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Article 1
From the New Times Los Angeles 6/15/00

OK Computer

Music killers in the pop mausoleum...or has the new technology rendered all modern rock fraudulent?

Editor's introduction: When most bands enter the studio to record an album these days, they have the luxury of perfection. Technology has developed to the point that performances of "live" bands can be cut and pasted at will. On any given song, bands can record 10 perfect seconds on the drums, copy the result 20 times, and have an entire song's worth of immaculate sterility; a guitar solo can consist of parts from 20 different takes, stitched together into one seamless track; riffs and bass lines can be mixed and matched with little regard to organic progression. The role of band interaction has been replaced by a confederacy of engineers, producers, and their computer programs; the musicians themselves need only be great for seconds at a time. To make a rock album in 2000 is not to capture the best performance, but to use the best editing software.

While these developments might have their uses -- electronic music being the most obvious -- one of their primary detriments is that actual rock bands, in which tension and imperfection once lent tangible energy to their records, have begun to sound more like amplified automatons, sacrificing humanity for perfect compression and a chance at radio play. (It is no accident that virtually every great jazz record was recorded live; the form, like most others, is nothing without the threat of surprise.) In an effort to address this issue, we asked Joe Carducci -- author of the controversial deconstructionist book, Rock and the Pop Narcotic; former co-owner of SST Records; currently a principal of Owned & Operated/Upland Records and Provisional Films -- to write on the ever-growing subservience of bands to obsessive studio geeks and potential hits. We then had writer Sean O'Neill talk to Henry Rollins, whose publishing company put out the second edition of Carducci's tome. The results follow.

"Computers do not swing. Computers do not shuffle. Computers do not boogie. They don't play heartbeat rhythms. They play sterile, correct beats." -- Henry Rollins, May 2000

Foo Fighters' drummer William Goldsmith quit when, after recording the band's second album, The Colour and the Shape, in good faith, he found that Dave Grohl had gone back in and tracked over his drumming. Bad move in terms of the "band ethic." No doubt Grohl played the drums better and no doubt the engineer nodded when Dave expressed his doubts about Goldsmith's tracks. But what Dave might not know is that the engineer, with pitch-perfect Industry cynicism, was further dreaming (while nodding) of ditching the drums altogether so he could strut his stuff.Social Distortion has two drummers -- one for the studio; one for live. Of course, the records make no mention of this, in deference to the "band ethic." The question then becomes: Who (if anyone) is the drummer on what they refer to as their "live" album? (Mike Ness' solo albums, then, could essentially be the same as a "band" effort.) The Cranberries, for some reason, maintain a band name, but anything coming out of Britain's thin music culture and unforgiving music industry these days is bound to be fraudulent in band terms. The Cranberries have toured with a guy who plays the piano from under the stage while what's-her-face bangs away on a hollow prop.

When Metallica begin recording an album, the drummer works solo for a month because it takes that long for his engineer to go through every single percussive incident and move it into its perfect, proper place. To do this, drums must be recorded with perfect separation so that microphones pick up only the individual drum or cymbal they are set on, and not the neighboring drums or cymbals. This is accomplished by atomizing the instrument and the performance with noise gates that choke off everything but the strike itself. Then an ambient delay must be added to disguise the dead isolation of the percussive incident and simulate room space. Or the drums can be set for use as triggers that send an ideal "canned" percussive incident to tape. This way, every hit is the same and can be more easily moved around by the mix computer. Or the drums can simply be dispensed with and programmed from the desk. These are the ways to squeeze out any possibility of undesirable musical incidents. Nobody's gonna confuse this stuff with jazz, but the lingering "band ethic" nevertheless demands such brave technicians pose as just another garage band.

it's not that these musicians can't play, so what's the problem here?

In the '60s, the Monkees fought for the right to play on their own records after being cast individually to portray a fictional band. They sang, but only mimed playing instruments on TV. They won a shot at it, since they were all musicians of sorts and the project was already such a success. The Monkees were sort of a fictionalization, conceived by television producers, of Paul Revere & the Raiders. The Raiders began in Idaho in the late '50s and were one of the great garage-band pathfinders, led by a Jerry Lee Lewis acolyte. Yet Revere had to ditch his piano for a Vox organ once they got management and arrived in L.A. Their early recordings are piano- and sax-led rock 'n' roll. They got a guitar/organ/ harmony makeover, and when they got so big they could tour forever, they did. Paul Revere wanted to rock 'n' roll, so he let his producers begin to use session players to record the stuff back in Hollywood while the real band toured. They'd fly in to do the vocals and learn how to play their new tunes later.

