Post-pop stars: Moby and Fukuyama

Kelefa Sanneh is one erudite music critic. At times, he reminds me of the indomitable Armond White, the shining star of the otherwise-uninteresting New York Press. (See, for instance, White's recent review of the CGI movie Robots; he finds a way to compare the film to Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle).

Sanneh isn't quite as out there as White sometimes is with the obscure and brilliant cultural allusions. Still, this one seems especially clever:

How did "Play" make Moby a star in the first place? As most articles about "Play" mentioned, Moby marketed his album by licensing the tracks to commercials and soundtracks; relying on the power of corporate synergy, he had made an end run around the pop establishment.

His wasn't just a success story, then, it was a new kind of success story. Even better (according to the strange rules that governed 1999), it was a success story involving the words "geek" and "synergy." Suddenly, regular pop stars seemed old-fashioned: a bunch of oversized personalities, jockeying for space on radio stations that broadcast their songs using an antiquated system of frequency modulation. By contrast, Moby was a scientist, a musical technician who listened to everything and distilled what he heard into some state-of-the-art pop essence.

"I want to have the broadest possible sonic palette to draw on when I'm composing music," he told Gerald Marzorati of The New York Times Magazine, adding that he'd been listening to "pop records, dance records, classical records." And you could tell he felt a bit sorry for those sad 20th-century types who confined themselves to a single genre. He was a pop star for a world too sophisticated to believe in pop stars - a post-pop-star, perhaps.

"The end of history will be a very sad time," the political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, anticipating, after a fashion, Moby's world. Mr. Fukuyama imagined a future defined by "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." The appeal of Moby was that he would give us a way to enjoy this future; he would satisfy our "sophisticated consumer demands" through superior engineering.

It's true -- every single track on Moby's Play was used in a commercial somewhere.

More on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank

So it looks like Paul Wolfowitz is going to get the job after all. It just goes to show that, while it's easy to see that the Bush administration is ethically challenged, Europeans shouldn't be confused with saints. European support here is clearly the result of some backroom wheeling and dealing.

Still, does anyone believe this career neo-conservative has a personal interest in helping poor countries develop economically?

On the other hand, who knows? Sometimes neophytes are surprisingly good at what they do. And it's not as if there is any direct contradiction between the philosophy of the World Bank and the free market/privatization ideology that is for American neocons a kind of religion.

The Reviewers' Revenge: Sometimes the Internet is Like That

In the Times.

Sometimes the Internet is like that. The traditional objects of
culture - books, movies, art - are becoming ever more distant. In their place
are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists.

Here's my opinion of this writer's opinion about Lit-bloggers who review the reviews: I disagree! To be more exact: 1) lit bloggers do more than list favorite books, authors, easy chairs, coffee mugs, and the like. While making lists is certainly my favorite thing to do, it is not the only thing I do.

Ron Hogan, who writes a literary blog called Beatrice.com, recently began a second blog, Beatrix: A Book Review Review. He's not the only one reviewing reviewers. The blogs Bookdwarf, Conversational Reading, The Elegant Variation, Golden Rule Jones, The Reading Experience and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind - all gloss, grade or review other people's book reviews. Most book-review reviews are summary, to say the least. Their main purpose, it seems, is to get noticed and linked to by more popular blogs.

In short, Boxer argues, book bloggers have no original ideas of their own. I would challenge this, but unfortunately I can't find a link or a quote to make my case for me.

[More seriously, see Scott Esposito.]

India: Employment Guarantee Act (NPR)

NPR has been good on India lately.

The latest: India is considering an act that would guarantee one person in every poor household employment 100 days out of every year. They call in everyone's favorite free-market enthusiast, Gurcharan Das, to pour cold water on the idea as "socialist interventionism, doomed to fail."

SACW has a draft of the act.

The idea of doing this does sound a little questionable to me in some respects; there are too many ways for it to turn into yet another government scheme hampered, as so many Indian government schemes are, by too much bureaucracy and too little efficacy. But then: something like 400 million Indians continue to live in poverty. The trickle-down effect promised by liberalization advocates isn't working the way it should. Among the very poor, way too many people are unemployed. Moreover, the rural poor are moving to cities in India at alarming, even dangerous, rates. This might help slow that a little.

