Tires & Sneakers

Very often if I want to follow a topic I'll set up a Google Alert. I set up a Google alert about six months ago to follow music AI and I receive the results every Monday morning.

What I like to do, even before reading the articles, is to simply listen to some of the music that's being produced with it, and attempt to play along with it with a guitar or bass. 

Music is in many ways a meme in the sense that musical ideas can be emulated and propagated through culture. Most musicians since the beginning of vinyl records (and even before with Duke Ellington learning music by watching player piano rolls, and going back perhaps thousands of years with hunter-gathers drumming and chanting work songs), music is an imitative art.

Yesterday I was checking out the band Shadow Planet and played along with it on the bass. The first thing I do is to find the root, key, and perhaps the mode. But I didn’t find anything to emulate. At least I found the key. But if one was first learning music by listening and interacting with this, what could it possibly evolve into?

What I thought was interesting was the “Level 4” aspect. (As I’ve described before, I have a theory of 4 levels in creativity: Level 1: learning to use the tools, rudiments, fundamentals; Level 2: A higher degree of skills and abilities. (Prog Rock is an example); Level 3: Level 2 plus conceptual frameworks (Pink Floyd is an example).

But since there is hardly any musical skill involved, I would categorize Shadow Planet as Level 4, but even then it’s not conceptual (but could be applied), and it’s certainly not the avant-garde. So I’m not clear on where this gets placed on the creativity axis. It has a lo-fi vibe which is interesting, but that’s been used for two generations now.

We need something that sounds like cubism; We don't need regurgitated digital files without processing or shaping the raw materials. In terms of conceptual Level 4, we can call it music arte povera--like Richard Serra using scrap rubber. But music can access pop culture trends more readily because it can be cranked out faster these days without any physical work in a studio. What we want is some kind of absorbing craft that takes weeks or months to complete. If the metaverse can be this space where the digital materials are shaped, then that’s something really new. In any event it has to sound like cubism looked.

What I think this is an attempt to break away from the past, but it hasn’t yet broken free. When something breaks free or breaks through, then we can see where it goes. But at the moment, I think it’s scavenged found objects. The artistic process hasn’t yet begun. To me, this is found rubber. I’d want to do something with it rather than get the formula for rubber tires and make rubber tires, which is what music is from data sets. Everything you make from chemical compounds off the shelf for making tires is going to be tires. But remember what Roy Lichtenstein did with tires and sneakers.

Here’s an interesting bit from Thomas Frank’s Conquest of Cool (1997) which touches on this same breaking away in the 1960s from the stilted 1950s, seeking out a new Vision:

During the 1950s, advertising was marked by what was called “Containment of Carnival”, a powerful effort to suppress the industry's impulse toward difference under a stifling vision of managerial order. In the 1960s, this vision was turned on its head. Advertising narrative suddenly idealized not the repressed account man in gray flannel, but the manic, unrestrained creative person in offbeat clothing. The world of advertising was no longer bureaucratic and placid with scientism, but artistic and dysfunctional, a place of wild passions, drunkenness, and occasional violence.” 

Not that this is what this is, but is the “black box” of cultural upheaval and we don’t even know why we’re doing it. Pop culture always surrenders to it, then riffs on it until it takes off in some way.