JohnHenry.US

Tag: music

  • JH AfterParty 1.2

    Thank you!

    Hey everyone, thanks again for being part of the ride and welcome to the second official edition of the JH AfterParty. As always with the AfterParty, it goes out to Patrons and other contributors a week before everyone else gets it, generally around noon on Tuesdays (at least for now). The public edition is scheduled ahead of time and will always drop at noon eastern a week after the previous one, and the whole mess is published simultaneously on my Patreon and on JohnHenry.US! (The edition on the website tends to be a bit prettier due to limitations of the rich text editor at Patreon.)

    It has been a heck of a week in terms of getting things done. Since the “launch” issue of AfterParty last Friday, I put up a couple of articles plus did a ton of work building and creating content on the newly-built section of my site devoted to gaming, which has long been a passion of mine that I’ve wanted to write and create content around, but have never really sat down and taken a serious run at it. There’ll be a comprehensive rundown of all that stuff in the Saturday Substack, but between that and the new article about gun violence alone there’s a couple of hours’ worth of well-spent time waiting for you over at JohnHenry.US if you get the urge to just pop over and check it out.

    All of that and everything else I do is possible only because of your support, so thank you!

    Looking Ahead Through Blurred Lenses

    I had this notion of creating a short – 60 seconds or less – ad video that’s intended to be used by “you,” Constant Reader, to introduce me to the part of the world you have contact with and I don’t.

    This is one of those rare things where I’m thinking pretty much in straight-up marketing terms. When it’s necessary I sort of have a little consultant in my head that I allow to run his mouth in small doses and look at me and my work as a product and service and object to be distributed and communicated. According to him, it would be really effective to reach out with a short vid pointing directly to past support and largely intended to be shared by you folks who have been behind me and watching me go through all this mess for the last harumharum years.

    Basically it’s an ethical and righteous way of leveraging social proof. Like these clowns that go buy 200K fake followers from an agency right out of the gate so you see them and think “well, obviously with that many people behind it there must be something worthwhile there.” It’s a known human “thing” to do that, and nearly everyone in any kind of marketing space leverages that with the artificial appearance of this support (called “social proof”) to build “real” support.

    I think that’s crooked as hell and reduces discourse and platform access to another dollar chase, and the dollar chase is exactly the disease I’m trying to vaccinate us all against. Unfortunately we live in a world that runs on money, and while we can fight to change that all day long it’s still the present reality and we have to work within it to some degree or we don’t work at all.

    Consequently I need to lean in a bit harder on the whole marketing thing even though I absolutely HATE it. I’ve often said that I’m a proud graduate of the Bill Hicks school of marketing and advertising…

    Planting seeds. It’s Hicks, again if I gotta tell you the audio’s NSFW I’m not sure how you found me in the first place…

    But the reality is that you good folks are all out there. There are dozens of names I could think of without looking, should I take the mind, that I know I’ve been seeing in and out of my comment section for many years. You all have an ownership piece of all of this work whether because you’ve put literal cash into it or because of the time and energy you put in reading and watching and liking and sharing and commenting, and I feel like growing the support base is as much a validation of your support as it is of my work.

    I want to give you a way to say straight up “hey I’ve been watching this cat fight like hell through some unimaginable garbage that’s been thrown at him over the years, he keeps on going and keeps on kicking out this really good work, I support him and I think you should too.” Everybody loves an underdog, everybody loves a comeback, (especially when it’s against the odds with righteous cause), everybody loves a story of a powerless individual triumphing against the malignancy of power arrayed against their desire to simply live freely. Everybody wants to be part of that.

    We just gotta let ’em know I’m out here, and I’m unfortunately “that asshole” who refuses to cheat the system by buying artificial appearances of social approval to “sell” myself emotionally to people by unethically bypassing their critical thinking. That means I’ve got to work a thousand times as hard to magnify and enhance the legitimate social approval I do have. It means eventually I’ll buy advertising on various platforms that I’d rather not exist at all, because those platforms have a monopoly on information gatekeeping and if you don’t pay them, your information doesn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs.

