A Further Appeal To Time-Honored Literary Devices (i.e. MAD LIBS!!!)

[ Why bother? ]

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An Open Letter To My Dissenters On Why Classical Isn’t Cool Anymore

Stefan Andrew Lord Kac, with apologies to Nicholas "The Cherub" Payton

(and previously, if briefly, Professor Gann)




Let me make one thing clear. I am not dissing an art form. I am dissing the name, Classical. Just like being called Cracker affected how White people felt about themselves at one time, I believe the term "CLASSICAL" affects the style of playing. I am not a Cracker and I am not a Classical musician.
What do Claude Debussy, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Kyle Gann (LOL!!!) and myself share in common? A disdain for Classical. I am reintroducing a talk to the table of a conversation that my ancestors wanted to have a long time ago. It is on their shoulders that I stand.
"Classical" is an oppressive colonialist slave-owner term and I want no parts of it. If Classical wasn’t a slave, why did Cage try to free it? Classical is not music, it is an idea that hasn’t served any of us well. It saddens me most that some of my friends can’t see that. Some of y’all who know me and I’ve even employed, stood on the bandstand with, know how important tradition is to me. My work speaks to that.

This Is Most Decidedly Not Any Kind of Rant

For all those who say I’m on a crazed, cranky, angry, dark rant. There is nothing crazed, cranky, angry or dark about what I write, but a lot of this hate energy I’ve received online truly is. Someone has even gone as far as to deem me the Nicholas Payton of Classical?

You know what the most offensive part of that statement is to me?

The “CLASSICAL” part.
I’m trying to save this music and folks are straight lambasting me. The saving grace is, for the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly favorable and it’s here where I choose to focus my gaze. I’m sacrificing myself for the greater good of post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music and some of you are calling me names, and I’m the angry one?
Most of these folks don’t even know me, but yet they have a strong dislike for Stefan Andrew Lord Kac. I am a human being, not some internet bot. When you hold an intense dislike for someone you don’t know, it means that somewhere down deep inside, you have an intense dislike for yourself.
Please take at look at yourselves. What are you doing to save this music? Are you out there earning meaningless masters degrees from fancy-pants art schools and enjoying the California sunshine in December honing your skills for the next trumpet player to take you for a fool on the basketball court, or are you just functioning under the guise of what you have been fed for many years and are told is the way things have to be?

You can dislike me or what I say all you want, but it doesn’t stop what I said from being true. It only disturbs you this deeply because it dismantles everything you’ve built your life upon. As I've stated on my blog, “CLASSICAL” is resistant to change. It wants to hold on to the old way of doing things, even if they’ve proven to not work.
What are you so afraid of? That you actually might have to think for yourself? That you will be responsible for the information that has been passed down from generation to generation though the lineage? That you have to live up to the great legacy this music demands?
I challenge my dissenters to really be an individual and stand alone in the face of everyone telling you that you’re wrong, crazy and can’t do it. That’s what Schoenberg did. That’s what Cage did. Are you willing? Are you able? Are you ready? Only a few can really do it and my blog makes that clear. It ain’t for everybody. So, go on, continue to box yourself in a label that was designed to marginalize White musicians and cut them off from their brilliance.

pBAAJMM!

When post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music became “CLASSICAL”, it separated itself from the European folk music idiom. I’m just trying to take it back to its roots. European folk music has been separated from its root (what you call Classical) and, as a result, all of the branches of the tree are dying. White music is dying and I’m trying to help save it. Turn on the radio, if you don’t believe me. How many Classical records that have come out in the last 5 years that you’ve really loved?
I do as much to support this music as most of you. I don’t just come online and bitch about the state about this music. I spew real and actual vitriol at the art and its artists and here I have to see some of you tear me down and say I’m killing the blogosphere? When it is some of you who want to hold on to an oppressive idea that doesn’t serve post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music who are the true murderers.
The music was just fine before it was called Classical and will be just fine without the name.