Did this matter? Not at the time. And not when you hear those records today."

Today, all rock music is recorded to radio programmer specs, despite the fact that virtually none of this music will ultimately be programmed by the radio. Nevertheless, it's all offered up to this digital processing, willingly, even desperately, by the bands themselves, aided and abetted by managers, A&R men, mixers, producers, and engineers. The "music," thus processed, is as thrilling as wallpaper. But even the few remaining bands capable of great playing willingly deface their music in the studio.Most modern audiences are listening to nothing but ice-cold digital sound manipulation instead of music. The dumber the audience gets, though, the more perfection they require: perfect regularity, perfect pitch -- a perfectly sterile sonic environment. Patti Page never dreamed of being so white-bread.

The efficient use of today's standard digital outboard gear requires that the original signal be generated in either a dead studio or sent direct into the mixing board. Subtle chording or bending strings, or the tactile profile of any genuinely musical player threatens the effectiveness of these digital fogs, which are preferably programmed by keyboards. And these sonic blocks work better with synthetic percussion. A live drummer and his bandmates reincarnating a song get inspired and never play it the same way twice. This is called Music. But here in the studio, such unpredictable "imperfection" would make later overdubs impossible to synchronize. So get the click track up. On second thought, just lay down the click track. Send the band home.

Earlier recording effects were physically generated in concrete rooms or underground lockers or by metal-plate reverbs. These less artificial echo effects decayed naturally. The high-end died faster than the low-mids. The American Recording studio in Hollywood had a meat locker buried underground. Listen to Steppenwolf or Three Dog Night recordings and you hear a warm, wet, even luminous reverb that placed the music in a psycho-acoustic space we recognize from our lives in the real world.

Digital technology can, in theory, do anything it's programmed to do...but who's doing the programming and what are they after? Who wrote the compact disc program? An audiophile? To what specs: classical or pop? Certainly not rock music. The widening of the audio spectrum from the LP to the CD has principally achieved the possible expansion of the recorded music market to both dogs and whales.

Today's rock music essentially ends up frosted. That's fine for pop music generated on digital keyboards jacked directly into the mixing board, but rock, blues, and country should preferably be hot forms. The icy, breathy, digital come-ons you hear in Def Leppard or late Van Halen recordings is a candied, narcotized substitute for the steaming meat and potatoes that rock music once offered. The only heat R&B, once the hot form, can hope to generate today is freezer burn. (Look at any hip-hop video: The sound is intimate, nearly reverb-free and at psychoacoustic odds with the image of the inevitable wide, high-ceilinged stage on which two dozen dancers are shaking four dozen butt cheeks.) In today's faux-R&B, the Tin Pan Alley pattern of the singles market has interfaced with the modern record industry technocracy completely -- aided and abetted by an increasingly cosmopolitan, increasingly ignorant audience. Indeed, this is an "R&B" that's increasingly sci-fi in its hysterical self-loathing flight from the American earth of roadhouse, kitchen, church, juke joint, whorehouse, etc. (Again, see those videos.)"

My complaint with a lot of albums I hear now is that they sound "good.' They sound "correct,' but it doesn't sound like anyone is in the room. I hear the computer. I think what you get these days is less emphasis on real talent and more emphasis on camera-ready, market-ready music. Have cheekbones, pointy ass, and pert titties, and... "Shit, we can work with this.' "But her band sucks.' "Oh, don't worry about that.' "But she can't sing.' "Yeah? And...?' That's not a consideration. That's not remotely a consideration." -- Rollins

Nearly 10 years ago, the technocracy had to contend with a sudden "pop" surfacing of an ostensibly more authentic punk approach to rock. But from the very first, this commercial breakthrough was prostrate before radio. Producer Butch Vig's account of the recording of Nirvana's Nevermind in the May '98 issue of MOJO makes much of his laboring to persuade Kurt Cobain to layer the guitars. Then mix engineer Andy Wallace came in to program drum samples and additional outboard effects for guitar and voice. What should have been a solid, earthshaking musical document was thus turned to candy for radio's use -- high pop-rotation for a month, then nevermind. After recording the follow-up, In Utero, in a rock honorable, stripped-down style with producer Steve Albini, Cobain critiqued Nevermind to journalist Jon Savage: "It's too slick. I don't listen to records like that at home. I can't listen to that record...I think it's a really good record, I have to admit that, but in a Cheap Trick sort of way. But for my personal listening pleasure, you know, it's just too slick."And, wonder of wonders, the radio programmers actually broadcast tunes from Nevermind! But that was probably just because Kurt had blue eyes.