Though India is certainly not in the midst of a Great Depression (more like: the Great Endless Insufficient Progress), if this were well-managed, it might have an effect along the lines of that great American institution, the WPA, of generating lots of jobs, and some really impressive , lasting public-works projects along the way.

'A bit more ear please!': Headscarves in France

A new BBC2 documentary: Crooked Timber:

But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

I have a hard time understanding why the French aren't getting it about this law. I'm half-tempted to go to Paris this summer and do my own inspections -- situationist parodies of the routine described above on the Paris Metro.

MP3 Blogs: Recommended, and some practical/legal questions

As mentioned last week, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and (legally) downloaded MP3s from MP3 blogs lately on my commute to and from work. There is even a new section on the sidebar towards the bottom for MP3 blogs and Podcasts.

The best "mainstream" media sources are the BBC show "In Our Time," WGBH-Boston's "Morning Stories," and virtually all of the original programming from KCRW-Los Angeles. (I've especially been enjoying "Bookworm" and "The Politics of Culture.")

WNYC-New York claims to be podcasting, but actually it seems to me that their XML feed isn't using downloadable enclosures. So no IPod, no IRiver -- and no podcast. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, and someone could show me how to download these correctly.

In terms of music MP3 blogs and amateur podcasters, it's becoming clear to me why ReelReviews (a classic movie review podcast) and Coverville are as popular as they are -- they have lots of interesting ideas, good taste, and a professional presentation. From a legal standpoint, I've gotten interested in how Brian Ibbott (of Coverville) operates; he says he licenses the songs he uses with ASCAP and BMI. Where does he send the checks? What
are the mechanics of it?

In terms of underground electronic music, the best podcasters seems to be Gutterbreakz and Knobtweakers. There is also a Japanese site called Music Forest that is good for mixtapes of UK Garage/Speed Garage (it's in Japanese, but you can use the "Translate this page" function in Google to sort of read along). Thanks to these people, I'm beginning to feel like I'm in touch with what's happening in genres like Electroclash, Grime, and the comparatively more obscure "Breakcore" and "Folktronica." A lot of the music on Gutterbreakz especially has a vibe that is vaguely 1981-ish... or maybe 1985-ish. (That means you, Julian.) This stuff is legal, I think, because the kind of music Gutterbreakz puts out is definitely not RIAA-protected. Some if it is produced on the computer of the blogger himself.

Funk You, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and Soul Sides tend to put up MP3s that are copyright protected, and then take them down very quickly.

I'm enjoying the music, though I'm not sure how I feel about the strategy. This class of podcaster isn't really harming anyone, since the majority of what they offer is either out of print or quite difficult to find. No CDs are being not being bought that would have been bought otherwise. (In Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture taxonomy, they are "Category D" [see chapter 4 of Lessig's book])

Still, it would be better if these sites were able to pay a licensing fee to a centralized location, and then keep their offerings up permanently, without fear of attracting a lawsuit. Here's to hoping Lessig's manifesto for a saner licensing system comes to pass. (Without it, I don't see how the above sites, as excellent as they are, can continue for very long)

While I'm at it, I also want to re-recommend Avolta, which is putting up new podcasts of crazy Brazilian music more frequently than it was before. They also have a new site, which looks great.

Above all, the aggregator MP3blogs.org, which aggregates the recent postings of several dozen MP3 blogs from all around the world. You can discover a lot of new sites through this, though some of the sites abroad are of dubious legality.

Metafor: Natural Language Programming

From MIT: Researchers at the Media Lab at MIT have developed a parser that converts natural language to a visual representation of code.

Ok. I created a new agent Pacman that is a kind of character agent. I added the ability for Pacman to run, which can be through a maze. I added the ability for Pacman to eat. A dot is something which can be eaten. Whenever Pacman eats a dot, it disappears and he wins a point.

And the parser interprets the meaning of those sentences, translates the logic to a computer language (Python, in this case), and creates the game.

Pretty neat. If you read the PDF (three pages; more or less accessible if you know what "deictic" and "anaphora" mean), it becomes clear that they are mainly thinking of it as a tool to help computer programmers brainstorm. But it might also be interesting as a way of teaching programming to kids, and also as a way of thinking about the way stories 'work' (deictically) in language.

There is also a Quicktime movie demo of their parser, but I couldn't get it to play...

This type of thing makes me wish I knew more about semantics (a sub-field of linguistics), as well as programming.

