The Expectational Debt of 2015
On Music, society, inequality, TV and film, and Stephen Curry
Society and politics.
As every New Year approaches, I’ve attempted to gather my thoughts about the year being left behind in the rearview mirror. This year may be harder than ever to tabulate as I have already spent so much time trying to get my head around the extremely divisive political positions being taken in the U.S.A., the rise of terrorism both foreign and national, and the rise of wealth inequality, not just in the U.S.A. but globally; I feel it is not too glib of me to suggest that income inequality is an important trigger for many of our global and national ills.
Although the news throughout 2015 has often been depressing, fueled by inept media coverage and fear-mongering presidential candidates, it is always worth recalling what President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to say in his first inaugural address:
“…let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That sentence is often mentioned in bleak times but let’s not forget that he also said “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
There’s definitely food for thought in those two phrases, depending on one’s personal universe of course, although I do hope the second sentence garners more exposure in 2016.
Music
On a brighter note let’s turn to a year in music. As a musician and in my professional career, music has always been my go-to escape pod, and in a year of much increased music discovery (I’ll get to my list of great finds in another post soon,) I took solace, if that’s the right word, in two stand out recordings that I’ve spent many hours with:
In late 2014 D’Angelo and, in early 2015 Kendrick Lamar, both delivered timely and propulsive albums; albums steeped in the history of the confessional, each in its own unique way.
D’Angelo’s Black Messiah at times feels like a reverse confessional, as if he’s asking us to admit to society’s ills and ailments, especially in its treatment of black people and their communities. Lamar on To Pimp A Butterfly reaches depths of personal confession that leave you feeling deeply unsettled.
Both these albums are spiritual in essence, and I use the term ‘spiritual’ in regard to the history of the African American Church. They are societal in depth especially coming on the heels of the civil unrest brought on by the police killings of unarmed black men in the USA, and, more blandly after having said that, the albums’ production techniques recreate the sounds of recordings from an earlier era; there are flashback’s to the production styles of Sly & The Family Stone, Funkadelic and Parliament on one hand, and are lyrically as hard-hitting as Linton Kwesi Johnson on the other. When I submerge myself into Black Messiah or To Pimp A Butterfly, usually late at night or on an aeroplane, I come back to the surface unsettled to say the least. I’ll throw down the hyperbole gauntlet here and say that these two albums defy genre; the albums found a popular audience but I would never file them under Pop Music. Music needs more artists like these two.
In a total surprise this year I discovered how much I liked Taylor Swift songs. The surprise is not because I disliked her songs before, it was because I realized I had never paid much attention to them — I knew more about Taylor than I did about her music. (In the age of the internet that is probably a common theme.)
Ryan Adams changed all that with the release of his own version of Swift’s album 1989. With the sly charm that he’s often capable of, Adams’ approach to the songs surfaces many underlying themes that I had missed. Themes that in Taylor’s versions are harder to discover as they have been draped in overblown pop production techniques; they remain undisturbed just beneath the surface or are reflected in distorted mirrors. If you remain unconvinced I say take a listen to Adams’ version of Out Of The Woods and see if you remain stoically untouched by the song’s metaphors as he teases them out.
Here is Adams talking about his re-working of ’1989.’
On another note, there has been an uptick in the rate of “Surprise!” releases from major artists, who drop full-length musical works or mixes online, using social platforms to great effect to inform fans. (Prince just dropped one today.)
Maybe the act of releasing an album without advance notice stemmed from artists and labels trying to preempt the leaking of a recorded work online, prior to an official release date. Or, perhaps more likely, artists and their handlers have come to the realization that the idea of a ’street date’ in an always-on online age is simply a holdover from a different era. In an age of attention deficit, it helps artists if they can keep generating new music for their fans simply to avoid being buried in the online fray; more than ever now, lack of attention is the kiss of death for artists’ careers.
I wonder though if there may be an argument that releasing ‘surprise’ works on the internet are best suited to hip hop, rap and EDM artists; the ‘mixtape’ format is an especially suitable format as it defies the term ‘album;’ for instance, Kelela’s 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me helped create a new wave of R&B genre re-imagination. The web as a vast container allows unparalleled access to the artist’s fans, and the element of surprise creates even more awareness as those fans spread the news in a ‘me first’ world. I don’t discount the popularity of rock acts dropping albums online, yet it never feels the same to me. The act feels forced, steeped in frustration, a me too gesture.