But in the producer's eyes, even here, the disassembling of performance and the processing of the parts had become the equivalent of taxidermy. "Layering guitars"? Is that like feathering hair? And Garbage, Nevermind producer Butch Vig's group, is state-of-the-art taxidermy. Certainly they're into Big Star, the Velvets, the Stooges, all the cool wild stuff that is now safely enshrined and thus mandatory to admire. Good move, cheeseheads -- checkmate. The rhetoric of "band ethic" has been solved for this era. Studio nerds have colonized rock. This era's Boston got hip to this era's rap. Built to last, not for speed...but, alas, there will be no suicides in Garbage.

After the success of Nevermind, engineers known for designing the sound of the more pliable metal bands were suddenly scrambling for punk or alt-rock sessions (major label signings only, please). One old-school punk band was faced with an arrogant metal engineer who answered no questions and used his own outboard mystery boxes to make them sound like surfers in knights' armor. They fired his ass, only to see him turn on a dime and come back crawling, pleading, and begging to stay involved on any terms. You see, he needed the credit -- the new street cred.

Now, of course, everything has settled down; in fact, it's collapsed. The losers went on drug binges or got honest work recording advertising jingles. The same half-dozen winners currently mix everything the radio programmers accept. But those programmers accept less and less. Lately, they're fond of editing song choruses of a half-dozen current hits and dosing listeners with the even smaller format of the station ID -- a pop suppository. And it allows them to play one less tune per hour (thank you, Jesus!). The Industry nervously demands reediting of song arrangements in the writing, recording, and mixing phases, or even as late as the mastering. Increasingly, it's no longer verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus (solos disappeared decades ago) because radio can't afford to make its listeners wait that long for a payoff. The chorus comes quicker now and sometimes there just isn't a verse at all (Chumbawumba? Crass!). It took from 1974 to 1991 to reeducate the pop listener so he could appreciate something other than Toto or Journey. But radio and MTV programmers de-educated the pop listener in less than half that time. They strip-mined their audience, winning their puny ratings and share battles while the greater war (audience size) was lost (to country, hip-hop, Latin, Internet, games, comics, porn, etc.).

It was barely reported in the Woodstock riot stories last year that among the predictable provocations facing these live music fans was the presence of MTV itself, as though this game show, lifestyle channel for losers still had anything to do with music. Kurt Loder's subsequent piece in Rolling Stone was too modest; he was, after all, a prime target, apparently worth being hit with a $10 tomato. Where does a Viacom employee get off indicting the promoters of Woodstock for being "incessantly profit-maximizing"?

Lenny Kravitz, meanwhile, has replaced his old rap about real playing and real tube-amp recording, "just like the '60s, man," by explaining his discovery of the hitherto unsuspected aesthetic viability of synthetic percussion. Like Ness going solo, Lenny has been forced to accept pop methodology to obtain the airplay necessary to maintain major label distribution and hits. But look at Kravitz: He's a media-dictated image of the '60s itself, reverse-engineered by someone who may listen to good music...but he listens as a fan. In other words, he's not a musician. I don't care how fast he can play scales. What good is being a black, Jewish hippie if you got no rhythm, can't write a tune, and don't have a real psychedelic bone in your body?

Radio programmers still have the music industry by the balls; it's their doing. But their game is disappearing up its own ass. One-hit blunders abound and follow-up albums litter the cutout bins. This is inefficient as it means every hit is a fluke that must be broken from scratch and no follow-up can build and recoup from its success. KROQ programmers complained that there is no audience loyalty and that what they need are more Pearl Jams...only without all those annoying rock band issues (Foo Fighters to the rescue). KROQ called for rock bands to send them their tapes -- more perfect-pitch Industry cynicism. (Any tapes sent were surely recorded over with the latest techno and goth wallpaper by UCLA interns.) Getting fired will not be punishment enough for their likes.

So until the next rock retrenchment, we are stuck with the pneumatic "singer-songwriter." Beat-box Bonos posing as new Dylans. Listen to those smoky baritones. Oh, the things they've seen and felt in their lives on campus and at the mall. Plus, they're so enigmatic! Women at least make better pneumatic singer-songwriters because at this late date (beyond feminism), they have more to say and they come almost entirely free of "band ethic" baggage. They also get their backs up less as the engineers and managers go to work on their tunes."

