A fun game

Short post today. Please watch the following video:



Questions for discussion:

1. How many different examples of product placement do you spot?
   
2. Does the product placement influence your enjoyment of the music/video?
   
3. Who is responsible for creating and disseminating the music you hear?
   

Bonus question: Compare and contrast "I need a doctor" with this:

I feel a paper brewing...

I'm a big fan of Nas's, but recently my students introduced me to a song by him that I didn't know, "I know I can:"



The song features a very positive message directed to children (a rarity in today's hip-hop milieu). It uses an altered version of Beethoven's "Fur Elise." When considered in light of the song's message--you can be what you want to be--I began to think about the choice of this sample. Sampling classical music is uncommon in rap, but it does happen on occasion. But why sample this piece for this song? "Fur Elise" strikes me as the quintessential student piano piece: virtually everyone who has ever pursued the piano to some degree has probably played this piece. It represents the discipline of daily practice, and what is possible through hard work, which resonates with the content of Nas's lyrics. There are clips throughout of a young girl playing the piano, and the video concludes with images of children playing various "classical" instruments while Nas encourages us to "Save the Music."

Two other songs that sample classical music prominently include Diddy's (Puff Daddy at that point, along with Faith Evans and 112) used Barber's Adagio for strings (actually, its choral arrangement as "Agnus Dei") as the introduction to his "I'll be missing you," an elegy for Biggie Smalls. (I can't find a recording on YouTube of this version.) I suspect the Adagio's function as a tool for collective mourning in our country inspired Diddy's use of the work.

Busdriver's "Imaginary Places" is probably my favorite example:



I have some theories on his use of the Bach orchestral suite, but you'll have to wait for the article...

The N-word; or, why we need the arts

Inevitably when teaching a course on rap music, conversation turns at some point to the n-word. Our rather free-form discussion today ventured into that territory and so today was the day. We touched on many of the usual topics that come up in these discussions:

• Are there any contexts in which its use is acceptable? (Some say among friends; some say never; some say any time)
  
• Who can use the word and who can't? (Only those in hip-hop culture? African Americans? Anyone? No one?)
  
• Is there a difference between the -a form and the -er form? (Some say no difference; some say the first one is a "term of endearment" and the second is derogatory)
  
• Does using the word over and over again "disempower" it (as some rappers argue)?
  

The list goes on and on. One student related that a few of her friends mentioned that they're going to stop using the word during Black History Month ("And then what? Come March first, it's OK to start using it again?). We discussed that one of the biggest rap songs last year was Jay-Z and Kanye West's "______ in Paris," a song whose title many people simply don't feel comfortable saying.

The topic is a difficult one to teach. I'm not going to lie--it makes me a bit uncomfortable to talk about. I do my best simply to stay out of the way and to moderate the discussion. I've been fortunate enough to have students who are very respectful and understanding and so things have never gotten out of hand or too adversarial. (I taught a rap class at Texas Tech twice, but that covered different material in a different way. This discussion still came up.)

I'm glad that it makes me uncomfortable. During the course of the discussion, we talked about efforts to "whitewash" Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Some believe the book should be banned outright; others believe that all instances of racial epithets in the book should be sanitized. Both of these solutions attempt to protect young people from a part of history. History, however, is full of messy things and horrible acts and pain and suffering. Students don't need to be protected from these things; they need to be taught the causes of these atrocities, how to deal with them, and how to prevent similar things from happening in the future.

I would contend that teaching students how to engage with issues of race, gender, religion, and other controversial topics (I refer to them as "all the things you shouldn't talk about on a first date") is precisely the reason that we need Mark Twain, rap music, contemporary visual art, etc. Art provides us with a stimulus for discussing and working to address these issues. All of the science, technology, and math in the world will not equip students to deal with issues of race, gender, etc. We need to preserve art for the kinds of discussions that it provokes, not because it makes people better at science and math.

Writing intensive

The rap class that I'm teaching this semester is writing intensive. There are two requirements (I think... I hope) for a class to fulfill this criteria: 1) we must talk about writing at some point, and 2) the student must have an opportunity to revise and resubmit a paper based on instructor feedback. No problem.

(I have 80 students. That's a lot of reading)

Submitted for your approval and discussion, a pastiche of quotations/anecdotes that have been swimming around in my head regarding writing and language.

1. Summarized from Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars (a book that I'm reading now; I wish I had read it a long time ago):

Received Standard English (RSE) is "proper" English as taught in schools and universities. There is no good reason that this vernacular is privileged other than the Eight Guys in a Mountain Hideout say it is. Black Vernacular English (BVE) is an(other) expressive dialect, a vernacular form of English. Speakers of BVE are often looked upon as poorly educated, of a lower social status. In fact, the Urban Dictionary defines Ebonics [closely related to, if not synonymous with BVE--please correct me if I'm wrong!] as follows [!]:

A poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of english. When in doubt, throw an "izzle" sound in the middle of any word of just string random thoughts together and insinuate that they actually mean something. When backed into a corner, you can always claim that it has something to do with a sort of symbolism or is a defining trait that makes your race great, versus own up to the fact that it is essentially laziness at it's finest.