In a recent NY Times article that discussed Drake and Taylor Swift using their friends to extend each others brands, Drake’s online spats with his fellow travelers are examined. In particular it focused on how he used the dropping of new material directly online to confront those who were dissing him, mostly Meek Mill, showing how rapidly an artist can respond these days. (I like the way the author of the article also coined the hedging term sort-of-albums.)
“…yet all this flack comes in the midst of what might be Drake’s most important year to date, one in which two sort-of-albums — “Too Late,” and the full-length Future collaboration “What a Time to Be Alive” — debuted atop the Billboard album chart. “Alive” was also itself a strategic checkmate of a project, in which Drake recruited the most productive and influential rapper of 2015, Future, for a full-length victory lap, capping off his takedown of Meek Mill. On “Digital Dash,” the first song from that album, Drake rapped, “I might take Quentin to Follies” — the Atlanta strip club — not worried about a thing.”
Of course Drake is a huge star, yet still, the internet is a no-barrier-to-entry platform available to all. It long ago usurped the CD as the new container.
Which brings me to the cult of the amateur.
What do I mean by that? Well, in a serendipitous moment I happened to read Teju Cole’s article about the famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who in 1952 published a book wherein the English title became The Decisive Decision. The original French publication was titled Images a la Sauvette that roughly translates as Images taken on the sly, a much more accurate and nuanced title.
Perhaps we could agree that the internet allows musicians to make music on the sly? Musique á la Sauvette? Cole asserts “The photographer has to be there to begin with, tuned in, tuned up, active.” One might paraphrase that as the musician has to be there to begin with, tuned in and tuned up, active. Different tools are at hand for sure, yet the access to distribution of a musician’s work is now boundless. As for an example of ‘being there to begin with’ I again give you Ryan Adams, who has his own studio along with a seemingly endless amount of material, and a work ethic of rather epic proportions. Adams is always on, always there. He sees recording as a never-ending process.
This may be obvious to anyone reading this, but you don’t have to look too hard online to find amazing music being created by unsigned musicians.
Personally, I am looking forward to what 2016 brings in music. And should you be inclined to think that Adele has restored faith in the chances of an upturn in record sales, I’m afraid to say that she is an anomaly, an outlier. And of course, she is phenomenally popular. My friend Sasha Frere-Jones covers that in a great article for the Los Angeles Times.
Television and Culture
As the music world continued shape shifting in 2015 attracting more of my attention, (hello A.Chal) I began to take note of my lack of TV-watching. It is not that I don’t own a television; I just don’t have cable television service. I have at hand all of the usual suspect platforms: Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, Fandor etc., but I never seem to be capable of settling in to any TV series. In other words I would be useless around the water cooler at work.
“Everyone needs to have skipped at least one cultural touchstone.”
I am unsure of who uttered that sentence, yet I agree with its premise. I can live without having ever seen a single episode of The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, or Game of Thrones. Do I feel as if I missed out? No. Of course not; YOLO! but it’s not as if I missed seeing exhibitions of works by Picasso, Francis Bacon or De Kooning; somewhere they will again be housed for viewing just as the aforementioned shows will live on the Web, just as Muhammad Ali will live on in film — Ali, who in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, helped to create some of the era’s most memorable cultural moments as Kalefah Sanneh wrote recently in The New Yorker. It’s just that I can’t relate to a TV/cable show with the same passion that I reserve for different aspects of other cultural touchstones.
Entertainment, especially in the television format, has its challenges; passive observance being one — I reserve that term for the mind-numbing network shows, by the way, although I will allow that the growth in second screen viewing broadens the experience for the observer. I could bring up McLuhan here, but I’ll spare you.
In what seems eons ago now, I definitely enjoyed the first couple of series’ of Mad Men, and my own English ancestry (putting aside snobbery,) allowed for slightly more viewing of Downton Abbey, the former initially compelling, slumping at times as it went on, the latter too focused on bourgeois fluff (Upstairs Downstairs, another British TV show of which Downton could be accused of plagiarizing, was far superior,) yet I soon gave up watching Mad Men and Downton Abbey for reasons I can’t clearly explain except to say that I felt I had to force myself to watch them; there’s a reason one stops reading a book after the first few chapters — a poor plot, uninteresting narrative or failure to provide great character development for instance.
