News Flash Number One: record labels are rapidly dying. So why is it that bands like Nightmare & The Cat still manage to make it to the top of every music blog out there, get signed almost immediately after forming, and despite being uninspiring, will probably continue to live a long life filled with the privilege of recording their music with the best producers in the world? It’s because the band is fronted by the son of a successful pop musician — Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics — and as much as the recession has sucked the life blood out of so many facets of the middle-class American existence, one fact remains: if your blood is blue, you will survive the impending vampire weekend, or month, or century for that matter, without the slightest trace of a struggle. There will not be a fang mark in sight on your silver spoon-fed neck.
So where does that leave the future of art? You know, the stuff forged by struggles and hardships, the stuff that made the music of men like George Harrison so compelling, and the sounds his son Dhani makes so, well, forgettable. Take one look at Martin Scorsese’s recent Harrison documentary, Living in the Material World, and you may find some answers. In the two-part HBO feature we follow George around the world, continually challenging his spiritual beliefs in search of a higher truth. His son on the other hand seems content inside the soundproofed walls of his lavish home studio. One is the reason we make documentaries, the other isn’t.
One would think that now, after the majority of the major labels have been reduced by mergers, that only true, struggling or brilliant artists would take the limelight, and the system that used to make millionaires out of mediocre pretty boys would be demolished before they could produce heirs. News Flash Number Two: It just isn’t so.
As we continue to develop new models for civil improvement, we are going to find more and more aspects of our culture dying. This is in fact a good thing. It’s a sign that humanity really is ridding itself of our historically flawed social designs, or at least becoming more “flat”, as Thomas Freidman first noted in 2005. But while phenomenon like massive studio budgets, glutinous album sales, and big advances have started filling our metaphysical graveyards, there remain remnants of an outdated system that we still need to question, and keep fighting until it dies.
So what’s missing from this emerging musical equation? Stories, for one. While it’s now possible through entities like CD Baby, Garage Band and iTunes to cheaply write, record, master, and distribute an album without leaving your room, it still isn’t guaranteed that such ease of production will in fact produce anything worth retaining. The easier it becomes to make art, the easier it will be to dispose of it.
This may be one major reason why Keith Richards’ 2010 autobiography Life topped the New York Times non-fiction list within its first week of publication. The Stones, despite the comfortable confines their work now affords them, started out in a post-apocalyptic London wasteland, enslaved themselves with a monastic study of Mississippi Blues music, struggled to find initial success, and then after they had all the money in the world, still managed to remain on the brink of utter disaster at all times. Now that’s a story. That’s why their songs have such a shelf life, and that’s still the formula for creating meaningful art, despite technology’s side-effect of lulling you into believing something different.
Oh no, I said it. While technology may be what gets us out of this economic turmoil, it’s also very much at the eye of the social tornado that has left our nation’s culture disheveled. While the immense distribution capabilities of modern innovations provide us with something great, they are simultaneously robbing us of something greater. The chance meeting between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards that led to their forming the band occurred because one had a collection of extremely rare American blues records, and the two forged their musical muscle through a shared hunt for this elusive and controversial inspiration. Today that would never happen. Keith could easily have found on YouTube what he was in search of without leaving his home, sent Mick a text on his iPhone, they could have enjoyed a few seconds of the song in separate places, at separate times, and moved on to the next momentary sensation in solitude.
Luckily for us though, Mr. Jagger and Richards do in fact come from a different time, and the symptoms of their upbringing continue to shine a light, pun very much intended, on new artistic formulas to this day. In fact, the only thing I wanted to talk about when I recently met Sam Stewart (guitarist for the aforementioned Nightmare & The Cat) was the project his father has spearheaded with Mick Jagger, Joss Stone and another of music’s most hallowed heirs, Damian Marley.
Superheavy, the new supergroup’s name, may not be the most tortured or inherently humble collection of artists at work in the music world, but they are doing one thing that other blue bloods and pop royalty aren’t: taking risks. Maybe that’s why Maroon 5’s latest pop smash claims that they have “moves like Jagger”, because if they were actually willing to challenge the pop paradigm they are kings of they would claim to have their own “moves”.
Reviews for Coldplay’s latest album Mylo Xyoto paints the band in much the same light: a pop superpower that is content with not evolving. Is Radiohead really the last collection of true artists who will be able to succeed in such a commercial world? I hope not, and as much as hope is beginning to remove itself from my cultural horizons, there are a still a few musicians out there who seam to offer redemption. Final News Flash: Believe it or not, they are blue bloods.
I’m talking about Damian Marley again, but also the Strokes. What Damian is doing now with Superheavy is just one aspect of a career marked by unorthodox collaborations and inventive musical explorations. His work with Nas on last year’s Distant Relatives is another example of how he has tried to push the musical envelope with his clout, instead of simply remaining content as the son of Bob Marley.
Damian is a rare case of a blue blood who uses his strategic position in society to either inform his audience from a normally unobtainable position in life, or to advance the arts through access to resources that normal people don’t have. I mention the Strokes as members of this species as well, because despite being descendants of legendary producers and international fashion moguls, the band’s members have managed to take their glamorous roots and either reject them with appropriate style or channel them intelligently. They didn’t record their groundbreaking first album in an East Village basement because they couldn’t afford a studio; they did it because it was cooler that way.
No matter what the color of your blood is, the changes that our world is going through are going to have an effect on everyone to some degree, rich or not. As Bowie said, “Look out you rock n’ rollers.” These changes are not all perception. It’s not necessarily because you are getting older, but because attention spans are getting shorter, the rich still have power, and like it or not your jobs as artists in society have gotten harder.
Don’t be fooled, there is a major revolution going on right now, but it’s not the type that forged the musical renaissance of the 1960s. Our revolution is developing every second, every day, and in multiple countries simultaneously. It may be a lot quieter, and less dramatic than the chaos of previous generations but what we are doing as a global society today is monumental.
However, there is a missing piece and that is that art needs to advance as powerfully as our technology has. While some may feel that the two entities are working together to forge something new, I tend to consider them at war. Maybe this battle is the cultural coup d’état that society always seems to need, but one thing is for sure, the royalty shouldn’t get to lead the troops into battle any more. Be it blue or red, more blood is going to be spilling out into our virtual, and cultural battle grounds. As in any meaningful war it’s going to get harder to judge whether to cry or dance at the funerals.
Nightmare & The Cat