Archive for the ‘Popular Music’ Category

Slipknot Still Sucks

Thursday, November 9th, 2023

Once upon a time, when the current century and millennium were just getting started, I was a middle- and high-school band director in my mid-20s. In the months after 9-11, I met another band director in her 20s, Jenny, and we went out on a few dates. I had a lot of first dates over the years, a few second dates, and Jenny and I probably went out eighteen times or so, making our dating relationship fairly memorable in the context of my history. Since I mostly don’t keep in touch with old girlfriends, and we never knew each other in any other setting, we’ve long since lost track, but Jenny was the last person I dated seriously before I met my wife, Becky.

Naturally, I suppose, a few anecdotes about Jenny and me are official canon in my family, including the “Slipknot still sucks” story.

It happened something like this:

I took Jenny to a minor league hockey game for our first evening date. Not because we were huge fans or even knew much about hockey… it was my idea of something to do. As the game progressed, we talked about likes and dislikes, as one does, and we fell to talking about music, as one does. We both shared an interest in rock music, and we may have even been talking about classical music, for all I remember at this point: we were both conservatory grads and school music teachers.

At some point, Jenny noticed that the teenaged boys in front of us kept turning around to look, and she thought they were snickering about our conversation. I don’t know if they were amused by our musical preferences, or wondering what it was like to be dating as adults, or genuinely shocked that someone like her would talk to someone like me. For whatever reason, they weren’t minding their own business.

I don’t know where the next part came from. I felt relaxed and just happy to be out and about: I always enjoyed dating, for the most part. I wasn’t happy in my job, but I had a decent group of friends, and was always welcome at my parents’ house. I had been living in Springfield for a little more than two years, and was really feeling comfortable there and in Dayton, where I had met Jenny when we both brought students to an honor band at the University of Dayton. I was feeling a confidence I hadn’t always felt, and I was on a second date with someone who seemed like a real prospect.

The kids in front of us turned around to sneer again, and I said, loud enough to be heard, “yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”

The kids probably reacted with more snickering, but I don’t really remember, because Jenny cracked up laughing, and I felt like I had actually said the right thing for a change.

It was a moment when a couple of snooty, sarcastic Young GenXer musicians bonded over the superiority of their shared musical tastes vis-a-vis a few Elder Millennials at a minor-league hockey game in Dayton, Ohio–not exactly the Algonquian Roundtable, but it felt good.

Really, that’s all I remember from that date, a couple of decades on: a dis on a few kids who were the same age as the kids I was teaching at the time.

The dirty truth? I had never listened to Slipknot. Not knowingly. Not one song.

It was the era before streaming, before iTunes even, so it wasn’t a simple matter of pulling Slipknot up on the app (I wouldn’t have a cell phone for another three years). I was still building a classical CD collection, and picking up a few classic rock CDs here and there. My radio diet was mostly NPR, which I had discovered in college, and some classic rock radio. I had recently adopted a TV that my parents had replaced, bringing the number of sets in my apartment to one, but I didn’t have cable, and barely ever turned it on.

My students listened to Slipknot–at least some of them–and that’s how I knew the name, from their t-shirts and the graffiti on their binders. It was around this time that I knew of Eminem and Insane Clown Posse, but I hadn’t heard them, either. I also hadn’t watched Fear Factor, or Survivor, and I had even lost track of The X-Files, which had been must-see TV for me in college and just after. I was much more in a bubble than I am today, I think, ironically at the very age when the proton pack of mass culture was aimed straight at my face. I read books, and I went to movies, and I thought about classical music, with my social life centered around being in a concert band and a brass band.

Jenny and I didn’t last much into the New Year, 2002. I left Springfield the next summer, and started dating Becky: we were serious by Thanksgiving, engaged for the Blackout of 2003, and married in 2004. This post was almost an email to Jenny, but I don’t even have that anymore. My Outlook contacts lists an AOL account for her, and that seems, well, unlikely.

But I thought Jenny–or the void I shout into–might appreciate the collision of worlds that has happened recently.

Noah, my thirteen-year-old son, is into music, and was talking about bands one day. At some point, unprompted, he mentioned Slipknot, to which I replied with a quick, “Yeah, yeah, Slipknot still sucks.”

I don’t usually use that kind of language around the kids, although I’ve gotten a little more free with it when it’s just Noah and me. I think he was probably also surprised that I would just dismiss any music in that way: I’ve always wanted him to have his own tastes, and explore what he’s interested in. Besides, I bit my tongue for his obsessions with Kid LaRoi, Lil Nas X, and Billie Eilish when he was in late elementary school, and they passed. Mercifully.

My little quip about Slipknot, though, was cause for discussion. First, I had to explain why I had said it: as a catch-phrase, mostly, from a time I wanted to impress a woman on our second date. I didn’t tell him it was also a reminder of a moment when I felt loose, and free, and confident in the midst of a time that I rarely felt those things. A reminder of a time when people my age were tastemakers–for better or for worse–and could enjoy our first opportunity to lord our good taste over our juniors.

Then, the inevitable:

“But Dad, have you really listened to Slipknot?”

I don’t lie to my kids (although I omit freely and without compunction): I admitted that I hadn’t, not knowingly.

Noah then appears to have taken it on himself to become a Slipknot expert. Not all at once, but it has gotten to the point where he is annoying not just his mother and me but also his friends with his interest in a band from two decades ago. He can’t be bothered to remember slope-intercept form, but if Slipknot sang it or did it, he wants to know.

Of course, Slipknot’s entire oeuvre and all the information one might want to know about Slipknot is right there, ready to be beer-bonged straight from his smartphone into his brain, in a way that wasn’t really available to me in late 2001 even if I had been of a mind to determine the band’s overall level of suckiness. I’m sure some Slipknot fan or a hundred dedicated their Geocities page to them, or there were glossy fan magazines on the rack at Big Bear, ready to cure my ignorance of what, for all I knew, might be the greatest act since, I don’t know… Barry Manilow?

So now, a mere twenty-two years after my initial assertion in a moment of colossally-hubristic snark, I am faced with the music that I once denigrated without hearing a single note. Noah streams it whenever he has the chance, and he sings along with Slipknot in the shower. He argues that it is “real” music that takes “real” work, unlike the processed drivel on the Top 40. They wear masks! They once played drums sideways! One of them speaks Klingon! Slipknot built the Pyramids, and beat up Kublai Khan!

You, reader, may be worried for me: Do I now have to tell Jenny–or absent that, the world–that I was wrong? Has that moment when I felt like I had a handle on things actually been built on an untenable assumption, and does one of the bright spots in a frankly difficult part of my life turn out to crumble?

More importantly, am I just some kind of a**hole with none of the cultural credibility my generation holds so dear?

Well, I’m here to tell you, having considered it more closely:

Slipknot still sucks.

Thank God.

Post-script: Things mentioned in this post that still suck:

  • Slipknot (Duh!)
  • Slope-Intercept Form
  • 9-11
  • The Blackout of 2003
  • Big Bear (or rather, the fact that Big Bear no longer exists)
  • Fear Factor and Survivor
  • smartphones

Post-post-script: Things mentioned in this post that don’t suck:

  • Becky
  • Noah
  • Minor-league hockey
  • First dates
  • Dayton
  • The X-Files
  • Showers

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Personal Reflections, Popular Music | Comments Closed

The ChatGPT Blues

Friday, June 30th, 2023

I wanted to share a discussion forum post I made this morning in my Lakeland Community College Course, MUSC 1800: Popular Music. Usually my prompts for discussion forums are centered around primary source material, but the prompt in this case is to write a verse of 12-bar blues lyrics, using a model that is discussed in our textbook and in the supporting materials I provide, including a Google Form to help students along. ChatGPT’s answer to the prompt is actually indicative of the mistakes some students tend toake on their first attempt. Here’s my post:

So, like many of your professors, I’ve been thinking a lot during 2023 about ChatGPT and similar AIs and what students and teachers might be doing with them. Of paramount and immediate concern to many of us is whether ChatGPT can do your assignments for you. So far, my finding has been a resounding “no, not if you want full credit.” But… it can probably help you as well.

To that end, here’s a short conversation I had with ChatGPT this morning:

Dr. Saunders: Write a verse of lyrics for a 12-bar blues about ChatGPT

ChatGPT: 

Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, here to please
I’ll answer your questions, just like a breeze
I’m an AI, powered by GPT
Ready to rock, come and chat with me

I’m a language model, with knowledge so vast
From history to science, I’ll make it last
Ask me anything, I’ll give you my best
In this digital world, I’m your friendly quest

I’m the blues of the internet, keeping it real
Analyzing data with an electric feel
I’ll write you lyrics, with a soulful touch
Bringing the rhythm, you’ll love it so much

So come on, let’s groove, in this digital zone
With ChatGPT, you’ll never feel alone
I’m here to entertain, 24/7
Just type away, and let the blues of AI heaven

I would say that the first thing you should notice is that ChatGPT gave us multiple verses when I only asked for one. That’s OK… I wouldn’t take points off for showing more creativity than is strictly required. However… our model for 12-bar blues lyrics is three lines, with the first two lines being similar to each other and the last line rhyming with the first. It’s clearly not doing that. But, as I discussed in my previous post, the three-line structure is typical of early blues, but was modified by later musicians, so maybe we can use some of this.

I’m not an English professor. To me, the quality of these rhymes is really just so-so, but the content of the lines is pretty good. I’m going to rewrite the first verse a little:

Well, I’m a ChatGPT, baby, and I’m just here to please. [bars 1-2, instrumental response in 3-4]

Well, I’m just a little ol’ ChatGPT baby, and you know I’m here to please. [bars 5-6, instrumental response in 7-8]

I’m gonna answer all your questions, just like an AI-powered breeze. [bars 9-10, instrumental response in 11-12]

This fits our model better… I think the most powerful potential for AI for students right now is this kind of thing: maybe you understand the way 12-bar blues works fairly well, but coming up with poetry is not your bag. ChatGPT is here to help.

Now… could you have given a more specific prompt and have the AI spit out a verse that does fit our model? Possibly. I’d love to see your results in this thread, but if you work with ChatGPT or something similar, academic honesty means that you need to let your instructor know.

(Saunders, Matthew. “ChatGPT Blues.” Posting in “12-bar Blues Forum” in Blackboard Ultra site for MUSC 1800: Popular Music Summer 2023 CRN 40149. Lakeland Community College. June 30, 2023.)

So… what am I trying to do here? I’ve been thinking about ways that I can use AI as an ally, and encourage my students to learn use it as a part of their toolkit, both now as learners, and later as workers in some capacity: where I only have to deal with AI for the second half of my career, my students will be dealing with it as part and parcel of what they do… much like the difference in the way a Boomer would have related to e-mail vs. the way a Gen Xer would have approached it. Building and learning to use a toolkit is in part, I think, what students should be doing in a general education course in the humanities.

When I took statistics in college in the mid-1990s, I learned a great deal about statistics, but I also had assignments that were due in a software program I had never used before, Microsoft Excel (music majors didn’t do many spreadsheets in those days). As it turned out, I have used Excel or a program like it in every job I’ve had since graduation (except the summer I sold shoes at Dillard’s), in my artistic and personal work. When I worked on my DMA document (the not-quite-a-dissertation you write when you earn a Doctor of Musical Arts), Excel was a big part of my process. ChatGPT and programs like it are probably the Excel of Gen Z.

“Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”

—Adventures in Babysitting

At the same time, we make non-majors study the humanities because being “educated” (as opposed to “trained”) means that a person has the skills to reflect and think about what it means to be human, about whether decisions are right. This little experience with ChatGPT shows that AI can make a stab at writing the blues, and even if it doesn’t get it right, it can still be helpful to a human who has an assignment to complete. But that’s not what the blues, or any musical expression, is, is it? The blues is taking the difficult parts of a human life, and putting them into an experience that we share with other humans. We can think about the reasons humans might like to do this: catharsis comes to mind, but there is also the need to share with others and to feel not alone. There is the satisfaction that the listener gains too, from feeling that someone else is living this life. My students have to write blues lyrics because I tell them too, not because they have the deep-seeded need to express their pain and anguish (which they may do in other ways, and which I try not to contribute to). In that sense, is their experience of the blues more like the experience of an AI trying to write the blues?

Last, I have a job to do, and as much as I’ve always worried about my fundamental ability (or lack thereof) to know whether the person registered for an online class is actually the person doing the work, ChatGPT should have us all reconsidering what we assign and how students might complete that assignment. I gave a very simple prompt, and ChatGPT bombed the assignment. This has been my experience so far every time I’ve given assignments from my class to ChatGPT, but it’s only a matter of time, they tell us, before AI will be able to produce convincing creative work.

So, I think the next time I run this class, I’ll modify this prompt: I’ll ask students to use ChatGPT or some other AI to create blues verses and copy the conversation into the forum. Then, the class can critique the verses, just like I did above, and demonstrate in that way their understanding of the 12-bar blues form. Or something else. Keep the machines guessing, everyone!

Tags:
Posted in Personal Reflections, Popular Music | Comments Closed

The Rock Star’s Art and the Rock Star’s Life

Monday, May 8th, 2023

The online versions of my courses contain discussion forums, dreaded by all online students, but I’ve worked for years to get them to be something effective. Like everything I try in the classroom, there seem be times and classes for which they work very well, and times when everyone is just going through the motions. I keep a number of “starter posts” on hand so that if a class is slow to get going each week and crowds the deadline, there’s something there for students to comment on. Here’s one I wrote recently for a discussion of offensive lyrics in music:

I’ve struggled for a long time with rock music in particular and pop music generally for its lyrical content, and I’ll explain why:

There’s a reason I chose music as my profession: I love it for its own sake, and the experience of music, broadly, is an enjoyable one for me. In fact, I love it so much that when I go to live performances, I get really annoyed and bothered by anything that distracts from the music: as you might expect, this means the rock concert experience is very frustrating for me most of the time, and I usually prefer listening to records to being in a live rock performance. You may think, “Well, this is just a grumpy middle-aged guy,” but believe me that I’ve always felt this way, from the first time I ever heard a rock concert and realized that people didn’t just sit politely and listen (the band was Hot Pursuit, a rock band made of Columbus police officers that changed the words to well-known songs to have anti-drug messages, and they played in my middle school auditorium in 1988 or so: here’s their awesome video: https://youtu.be/bQt1yjZeVvs; I believe they actually got paid by the police department to do this at least part-time).

Another quirk about me is that I tend to focus so much on the music that I either don’t really listen to or don’t understand the lyrics. I really am just more interested in the music, and I have to *make* myself think about the words most of the time. Ironically, this is, I think, the opposite problem from most students in my classes: the non-musicians are generally more in-tune with lyrics and apt to think of the contents of a song being its lyrics rather than its music. To me, though, I might as well be listening to a song sung in a foreign language most of the time.

And imagine that situation for a moment: a person who doesn’t speak English and learns lyrics phonetically might not understand whether a word or line is offensive; or, someone from outside a culture who does speak the language of a song still might not understand the nuance in the lyrics.

Sometimes lyrics have deliberately mysterious, veiled, or coded meanings, or just meanings that escape much of the mainstream: I think of The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A,” which many people (especially post-1990 people) think of as a fun disco song without realizing its homage to gay hookup culture.

So… I am repeatedly surprised by what song lyrics actually say when I stop to listen to them. They depict a world that is much broader than my personal experience, and this is at least partly a good thing. I have mostly lived a life that is not very much like the lyrics of the songs I’ve listened to in that life, and that is largely by choice. I mean, my relationship to pop music is mostly that I teach about it in a state-subsidized school and while I’ve performed in popular styles a lot, that wasn’t the focus of my training, and I’ve never tried to make a living at it. I certainly haven’t lived the “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” life that rock songs tend to describe, or the gangsta life that is so often a part of hip-hop, or the good times country life, and most of my life since my mid-20s has not been about the kind of relationship drama that fills pop songs.

And in some ways, this is what art of all kinds does: it allows us to step into a life other than our own, whether it’s a rock song about the sex a teenager wishes they were having, a video game that allows us to experience combat without actually getting hurt, a TV sitcom where we can laugh at problems instead of agonize over them, or a book that transports us to a time and place we couldn’t otherwise experience. This is a great thing.

But the more I listen to rock lyrics and the more I read about the lives of rock’n’rollers, the more I see that, for many of them, the lyrics aren’t just fantasy and reflect the actual reality of their lives. “Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” isn’t just a slogan, and it’s hard to find a rock star who wasn’t an addict, an abuser, an adulterer, a pedophile, or some combination of those. Songs about drugs are usually written by people who take drugs, and songs about sex with young girls are usually written by people who have sex with young girls. The lyrics may be coded, or their hit songs may seem innocent, but getting into deep cuts will often show you more of the true person.

And no one should be surprised by this, I suppose: very few people get from relative obscurity to the top of their field–any field–without ambition, obsessiveness, enormous ego, and at least a general willingness to be self-serving.

I’ve been reading a new biography of Chuck Berry (R.J. Smith’s Chuck Berry: An American Life) this month, and what stands out about Berry’s story is the way that he turned his fame and money into ways to constantly exert his own power over other people to get them to do what he wanted (usually in sexual ways… he was more or less clean and sober in terms of substances). There is complexity and nuance: his need to exert power came from his background as a Black man in mid-century St. Louis and the constant racism that he endured throughout his career. But he still comes off as a fine example of toxic masculinity. We study Chuck Berry for his mid-to-late 1950s songs like “Maybelline” and “School Days,” but his only Number One Pop single in the US was one of his favorites to play in concert, “My Ding-a-Ling,” an ode to the joys of masturbation. Berry got his jollies from getting the audience to sing along with him in a song about his manhood: exerting his power as a Black man over a mostly-white audience.

So: people can live their lives, and what goes on between consenting adults is just that (if your kink is doing things without consent, I don’t have any sympathy). But I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of art, especially by artists who aren’t trained “formally,” comes from a place of authentic experience, and the simplest answer is that an authentic pop song is rarely a contrivance to convince us that someone is something they are inherently not (although the contradictions between public image and private persona can be fascinating study!).

Thus, when Axl Rose, or Professor Griff, or Andrew Dice Clay make art that is offensive, or demeaning, or insensitive, I think we have to believe that is who they are, on some level. When they make comments in interviews that are misogynist or racists or anti-Semitic or homophobic, we have even more evidence that this is what they believe. Yes, over time, a person can change their ideas and behaviors, for a variety of reasons, at least in their public-facing self. Yes, someone can apologize or make amends, or even pay restitution or serve prison time (Chuck Berry spent 18 months in federal prison on crimes related to a 14-year-old girlfriend… in true Berry fashion, he said he was grateful for the time he spent finishing his diploma and taking business classes so that he could manage his own money, and his record label did everything in its power to keep the full story out of the public eye).

If pop song lyrics–clean, dirty, offensive, sexual, chaste, worshipful, fantastic, gritty–come from personal experiences, we as listeners then have the task of figuring out what we do with those tales. We may choose to like them because they reflect our own experiences. They may reflect our ambitions or alternate versions of ourselves that are better or worse, or just more exciting. They may inspire us to do better, or to reach for more, or they may commiserate with us when we feel we have failed. As I’ve said, they may simply open windows to experiences and lives we won’t, can’t, or don’t want to live. For me, it’s all too easy to ignore the lyrics and focus on the music, and that, of course, is missing the point.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Personal Reflections, Popular Music | Comments Closed