There is nothing to be afraid of except yourselves.

I am Stefan Andrew Lord Kac and I play post-Black-American Anglo-Jewish Mutt Music.

Nicholas Payton plays more horn than I do, but mine is BIGGER!

pBAAJMM!


(the giant on whose shoulders I stand)

Occupation of the Mind, Part 2

[ Why bother? ]

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NP continues:

The 99% is simply about a class of Whites aligning themselves with the impoverished they didn’t give a shit about until they, too, were broke. Am I supposed to care now that you’ve had a “come to Jesus” moment and want to say it’s all about us? Us didn’t become “us” until a faction of people felt the burn who never felt it. They didn’t give a shit when it was “just us”, so now I don’t give a shit. Justice. How does that song go, “Cry Me A River”?

At the heart of this statement lies what white culture might call an "old world" view of ancestry and cultural inheritance. In other words, you are a living representative of your entire lineage whether you like it or not, and their deeds and misdeeds alike are yours as well. I'm not oblivious to the backstory here, and yet I also have trouble seeing this worldview resulting in anything less than a permanent impasse in the getting along department. Because I'll never meet a German who helped exterminate the Jewish side of my family, I can't see any reason to put all of that on any given German indiscriminately until one who had nothing to do with it can be cowed into a contrite gesture of my choosing. From my middle-class white American vantage point, there's no rational justification for this, nor can I anticipate anything constructive coming of it. And to meet a random, unexpected contrite gesture with "so now I don't give a shit" would simply be to throw salt in the wounds.

So yes, Mr. Payton, we presently feel the burn, and only more acutely with your comments. In jazz as in life, the options are few for us modern-day pale folk who aspire to be part of the solution: apathy is complicity, activism is sour grapes; we are thieves if we imitate black music too closely, or ingrates if we do not imitate it closely enough; and the happy medium in both cases is a pinball of a moving target. It is a worldview by which culpability and victimry alike become genetic traits, and where each generation takes with them to the grave their children's hope for reconciliation along with their own. I think we can do better without forgetting our history, and I'm ready when you are.

Occupation of the Mind, Part 1

[ Why bother? ]

• • • • •


Here's NP waxing resentful on the Occupy movement.

The "Carpetbagger" item is intriguing. I think might know some, actually. Unfortunately, they do not just make pilgrimages to New Orleans, but indeed bring their "discoveries" home with them and try to claim some sort of direct line. The music is often embarrassing and the gesture borders on the offensive. So I'm with you there, NP. Some soul-searching and ton more time in the woodshed would do these busybodies good.

Now...

"Why are people occupying the streets when the only person capable of keeping you from your dreams is you? The Occupy movement is a distraction and will not yield anything but more confusion. There is no “machine” to fight against. We are in the dark because people are asleep to their own light. Cure the internal war within and the war without instantly vanishes.

We’ve worked from the outside in for centuries and still have not completely resolved the bigger issues. Grand gestures make great headlines, but the real healing takes place on an individual level.

"The internal war," huh? Sounds about right. We all have one, and we should absolutely fight it in the way that you describe. Is that it, though? Collective action is dead? Really? Since the 1960's? I'd like to believe you. I'm an introvert. I'm good at fighting internal battles and virtually incapable of being part of a collective anything. But comfort be damned, I can't agree with you on this, and I would, with all due respect, raise the question of Abolitionism first and foremost. How would that have gone without a little bit of collective action, public debate and well-timed violence thrown in? Not a direct analogy? I'm not so sure. The Pro-Slavery side certainly took great pains to specifically inhibit the formation of collective consciousness and action alike among their slaves. They feared it, and they were right to. They were cowards and they were outnumbered. Even failing any more specific similarities, I think the same can absolutely be said about modern-day Wall Street. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Poonpuff FAQ for the e-Nihilists in the room (as well as any and all past/present/future MFEDI readers whose e-worldview necessitates such overt clarifications of purpose and method be made again and again regarding this and the few other constructive, well-written weblogs about music and musicians)


WHEEEEW, okay...


ahem...



