Musicians vs. The Audience
SPlDEY
Vegas 3,375 Posts
Should musicians give the people what they want to hear or should they create for themselves?
I would like to hear the Struts consensus on this.
This question comes because I'm friends with a great band here in Las Vegas. It's kind of a progressive rock damn near krautrock band called UBERSCHALL. It's a band that's been going on for about 10 years, and it's core is comprised of members of the Blue man group, Chris Angel's band, and some of the finest musicians we have in town. They just got interviewed for NPR state of the union, and should have an article published about them soon.
They play a show every third Sunday of the month at the local punk rock bar, The Double Down. We don't have much culture here in Vegas, but the things that really are local CULTURE kind of gets let's say unappreciated. The locals know about it, but we don't have the PR pull compared to LA bands for us to get any mainstream exposure.
The group has 3 drummers, 2 guitar players, and a Bass player. They are a jam band, but not like any jam band you've heard before. This isn't your typical Phish jam band they are extremely progressive, and psychedelic and tight. They play with an accuracy that you get from playing with each other, every day for over 10 years. They blend genres, will go completely dub, or funk, but they keep a MOTORIK core. The only bands you can really compare them to would be Hawkwind, Neu, Acid Mothers Temple, Amon Duul but even that would be selling them short.
Anyways, I doubt many people have ever heard of them outside of our city, and that's fine. They all work as musicians for a living, and they have no real aspirations to become famous. They don't seek to make a lot of money, and they're not making music for the audience. They've never done a proper recording in a studio, they don't practice. It's purely an Art project. They create these epic cinematic soundscapes, and then it's gone forever. Lost on maybe the 20-30 people on the audience.
I got into it with a BECKY at there show last night. Her argument was they're a good enough band, but she thinks they are not playing to there potential. She thinks they should be playing what the audience wants to here, because that's what real bands do. They're doing a 70's thing, and music like that's not popular anymore. They need to write shorter songs, wear costumes and dance around and put on a show, because that's what people want.
During the conversation I found out she loves bands like New found glory, Reel big fish, and her favorite movie is A league of there own. I feel she has an opinion that's probably shared by a lot of people.
So what do you think? Should fans dictate the Art? Or should the creators create. innovate, and progress regardless of the audience?
- spidey
I would like to hear the Struts consensus on this.
This question comes because I'm friends with a great band here in Las Vegas. It's kind of a progressive rock damn near krautrock band called UBERSCHALL. It's a band that's been going on for about 10 years, and it's core is comprised of members of the Blue man group, Chris Angel's band, and some of the finest musicians we have in town. They just got interviewed for NPR state of the union, and should have an article published about them soon.
They play a show every third Sunday of the month at the local punk rock bar, The Double Down. We don't have much culture here in Vegas, but the things that really are local CULTURE kind of gets let's say unappreciated. The locals know about it, but we don't have the PR pull compared to LA bands for us to get any mainstream exposure.
The group has 3 drummers, 2 guitar players, and a Bass player. They are a jam band, but not like any jam band you've heard before. This isn't your typical Phish jam band they are extremely progressive, and psychedelic and tight. They play with an accuracy that you get from playing with each other, every day for over 10 years. They blend genres, will go completely dub, or funk, but they keep a MOTORIK core. The only bands you can really compare them to would be Hawkwind, Neu, Acid Mothers Temple, Amon Duul but even that would be selling them short.
Anyways, I doubt many people have ever heard of them outside of our city, and that's fine. They all work as musicians for a living, and they have no real aspirations to become famous. They don't seek to make a lot of money, and they're not making music for the audience. They've never done a proper recording in a studio, they don't practice. It's purely an Art project. They create these epic cinematic soundscapes, and then it's gone forever. Lost on maybe the 20-30 people on the audience.
I got into it with a BECKY at there show last night. Her argument was they're a good enough band, but she thinks they are not playing to there potential. She thinks they should be playing what the audience wants to here, because that's what real bands do. They're doing a 70's thing, and music like that's not popular anymore. They need to write shorter songs, wear costumes and dance around and put on a show, because that's what people want.
During the conversation I found out she loves bands like New found glory, Reel big fish, and her favorite movie is A league of there own. I feel she has an opinion that's probably shared by a lot of people.
So what do you think? Should fans dictate the Art? Or should the creators create. innovate, and progress regardless of the audience?
- spidey
Comments
Thus they should play for their own creative enjoyment with the knowledge that if the audience doesn't like it, or buy beer, they will lose their slot. Which wont be a lose for them, because they can still play in a warehouse and they are only doing it for their own creative enjoyment and don't care about the audience.
Which was your friends point. They don't care about the audience.
If on the other hand they do this gig in this club because they want an audience, and if the audience was paying a cover charge, then they have an obligation to the audience, and the club owners, to make an attempt to please the audience.
Or if their creative expression results in good music that some people want to hear, but others don't, then fusk the others. No band is so great that everyone likes them.
So does that imply that the artist ultimately controls their own level of success?
