (which I'm very excited about, and will likely post about soon), I don't see the point in stopping, even if this blog is just for me. A place to collect all my rambles in an effort to clarify said rambles into coherent thoughts. I'll probably be quoting things and discussing them, talking about my own musical experiences, and maybe discussing and explaining my own music and why we make and consume music.

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This first post is about a documentary I just watched called "Before the Music Dies." This film (viewable on hulu--hush, you didn't read it here) is made by two music fans whose musician siblings both passed away briefly before the making of the film. The last conversations the two producer/director music fans had with their siblings were about the drastically declining quality of the music industry and the popular culture music we are forced to consume on a daily basis. After their siblings passed away, the two friends decided to start a documentary film in which they interviewed musicians of both large and small successes about their experiences in and opinions of the current music industry.

Now, the obvious reason for which I enjoyed this film so much is that it talks about an issue that is incredibly relevant to me and most of my friends from high school, who generally think about why they listen to the things they do on a rather critical, intellectual, and intuitive level. But the other reason, and perhaps more important reason, why I enjoyed this film so much is that it asks you to think about what's around you and how absent-mindedly we accept the art, and by extension the publicity, the food, the gender dynamics, the clothing, and the pollution around us. Sure, this documentary was only focused on music, but the position it took toward popular culture in general, which wasn't only a negative or critical position, is an ideal model of a totally necessary thought process that every responsible citizen should use when reflecting on the world around his or herself. "Before the music dies" doesn't claim that all pop culture is bad or turning us into droids, it just demonstrates how creativity in music used to be appreciated and allowed by popular culture (for example physically different musicians like janis joplin, stevie wonder, and ray charles would have been barred from not only the fame they eventually merited, but from the soaring musical achievements and amazing artistic contributions they brought to the US) where as now uniformity, replication and essentially a lack of creativity is appreciated and condoned by the CEOs of the record companies that control popular music. What the movie shows is how music popular culture has shifted over the last 20 years to a very restrictive and suffocating artistic aesthetic.

Intuitively, the film doesn't really highlight any thing that a real music fan hasn't already sensed, if not extensively considered. If the movie brought the dismal musical reality to the forefront for a viewer for the first time, the viewer would probably be one of the people who just doesn't consider music as relevant, and probably wouldn't appreciate the invite to think about it. But what is great about the format of the film is the series of invaluable quotations and anecdotes from all the music fans, music journalists, and incredible musicians interviewed: erykah badu, doyle bramhall ii, calexico, eric clapton, elvis costello, david hidalgo, branford marsalis, dave matthews band, my morning jacket, les paul, questlove, bonnie rait, widespread panic. Footage of live performances both legendary and forgotten.

There's this point in the film, where interviews with music journalists about Dave Matthews and with Dave Matthews himself are spliced over a live performance of his song "Bartender" in Charlottesville, Virginia (which is Dave Matthews hometown in the US even though he's actually south-african born, and ironically, he was also a Bartender in Charlottesville, Virginia before a producer in the industry encouraged him to record his first 4 originals on a demo and play at the bar where he bartended) At that point in the film, after hearing and observing all the criticism and the depressing state of the music industry, I was struck by the Dave Matthews Band performance. Who knows if the performance was really as magical as it seemed with all the comments interspersed between really powerful parts of the song, but either way, you see this incredible push by the whole band to get to a very raw musical level. For me, and maybe only for me, the combination of the lyrics he's singing "I'm on bended knees father please" with the bulging veins and tendons in his neck, the sweat, the grunt in his voice, calm often closed eyes, his open but powerful vocal sound....it's just this sort of perfect connection with his soul. the viewer can see that his whole body is involved in channeling the sound of his voice, his shoulder movements, the leaning back, his winced eyes and tensed cheeks, he opens his entire body to let a very controlled and powerful expression of himself fall upon his listener's ears. Now, Dave Matthews is a guy whose record label never paid radio stations to play his hits for a certain number of spins. He's a guy whose music was so new and out there when he came out that people said things like "this is lame, I haven't heard anything like this, there's a violin in the band, what is this? this is garbage!" The band's popularity rose up from the underground, from people calling in and making requests, and his insanely faithful fans, and his wholly original style. One of the music critics interviewed said: "when you go see someone and you know they are not gonna stick to a script, someone like Dave Matthews, that's electric, because we're in a culture right now where the script is all."


That's what we go to concerts for. That's why music is important. Because there's something undeniably real and moving about music, about being outside of what you know, about having your ears acoustically challenged to understand how something your unfamiliar with actually works, that's why genuinely learning about another culture is thrilling, that's why trying new food touches different parts of your soul. This movie surveys an array of different musics, referencing greats from jazz to folk to soul to rock to pop. There's nothing that gets left out, and nothing that should be left out, because great music manifests in so many ways, just like great manifestations of what it means to be human or to exist manifest in so many different arts and disciplines, and thats why this movie is great. It asks us, underneath it all, to reconsider our condition, even our musical one, which may not seem important to most, but is really a blatantly obvious reflection of America's saddening cultural health, and that can be applied to so many fields.

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"and that's what I love again about uhh
bout the music though man
because I can't conceive of a great musician
who has not explored the highest levels of courageous engagement
in their craft
at the level of form and content
at the level of style and substance
(mhm) you know? That's what greatness is
it's a courage to go to the edge of life's abyss
to step out on nothing and still think you gon land on something"
-Cornel West on Terence Blanchard's Album Choices

"Virtually all the music that lasts, that sells those 10 million copies is not formula music. It's crazy music, it's Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It's stuff that was out there." -music critic.

Before the Music Dies Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwIiYvLVyZU