Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth
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Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth
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Overview
Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media in the digital era. With his fifth book, producer, activist, and author Ian Brennan delves deep into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts globally. Brennan challenges music industry tycoons by skillfully demonstrating that there are millions of talented people around the world far more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.
We are invited to accompany the author on his travels, finding and recording music from some of the world’s most marginalized peoples. In the breathtaking range of this book, our preconceived notions of art are challenged by musicians from South Sudan to Kosovo, as Brennan lucidly details his experiences recording music by the Tanzania Albinism Collective, the Zomba Prison Project, a “witch camp” in Ghana, the Vietnamese war veterans of Hanoi Masters, the Malawi Mouse Boys, the Canary Island whistlers, genocide survivors in both Cambodia and Rwanda, and more.
Silenced by Sound is defined by muscular, terse, and poetic verse, and a nonlinear format rife with how-to tips and anecdotes. The narrative is driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles, his memoir-like reveries, and the striking photographs that accompany these projects.
After reading it, you’ll never hear quite the same again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629637037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2019 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Tunde Adebimpe is an American musician, actor, director, and visual artist best known as the lead singer of the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lopsided Representation: many "too manys"
The music industry has a dirty, dark secret. And it is the faulty concept that the entire enterprise is founded upon.
There are millions upon millions of talented people around the world. And you will never hear any of them. Many are as or far more gifted than the superstars that billions of dollars are depleted promoting the delusion that these lone wolfs have been blessed with genius far exceeding the common man, careers kept afloat by artificial life support.
But on a planet of seven billion people and counting, few things could be further from the truth. And so the gatekeepers make disappeared the platoons of to-be-forgotten or not-ever-known voices that singly could make some overhyped talent like Adele sound tinny and tone-deaf in comparison.
It is this lie that the media mafia are forced to maintain in order to continue the scam that they perpetually perpetrate upon the public: that beauty and inspiration are beyond the reach of everyday life, that magic resides outside of us, and can only be ours if bought — rented on loan.
The reality is that music is within us all. We carry it everywhere we go: stamped in our vocal cords, palms (snare drum), and heels (bass drum). Yet since the dawn of the pop era we've been hypnotized into believing that a choice few elite are so much more gifted than we mere minions, that we should do nothing other than fall dutifully silent. Their superhuman skill? Combining a handful of rudimentary chords, notes, and phrases into elemental structures. As a capper, we have to even pay for the privilege of being oh so fortunate enough to be allowed to listen.
Genius is a torch, not a state — an adverb more than an adjective. Springsteen is not a genius but is gifted and did genius things for an album or a few ... at best. The brief flickerings where God murmured faintly in his ear.
If Bob Dylan stopped making records after Blood on the Tracks, the world would be no worse the wear. If U2's last album had been Joshua Tree, today there would be millions of dollars in reserve as a cultural trust. Instead, it was blown on half-baked inspiration and coasting. If Springsteen had ended with Nebraska, the world would have been saved the Ramborock caricature that followed. And that the Rolling Stones have not made a solid album since 1978 must mark the year that their storied pact with the Devil expired.
These are one-trick ponies whose shtick has worn thin.
Every new troubadour messiah should be reminded that they are not Bob Dylan. And even more importantly, neither is Bob Dylan.
Professional "personalities" pimp out their own persona, twisting themselves into affectations until they end up impersonating themselves, often illegibly. This creative devolution is marked by the passage from artist to entertainer, through which they become their own best cover band.
The telltale sign of a strong record is that one has such an excess of great songs that some can be jettisoned. Instead, the norm is artists grasping desperately for enough quality material to justify a foreordained release, even taking drastic and extravagant measures like recording in the Bahamas or the south of France to find their muse.
Pop culture is in dire need of a tough-love intervention.
Here is a basic rule of thumb ratio: the more money spent on a project, the more lacking its core. For if someone is burning to communicate something badly enough, it doesn't take them years and budgets of hundreds of thousands. Instead, they do it against all costs and obstacle.
Even more important than the majority of records that are not granted a fair shake of being heard are the millions of albums that simply never will get made at all — songs that are lost forever, dying with the physical death (or even earlier, through the spiritual surrender) of their creators.
CHAPTER 2The Myth of Heroic Authorship
In an era when citizens theoretically have the opportunity to listen to more voices than ever before, they are exposed to fewer.
As a direct result, the music industry is not dying as many people misconceive but is actually growing — generating revenue of over $50 billion a year.
Yes, we live in a world where Justin Bieber concerts gross $4 million a night.
Despite over one hundred thousand albums being released annually in the USA alone, the majority of countries will have no widely distributed releases internationally. But it is not for lack of product. It is based on the reality that most music remains imprisoned within its own linguistic borders.
And, this disproportion in distribution is not a case of the already preposterously unfair odds of 100,000 to 1, but 100,000 to zero.
Extrapolate that out over a decade and we have a million-to-one (or worse) odds, an indefensible and unsustainable equation for any semblance of democracy.
Meanwhile, as inventors of most one-way communication technologies, the English-speaking media has pervaded almost every corner of the globe for decades and recolonizes the world daily with Western imagery.
The songs linger long after the departed are gone.
English is the third most spoken, but debatably most hated language in the world. Many who speak English as a second (or third or more) language do not choose but are forced to speak it for their own economic survival (unlike someone learning, for example, Finnish or Cherokee purely out of admiration for the way they sound). One Portuguese musician I know goes so far as to refer to English as a "speech impediment."
Anyone who thinks that everyone in a given country speaks English just hasn't traveled deep enough in, far enough off the beaten path — even in Italy and France.
Unknowingly privileged people from the West often protest that it is "difficult" to listen to music in a foreign tongue. But this argument is highly selective. For if that same person was pressed to recite the lyrics to the majority of pop songs that they "know" — including those they have heard hundreds of times — they would prove completely unable, even in the case of their favorite songs.
If then asked, at minimum to provide a synopsis or gist of what a given song is about, many listeners would be unable to do even that. In fact, they instead often falsely believe that the song contains the exact opposite of its literal meaning.
"Born in the USA" is a patriotic jingle?
Hardly.
(Instead, it is the tale of a Vietnam veteran, traumatized irreparably.)
Unwittingly on point, a typical defense of vapid or offensive lyrics is, "I don't listen to the words anyway."
What avalanche of outrage would result if for even a single morning every television and radio station in New York City blared out nothing but Basque? Yet, this is the equivalent that has been and continues to be the case for almost every other place on the planet since at least WWII.
A solution?
I propose that artists past their prime be issued anti-recording contracts — paid to stop releasing music and thereby to help unclog the cultural circulation system of excess and refuse, halting the collective aesthetic bloodbath.
Even better would be retroactive recording contracts — whereby legends would receive just rewards for annulling and unreleasing their more lackluster material.
Does the world really need another Neil Young song? Did he really have more than one (or maybe two) to begin with?
Do we really benefit any longer from hearing yet another group of white, straight males whine to standardly tuned guitars?
Not an iota as much as we'd profit from listening to an artist from the Central African Republic or Laos or anywhere but "here."
For the soy decaf café latte and coconut water budget alone of the latest corporately tied-in and timed single, hundreds of albums from the least wealthy nations could be made instead. But in their stead, we are offered up gilded turds, slathered as "comebacks" — the ever-reproposed return-to-form hype.
We are blue-balled ceaselessly by promo-machine-fed false prophets, spitting out confectionary misdirections. Anything to keep us from thinking beyond blinding, sponge-like whitened smiles.
Can you hum one song by Bon Jovi from the past three decades? Or Paul McCartney? Sting or Roger Waters?
Yet who here has not involuntarily been bombarded by "Living on a Prayer" at the mini-mall or "Comfortably Numb" while boarding an airplane or standing in line at the bank — held hostage and force-fed piped tuneage.
How many artists are there that you can get past your hands counting the number of irrefutably incredible songs harvested from throughout their generations-long career?
CHAPTER 3Freed Speech
In a truly democratic system, music would be released with complete anonymity: no photos, no names, only music.
Songs without faces and bios. Just sound standing on its own.
Historically, corporate controllers lost money on 80 percent of releases. Consolidation has made business far easier for them. They now profit off a spare few individuals, force-feeding those to the masses rather than experimenting and championing diverse sources.
It is the listeners who are the cheated by this manipulation and hoarding. It is we who've been victimized.
