If everybody does it, what’s original about writing original songs?

The reason our musical culture has grown such an overwhelming emphasis on original songs is that owning compositions is lucrative.

Revenues from compositions can be more enduring than from sound recordings, because performances go in and out of style, but new performances can bring an old song back to life.

And this way of evaluating the virtues of a piece of music complements the corporate basis of the business. Corporations need to be able to think of their work as investments. Compositions are assets that can be bought and sold, amassed, licensed, published, attributed. As a result songwriters can get corporate backing, which in turn enables them to rise at the expense of non-songwriters.

It’s an economic thing, not an art thing.

Yesterday I played in a mainline jazz act at an art gallery. I liked the guy I was playing with, and I had a fun time navigating the chord changes. That style of jazz is like a first person shooter: you fire at each chord as it comes along, and if you miss one there’s always another.

gurdonark on peaktrough in Hollywood:

When I think of music in Los Angeles, I always think of the wrong things. I think of kids who came all the way west to pay to play Cococut T’zers and homogenizing their style into a kind of Los Angeles bar band sound that always sounds a bit dated. On the other hand, I think of folks writing music for movies, and feeling insulted, somehow, because the people for whom they write want the music to be a universal prop for a wide audience film.

I know I should think instead of mariachi guys who light up the sky every Thursday at La Fonda, or guys out in Shadow Hills who make music for the creative commons on their home computers, but I always think about notes in Guitar Center or the weekly alternative that say “must appreciate Alice in Chains”.

I think about the relationship between these two classes of players pretty often. I don’t know why.

The dreamer players are a tsunami. The ambitious — often bitter — talented are a steady trickle. I am myself among the unambitious but passionate mediocrities, who know each other by the wake of modest bands.

The biggest film of the year in 1896 was 47 seconds long.

The Kiss was an Edison Vitascope film featuring a scene from a New York stage comedy entitled The Widow Jones. The actors were May Irwin and John Rice; May Irwin made a previous (uncredited) appearance here on soupgreens.com as the singer to popularize Good-Bye, Booze! when it first appeared in 1901. Similar to Paris Hilton’s sex tape, the kiss in The Widow Jones was the titillating scandal that made May Irwin’s career.

A fun ultra-retro music video by Madame Pamita: