It took listening to Jesse Thorn's Bullseye to remind me of the greatness of The Pointer Sisters. The song “Yes We Can Can,” written by Allen Toussaint, was the hit single from their first self-titled album in 1973. When I listen to it today I can hear echoes of the time, the song coming out of transistor radios, car radios and television sets. Richard Nixon had been re-elected, the Viet Nam War continued on, Pink Floyd released “Dark Side of the Moon,” E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful,” Watergate began to heat up, the Skylab space station was launched, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its DSM-II and the Endangered Species Act was enacted. Even in the face of the rising backlash against the counter-culture 60s, that song captured something of the strong optimistic spirit of those times.
The “Yes We Can” theme was famously used in Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Given the political battles that have unfolded in the interim, we look back on that sentiment as naive. From this vantage point we're singing more about going it alone than moving forward together.
Faced with global warming and the sixth mass extinction event, it's difficult to see how we can alter the course of the biosphere through uncoordinated individual action. Actually, that's how we got ourselves into this mess. We act at the level of species whether we intend to or not.
Beyond “Yes We Can” might be “Yes We Can Can.” Beyond the scientific observations and the rhetorical hammers is a groove that shows us something about the kindness that we can give.
The “meta” formation of the old saw of technology journalism is to say that “calling technology ‘X’ dead, is dead.” In its most entertaining usages, the “is dead” formulation refers to a disruptive change in the infrastructure of computer technology. It’s a way to tell the story of changing fortunes in the feudal kingdoms that have come to dominate our technology landscape. There’s a fierce battle for the tip of the spear. These kingdoms have variously been called platforms or technology ecosystems. And rather than the use of force, we see our personal stories rewritten such that it’s impossible to imagine living without the devices and services delivered, like clockwork, each day to the leading edge.
Technologist and hands-on thinker, Jon Udell recently wrote about MOOCs on his blog. MOOCs attempt to impose a digital industrial model of production onto university education. An infinite number of uneducated young adults are dumped into a chute, a crank is turned, and some smaller, but still significant number, of educated adults are spewed into society through the other end. It’s a model where technology is used on students — Udell prefers his thinking to be hands on, he wants to see technology used by students. In support of this effort he’s made a key strategic decision, he’s retreated from the fierce battle for the leading edge. Here’s Udell on the value of the trailing edge:
And while I was often seen as an innovator, the truth is that much of my work happened on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was already ancient when I was experimenting with ways to adapt it for intranet collaboration. Videos of software in action had been possible long before I demonstrated the power of what we now call screencasting. And iCalendar, the venerable standard at the heart of my current effort to bootstrap a calendar web, has been around forever too.
There’s a reason I keep finding novel uses for these trailing-edge technologies. I see them not as closed products and services, but rather as toolkits that invite their users to adapt and extend them. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel calls such things “user innovation toolkits” — products or services that, while being used for their intended purposes, also enable their users to express unanticipated intents and find ways to realize them.
No one is fighting for dominance of trailing edge technology. Yet the landscape is strewn with valuable technologies left behind by the big technology silos battling each other for monopoly position at the top of the hill. Modern digital computer technology moves so quickly that it’s often forgotten how slowly societies comprehend and incorporate new technologies. The telephone and the television have not been fully understood and digested by society. The VCR became obsolete well before the average person could program it to record a television show at an appointed time.
RSS is famously, dead. It’s been shouted from the mountaintops of every snarky technology blog around the valley. Clearly the RSS syndication format is no longer a potent weapon in the battle for the leading edge. But along with some of the other technologies Udell mentions, RSS has joined the undead. This makes it an excellent candidate for a “user innovation toolkit.” Undead technologies continue to function and roam the landscape despite being casualties of the war for technological dominance. The trailing edge of the undead is the most fertile ground for finding and creating non-violent technological solutions to the problems faced by ordinary people in their daily lives. More importantly, they are the means by which ordinary people can fashion their own solutions.
Technology is a kind of thinking with your hands. It’s something each of us does everyday. And despite what we read on our screens, most of it isn’t digital.
A simple definition of an earworm is a piece of music that continues to play on a loop in your mind long after it has stopped coming through the stereo speakers. “Earworm” is also the title of a talk given by philosopher Timothy Morton earlier this year at Tuned City Brussels. Morton describes earworms as independent objects living rent-free inside your head.