Dear Angry Reader With Better Things To Do Than Sit Around Reading Some Young White Asshole's Weblog,

Before attacking my motives for joining the Post-Nicholas Payton Foofaraw (PNPF or "Poonpuff"), for making any particular argument therein, and/or for having this blog in the first place, I would humbly ask you to consider the following clarifications of purpose and method, issued at the outset of my joining the PNPF and applicable to all subsequent statements made on this topic.


(1) You're not qualified to disagree with someone who "plays more horn" than you do. Who do you think you are, anyway?

While NP indeed plays more horn than I do, mine is bigger.

In all seriousness, I graciously defer to NP and similarly accomplished individuals (if any others exist) on matters which are directly informed by one's degree of musical skill and/or career success, such as issues of instrumental technique, music criticism, marketing/career advice, practice habits, etc. However, any generalizations (music-related or otherwise) about a group of which I am a member (e.g. "white people" or "all these kids with music degrees") are fair game for rebuttal because they require no further qualifications than (a) that I be a member of the group(s) in question, and (b) that I tell the truth about myself. Under those circumstances, no musical skill whatsoever is required to be qualified to make such a rebuttal, even to a highly skilled musician such as NP. Were I to make a blanket generalization about "black people" or "New Orleans cats," don't you think NP and all other members of those respective groups would be qualified to rebut my statement?



(2) But...you're...white. WTF is up with that shit?

Guilty. Can't change it, and unlike many white classmates growing up, I never tried. If it's relevant (and I'm not saying it is; only you can decide), I did go to an elementary school from 1st through 5th grade where blacks outnumbered whites by more than 2-to-1; I have spent hundreds of hours of my life on the basketball court (one of NP's hallowed proving grounds, which is the only reason I bring it up) outnumbered by a similar margin; I did continue to volunteer (albeit in fits and starts) on the Northside of Minneapolis long after I finished high school there; believe it or not, a good high school friend of mine declared another friend and I "blacker than some [black people]" even though we didn't talk, act or dress like him; and of course, it goes without saying that a good number of my strongest musical influences are African-Americans. These are mere facts about my life experience. They do not grant me any kind of authority to speak about racial issues that I would not otherwise be thought to have. By relating them here, I simply hope to convince anyone who is not otherwise inclined to believe so that I care and that black people are real and human to me. You don't have to believe me, but that is the truth. That's all I've got for you on that front.

Hence, if you see fit to comment on something I wrote (which I welcome), I would appreciate the common intellectual courtesy of having this articulated in terms of the content of the argument in question, not in terms of my supposed qualifications (or lack thereof) to make it based on overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member (e.g. "young white assholes" or "academically trained white musicians from the Upper Midwest who, surprisingly, can also hold their own on the basketball court") when these generalizations may or may not actually be reflected in my specific case, and indeed, when you clearly have no possible way of knowing if they are reflected in my case or not based solely on an argument I have put forward about music and the world immediately surrounding it. There certainly are "qualifications" I do not and cannot possess, and I promise never to speak as if I possess them; I am, however, eminently qualified to evaluate overbroad generalizations about groups of which I am a member, no matter who made them or what they are. At that point, any further psychoanalysis of my identity, while perhaps relevant to other, broader discussions, is moot to the particular argument I've made about music and the world immediately surrounding it. And that's why we're all here. Just the facts, ma'am.



(3) Gee, that's a mouthful, Socrates. If you're a musician, why don't you go practice/study/listen/compose instead of writing a pointless blog about your white angst?

