Music Monday - An Ongoing Rant

I felt badly about not caring for rap performance because it destroyed my status of being able to enjoy and appreciate all forms of music. I finally rationalized, “How can anything be music if it is not musical?”

Most (and I feel safe in saying “most”) rap performance is merely inflammatory, profanity-filled, roughly rhyming couplets, set to a rhythmic background of raucous and thumping sounds. It is seldom musical.

How can that which is not musical be termed “music”? Simply put, rap is not music.

I don’t know what it is. Some kind of performance art I suppose.

And there’s something else that worries me: We hum and whistle the songs and music of our youth. That’s what makes them so eternal, so legendary to us. Just what are people going to be humming 20 years from now? It’ll be slim pickings surely. Will it be “bomtiddy bomtiddy bomtiddy bom”?

I have pawed through the cut-out bins, the pawn shops and the abundant thrift stores for cast out and cast away recordings, 8 track, cassette, 45rpm, LP and now CD. Years of doing this taught me (among many other things) that the music that is temporary and disappointing in our lives ends up there in the discard bins, reverting to dust.

Sometimes it was heart-throb entries like David Cassidy or Michael Parks there in the bins. Or maybe classical albums like Ravel’s Bolero or Handel’s Messiah orchestrated and played by small town bands in Europe or Alabama somewhere and bought from magazine ads. There were stacks of stand-up comedy albums, played once and never touched again. I found lots of vanity albums from show-biz personalities hoping to supplement their income in the music business. But, “William Shatner Sings?” or Robert Mitchum’s “Calypso is Like So” although treasures to the collector now, were turkeys when released. The used boxes contained albums by one hit wonders and head bangers. Never a Sinatra, never a Brubeck. It was seldom any jazz album would appear in the charity shop or garage sale. A used Charlie Parker album? Get real.

Today what do you find? Rap CDs. Lots of them. LOTS of them. It seems they do not stand up to repeat plays. The rap protagonists listen to the recording once and then move on. They must. Apparently there is not enough pith in the helmet to wear it repeatedly.

Of course in any art there are exceptions to every premise and medium. I make no judgments here; it’s only an observation.

Since the advent of recordings, one generation of parents grew up listening to jazz and show tunes. That was the popular music of their time. They listened to songs with fine poetry and indelible melodies. They also carry the guilt of the “Charleston” and the “Lindy Hop” and other dances of that ilk.

Along came Bill Haley and Little Richard. Parents were wary because they couldn’t understand the lyrics and thought the dances too sexually symbolic. Turns out they were right and well … wrong. Rock didn’t promote sexual activity any more than the crooners and the snuggle dances of the ‘40’s.

Rap is not the same story. The older generation may just be completely right. The current younger generation may just be the victims of the emperor’s new clothes. The next BIG thing might just be the cash-cow of corporations, eager to exploit the markets with a product that is transitional and must be replaced often; another edition of the planned obsolesce ploy, geared to selling the same product over and over.

The jury is still sequestered on that and ordered Gulf Shrimp today. It's going to be a long session.

Flickr Rant

Things ain't what they used to be. (In fact, they never was.) The Profile (more than you really wanted to know) is here.

Flickr is a complex organization. There seems to be several motivations for posting pictures or graphic visualizations on a Flickr stream. There’s self-advertising, family albums, event documentation, on-line storage and certainly many other reasons. The most genuine and sincere of these is the quest for encouraging and instructive comment from other Flickr members in an effort to grow in artistic or communicative or photographic skill. The quality seems to range from the silly to the strikingly artistic. There are floods of camera phone self-portraits (sideways) posted to annoy or interest someone in particular. Obviously there isn’t time in this life to select the best shot so all of them, sometimes hundreds are posted. There are endless collections of blurry smears of color or speckles and splatters in hastily collected frames meant to impress a close circle of friends; to evoke the occasional “oo-ah” from someone; to gain acceptance as a “cutting edge” artist or photographer or something. And there are those frames posted now and then, that have such striking power they leave one staring in disbelief or satisfaction or exhaustion. Some present such a story or drama or action they tell you on one look what is happening. Some are so visually provocative that your other senses are activated; you can hear it or smell it or taste it. Some frames are so communicative that you are taken back in time to that moment; you are not looking at it, you are there, in it. Acknowledging good work can come in several forms. There’s the straight out comment, enlarging on the feelings about the photograph. There’s the “Favorite” button which places that photograph into a personal array situated all in one spot so that an observer can view them as a collection. A photographer one wishes to watch more closely for new postings can be added as a “contact” and this will place a thumbnail of their latest offerings on the member’s Flickr front page. Now, adding a “Contact” or a “favorite” requires only the minimum of effort, a one or two click operation. The seasoned Flickr member knows that being added as a “contact” for a member who has two or three thousand contacts is not much of an honor. Having a photo added as a “Favorite” to a collection of five or six thousand “favorites” is not much of an honor. The only acknowledgement that consistently carries any weight seems to be the “comment” and even that can be trite when it becomes repeated “Nice” or “Good shot” or “Super” with lots of exclamation marks. Most of these huge “favorite” collections or gigantic circles of “Contacts” or one-word “comments” are just to elicit a visit to their own Flickr stream. And when you do, it is usually not much of an event. Those Flickr members who become friends are those who regularly discuss a presentation in a conversational way. They communicate. So that’s the rant for today or this month.

These are the most popular pages: Alison Young Art Pepper Barney Kessel Bettie Page Curl-up-and-dye Edgar Degas and the lost Ginger Nude Ginger Panda Gnat Trap Little Annie Fannie Marilyn Resident Alien Sunday Funnies

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...

Interestingness.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...
Originally uploaded by anyjazz65.

I don't know how it works either. I THINK I know what the big boys tell me. There are 500 photographs chosen for explorer each day and their rankings change within the day (how many times I couldn't guess. ) If your photo drops to #501 in the rankings it will drop off the charts until it maybe jumps into the top 500 again. The rankings are based (again, as the big boys taught me) on how many visits, favorites and comments each photo has and how FAST it collects them. The Favorites probably outweigh the Comments and the Comments probably Outweigh the visits. The number of groups they are posted in also adjusts the rank somehow. (the fewer postings, the higher the rank). The number and kind of tags figures in too. Beyond that, I understand, Flickr isn't telling. If anyone can correct or supplement this loose description, help out!

Here is a nice LONG discussion on it:
www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72057594093319838/

Well as long as I'm on a rant about it, I might as well add this too. Apparently Flickr gives each photo a unique number by just numbering them consecutively upon arrival. The number for the above bird picture is 218727061...(see the URL line at Flickr...) and

this is one of the first photogrphs I uploaded which was #45142957.

If that is true, using my own numbers over the past 11 months, Flickr has upoladed at least 170 million photos. That's an average of more than 15 million a month, over 500 thousand a day. Average. To have ONE photo in the top 500 for that day is pretty rare atmosphere. Flickr has more than 200 million photographs numbered now (AT THIS DATE!).

Of course when the photosite was younger there were fewer members, fewer photos per month, perhaps as few as 10,000. Now of course it is probably 25 million a month. Or so.