- d
I hear ya and then this:
http://www.jsyk.com/2010/04/16/justin-bieber-sings-for-a-good-cause-on-idol-gives-back/
I think people give what they can to good causes, but when a young man donates as generously as Bieber did there I think it hurts the other live bands. I think it makes people believe that other live bands are either tight with their money or don't support worthy causes. Which couldn't be farther from the truth.
When it comes to supporting the audience and supporting the craft...maybe, like Batmon said, do a little of each. Anyway, musicians are great and I hope musicians hold their heads up and play with enthusiasm.
When i was working it was really about the mood i was in and who the audience was.
My regulars who knew my shit would roll w me if i decided to play some other shit.
But if the crowd seemed like thry werent the type to fusk w me playing with myself, i could always revert to playin familiar bangers and sneak in my shit throughout my sets.
There were times when i loaded up my bags with nothin but bangers and there were times when i siad fuck them, im playing the blues for two hours,then a 25 min coltrane song, anf then decide if i wanted to serve hambugers and hot dogs later on.
Blah blah blah.......
And what resonance that simple gesture had! During a wind-up doll joke craze in the early 1960's, George Crater, a humorist with Down Beat magazine, asked the question: what does a Miles Davis doll do if you wind it up? Answer: it turns its back on you. Even in the global backwaters of the jazz world, they had heard of Miles' behavior. In Ved Mehta's Portrait of India he describes the vocalist with a Bombay jazz band singing "My Funny Valentine" with her back to the crowd because of the disdain in which she held Indian audiences. When Birdland seemed to be on the verge of eliminating jazz for rhythm and blues in 1964, the New York Daily News columnist Robert Sylvester quoted bartender Oscar Goodstein on "these icebox artists" who were not entertaining anyone. But, if Birdland does close out jazz, Sylvester said, "It's at least one less place in which the arrogant and hostile can turn their backs on people who made them rich and sputter through their sour, slobbering horns." With the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the same era, such a gesture took on added symbolism, that of a refusal to placate whites; and with the appearance of the Black Arts Movement of the early '60's, Miles could be seen as turning his back on all of Western civilization. Asked about why Miles left the stage after soloing, Dizzy Gillespie once said, "Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles and just haven't got the courage." By the '90's this gesture was still emblematic, though of what was not so clear by then. Poet Nathaniel Mackey gently mocks the obsession with Davis' behavior in social science-ese:
This clicked with an idea Derek had been carrying around for some time -- namely that people weren't being precise enough in discussing Miles Davis turning his back on his audiences, that sufficient note had yet to be made of the fact that the angle at which his back addressed the audience tended to vary in relation to a host of contextual factors and coefficients. The upshot was that he set about quantifying and chronologizing based on photographs, films, second-hand accounts and first-hand observation -- the positional/propositional variables attendant upon Miles' posture, or, as he himself puts it, the "semitemporal calculus of Miles' postural kinematics."
Journalists began to let readers know whenever Davis turned away from them when they asked for interviews. Newspaper headlines and club marquees now proclaimed Davis "the prince of darkness," "the angry young man of jazz," "the evil genius." 'Evil' was a word whose black meanings resonated well beyond the obvious -- bad humored, ominous, unnatural, angry, but also thrillingly dangerous. Despite Davis' distrust of most critics and journalists, he offered a select few of them various reasons for his behavior: he turned away from the audience when he wasn't playing because he wanted to hear the band like a conductor; he didn't want to distract from other musicians' solos when he wasn't playing; some spots on the bandstand were better than others for sound; he wanted to be close to the rhythm section; or, while playing at the Village Vanguard, he couldn't stand looking at the flicker of the candles on the tables. Since he normally played with his eyes open, this last explanation is not as strange as it might sound. Musicians who are reading music focus on the page, while those who are playing from memory or improvising have the choice of playing with eyes open or shut. Eyes open in front of an audience presents serious distractions to many players, and Miles' solution was to minimize the presence of the audience.
Charlie Parker often said that Miles was shy, as did Dizzy Gillespie: "You'd never think it, but I've been watching him for so many years. There must always be reasons for actions. So I think that the reasons for some of his actions are a natural result of his being shy." Dizzy told of the time that that they were both playing at the Village Vanguard, and Sugar Ray Robinson and Archie Moore both walked in the club while Miles' band was on the stand. Miles came over to Dizzy and asked him to introduce them when his set started. Knowing Miles was a huge fight fan, he said, "Hell, you're on now. You introduce them. You've got it" But Miles was too shy to do [it], and left it to him." Sonny Rollins agreed: "I hate to use that word 'shy', but he is a shy guy. Which is why he turned his back sometimes, and then people would say, 'Oh, gee, he's arrogant.' Miles wanted to hear the music, and he'd play something that he didn't want the public to hear, because we were getting the music together. It was more the feeling of a workshop, and Miles would take the time to change a note or chord. We were all experimenting, and Miles encouraged it." "Miles sometimes played into the curtain at the Vanguard," according to the club's manager, Lorraine Gordon, "but people didn't seem to mind."