Like you, I'm darn close to being a Nihilist at this point, but not completely. The ethical issues surrounding music still matter enough to me to devote a small bit of my time to considering them publicly. This is wholly a matter of (a) self-interest (i.e. since I have to live and work in this world just like NP and everyone else who makes music, and therefore would like to see it improved wherever possible), and (b) the sense that such "improvements" are, frequently, so fucking obvious to a majority of us and thus quite easily attainable if only more of us were to give them proper consideration using adequately precise terminology and more than 140 characters where needed. As you no doubt know based on your wording of the above question, most blogs fall short of meeting this need; this is where I come in.

If I had no self-interest in seeing a better musical world, or if I thought it was a wholly untenable proposition, then no, I absolutely would not bother. There are other areas of life that I feel are lost causes in this way (see: Congress, U.S.), but music is not one of them. I believe that music is trivial in comparison to these other areas, and therefore that it is easier to fix. Only a small percentage of these musical issues do I choose to explore publicly. The rest I keep to myself and seldom write down; thus, the content here is already heavily edited and pared down to its essence. You are absolutely entitled to judge it to be a waste of your time, but not a waste of my own; the latter is for myself alone to judge. Know that I spend quite a bit of time reading blogs as well as writing them, and have thus developed a very low tolerance for vacuous garbage masquerading as musicology. My activities here are always directed towards achieving something more vital and useful. Even during my annual "Blog Month" project (which is presently in effect), during which I force myself to blog daily for a month regardless of whether I feel I have something just this important to say, I am after two things I believe to be constructive objectives: one is to throw myself a change-up, knowing that I sometimes become a different writer when forced to work constantly; and the other is to critique the vacuous garbage referred to above through the time-honored literary device of satire.

Sounds like fun, huh? None of this is a burden on my direct music-making endeavors, from which I, like virtually every other musician, need occasional respite anyway. In fact, blogging has frequently allowed me to bring fresh motivation to these endeavors at times when it has been lacking. (Knowing that more people would take your blog seriously if you "played more horn," while not necessarily right, certainly provides some motivation, doesn't it?) It isn't hard to find bloggers and trolls whose musical lives are out of balance in this way, but I do not consider myself to be one of them. If you do consider me to be one, I would like to know on what intimate knowledge of my inner thoughts you base this observation, and also what you are doing wasting your time with my senseless rants? It must be more complicated than misery loving company...

a foofaraw over a kerfuffle about a boondoggle

Longtime MFEDI readers know the drill by this time: I post misinformed rants about pop music while the real issues are discussed elsewhere by more important people on their more important blogs, are then commented on extensively by the people I malign here, and are noted by me, if at all, only weeks, months or years later after I've had a chance to catch up on the gory details, by which time comment threads have been closed, libel suits filed, and any further attempt to get a word in edgewise merely dismissed as self-important "intellectual land prospecting." Ah yes, long live the blogosphere, the first (and I hope last) vehicle of human discourse where it is neither what you said nor how you said it that matter, but rather when!

So it is, again, with the Nic Payton skirmish, and here I am late to the party as usual, still young, white, middle class and accredited, just like I was before, still with a blog and a project of my own invention whereby I intend to post on it daily for a month, and presented with yet another eminent black musician who I have great respect for saying a few things I agree with alongside many more things that make me want to quit playing music altogether and go back to working at the airport. You could argue that the worst thing I could do under these circumstances would be to get involved; indeed, there superficially seems to be nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing so. By dint of both a deeper interpretation of the possibilities and a spectacular lack of willpower, I hereby declare my intent (to be withdrawn whenever I see fit) to enter the fray. In part by choice but also by necessity on some levels, this will take place here rather than elsewhere until further notice. The next post will explain in more detail why I feel justified in doing this, and will be linked to at the top of each subsequent post on the topic in order to anticipate the usual nihilistic barbs.

(FYI, Payton's blog is here. Further links omitted; you're smart enough to follow the trail.)

Also, closed-circuit to Sean Roderick: where's Sean Roderick when you need him? If you're out there reading, I want your reaction (on or off the record) as this discussion unfolds.