The Beato Goes On

Whenever the end of the month comes and I am short on posts and there's nothing in the hopper in the way of ideas, panic sets in.  "Let this not be the month that the streak is broken.  Let a fourth topic come!"  This has been a particularly busy month in which my mind has been preoccupied with my actual job, and I'm also preparing for a vacation.  And for some reason, none of the usual sources of inspiration are especially doing anything  for me.  

And then right on time, Rick Beato posts another YouTube video with an almost perfect clickbait title: "The Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse."   I'm familiar with Mr. Beato's take on the kids' music of today-- for starters he hates autotune categorically.  Originally (and I'm sure to some extent still) a procurer of an expert's view on what makes a song great, he one day succumbed to the temptation to whine about today's music, and millions of clicks later it's a topic he returns to time and again.  You can't  (and I don't) fault a gent for suckling at the teat of the golden cow.  But from an aesthetic standpoint, from one old guy to another, I want to say "Dude! What are you doing?"  Nevertheless, this proclivity of his to serialize his complaints about contemporary song provides video essays that can be argued with in blog posts-- and who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?  

Beato is a multi-instrumentalist, studio musician and teacher.  His unspoken beef with music today is essentially that much of it lacks the professionalism and credentials on which he built his career many decades ago. Technology has reached a point at which anyone can produce music without a degree in it or even any proficiency on an instrument. This is part of what rankles him about auto-tune and trap beats-- a recurring gripe in his videos.  He has done a series of videos in which he listens to the top 10 on Spotify and critiques it as he goes.  The latest is called "I didn't think the top 10 could get any worse"-- a purposely hyperbolic clickbait title that doesn't accurately describe the contents.  As for the topic, well, the top 10 has almost always sucked in my lifetime-- at least 80% of it from day one.  If you're in a complaining mood, it's easy to complain about music bland and predictable enough to appeal to almost anyone.  For my part, while I couldn't hum any of what he listened to back to you on his latest slumming in the Spotify Top 10, none of it hit my ears as being in the category of awfulness of say "Billy Don't Be A Hero" or "I Really Want to See You Tonight", or other turkeys from my and Rick Beato's youth.

But to the video at hand, I again think the title oversells the meager content.  There's a lot of hemming and hawing throughout.  In keeping with the boldness of the assertion that he is revealing the key to contemporary music's suckiness, however, Beato says he will provide a presentation in 2 acts.

Act 1: Music is too easy to make - Right off the bat, I find the notion that it's a bad thing that music might to be too easy to make to be an elitist opinion.  As a democratic populist, I celebrate when the tools that make the culture are available to all.  As a sometime user of the Logic software that came with my computer unbidden by me, I have benefited from the ways that technology has made music production widely accessible.  The phrase"music is too easy" hurts my ears.  However, Beato's demonstration of what he means contradicts his argument.  He compares the old days, when musicians had to be prepared to perform at their best in as few takes as possible in the days before multitrack recording and studio engineering, and recording engineers had to be conversant in the actual acoustics of their studios and how to capture the subtle colorings of voices and instruments, to today when the simplest of tracks can be (and usually are) highly engineered to remove imperfections in the performance and to create effects that would be close to impossible to sustain with traditional instruments; but his description of the process (and my own experience) belies the notion that anything about the creation of a track of decent music with technology is "too easy."  As with anything, much of music is derivative and unimaginative.  But so it has always been. Disco was a phenomenal form of music the best of which was produced by highly talented musicians, but its popularity ensured a glut of crass pale imitations that littered the airwaves.  The best music then and now is the product of a mix of inspiration (or sheer luck) and skill.  As far as Beato's lengthy aside that AI generated music both violates copyrights, hurts professional musicians and makes bad music to boot, he'll get no argument from me, but this is hardly in the same category as the music making by humans enhanced by advances in software. 

Act 2: Music is too easy to Consume - Yes this is actually presented as "Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse."  Following a rather confusing demonstration analogizing the drops in the bucket that an artist's output is in the total marketplace of streaming music to actual drops of water from a stream that comes out of the kitchen faucet, Beato laments the days of his youth when if you wanted the latest Led Zeppelin album you had to work to earn the price of it and then drive to the local record store to actually purchase it.   What a feeling!  Today, there is so much music (100,000 new songs per day added to Spotify per the video) that Led Zeppelin would be lost in the shuffle.  Moreover according to Beato, the way many listen to music these days, Spotify (or other streaming apps), there is no opportunity to desire and explore quality music.  (This is not my experience; I feel no dearth of quality music in my ongoing playlist).  To Beato, Music in a stream just becomes an undifferentiated gush that gets poured into your ear.  It's as though there had never been such thing as radio -- the constant companion as one of my college media textbooks described it-- with its never-ending stream of musical product.  Was music better when DJs played the crap out of the same song all day until you wanted to chuck your transistor into the river? 

