Writing About Music

Writing books tends to drive musicians bonkers, particularly towards the end of the process when we’re fussing with minutia, reviewing proofs, cleaning up the final punchlist of details, and awaiting the final endlessly long march to the printer. Authors get crabby. There are two primary reasons why, in my opinion:

1. Books are persistent artifacts of an author’s best work and best thinking, and so getting books exactly right is intertwined with perceptions of self worth. At the end of the project, we feel stuck with its limitations, and are running out of time to make it the perfect, most holistic statement of who we are.

2. Musicians need to create actual music. Writing books about music is not the same as making music, and towards the end of the process, we get antsy because it’s been such an incredibly laborious distraction from what we need to be our primary life focus: making music.

(I won’t offer a third reason: that they are getting fed up with me torturing them…. That couldn’t be the case, could it?!)

An antidote to the first one, about identity, is to plan to write a series of books in your life that will collectively articulate a part of your persona, but more importantly to realize that no book could ever possibly do a soul justice. Books just don’t have that capability.

An antidote to the third one, if it exists (and I’m sure it does not), is to know that I will leave you alone very soon.

The middle one is what I really want to discuss. This past weekend, I took my boys to visit Sue (Gedutis) Lindsay and her family. Sue is a friend, musician, and fellow editor of Berklee Media projects. Here are Annie Lindsay and Forrest Feist munching on French fries, before we went to Plimoth Plantation.

We were catching up, and I was complaining about being generally crabby, and I mentioned feeling a bit far from music these days, when I seem to spend all my time talking and writing about music, rather than actually creating the real thing.

She offered a bit of wisdom that I feel is important to pass on. Cynical Sue said (and I paraphrase), “Musicians are special people, and we need to be creating music all the time, to feel normal.” She discussed her own journey through various distractions that were almost, but not quite, music, including writing books, research, teaching, and so forth. It’s not that these aren’t worthy, fun, and even necessary undertakings. We must call them “pseudo-musical activities,” though, and doing the real thing is where it’s really at. We must carve out time to create real music, for sanity’s sake, and be ferociously protective of this time.

So, I’m looking at life, and counting directions. I have my family (including two little boys), an old/maintenance-needing house, endless yard work, I serve on three town boards (chairing one), there’s my full-time gig at Berklee Press, part-time teaching Finale online, a variety of neglected hobbies, a few assorted other obligations, plus protecting my flock of chickens/ducks/geese from that hungry fox….. Quite a lot happening here, which all conspire to create distance from that spiritual life engine called music, which is the primary force that can keep me relatively sane and whole, but which is now at arm’s length. And I feel it poignantly this November, as days grow short and the world grows cold.

Prioritization is increasingly a necessary life’s skill for me, and I would venture, for anyone, as life developments bring increasing directions without offering us more hours in the day.

Arthur Cunningham, my first composition teacher and life mentor, once said to me, “I promise you that if you write every day, you will improve.”

So, here’s my thought/recommendation:

Create music every day.

Even if it’s for five minutes, you need to touch that fire, no how busy you are, and no matter how deeply your daily life is embroiled into pseudo-musical or non-musical activities. An hour would be great, but five minutes is better than nothing. Recognize that pseudo-musical activities (writing, teaching, studying, copying parts….) are not the same as making music, even though they might be delightful experiences in their own right. We need to be constantly warmed by that real core energy of musical spirit.

Commercial success and even inter-human communication are secondary to being warmed by the fire of creativity. Consider it a life imperative to touch the real thing. See progress over weeks, months, and years, not over the course of a few minutes.

If this rings true to you, please stop surfing the ’net, and create music for five minutes RIGHT NOW. Close your door, then play your guitar, beat your drum, improvise, scat sing, write a lyric—whatever the real-deal-essence-of-what-music-is-all-about-closest-to-center activity is for you. Then schedule a time when you will do it again tomorrow, and repeat. Just five minutes.

Let me know how it goes.

It’s “hip-hop.” Lowercase h, use the hyphen. Feel good about it.

This is controversial, as are so many aspects of hip-hop. But I’m happy to lean on the big guns for this preference. It’s how The Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal write “hip-hop.” Also Keyboard Magazine. BET doesn’t seem to care much, using both “hip-hop” and “hip hop.” The American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet (Princeton University), The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and every other dictionary I consulted all render it “hip-hop.”

Lowercase is similarly accepted in other musical style names, such as jazz, blues, rock, classical, bossa nova, and so on. Motown, Latin jazz, and Delta blues get the capital only because the names come from place names, which get capitals, e.g., Roman numerals and French kiss (though these are also frequently set lowercase). “Bebop” is a minor monkey wrench; it lost its hyphen in most contemporary usage, but the b is decidedly lowercase.

All in all, I’m confident that “hip-hop” is a sound house style choice for Berklee Press.

One group that disagrees is Harvard University’s “Hiphop Archive”. This think tank is a treasure trove of rumination about “Hiphop.” Their argument for how they render the term (uppercase, no hyphen) is that it’s the name of a culture, not just a “cool dance,” (the likely etymological derivation of the term). Hiphop style includes language, visual arts, dance, and social practices, as well as musical genre(s).

Eh, maybe, they have a point. If one of our authors truly wishes to focus on these aspects, and feels strongly about the word choice, we might permit the anomalous rendering, though violating house style complicates the publishing process and I’d really prefer not to and would try to guilt the author into reconsidering. And the “Hiphop” preference just doesn’t seem to have much traction in the world outside Harvard University. For example, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a provocative film by Byron Hurt, similarly discusses the social issues of hip-hop, but he renders the term as “hip-hop.” And not to pick on what is likely a sore point for the Hiphop Archive, even elsewhere on the Harvard University Web site, the term is rendered as “hip-hop.” Harvard, that’s just not good team spirit.

Anyhow, there is good reason to separate the culture from the musical aspects of the term, particularly at Berklee. Contemporary hip-hop culture is often problematic and even despised by its fans, with so much promulgation of aggression, the objectification of women, the romanticization of materialism, and so forth. This hasn’t always been the case; there are deep roots in hip-hop as an activity of peacemaking and a tool of raising social conscience. But that’s not what’s selling the most records, today, and there are good reasons to separate the medium from the current message.

Berklee hip-hop guru Prince Charles Alexander, one of my current guiding lights, suggests looking at hip-hop as essentially a production style, with emblematic sounds and groove characteristics. The music serves as a bed for the rap, the content of which can be anything. This, to me, is a healthy way to see it. You can love the sound of hip-hop, but despise many of its artists’ messages. For the record, PC was initially leaning towards the capital H, but I’m trying to talk him out of it.

I see his technocratic approach as a good teaching strategy, and the lowercase h helps us to divorce the evolving social elements of hip-hop culture from its essential musical/production elements in the classroom, as well as the printed page.

The homoerotic imagery, the desensitization regarding violence, the role of women—for now, I’m happy to let Harvard University sort these out. In a sense, it is more revolutionary to think about hip-hop in terms of shout choruses, Roland TR-808 drum sounds, and beat subdivisions. By presenting it in these terms, the tools of creating hip-hop become within reach of a great diversity of potential artists, who will hopefully rescue this vibrant, creative form from some of its current doldrums of content.