[Let's disregard the writer's misuses of RSE for the moment...]

Taken together with other regional/cultural dialects (do you call it "soda" or "pop"?), all of these vernaculars can be abstracted to something called the English language.

2. Henry Louis Gates quotes this article in The Signifyin(g) Monkey, suggesting that what constitutes a basic skill set for some might not constitute a basic skill set for others. Standardized tests are perhaps a bit too standardized.

3. Bill Cosby's "Pound Cake" speech (excerpt below; full text here

It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. “Why you ain't where you is go, ra,” I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk (laughter). Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with “why you ain't...” You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this?

4. Summarized from Diane Ravitch, The Language Police:

In an effort to minimize the disparities on standardized test scores, testing companies started examining questions for bias. Racial bias was first (on the heels of the civil rights movement): eliminate questions that might give members of one race an unfair advantage over the other. Then gender bias: omit questions that might give men an unfair advantage over women, and vice versa. [etc. etc. etc.] Then geographic bias: people who live in the plains can't possibly know what a mountain is--questions involving mountains give an unfair advantage to people from Colorado. Avoid inflammatory topics (death, suicide, abortion, poverty, unemployment); avoid topics that might show a bias of privilege (yachting, debutante ball, junk bond)... what are we left with?

The NES [National Evaluation Systems] guidelines admit what others leave implicit. Their goal is to create a portrait of an "ideal toward which society is striving." To reach this goal, children will encounter on their tests a world in which equal numbers of men, women, and racial groups participate fully in all activities and all roles. It will be a world in which older persons suffer no constraints because of their age, a world in which persons with a handicap are entirely unaffected by their handicap" (58)

Questions for discussion:

1. What does this have to do with a writing intensive course on rap music?
   
2. What does this have to do with rap music at all?
   
3. Could we abstract these arguments into the realm of music to examine claims that "rap is not music?" Or, BVE:RSE::rap:music?
   

Rap music

I'm enjoying my new home at UW Tacoma very much. The students are all really enthusiastic and hard working; many of them fall into the "non-traditional" student category: they're a bit older, many work full-time jobs and have families. It's a very different environment from my old home--no music majors being the biggest difference. The student population here is also remarkably diverse.

I'm teaching this quarter a class on rap music. We're using Tricia Rose's Hip-Hop Wars as a primary text with supplemental readings from Jeff Chang's Can't stop, won't stop. Rose argues that hip-hop is in trouble; it's not the socially relevant art form that it used to be "back in the day" (Chang's book provides the relevant history of "back in the day"). I have long felt that rap music was once good and now it's (mostly) awful. Something happened, and I want to get to the bottom of it.

I've actually been struggling with this course quite a lot--more than I have with any other course in recent memory. What business do I have--a middle-class, white, university professor, steeped in the Western art music/academic tradition--teaching this class? What light could I cast on the topic that others can't?

We spent a little time addressing arguments that rap is not music. I felt comfortable there; it's my home turf, getting my hands dirty in "the music itself." We introduced some musical terminology from Adam Krims's book. And that's all could do from the music theory side.

Now, I mentioned there are no music majors here, so many of the activities that I would have used (transcriptions, close readings, sample-chasing, etc.) are to some extent off limits. So what is it that I hope to accomplish?

The students are giving group presentations on chapters from Rose's book, giving them an opportunity to share their experiences. Most of what we've been talking about boils down to hegemony: someone, somewhere, determines what is best for everyone. I use the metaphor of eight guys (undoubtedly older white males for the purposes of our class discussion) sitting in a secret mountain lair determining what is and isn't acceptable to society at large.

(from here)

Among the arguments we've heard so far (the first few chapters in Rose's book) are that hip-hop causes violence, hip-hop represents black dysfunctional ghetto culture, hip-hop is destroying traditional American values, and hip-hop hurts black people. The question that has pervaded all of these discussions is who determines these things?

Rose (and others) argue that structural racism has created the conditions from which rap music was born. The music doesn't cause these things; it simply reflects them and tries to address them by calling attention to them (or at least it did in the early days of rap; I think this is less the case with current commercialized rap music).

The argument that rap *causes* violence is moot: we live in a violent culture--violent movies, TV shows, video games, etc. Why is rap music any more dangerous than, say, Rambo (n.b.: the link is to a tribute to Rambo, featuring clips from all four movies. Kinda makes my case for me...).

As far as traditional American values, who determines what these values are? Who has conclusively determined that the patriarchal nuclear family of 1950s-era sitcom fame is the typical American family and that everything else is a dangerous aberration? How is Mitt Romney's wealth and the means by which he acquired it any different from Jay-Z's wealth and how he acquired it?



Certainly, I think some hip-hop casts black America in a bad light. I don't need to post links to any songs or videos here--I'm sure you can find them pretty easily on the radio or MTV. The question is why do artists create such songs if they hurt the culture, and (more importantly) why do they continue to sell?

My students and I agree that simply talking about these issues is a good first step toward fixing the problem, but it's a very big problem... Maybe that's what this course is meant to accomplish...