All of this raises a question, what does it mean to say "Music is getting worse"?  What does Beato mean by music.  When I think music, I think of an artistic expression of sound, words and rhythm that moves me or just gives me pleasure.  I can find no shortage of new music that fits the bill.  Truthfully if a song gets under my skin, I probably don't care if it was made purposely by Leonard Bernstein or by some fluke by AI.  There is no mechanism by which Music in this sense can get better or worse.  It just is and always will be as long we continue to make it.  But I suspect when Rick Beato thinks music, he thinks "product".  If music as a commodity is deteriorating, I think that deserves some cheer.

Midsummer Hormonal Dance Rampage

Kitra Williams - You're My Rose

Goldfrapp - Train

Mexican Institute of Sound - Revolución!

Slim Gaillard Orchestra (with Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie) - Popity Pop

Sparks - My Baby's Taking Me Home

DJ Seinfeld & Confidence Man - Now U Do

Ensemble Leones - Wes mich mein bül ie hat erfreut  (Oswald von Wolkenstein)

 

Deee-Lite - Smile on

Verckys Et L'Orchestre Vévé - Talali Talala

The Mae Shi - Run To Your Grave

Peter Fox - Schüttel deinen Speck (Shake Your Bacon)

Betty Boo - Skin Tight

Nick Lowe - Let's Eat

Rock Steady Crew - (Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew

Sinkane - Young Trouble

Sebass - Xipnitiráki

Rosenberg Trio - Rhythme Futur (Django Rheinhardt)

Joanna Newsom - The Book of Right-On

Making Lemonade

Don Lemon interviewed Briahna Joy Gray within days of Gray's firing from the Hill's daily webcast Rising.  I strongly encourage you to watch it because Lemon's questioning provides-- even a year after his forced exit from the sine qua non of mainstream media outlets, CNN-- a gratuitous free window into how the mass media does information in an age in which the truth is particularly unkind to the motives and efficacy of the ruling and ownership elite in whose laps they curl up.

Gray was fired from Rising days after presenting a particularly devastating "Radar" or on-air commentary on the topic of a recent segment of Bill Maher's Real Time in which on the explicit basis of his inability to identify with Palestinian humanity, Maher dismissed the imbalance of misery inflicted on Palestinians in Israel's conduct of its prolonged military operation in Gaza, exemplified most recently  in a raid in which it rescued 4 hostages, killing 214 Palestinians (and  as usual, mostly women and children) in the process.  Lemon related that he had listened to Gray's Radar in real time and thought, "uh oh".  To Lemon, Gray's impetus to expose Maher's explicit bigotry and to debunk Israeli mistruths and propaganda around Hamas's conduct on October 7 was self-inflicted flirtation with willingness to be condemned as being pro-Hamas.

"If you knew they had it out for you, why did you continue to do what you did?" Lemon asked. Gray's answer was that she did it to represent the rare voice from the left side of the spectrum counterbalancing the prevailing center/right of center bias on mainstream media, and that she was "testing the hypothesis" of the Rising's producers that Katie Halper's firing from the same program a year before for commentary critical of Israel was not the reason she was fired.

"Do you think it's fair to describe The Hill as a conservative outlet?" Lemon asked.  "Considering the stance you have, if you have the sort of takes that you have on a right-leaning network, one might not be so surprised that they would try to get rid of you. You understand what I'm saying? 

Gray responded, "You're saying basically I asked for it."  She went on to say, "Can an organization hold itself out as one that's invested in free speech, as one that's giving you fair unbiased news coverage when it would fire one of its most popular hosts for ideological reasons?  Rising postures like independent media, it's a streaming show, can feel like one of these podcast like shows.  It does media criticism, covers a lot of free speech stories. It's faux posturing on issues that its audience very much cares about."

Lemon pushed back on the free speech.  "On streaming shows there are a lot of opinions on the right and left that would get you fired from traditional media."  What's more The Hill "didn't have to pay you", Lemon said, suggesting, "there's a free marketplace of ideas, other avenues."  Gray retorted that  news outlets want to project "a  veneer of objectivity, democracy dies in darkness etc."  We know these outlets are biased but we want to think they're "committed to this idea of the truth".  "How can you fire someone for her truthful factual coverage of what's going on in Gaza?" Gray asked, citing the example of her coverage of the originally widely reported, now thoroughly discredited beheadings of babies on October 7.  Her cohost on Rising had persisted in promoting that as fact when it was discredited and suffered no consequeneces.

Lemon: "Saying that Hamas did not behead babies could be viewed by some as being pro-Hamas and couldn't a case be made that Pro-Hamas journalists should not be allowed on the air?  Anyone who supports Hamas in any way should not be able to have a job or be able to speak and have someone pay for you to say that."  Gray: "You're supposed to lie and say that Hamas beheaded 40 babies? Is that what journalism has come to?  In most newsrooms that's exactly what journalism has come to."