He believed that his arm was bionic, sporting nerves that had been replaced with wire cables by the government as he slept. He would flash his left hand in front of you as quickly as he could in an attempt to prove his strength and the speed of movement that he was convinced couldn't be detected by the naked eye.
He also wrote as tender and touching a ballad as I've ever heard.
The song was called "Water." It spoke of his desire to be washed clean of mental illness. And it is now lost forever. But its melody was so strong, I can recall the refrain, even though I heard it only once.
His name was Dennis — a street person, "rough sleeper," a Vietnam combat vet, and paranoid-schizophrenic — as if that were not already clear.
Those with schizophrenia usually possess greater awareness than we do, literally hearing things — real or imagined — that we don't, can't or won't. The illness is not so much due to a lack of awareness, but a surplus paired with the inability to filter and distinguish the environment's barrage.
Seeing a song so intricate dissipate is part of what sparked my quest to document the mightily worthy but little-heard.
What dreams must have lived inside his head as he floated past, almost transparent?
TIPS TO BE TAKEN WITH A GRAIN OF SALT
Healthy Disruption
You should not feel the same after a song is over as when it began. If it has not changed you in some way, it has failed.
Entertainment is amnesia. But art contains elements of suspense, making us look inward, to connect with ourselves and others more deeply, remembering the core of our humanity.
Art makes the world suddenly foreign and questionable, cracking our shell emotionally and rendering listeners smitten to a song.
Unless music evokes something in that you didn't know was there or fortifies what you aspire to, then people would be better served pulling out their earbuds and instead listening more closely to the sounds of their immediate surroundings.
I aim for a more immersive relationship to sound — much like how unstruck, sympathetic drone strings on many instruments are what carry texture to the listener. It is at the moment of decay is the point where instruments take on a life of their own, beyond the player's control — a beginning, not an ending.
If you are going to play conventional instruments, at least try to play them in unconventional ways. This mirrors neurosurgeons who force themselves to eat and write with their nondominant hand to develop ambidextrousness.
Breaking patterns is the universal aspect of all interventions throughout psychiatric history — no matter how misfired. And emotional health can largely be measured by the ability to embrace change and adapt, letting go of preconceptions and precedents.
In creative pursuits, err on the side of madness.
Instead, commercial music acts as a narcotizing force, arresting progress through its mass and heft. Rather than sounding like [??], it sounds like $$$. Not a quarter note but a banknote.
We gorge from a virtually inexhaustible stream of contentless "content." The overdocumentation of nothingness.
A true artist suggests something more, something beyond the song. And through that they locate an indescribable, but undeniable spiritual connection with their audience — a sigh (or scream) that reaches the afterworld.
The ultimate recording device is the mind of the listener, etching sound into memory.
FIELD-RECORDING CHRONICLE
Tanzania Albinism Collective: Our Skin May Be Different, but Our Blood Is the Same
My parents abandoned me, because I look the way I do. They said I'm not their child — that I belong to the "whites."
Ukerewe is the largest inland island in Africa and can only be reached by an overpacked four-hour ferry ride. It is a place so remote that historically people often traveled there to abandon their albino children
Eighteen members of the Standing Voice community volunteered for our songwriting workshop, ranging in age from twenty-four to fifty-seven. We encouraged them to write about their experiences and to express what they wanted others to understand about their existence. But even among the willing, singing out proved hard for a group that routinely avoided eye contact, rarely spoke above a mumble, and were unaccustomed to dancing.
Yet a boatload of self-serious Brooklyn shoegazers would find it a challenge to ever muster the unforced sorrow and despair found in the voices there. Many of the people there are burn victims from the sun, with everyday ultraviolet exposure proving life-threatening. Often at a glance they resemble the aged, and many exude a wisdom, calm, and weariness well beyond their years, a quietude found only in those who have been forced to walk on cat's paws for a lifetime.
Upon arriving, we learned that the local population with albinism had not only never been asked to sing, but often were forbidden to, even in church. As appalling as that is, it should maybe not come as such a surprise in light of the knowledge that even among those parents that actually do choose to keep their albino child, some still force them to eat outside and apart from their other siblings.
Not surprisingly, themes of loneliness emerged — "I Am a Human Being," "They Gossiped When I Was Born," "Life Is Hard," and "Who Can We Run To?" are just a few examples. Many lyrics were written in Kikirewe and Jeet a, both dialects which were officially discouraged following the country's unification in 1964.