It also, incidentally, reminds me of the interactive fiction Adam Cadre writes. A parser like this might make the task of coding such stories much more straightforward.

"It looks like a hospital": Medical Tourism in India

Medical tourism, on NPR. A growing number of Europeans are going to India to get medical treatment, including advanced surgery. This story has a Canadian man who needed a knee replacement, but was told that it would take a year before the operation could be performed in Canada. He was able to fly to India, have the operation done, and stay for 21 days in the hospital, all for $8000. He used Apollo Hospitals, which is aggressively marketing itself for just this sort of thing. But apparently India doesn't have a licensing system for this type of private hospital (is that really true?), and only a a small number of European and North American insurance companies currently recognize them.

The story suggests that India could generate revenues of $2 Billion USD this way by 2012. But again, it will only happen if the government invests in certain infrastructure improvements; one potential patient (this could be apocryphal) was so horrified by what he saw between the airport and the hospital that he decided not to get treatment in India after all.

They are also talking about a special line at the Immigration counter for people getting medical treatment, as they have in Thailand.

Melinda and Melinda: Mini-review

We saw Melinda and Melinda last night in Montclair, and walked away in quite a good mood. The actors were interesting to watch, especially Radha Mitchell, Will Farrell, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chloe Sevigny. The gimmick of the film -- the same story told two ways, one as tragedy, the other as comedy -- doesn't blow one away, but it does offer a group of very talented actors a chance to show off their talent. Even if Woody Allen's script and his ideas aren't especially fresh, he gives his cast room to work, and it is the actors who give the film its sense of elegance and sophistication. It is the actors who carry the film.

I remember reading A.O. Scott's review a week or two ago, and thinking, "man, that's harsh." But then I just re-read it, and realized that he's actually quite appreciative on the whole, and in fact seems to get the film just about right. (It was actually the Slate review that was too harsh. David Edelstein seems to be holding Woody Allen's age against him, in ways that I think are unfair and perhaps even age-ist.)

An interesting thing: this Woody Allen film has two black actors in "starring" roles. Now, Allen is controversial for many things, both on and off the screen. But Scott mentions one aspect of Woody Allen that's actually not been controversial enough, and that is that he's somehow made 30 or so films about New Yorkers who all happen to be white -- this in a city where blacks, hispanics, and asians make up about 60% of the population. Melinda and Melinda has not one, but two significant roles for black actors:

In the comedy, Hobie falls in love with Melinda, while in the tragedy she and Laurel become rivals for the affections of a gallant pianist and composer with the extraordinary name of Ellis Moonsong, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor ("Love, Actually," "Dirty Pretty Things").

Mr. Ejiofor's presence, along with that of Daniel Sunjata in a smaller, similar role in the film's comic half, is perhaps the biggest shock in "Melinda and Melinda." In the fifth decade of his career as a New York filmmaker, Mr. Allen has written not one but two black characters into a movie, without sensationalism or stereotyping. Better late than never, I suppose.

I really like Ejiofor in the movie (and he was amazing in Mike Leigh's movie about illegal immigrants in London, Dirty Pretty Things), but I don't know if I can let Woody Allen off the hook on this one quite as easily as Scott does.

Indo-Musicology

I recently found myself trying to explain contemporary Indian music to my "Modern India: Literature and Film" class. Very messy and complex, especially since I don't have much of a musicology background.

I used one helpful article on some of the recent trends in Indian popular music, by Peter Kvetko. It's called "Can the Indian Tune Go Global?" (Drama Review 48.4, Winter 2004; not online, though people with a subscription to Project Muse can download it here). Kvetko went to a conference on "IndiPop" sponsored by Planet M and MTV India in Bombay in 2000.

The attendees at the conference seemed to be most preoccupied about the prospect of an emerging global audience for the newish genre of non-filmi pop music -- by artists like Lucky Ali, Colonial Cousins, Adnan Sami Khan, and Stereo Nation. If Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias are so huge in India, why can't Stereo Nation be as huge in Puerto Rico? This question doesn't interest me all that much (I'll believe it when I see it), but Kvetko's explanation of the musical distinction between Indi-Pop and contemporary Hindi film music is helpful:

The influence of this music on Indipop artists can be clearly heard in the increasing use of “riff-based” compositions, as opposed to the typically “raga-­based” music of films. For example, Lezz Lewis and Hariharan of the success­ful Indipop duo known as The Colonial Cousins sit together with an acoustic guitar when writing songs. The chords and riffs they choose dictate the form of the song. Film song composers, on the other hand, pick out single notes on a harmonium (a small organ with hand-pumped bellows) in order to find a memorable melody. Later, a music arranger will fill in the background with accompanying chords, but the organization of the film song is determined by the melody and lyrics.

Furthermore, the overall structures of many Indipop songs are formed around moments of harmonic tension and release. Similar to many Western pop songs, "the hook" is deferred by a sequence of chords to create the effect of a buildup.8 Only then, after we have been kept in anticipation, do we reach a moment (often intentionally brief) of musical release. In many ways, I find this to be a fetishization of the act of listening itself, and it stands in direct op­position to what several film music directors told me: "If the audience can’t sing along within the first few seconds, the song will never be a success."

Other characteristics of Indipop music include a preference for guitars and drums over the synthesizers and electronic drum machines of today’s film mu­sic. Examples include Lucky Ali, The Colonial Cousins, Silk Route, Eupho­ria, and Strings. Of course, the founders of Indipop—Biddu, Daler Mehndi, and Alisha—came out of a disco-influenced era and made extensive use of synthesizers. But as the Indipop movement has come of age, the trend has been toward “authenticity” and a heightened sense of tradition with the use of In­dian instruments and rhythms.

Kvetko seems generally right to me, though this passage forces us (if we're trying to teach this) to explain in some approximation of technical detail what exactly a raga is. Yikes. Even with Google, this turns out to be fairly hard to do, especially if you don't know your modes from your chord progressions...

Separately from the issue of defining "raga-based music," there are a couple of blind-spots in the essay. For one, with his exclusive emphasis on Indi-Pop, Kvetko doesn't allude to the other trends in Indian popular music. Especially glaring is the omission of reference to A.R. Rahman, who does make raga-based Hindi film music -- but who is equally comfortable using the western pop/rock format. And quite a number of Rahman's compositions are considerably more complex than your standard filmi fare. If corrected for the advent of Rahman (and Rahman's imitators), Kvetko's history of recent Indian pop music might look something like the following table, if he charted it (the table is actually mine):

Era	Film music	Non-film pop music
18th C.-Present	Hindustani Classical Music (Raga)
1950s-1980s	Classic, Raga-based Hindi film music
1990s	Contemporary Hindi film music (still raga based)	Disco Indi-Pop
Late 1990s-Present	Neo-traditional/folk & Rock/Hip-hop film music (Rahman, etc.)	Neo-traditional Indi-Pop (Rabbi Sher-Gil, etc.)

[Note: One significant problem with this table is the way it short-shrifts the 1950s-80s era in Hindi film music. Anyone who knows their R.D. Burman from their Kalyanji and Anandji Shah is likely to be peeved; same for fans of the lyricists. How might my table be improved?]

Finally, I think Kvetko is on to something when he outlines a shift in production values across the board in Indian popular music in the 1990s:

One of the clearest distinguishing features of Indipop production is the lack of the heavy reverb that characterized much of film music throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Indipop producers prefer a clear tone that will sound good on head­phones, personal stereos, and in other modes of individual consumption. This is in clear opposition to the echoing sounds sought by film music producers, who attempt to create a sonic space compatible with the modes of public con­sumption associated with films—such as movie theatres, rickshaws and taxis, and open-air bazaars where film music is blasted from loudspeakers.

Good point, though again, I think Kvetko isn't anticipating the degree to which Indipop production values have been integrated into the Bollywood music universe. Lucky Ali and Adnan Sami Khan routinely do songs for films, and mainstream, 'timepass' movies like Hum Tum hire producers like Rishi Rich to produce Hip-hop inflected tracks. And IndiPop has itself maybe lost a little steam recently, with the overwhelming crush of classic Hindi remix numbers...

Happy Holi

Holi Pictures. Check out this one.

Happy Holi, people. (Well, happy almost-Holi... it's actually coming up this Saturday...)

The SAJA South Asian Writers Panel According to...

Elck, @ Vernacular Body. An excellent, thorough account of the event; it makes me sorry I missed it.

India adopts New Patents on AIDS drugs

My first thought is: oh, crap. This just to get WTO membership?

But if you read further into it, it begins to seem a little more complicated. For one thing, the already-approved generics can still be produced. There will be a new licensing fee, but it isn't specified how much that will come out to. So it's possible the price rise for India's generic AIDS drugs will be incremental rather than exponential; we'll have to wait and see.

A waste of an evening... almost

Because of the snow, my one-hour commute took three hours tonight. Ouch.

Well, anyway, I made good use of my IRiver MP3 (recent acquisition) player. I have a little device which I found on line, that broadcasts your MP3 player's output to a radio station you set. Pretty nifty; it lets you listen in the car. (Headphones and driving don't mix, in my opinion)

During the endless traffic jam, I listened to the podcasts of KCRW interviews with Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), Marilynne Robinson (Gilead), and about half of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture from the 'open source' free audiobook compiled by a bunch of bloggers.

The highlight was probably the Lessig, which is very well-written. Lessig's argument, also, is truly a far cry from the simplistic 'Free Napster' type of argument that I'd kind of expected. People who are thinking about Intellectual Property issues online really ought to check it out...

Paul Berman, on the "Unworldliness" of the American Left

Via Literary Saloon, I came across a Paul Berman essay in the new Bookforum. It's Berman considering the career of the sociologist Daniel Bell, who published a series of books analyzing the American left, starting in the late 19th century.

The highlight for me are the following paragraphs, summarizing the argument of Bell's book Marxian Socialism in the United States:

Marxian Socialism in the United States is a work of great psychological acuity. Martin Luther said of the church that it was "in the world, but not of it," and Bell quoted this remark to evoke a quality of unworldliness in the American Left. He meant that, over the decades, the socialist movement in America had never quite been able to accept the political world as it was, preferring instead to dwell apart, in a world of dreams and moral postures. Marxian Socialism in the United States has received, over the years, mountains of criticism for this one quotation from Luther. And yet something about that phrase has always been on the mark, as I think anyone can see, with a glance at Debs's four presidential campaigns at the start of the twentieth century, and at Ralph Nader's two campaigns at the start of the twenty-first.

The phrase "in the world, but not of it" strikes me as pretty astute on the topic of the New Left, too—the New Left that commanded the allegiance of several million Americans in the '60s and '70s but was never able to break into conventional political life, with a couple of exceptions. For the New Left too preferred to dwell apart, in its own world of dreams and moral postures. This habit did the movement no harm at all, by the way, in regard to cultural issues—which is why it succeeded in capturing whole neighborhoods in a number of cities, and used those neighborhoods to conduct experiments on cultural matters, and sent those experiments orbiting outward to the rest of American society. Nor did a few unworldly habits do the New Left any harm at the universities, once the graduate-student militants had succeeded in shoving aside the populist anti-intellectuals. But the kind of movement that was capable of capturing a student neighborhood or an English department was never going to capture a state assembly.

Being a person who likes to think of himself as both in the world, and of it -- and being no big fan of Ralph Nader -- I want to agree with Berman on this characterization. Using the polemical charge of Bell's religious metaphor, Berman turns Marxist idealism into a kind of Priesthood.

But I know several left-leaning folks (Michael Hardt, for instance) who don't fit this characterization at all. There are more complex ways of using and working with idealism than Berman allows. That one rejects certain dominant political and economic frameworks on ethical grounds doesn't necessarily mean one harbors unrealistic ideas about human nature (one thinks of the old cliché that Marxists believe humanity must suddenly turn altruistic for the systme to work). In my view, it's quite possible for realism and idealism not to contradict each other. But it requires a somewhat more multi-dimensional way of thinking about political ideology than the tired old Left-Right axis.

Berman also continues to work with the Marxism-as-religion metaphor beyond where it is probably useful. The following paragraph, for instance, doesn't make very much sense to me:

"Among the radical, as among the religious minded," [Daniel Bell] wrote, "there are the once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the ‘sky-blue healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil—the ‘soul's mumps and measles and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase—are merely transient episodes to be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice born, the world is ‘a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil and look Medusa in the face."

A textbook case of mixed metaphors, this. Reading the above paragraph reminds me why it's wrong to do it: the problem isn't that mixed metaphors will annoy Grammar Sticklers, but rather that no one will know what you're talking about.

Still, an interesting read overall from Paul Berman, author of the interesting (if a little maddening) Terror and Liberalism, a book much-talked about in the blog-world a couple of years ago.