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/folklore/center/ConferenceArchive/voiceover/miles.html
Some good responses all around thanks everybody. I agree with Almond.
All music starts off as art, and then it's packaged and sold as a product. In it's raw state it might be too difficult to grasp for the average listener. It needs to be refined, and made culturally acceptable before it will ever be considered for the mainstream. Add sugar, and clever packaging to get attention. No matter how good it is naturally.
I'm guessing bands like Hawkwind and Can had similar issues bitd.
- spidey
I'm a notoriously selfish DJ and musician. No requests sign and everything.
- spidey
As I played there myself, I told him that dudes were free to play and wear whatever they wanted, and dudes were free to go someplace else if they found the music boring. But eventually, I came round to the idea that if you are going to play live, you have an obligation to entertain - to add some value beyond what you would get by putting the CD on at home.
It became apparent to me that folks didn't want to pay good money and be tranquillised in return. People are paying money, they want something better than that. I guess that applies to DJing too.
So we stuck to the upbeat numbers live and I didn't get on stage in the same clothes I would put on to wash the car. I suspect for anything "Rawk"-R, jeans and Ts are fine, but the point is:
As you are giving them something to remember, some experience beyond them putting the songs on themselves, then you are doing it right. If you are not concerned with anyone ever hearing you gig or making a career of it, then do whatever you want. I remember Jack Bruce recalling his early days in art rock outfits with the line "Yeah, we were free to starve to death."
To be that "Hi everyone" dude/Band that is easily acceptable is also a slippery slope.
Depending on the audience/venue/genre/etc, FOLKS LOVE EXCLUSIVITY, or that feelin of BEING IN THE KNOW. When your too easy what's distinguishing your from a radio robot?
Make the Squares feel "hip" or create that illusion and keep the Snobs challenged.
In the end - Rock the fuckin party and dont over-intellectualize that shit.
IMO, an "artist" who has performance skills is way ahead of both the purists and the entertainers.
Even though you are DJing and performing do not forget that you are also a member of the audience, you all are their together. If I make a mistake, play the wrong record at the wrong time, and the audience let's me know, I thank them. I appreciate them and learn from them in the mix.
This.
When you are as good as Miles Davis you can act like Miles Davis.
Until then, try to act like James Brown.
Maybe this got lost along the way and that's why there's hardly anything out there today that would be of much relevance. That and the fact that there's nothing new to say and no new ways to say it.
Me too. Completely agree.
- spidey
i think this is true for recorded music to a certain extent - but aside from private loner Xian people, I think most musicians care about about their audience, even the people who pretend not to. when playing live, the basic stuff - creating a set list that is the right balance of slow and fast, recognisable hits and exclusive material - is a time honoured tradition and still really important. It always surprises me how many really good bands don't seem to have thought about the set list too much. It doesn't matter what you make, even if it's private mongolian nose flute jazz - all audiences have a similar attention span, and it's important to give the people, whether fans or those checking you out for the first time, an engaging performance. so i'm with the club owner jimster mentioned - you're getting paid, effort must be made. musicians care about about getting more gigs, so it's likely they are sensitive to the importance of satisfying their audience.
How do you define relevant though?
You could argue relevant is Radiohead, but that kind of ish will never be a battle cry. Miles and Coltrane are relevant to me, but even in their heyday, were they what everybody was listening to when James Brown and the Beatles were in town?
I don't necessarily like the idea, but to me, relevant is striking a chord with the populace, not just music critics. Stuff that all the kids are lapping up or when every single motherf*cker in the club is moved by some clurrbb banggger. It is relevant to them. You know these tunes. From "Sex Machine" through "Good Times" to "Jump Around" to whatever is repped in your local clurb experience.
I doubt most tunes that have this kind of effect on people were made by people who follow their own vision and not worry about their audience - they were penned for the audience; they are incomplete without audience participation.
The vision of an artist can very well include having people lose their shit when witnessing their performances and not just get reviews from critics and music writers. But how sad if the artists vision is to entertain a random crowd at one of those places where people go to hear "live music" without knowing or even caring what band is playing. How would anybody want to labor through For what? To be an anonymous shred of blurred but happy memory of someone who saw some band some night that he can't remember the name of but they were really good...
Maybe those kind of places pay fairly well for such bands but I think that even street level prostitution would be a more dignified and profitable way to make money.
I'll admit, this habit initially came out of laziness or a lack of pen and paper when we needed one ... but it's gotten to the point where it's our preferred way to perform. Even when we do write a setlist, we often stray from it.
As for songwriting, audience reaction doesn't enter the equation. Once you start writing to please a particular group of people (other than yourselves), you're done. Like Otis_Funkmeyer said, "put on a show that you would pay to see. Release records you would pay to own." Hopefully you have the talent and taste to produce something that others would like as well. If not, it could be because you simply aren't talented/tasteful or it could be because you haven't found your audience ... either way you won't be booked very often.