Lemon: "Do you think you're at risk of alienating potential allies from the use of such inflammatory terms as genocide and apartheid? "

Gray: "I use the term that the ICJ has plausibly used which is genocide.  Officials have spoken so openly about their intentions in Gaza that it's an open and shut case."

As to the specific incident that is widely pointed to as the basis for which Gray was fired (it's important to note that out of the conversation in which she was released from her contract Gray herself was not made privy to a specific reason), the facts are that the producer of the show intentionally or not withheld information from Gray about the programming of the show the day that Yarden Gonen, the sister of a hostage who Gray was told requested an appearance in order to confront Gray about her reporting in contradiction of Israeli accounts of Hamas atrocities on October 7th beyond what is uncontested was the guest until moments before taping began.  The impetus for Gonen's request was that bucking the editorial priorities of the Rising producers, Gray had insisted on covering the now thoroughly debunked story reported in among other places the New York Times that there had been systematic raping of over 200 women including hostages in the attack.  While a UN panel investigating the claims suggested that incidents of rape or sexual assault consistent with the mayhem of a military attack may have occurred, there was no specific confirmation of the IDF's story -- which conveniently enough surfaced at the time that South Africa brought allegations of Israeli Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza to the International Court of Justice.  Nevertheless, at the conclusion of Gray's interview of Gonen, after Gray had wished for Netanyahu to agree to the terms of a cease fire that would bring her sister's safe return, Gonen said, "Thank you.  Me too, and I really hope that you, specifically, will believe women when they say that they got hurt" which prompted Gray to visibly roll her eyes and cut the interview short.  Was Gray rolling her eyes at the raping of women?   Of course not!  She was rolling her eyes at the fact there are no women even according to the UN report that many mainstream news organizations cited in support of the original Israeli Defense Force's story, even though the investigation had not turned up a single woman or video footage corroborating the IDF's claim.  Nevertheless, Gray's obvious exasperation is assumed to be the pretext for which the termination she had been expecting came to pass.

Lemon was of course, just asking questions.  But as a journalist who was himself recently terminated from CNN, his questions provided some insight into the mindset of the type of talent that finds its way to the screens of our most unquestioning media.  Gray knew she'd be fired, yet she persisted in pursuing truths that her employers were not particularly interested in telling.

Try Again

Democratic strategists, media boosters and party loyalists would like us to view Trump's new status as felon as Joe Biden’s golden ticket to re-election. This is the Dem wet dream: victory without effort, with no promises to excite on-the-fence voters with, allowing the Biden team to pretend that history will merely behave as they would command it to, and leaving them free to pursue their usual strategy of implementing Trump's border and trade agendas in order to try to court the handful of centrist asshole Republicans who could be courted to the exclusion of everyone else.  And if it doesn't work out for them, at least no one got too excited in the process.  

We have to eat so much shit in order to keep voting for dems that it’s easy for some of us to understand why the majority of Trump supporters are unlikely to be fazed by a little thing like their man’s conviction on 34 felony counts.  The rest of Dem boosters might be just a little bit deluded.  Their giddiness has gone to their heads, leaving their sobriety in doubt.  To be fair it is a heady thing.  A historic first:  Trump is the first president to be convicted of a felony.  Put another way, he's the first to have gotten caught committing an act that happens to be plausibly in the contemporary legal category of a crime.  He's the Al Capone of ex-Presidents, tripped up on the technicality of sloppy creative bookkeeping in his 2016 cover up of using campaign funds to buy the silence of one of his indiscretions -- a move intended only to allow him to come away untainted from the vanity exercise of an election everyone including him expected him to lose.   If he'd known he was actually going to win, he might have forgone the image maintenance.  Richard Nixon had Gerald Ford to pardon him before he could beat Trump to the distinction.  Others have simply taken advantage of the executive privilege our elite grant to each other in order to let them get away with whatever they can.  Trump's alienation of every potential peer who could have saved him is how he got in this position in the first place.

It should gall anyone with a conscience that of all the things you could pin on Trump-- how about his fascist appeal? -- Democrats opt to politically exploit the mere fact of Trump's conviction as though it means something that should alone be enough reason for the average person not to vote for him.  On the contrary, our selective, arbitrary, partisan, activist, corrupt and debased criminal justice system is in smithereens.  After witnessing or taking decades of abuse from it, our low esteem of it is well deserved.  We expect nothing from it ...  except in the case of Donald J. Trump?  Come on, man!  Call me cynical, but I've been well trained by reality to be.  This is aside from the fact that bigotry against criminal justice system losers is just plain sleazy.  

Something about the Stormy Daniels affair never added up.  In a moment of more typical over-confidence, Trump accurately predicted he could shoot someone in the face on 5th Avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would stick with him. This is the key to and the danger of Trump. But many Democrats do not seem to understand the problem.