Glenn Branca & creativity/hope from the lower half of the internet

Composer and guitar-orchestrator Glenn Branca comes off inexplicably curmudgeonly and doomsaying in this blog for the NYT late last year, seemingly both claiming that creativity in music is dead (without really qualifying this rather sweeping statement) and also buying into the strange idea that music is some sort of linear progression of qualitative improvement, like the ever-decreasing time it takes to do a 100-metre sprint or something, which also seems pretty daft to me. Surely it's better understood like the outward expansion of an ink blot on tissue paper, branching outwards simultaneously in all directions?

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring in shopping malls, fast food stops, clothing stores and wherever else it will mesmerize the consumer into excitedly pulling out their credit card or debit card or whatever might be coming.

The best answer to Branca's thesis comes from the comments section of the same article, from one Matt Penniman.

In the last half a century we've seen Philip Glass achieve rather remarkable levels of productivity and popularity, Arvo Part create a new sound for choral music, Yo-Yo Ma bring awareness of Asian classical music to America with the Silk Road Project (and generate some appealing confluences of classical and folk with Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor), and much more. Meanwhile, the larger popular music culture has developed whole new genres, like electronica and hip-hop, not to mention more esoteric experiments like procedural music.

Crucially, these achievements are most visible in hindsight; if you want to say "sure, but what's happened in the last five years?" I would have to answer "plenty, but we won't know what was important for a while yet."

Or, like the first Premier of the People's Republic Zhou Enlai is reputed to have said, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: "It is too early to tell".

"Don't be evil" my arse.

Google has decided to start nuking music blogs without any warning (in spite of leaving up whole-album-download blogs, revoking people's AdSense accounts for criticising Scientology, collaborating with Chinese state censorship until someone went after their own servers, and all the rest of it).

It's a suitcase nuke. See what i did there? (from — aaargh! — National Terror Alert)

If we disappear, you'll know where. But if we do, we'll be back. Stay tuned.

mp3: Mano Negra – "Letter to the Censors"

Hey Ryan Reynolds, stfu. Love, LJB

It's galling to me that serious people actually give enough of a shit about what slick Hollywood sleazoids like Ryan Reynolds think to commission Written Articles About Stuff from them, especially when it's ostensibly reputable blogs like Huffington Post doing the commissioning.

Take this bleating piece, for instance, in which Ryan takes the moral high-ground re: the decadent wastefulness of competitive eating contests, mainly by invoking a variety of third-world children he has made up. "Young Mustafat, who maintains a strict diet of inner turmoil and bleached hope, looks forward to watching the ESPN-televised event to better understand what gigantically wasteful, fucking super-retards we all are", he wails, rending the air around him with concern.

Without, of course, pausing at any point to consider that: (a) competitive eating contests are at least 5 times more entertaining than any film Ryan Reynolds has ever starred in, and his self-congratulatory writing and poor stabs at Socratic irony too, for that matter; and (b) the combined staging and costs of every competitive eating contest in the United States wouldn't exceed the budget of a wack summer tossbuster such as, ooh i dunno, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.¹ (Ryan's condemnation of the excess promotional budgets of 7-11 convenience stores, Papa John's pizza,² the California Milk Processor Board and Schick razors is also strangely absent.)

Moral? i guess it's partly this: if you once starred as Van Wilder: Party Liaison, your right to diss anything on the grounds of taste is pretty fuckin' limited. And so, unless your salary for the next brainless superhero mindsore is all being donated to, e.g., MSF, it might be best not to single out one business's pefectly legitimate promotional tactic as if it were the major cause of the West's entire ethical downward spiral.

So, in summary, then: shut-up, pretty-boy. Now somebody pass the frankfurters.

Eine kleine wurstmusik:
mp3: Men's Recovery Project — "New Talking Sausage" (YSI)
mp3: Sam White — "Polish Sausage"

¹ FYI: The only reference i can find to a budget for the Nathan's annual Hot Dog Eating Contest is a 1995 NYT piece which postulates that Nathan's, as a "smaller" chain "with only 30 company-owned restaurants and fewer than 170 franchisees", can probably afford an annual advertising budget of "less than $1 million". Now i know that's old, and deals specifically with TV spots; but factor in the cost of staging the contest and then adjust for 14 years' inflation, and i still don't think you're near the same ballpark as X-Men Origins: Wolverine's $150 million budget. i'd speculate that maybe the X-Men catering budget might be nearer the mark. Assuming that's even vaguely close: so for the cost of promoting 30 restaurants and 170 franchises for a full calendar year, you could also achieve a small fraction of 107 minutes of celluloid! Positively bargainous, no? Well... no.
² Why the fuck would you want to eat at somewhere called "Papa John's"? It just reminds me of Papa Doc Duvalier. Preusmably if you displease the staff, you don't get your food gobbed in, you just get fully fucking hexed and then "disappeared".