It turned out that the instruments we'd sent ahead had remained untouched. So the first step was to demystify the guitars and keyboards — to have every individual hit and hold them — to introduce them as merely tools, and that rough-handling or even breaking them were permissible. They were no better than a hammer or wheelbarrow: without value unless used.
I'd learned this lesson early as a "gigging" and sometimes touring musician. I deliberately bought and played cheap instruments. Otherwise there was the handicap of putting materialism — the anxiety that you might dare scratch the exterior, etc. — ahead of freedom and creativity.
One individual on Ukerewe had found refuge at the newly built community center, after previously having lived malnourished in the bush due to being rejected by the various villages that he'd attempted to join. He subsequently engaged in repeated suicide attempts, including drinking battery acid.
Another resident shared the trauma of her repeated rapes, a horrid byproduct of the sick superstition that having intercourse with a woman with albinism was a cure for AIDS. Chillingly, Thereza detailed how in her village people often hissed "deal" when she passed — an indication of the money that her bodily parts allegedly could fetch on the underworld market.
Those who often suffer the most are the mothers who've valiantly stood by their albino offspring. Out of ignorance, husbands often accuse their wives of having cheated with a Caucasian man or they demand divorce due to their own shame. Frequently, it is an aunt or another kindhearted neighbor that takes in a rejected child as their own, assuming also the tremendous social burden that carries.
There was the thrill of playing "exotic" music for the collective and their sharing confusion that Bill Monroe was not a woman and Nina Simone and Chavela Vargas were not men. Even better was their guess that Wayo's trance music from South Sudan was from China.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Silenced by Sound"
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Foreword 3
Introduction 9
Synopsis of Critical Challenges 11
Prologue Don't Call Me Baby: I wrote you a love song on an air-sickness bag 13
I De-Rigging The Systems Spitting Out the Spoonfed Shit
1 Lopsided Representation: many "too manys" 17
2 The Myth of Heroic Authorship 19
3 Freed Speech 23
Weed-like roots Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places 25
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Healthy Disruption field-recording chronicle Tanzania Albinism Collective: Our Skin May Be Different, but Our Blood Is the Same 31
4 We Aren't the World… Still! Missing Music 37
5 Clogged Cultural Arteries: The Boys Are Not Back in Town, They Never Left 39
6 Getting Past the Past: Pillaged Vision 41
Field-recording chronicle Abatwa (the Pygmy): Why Did We Stop Growing Tall? 45
7 The Trespass Tribe 51
8 You'll Save Yourself a Lifetime in the End 53
II False Friends: The Perils of Underestimation
9 Making a Lil' Space for the Rest of Us 57
10 If the Truth Fits, Wear It: You Want Bigots, We've Got 'Em! 59
11 More than We'll Ever Know: Watch Out for the Little Stuff 61
Weed-like roots Patient to Take Him Whole, the Hurt Lay in Wait for Him His Entire Life 63
Field-recording chronicle Afar Ways: Raising the Dead on the Red Sea 65
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt You Can Have It All for a Song 67
12 Hyphens & Fingerpaint: Art without Heart 69
13 Wormholes 71
Field-recording chronicle Zomba Prison Project: I Will Not Stop Singing 73
Weed-like roots Home Is Where the Hurt Is: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts 77
14 Mineral Deficiency 81
15 The Easter Bunny, Superstars, and Further Fairy Tales 83
Field-recording chronicle Immigrant Song: The Refugee Rock Stars 85
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt The Objective? Objectivity 89
III Music Matters: The Trivial Should Not Be Trivialized
16 Anti-depressing 93
17 Don't Believe Half of What You See, but (Almost) Everything You Hear 95
18 Art Super-sized 97
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Put Your Music Where Your Mouth Is 99
19 Autopsies on a Ghost 101
Field-recording chronicle Witch Camp (Ghana): I've Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be 103