At one point in the talk, Morton considers the kind of music that attempts to instruct or provide critique. That’s the kind of art that wants to upgrade your consciousness, make you a better person, make the world a better place. If you looked across the landscape of art and music that takes “upgrade” as its mission, it’s rare you’d find an earworm. Generally the earworm is not considered serious enough to be encouraged to find a home in this soil. Critical pesticides keep the earworms at bay; rather it’s in popular music that you’re more likely to become infected.
Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Listening Hour. The spot on your dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of Difficult Music (Music). So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair (Music), button that top button (Music), and get set for some difficult music.
The earworm is not necessarily viral, moving from ear to ear. But all of us have seen it happen. The song of the Summer gets a hold in your mind and it won’t let go. You unconsciously start humming the hook, and the earworm suddenly blooms in the mind of the person next to you. Many times it’s not even a song we like, it’s just that the hook it too catchy to resist. We can’t make it stop. This is why Morton sees the earworm as an independent object, something that’s not you but nonetheless inside you.
Shortly after listening to Morton’s talk I was infected by a song called “I Can’t Go for That.” The song was released in 1981 and in 1982 it took the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100, the R&B / Hip Hop Chart and the Dance Club Chart. It’s a rare song that crosses over from the pop charts to the R&B charts. It made no impression on me at the time.
At the “We Are the World” sessions, Michael Jackson told Daryl Hall that he’d lifted the bass lick from “I Can’t Go for That” for his mega-hit “Billie Jean”. Jackson loved to work out his dance routines to the song and he eventually worked it into a song of his own. One earworm turns into a new earworm. Hall told Jackson that he did the same thing when he wrote the song.
I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
Lyrics: Daryl Hall, John Oates, Sara Allen
Music: Daryl Hall
Easy ready willing overtime
When does it stop, where do you dare me to draw the line
You got the body now you want my soul
Don’t even think about it say no go
Now i’ll do anything you want me to
I’ll do almost anything that you want me to
But i can’t go for that
No can do
I can’t go for being twice as nice
I can’t go for just repeating the same old lines
Use the body now you want my soul
Oo forget about it say no go
Yeah i’ll do anything you want me to
I’ll do almost anything that you want me to
But i can’t go for that
No can do.
The strange thing about “I Can’t Go for That” is that it’s a song about saying “no”. It’s about limits and entanglement. The music seems to ecstatically say “yes”, but the words and especially the hook say “no” — there are limits. It has the funny syntax of Samuel Goldwyn’s saying “Include me out”. It’s the most positive way of saying no.
Perhaps it’s because I heard the song in the shadow of a talk by Tim Morton, but suddenly it seemed to be a song about global warming. It describes our deep entanglement with the machinery of the anthropocene and the moment where we realize that a limit has to be set. We have to say “no”.
The song is more than 30 years old, but it has legs. It still has the power to spawn earworms. And now when it plays in your head, you’ll remember that’s it’s a song about global warming and changing the relationship between humans and the earth. It will play on a loop in your head until your consciousness is upgraded. The song was born into the high glitz of the MTV era, but the hook has been strong enough to survive and transform itself through time and into many different styles.
The first time I heard the phrase it was used to describe something that happened at Johnny Cash’s house in Hendersonville, Tennessee. As the story goes, it was February of 1969, the hour turned late and the party at Cash’s house turned into a guitar pull. Bob Dylan sings “Lay Lady Lay”, Joni Mitchell sings “Both Sides Now”, Graham Nash sings “Marrakesh Express” and Kris Kristofferson sings “Me and Bobby McGee.” There are no recordings of that evening, or none that have surfaced publicly. We only have the stories and memories of the people who pulled out a guitar and put across a song. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
The “guitar pull” is a tradition that comes from country music. Musicians sit around and take turns playing songs. The origin of the phrase has been lost, its first speakers are time out of mind. Some say that it refers to passing a single guitar around, everyone taking their turn. Not everyone owned a guitar, but everyone had a song to sing. People “took a turn” in the sense of pulling the guitar from someone’s hands so they could get their song out.
Musicians playing on a stage for an audience is the dominant configuration for live performance. Occasionally it’s done in the round, but usually music is presented from within a proscenium — musicians on one side and the audience seated in rows on the other. The guitar pull has a different shape. The musicians and the audience aren’t separate, they aren’t even that different. I imagine the shape as roughly circular — a presentation to each other. This is different from musicians sitting around in a recording studio performing for a microphone. No one’s trying to create the definitive version of a song that will go on to sell millions of copies. In a sense, the purpose of the guitar pull is to keep it going. One song brings another out of the group.
