Connected Composers: Making Music and Money Online

Clive Tompson's "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" describes how blogs are changing the dynamic between musicians and their listeners. Blogs provide musicians a way to find an audience for their tunes, but fans are coming to expect more from them. Fans don't simply want music to be readily available for downloading; they want the musicians to be available for chit chat; they want the musicians to be their "friends."

Audience-artist interactivity is an interesting phenomenon, but I wonder whether the model is sustainable. Artists are often reclusive for a good reason: creation takes time and requires a level of attention that isn't possible when one must constantly check her e-mail or update her blog.

I've learned this lesson the hard way, through experience.

Questions this article raised for me: Are the Internet and e-networks making audience interaction necessary for artists and musicians who want to support themselves financially through their art? Will artists have the time both to communicate with the audience and to create quality compositions? To what extent will economic considerations - both financial and libidinal - shape the form of these compositions?

I know that my professional commitments - reading, writing, teaching, etc. - prevent me from blogging as much as I would like. Right now academia, at least the institution and the department in which I work, does not really provide the infrastructural resources to integrate blogging into the curriculum. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

While I love the convenience of networked discourse, electronic communication technologies can lead to hurried thoughts. Too often the aim is simply to hit send and make a connection. More time and thought must be given to the act of composition, to the creation of a message worth communicating.

As a teacher of literature, I devote much energy to making students more mindful readers: they need to be trained to slow down and pay attention to the workings of language, both their own and others's. I've found that electronic communications can distract students, who are no accustomed to being pereceptive observers of texts, or, for that matter, the world in which they live.

Tom Waits' Orphans

Coming soon (the Nov. 21 release date coincides with the new Pynchon novel; how's that for a truly harmonic convergence): Tom Waits' new 3-disc collection Orphans, which is comprised of "Brawlers," "Bawlers," and "Bastards."

Shit, I wouldn't be surprised one whit to learn that Pynchon, or maybe ol' Tyrone Slothrop himself (whatever happened to him anyway?) make an appearance on the record, playing the kazoo, of course.

Scroll down to read Tom's commentary on what this project's all about. With such an eloquent account, what'll the rock critics have to add?

Note to Jeff: It includes a Jack Kerouac song (lyrics by him?) and the last two tunes on the "Bastards" disc are "King Kong" and "On the Road." Apes love 'dat shit.

Of Rap and Racism

The question posted in John Cook's article's title is stupid: If you don't like rap, are you a racist? But that's because the basic claim being assessed here - that one's cultural tastes and preferences correspond to or can be mapped onto one's racial identity - is ludicrous. If, say, Toni Morrison were to profess that she didn't enjoy reading or watching performances of Shakespeare plays, would that make her a racist? And what about black jazz musicians who don't like rap? Are they 'race traitors?'

If only someone - perhaps Jessica Hopper's and Sasha Frere-Jones's editors - would call two posturing writers on the racist logic informing their smears of Stephen Merritt, the singer-songwriter who is best known for his work with the Magnetic Fields, whom they attack for being an outright racist and a cracker. Someone please make these two read Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, which explains why it's a mistake - logically, politically, ethically, and morally - to divide humanity into identity groups based on skin color.

And if you want to say in response that race goes beyond skin color, that it's a 'social construction,' read Walter Benn Michaels' work to understand how modern and postmodern talk about cultural identity repeated the same, discredited logic of racial essentialism as did talk about racial identity in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I've a lot more to say, but I've got to get back to a paper on performance and DeLillo before heading to the MCA for a talk about Chris Ware.