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Feeling Left Out 109
Field-recording chronicle Hanoi Masters: Stereotypes in Stereo 111
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt PAX Hole, No Soul 113
20 Really "Real"? 115
21 Naturally Higher 117
Weed-like roots A Song Only a Mother Could Love 119
IV Liberating Spirit Through Sound: Choosing Life over Things
22 Like Cutters Trying to Locate the Pain 123
23 Who Do You Love? 125
24 Sold Soul 127
Field-recording chronicle The Good Ones (Rwanda): I Love You Even If You Break My Heart 129
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Every Task Inflates to Whatever Time Allowed 131
Field-recording chronicle Malawi Mouse Boys: Getting Down and Dirtier 133
25 Unmasking Precedents 137
26 (mis-)reading minds 139
27 Hazards of Hypercognition 141
28 Commercialization Choking on Its Own Waste 143
29 Dysfunction function: Repeating Something Over and Over Again, Still Doesn't Make It True 145
Weed-like roots Squeezing Out a Spark 147
Field-recording chronicle La Gomera: The Canary Island Whistlers 149
Weed-like roots Accidental Implosion 151
30 Letting Go 153
V Raising Our Voices: Singing Back the Tidal Wave
31 Tyrannical Tech: Social Media Suckled Suckers Stalking Themselves 157
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Counterfeit Prophets: Using Technology as a Crutch 159
Field-recording chronicle Khmer Rouge Survivor: the unnoticed passing of a master 161
32 Hungering for Connection: Sloppy Kisses, at Best 163
Field-recording chronicle From Russia with Love (and Ambivalence) 165
Weed-like roots History Does Not Repeat, It Merely Morphs and Searches for a Fresh Host 167
33 As the Heart Grows, the Ego Shrinks, Making Room 169
34 Voluntary Enslavement 171
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt Don't Tell Me What You Think, Show What You Feel 173
Field-recording chronicle fra fra: Funeral Songs 177
Weed-like roots Using the Only Filter I Knew 181
VI Losing the Human Race: Compartmentalization Coffins
35 Living Downstream of the Slush 185
36 Without You, Nothing 187
37 Mixed-Up Tapes 189
38 Leading by Disguise 191
Field-recording chronicle An Immigrant in Your Own Hometown 193
39 More White Guys with Guitars: the remake of the prequel to "A fine line between love and take" 195
40 Can't Hold a Tune? 197
41 Boxed within Borders 199
Field-recording chronicle South Sudan: Selective Freedom 201
42 Debunk the Funk 203
Weed-like roots Trying to Pass 205
Field-recording chronicle Standing at the Border, Longing for Home: Just Another Brick in the Wall 207
43 Wide Privilege 209
44 What Can You Say? 211
VII We First: Rising above Compulsive Competitiveness
45 All That Is Not Singing Is Merely Chatter 215
46 Go Get Othered 217
Field-recording chronicle Malawi Mouse Boys (the sequel): Score for a Film about Malawi without Music from Malawi 219
Weed-like roots Life Lived like a Suicide Hotline Call 223
47 Affectation Containers: Something's Missing 225
48 Binary Thinking and the Perpetuation of Cycles of Abuse 227
Field-recording chronicle After the Bombing Has Stopped, Don't Let Your Women Go to Kosovo 229
49 Fight for Your Right Not to Fight 231
Field-recording chronicle Yemen: I Am a Good Person and So Is My Friend 233
Tips to be taken with a grain of salt So Malnourished of Love, You Ate Your Own Heart 235
VIII Family Resemblance: We're All Just Passing Through
50 Dangerously Similar Others: False Friends 239
Field-recording chronicle Pakistan: God Is Not a Terrorist 241
Weed-like roots Not Nearly the Best, but Still Enough 245
51 Fueled by Fear 247
Field-recording chronicle Somaliland: Stood Up by the Rock Star … Again! 249
52 Counting Your Curses 251
Weed-like roots Three Scenes from the Same East Oakland Parking Lot 253
Field-recording chronicle The Land of Aplenty: A City in the Key of Db 257
Weed-like roots Look Away from the Flash 261
53 Interlaced 263
54 Meek Inheritance 265
55 The Straw That Saves the Camel's Back 267
56 Conclusion Strong Silent Types: Walk Quietly and Carry a Big Think 269
57 Epilogue Mother Tongues: you, with highlights in your hair that could scare away the sun 271
58 Requiem 275
Afterword
Overview of Key Points 279
Some Possible Solutions 281
For the Record(s): Unfair Trade 283
About the Author 285