A related way of organizing a performance is Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble. The ramble was a rent party in a barn that held about 200 people. Its purpose was to help save Levon’s house from his creditors and rehabilitate his voice after surgery for throat cancer. The audience brought casseroles for a pot luck dinner and music played late into the night. There’s a scene in Scorsese’s movie “The Last Waltz” where Helm tells a story about the origin of the midnight ramble.
“After the finale, they’d have the midnight ramble. The songs would get a little bit juicier. The jokes would get a little funnier and the prettiest dancer would really get down and shake it a few times. A lot of the rock and roll duck walks and moves came from that.”
The shows in the barn in Woodstock weren’t really patterned on the midnight ramble so much as the house parties thrown by blues musicians. On Levon Helm’s website, Kay Cordtz writes about Muddy Waters and his pop-up juke joints.
When Muddy Waters was developing his blues style in the 1930s, he would sometimes play for fans and fellow musicians at his house on the Stovall Plantation, transformed into a juke joint of sorts. They’d move the beds outside so people could dance, sell moonshine and run craps tables out back. Muddy would try out new sounds, make a little money, and everybody would have a ball. People told of finding the place in the dark of the country night by the light of hanging coal oil lamps, and hearing the guitars and people hollering through the trees before you got there.
For musicians like Muddy Waters there was a lot of power in having a venue where he could play the music he wanted for a receptive audience. It’s a kind of control that musicians rarely enjoy. That’s what makes Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble a powerful disruption of the music business. And it’s a place that musicians who’ve scaled the heights of pop-music success always seem to be trying to get back to.
“We had to almost invent a place to perform.”
– Levon Helm
“It felt like the house was calling for musicians to come be a part of it.”
– Amy Helm
There’s a small trend emerging among musicians of trying to invent new places to perform. These new places have their roots in the guitar pulls, pop-up juke joints and midnight rambles. On the west coast, Bob Weir built TRI Studios to provide an intimate space to create and broadcast music. But the most surprising and delightful new space has to be Daryl’s House.
“Well, for me it was sort of an obvious thing. I’ve been touring my whole adult life really and, you know, you can’t be everywhere. Nor do I want to be every-where at this point. I only like to spend so much time per year on the road. So I thought ‘Why don’t I just do something where anyone who wants to see me any-where in the world can?’
And, instead of doing the artist/audience performance-type thing, I wanted to deconstruct it and make the audience more of a fly-on-the wall kind of observer. You know, I actually like the added intimacy of having no audience in the room with us – just the musicians, myself and the crew hanging out, sitting around talking, rehearsing a song, and then just playing it.”
Daryl Hall has created that fly-on-the-wall view into a guitar pull — that view I wish had into Johnny Cash’s living room in February of 1969. Sure, in Hall’s version the arrangements have been worked out and there’s a little rehearsal. But it’s just enough so that talented musicians can pull it off at a pretty high level. It’s not a rote presentation, you can see the song being discovered as it’s being performed. And like a guitar pull, the music is performed for the musicians. As Hall says, there’s an “added intimacy.” The players don’t look at cameras or out at an audience, instead they look at each other. Daryl Hall has been around long enough to know there’s a different sound created in this kind of environment. It’s a sound that musicians love and one that’s really worth hearing.
Here’s Booker T. Jones on the experience of playing at Daryl’s House.
“One of the nicest things about performing on Live from Daryl’s House is that Daryl has surrounded himself with musicians who can ‘hear’ That is, each one has talent to the extent of being capable of performing as a soloist on his own, not needing to be told the proper notes to sing or play.”
Some believe that the future of popular music is Pandora, Spotify, iRadio and Rdio. These services appear to be cutting edge technology. But the reality of these streaming services is they’ve got a defective business model. They can’t afford to pay the musicians who provide 100% of their content. That means ultimately they’ll be serving up music in its last window of freshness. Once a musician has made as much as she can through every other avenue, then the songs can be sent to the streaming services. It’s the equivalent of waiting until a movie comes out on Netflix. Essentially these services are oldies stations.
The technology used to create “Live from Daryl’s House” seems much more cutting edge to me. Even if that consists of a single omni-directional microphone in the middle of the living room and a cable running down the hallway to a recording set up. Like Muddy Waters, many musicians are starting to invent new places to perform. If you want to know where music and technology is going, check out Daryl’s House.