One of those gigs...

There's so much more to being a musician than just playing the notes. You need to know the music, have good aural skills, good ensemble skills, and good communication. I had a gig this weekend that tested every musical skill that I've honed over the years. The concert was a Holiday-themed concert, with one rehearsal before the concert. This would be no problem if we were just playing Leroy Anderson's greatest hit over and over. I've written before about the strange animals that pops concerts tend to be, but this was not exactly a pops concert...

We arrived at the rehearsal to find the complete book for La Boheme on our stands, along with "Nessun Dorma." We were going to add the finale to act I of the opera to the concert. To save time, the conductor recommended several cuts. The problem here is that at some point, there are duplicate rehearsal numbers (at least in our part), and someone else had marked a different set of cuts in the part. So the other bassist and I wound up picking our way through ("Sounds like we're... here!"). This is tough music to do on one rehearsal because of all of the liberties with the tempo.

We then went on to rehearse Rimsky-Korsakov's entire suite from Christmas Eve, which no one in the orchestra knew or had played before (the conductor confirmed this by asking for a show of hands). We had the opportunity to play through it once. At some point, the bass part was inexplicably missing sixteen measures. I checked IMSLP on my iPhone at break to confirm that they had the score (and parts!) and we'd have those sixteen measures for the concert.

Johann Strauss's overture to Die Fledermaus was on the program as well. That piece I think is deceptively difficult. It's short and there are so many abrupt tempo changes/transitions. To make matters even more difficult, there are many conventions in that piece that aren't in the score (i.e., the Viennese oom--pah-pah; the caesura before the big waltz tune, etc.). It's a piece you have to have played several times before to know all those little details. We played it once through.

The real challenge came with the Nutcracker Suite, which we performed in a very unconventional fashion. The powers-that-be thought it would be great if the orchestra accompanied a video of the dances. A little bouncing ball cued the tempo for the conductor, and he was to follow that throughout (and we were to follow him). Due to the nature of the video, in rehearsal, we always had to go back to the beginning if we goofed up--you can imagine how much time that ate up.

The concert rolls around, and we arrive to find cuts for the Rimsky-Korsakov on our stands; the conductor cut about three pages (of the bass part) out of the concert. We hung on for dear life through that and the Nutcracker (which came off remarkably well in performance, considering all that could have gone wrong).

The second half of the concert was a little easier on the brain. The last number of the concert was a soprano/tenor duet of "O Holy Night," and the singers came in two beats early in the second verse. Most (if not all) of the orchestra caught it within a few beats and was back on track pretty quickly.

Never a dull moment... This concert succeeded because the ensemble consisted of a bunch of seasoned players who knew all the music and details, and naturally play well together. There were so many opportunities for catastrophe (and a couple of very near misses!). And people wonder why musicians can be so expensive...

A world without art?

I was having a conversation with someone this weekend about the disappearance of arts organizations. There have been a few orchestras in this neck of the woods that have either folded or come awfully close. I'm sure I don't need to make the case here that the arts are suffering considerably in this economy to anyone who reads this blog.

It just so happens that I'm reading a book at the moment called The world without us by Alan Weisman. The book is an extended thought experiment that seeks to answer the question, "how would the Earth respond if all human beings suddenly disappeared from the planet?" He talks about what would happen to animal and plant life, human-built structures, and so on. It's a pretty interesting book (I'm only about 75 pages in at the moment).

I got to thinking, what would happen if all art on Earth suddenly vanished, in an instant? What would the consequences be for our civilization? It's far from a simple question with a simple answer. I think any answer would first have to draw some sort of line as to what is art and what is not: painting, yes; fiction, yes; music, yes; architecture, maybe; non-fiction writing...?

There would be considerable economic impact: many would lose their jobs. These people would not only be artists per se, but would work at businesses that count on, say, symphony patrons to dine there on a weekend, or artists to buy their materials there.

I'm also not thinking retrospectively, i.e., if there was no art, Hitler would not have been a failed art student, there wouldn't have been World War II, no Holocaust, etc.

What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and there were no art? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts via the comments. I'll leave this thread open for a while and try then to synthesize the results.

The things I carry

Having played professionally in a variety of contexts over the years, I have found the need to carry all sorts of things in my gig bag; one never knows what to expect on a gig. I played a pops concert out of town this week and it got me to thinking about all of the stuff I take with me in my bass case (and using some of it, too!).

Here's the list:

• A pencil (of course!)
  
• Tuning fork (old school!)
  
• Extra black bow tie
  
• Nail clippers
  
• Clothespins (for outdoor gigs in particular)
  
• Earplugs
  
• Medical tape (good for saving fingers on pops concerts with lots of pizzicato)
  
• Post-it notes (good for marking cuts, particularly in show books)
  

There is, of course, the obvious: I carry two bows, at least two cakes of rosin, and extra strings. I just happen to have a spare bridge in my case as well...

I have a variety of apps on my iPhone that I use regularly, too: Cleartune chromatic tuner, Tempo metronome; of course, e-mail, phone and GPS features are super-handy.

Anyone else carry anything somewhat unusual?