Maybe in 2016 I’ll change my habit and start to look in on TV shows again as they too shape shift. Here’s Emily Nussbaum writing for The New Yorker about the future of TV:
Once upon a time, TV made sense, economically and structurally: a few dominant network shows ran weekly, with ads breaking them up, like choruses between verses. Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet. At this point, the model seems to morph every six months. Oceanic flat screens give way to palm-size iPhones. A cheap writer-dominated medium absorbs pricey Hollywood directors. You can steal TV; you can buy TV; you can get it free. Netflix, a distributor, becomes a producer. On Amazon, customers vote for which pilots will survive. Shows cancelled by NBC jump to Yahoo, which used to be a failing search engine. The two most ambitious and original début series this summer came not from HBO or AMC but from a pair of lightweight cable networks whose slogans might as well be “Please underestimate us”: Lifetime, with “UnREAL,” and USA Network, with “Mr. Robot.” That there is a summer season at all is a new phenomenon. This fall, as the networks launch a bland slate of pilots, we know there are better options. Link.
Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott have just released their list of what they consider the year’s best films. I particularly enjoyed Ms. Dargis’s opening paragraph:
“You might think that our love of lists could be pinned on the Ten Commandments, but Umberto Eco says otherwise. “The list is the origin of the culture,” he once said on a subject he knows well, having written a book titled “The Infinity of Lists.” And culture wants “to make infinity comprehensible” and “to create order — not always, but often,” hence Homer’s catalogs in “The Iliad” and the roll call of never-completed household chores on my fridge. “We like lists because we don’t want to die,” Mr. Eco also said, which is the best explanation of the listicle that I’ve yet read.”
The Income Gap
My favorite Nobel Laureate economist, Paul Krugman, reviewed Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich. I have yet to read the book, but Krugman’s review is a very detailed synopsis that could stand alone as a primer on income inequality:
“The story fell apart in stages. First, over the course of the 1990s the skill gap stopped growing at the bottom of the scale: real wages of workers near the middle stopped outpacing those near the bottom, and even began to fall a bit behind. Some economists responded by revising the theory, claiming that technology was hollowing out the middle rather than displacing the bottom. But this had the feel of an epicycle added to a troubled theory — and after about 2000 the real wages of college graduates stopped rising as well. Meanwhile, incomes at the very top — the one percent, and even more so a very tiny group within the one percent — continued to soar. And this divergence evidently had little to do with education, since hedge fund managers and high school teachers have similar levels of formal training.”
With regard to Krugman’s slight dismissal of technology being responsible for a downturn in middle-class income, it’s worth reading Don’t Blame The Robots by John Schmitt, Heidi Shierholz, and Lawrence Mishel.
However you may feel about the hyper-rich and the income gap in between them and the lower classes, I believe, as I said at the beginning of this essay, that societal ills will continue to grow until the income gap is addressed. And I’m not holding my breath that it will be addressed anytime soon.
And finally: Steph Curry.
Let’s go out on an uplifting story. At the time of writing the Golden State Warriors are 24–0 in their season. It is an amazing accomplishment that has been achieved through consistent teamwork and the considerable talent of Point Guard Stephen Curry. In a recent ESPN interview, Steph shares some insights into how he practices mindfulness and focus, by floating. His humbleness is inspiring.
Interviewer: For an encore to your MVP campaign, you’re giving us a season that by analytical measure would be an all-timer. What did you work on this summer that enabled you to elevate your game to another level?
Curry: The overall theme was to get better at the things I do well and try to add more explosiveness to it. For me, that doesn’t mean vertical, it means creating space, being in the best shape I can be so I can run circles around guys on the floor. But the drills I do are pretty much what I’ve been working on these past three or four years: like this drill where I wear goggles with flashing lights that obstruct my vision (while dribbling and passing). Weird, random stuff. Those kinds of sensory distractions are variables that take my mind off the ball and sharpen the brain, helping me neurologically. All of that stuff helps me slow the game down.
Slow the game down could be a great metaphor for many things in 2016.
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Footnote: I should explain the meaning behind the title of this essay. First of all expectational debt is a phrase that I love. I came across it in a post by John Gruber. If you follow that link you’ll see it was used by Rene Ritchie in his review of the Apple Watch, although the phrase can be applied to any shifts that happen when the status quo is upended and leaves someone feeling let down — expected expectations are never met, in other words.
*As always, all of the opinions written here are personal and do not reflect those of my employer.