The radio now is industry-driven. The industry has such a lock on the perks and the payola, to the point where Sony tells you what you're going to play. I remember the personality DJs, from Wolfman Jack on up. They would play what they wanted, and that was cool. That's when radio personified the great spirit of this country. But it's over. Now DJs are just talking heads, the same as newscasters. They just sell the soap and play what they're told to. So now it's kinda static. There's no spontaneity." -- Rollins

The late-period alt-rock bands, largely conceived by college kids under the influence of platinum punk, fit right in to Industry needs; they could hardly imagine a move that might hurt their careers. When Iggy threw himself into a mixed crowd of Motown greasers and long-haired gearheads in the early '70s (and moved no Stooges product), did he land on anyone? Yes. After all, real trees fall every day in the forest, though no one hears jack. But Cobain's dive into the drums had a platinum audience with TV cameras present, which was then fed back into the MTV loop. Did Kurt land on anyone? No. I already told you he jumped into the drums! And the video was lip-synched so nobody in the platinum audience even heard him hit the drum kit and its microphones. We only saw it. That and his blue eyes.

Kurt's gesture was authentic enough (though unlike the Who and Elvis Costello before them, the members of Nirvana actually asked Lorne Michaels for his permission before destroying things on a Saturday Night Live appearance!) but newfound success overwhelmed musical considerations, both among the hipsters Kurt wanted in his audience and the climbers and metalheads he did not. Thus, Iggy's silent gesture can be said to have moved music and launched all manner of incredible bands (Ramones, Avengers, Black Flag, Minor Threat), while Kurt's eye-splittingly loud gesture yielded Industry-friendly porridge (Weezer? Everclear?).

Rock is no longer rock 'n' roll -- the interface that a half-dozen root forms once had with the electric future. Now it is freestanding with less organic ties to those root forms. And it is no longer an interface with the future. As totally self-conscious "futurist" solo artists race toward downloading their personas into immortal Web lives, rock music seems just another Luddite pursuit, bracketed with the blues, bluegrass, and other forms tamed over time. The future may actually come someday, but for now, the techno soloists seem to need to backslide into rock formats to tour in support of their releases -- Industry imperatives again. But like the hip-hoppers before them, they have a hard time coming up with anything much more innovative in presentation than a 1979 Sammy Hagar concert (hey, Cleveland, show us your tits!).After platinum punk, metal Grammys, and "alternative" gold, stoner rock alone has the sole loser sensibility immune to the siren song of radio play. Sleep, Fu Manchu, and Nebula may not rank with Queens of the Stone Age and Spirit Caravan -- but they have recorded some great tunes. The Queens and Caravan come respectively from the last great recent bands: Kyuss and the Obsessed -- i.e., they are not young. The young band today must consciously challenge the musical ignorance bad radio has bequeathed them. Unfortunately, rock music is largely about the cultivation of instinct and, therefore, preconscious and vulnerable to its surroundings. In the old days, pre-1973, you could bone up on music by listening to the radio; now that just dumbs you down. And no longer is music fed by a stream of middle-class dropouts and risk takers; now the middle class liberal arts grads descend en masse like locusts on every single subcultural niche. A pop act today might even pick a stoner manqué as shtick (hello, Monster Magnet). But even well-received, stoner rock remains a foolish career move, and therefore -- alongside a few other cranky music-focused subcults like the Chicago improv scene -- is a last, best hope for musical reconstruction. This can happen while the Industry is busy trying to destroy Internet radio, and Napster, to corner the Web's music market. They will fail miserably because mass culture itself is failing and the new medium is uncentered. When Elvis died, Lester Bangs wrote that since we'd never again agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis, he wasn't going to say goodbye to Him; he was going to say goodbye to us. And the stoners go, "All right now!"

I think I agree with what the article is trying to say, but it's so horribly written that I can't tell for sure. It sounds like the author went to a Rollins gig, took some speed, and just started writing.

Yeah, you definitely have to read in a couple of different directions at once to appreciate it.

A few more paragraph breaks wouldn't have hurt either.

j.

Um...

Some good points and it was an interesting read, but he was all over the place.

He should also get off of Rollin's dong.

is there a part 2 or 3 of it? I'd read them.

Well, they did interview Rollins for the piece, so it's only understandable that they use a few excerpts.

It was pretty interesting though, and they guy did have a lot of good points. Just think of how much things have declined in the 5 years since that article was written.

My Morning Jacket's best album was recorded by themselves in a barn. coincidence?

I thought hwe was just quoting what Rollins had said over the years, my bad.