    Mostly it means I need to work harder to give you the voice to spread the word, so I’ll be doing that Real Soon™. Clearly the word needs to be there, to be spread, so I’m balancing the need for creating these kinds of overt marketing materials with the need to create quality original content that speaks for itself and doesn’t require a bunch of carnival barking or sales pitching.

    Obviously the idea is very rough at present and I’m not 100% sure how quickly that will be done, so that’s about all I’ll say about it for now, but obviously I’m always interested in your feedback and thoughts on stuff like this.

    In My Head

    Life is incredibly positive right now. Not perfect by any means, there remain challenges even beyond trying to pay for my existence, but I’m working at a speed and level of quality that I haven’t touched in years, and I’m super excited about it. Things I’ve struggled with mentally for a long time because of ongoing stress and anxiety about the stability of my living situation or other pressures related thereto, I’m finally breaking through on and getting settled in properly the way I’ve been fighting to in some ways for most of my life.

    This newsletter is one small example of that, and I think I’ve discussed enough others that there’s no need to re-enumerate them here. I’m more organized, more focused, more productive with my work time, generally in a better mood. I’ve even lost about a tenth of my body weight in the last couple of months, which is a good thing – it’s because my diet isn’t mostly pasta, sugar, and salt anymore. I have more energy when I’m awake, and I feel more stable than I have since I was working at Musician’s Friend…more so, because I’m not relying on my ability to not piss off some yuppie.

    I’m probably in the best space mentally and intellectually that I’ve been in…at least a decade, maybe two, maybe ever if I take everything into account. By no means does that means life is easy, obviously I’m still scrambling for forward momentum and financial stability, or steady income of any sort that I can count on beyond the $105/month in pledges that goes through Patreon right now for that matter – but boyohboy does that $105 – or really about 97 after fees – make a difference!

    If I just had 18 more people pitching in $50 a month, that would be $1k/m. That’s easily survival money in my present situation. That plus an occasional large contribution or a whole lot of other small ones, and I can start doing things like replacing this computer, which has now officially aged out of useful life for my purposes as a primary machine because it’s so old it can’t run Windows 11 and MS has announced they’re not issuing any more updates for Windows 10 beyond critical security patches.

    That means that OS is at end of life and it’s the most modern one I can run and still use any of my tools to speak of. That also means my tools are evolving beyond my current hardware’s ability to even upgrade to with the same motherboard and cpu architecture (i7-3700 I think, so i7 yay but third gen; it’s twelfth-gen now plus they’re up to i10 or so. It’ll make a great file server for years to come but as a production box its breathing its last.). I think I’m going to work up some kind of targeted fundraiser specifically for that, maybe two thousand dollars. From what I can see that’s about where the current “sweet spot” is between paying too much for the most modern tech and getting tech that will age out too fast to be worth what they’re asking for it.

    Plus the market is so screwy right now you’ll still pay two grand for a box that has 4.5K worth of components in it if you tried to build it yourself, largely because of the price of video cards and how much cheaper they are for fabricators buying them to put in computers than for tech bros buying them to mine crypto. Some of that’s changing and shifting now that crypto has basically fallen apart, but I don’t expect to go back to the days of building it cheaper than you can buy it, except at the very high end of the price ranges, for at least another five, maybe ten years, if at all.

    My last guess has lasted me ten years with nothing but video upgrades, so yeah. I’ll be all right, just need the funding. Should make for a step up in video quality too, especially when I also upgrade my webcam and ultimately invest in a solid 4K or (better) 8K portable.

    I note that it’s about noon-thirty my time right now, which means in theory I should’ve had this out half an hour ago. I’m gonna shut up for now and get back on the rest of my work. Hopefully as things including my mental health progress, I’ll get to the point where I’ve got this newsletter done by Monday night, and I can just schedule it to drop regularly at noon on Tuesdays for the “Advance” edition at the same time the “Public” edition from the prior week goes public. That said, I also don’t want them to drop on top of each other, so I’ll probably aim for a little earlier, say 9am, on Tuesdays for the Advance and then noon for the Public.

    Edition 1.1 will be public at noon eastern, this Friday.

    Let me get back on it, there’s still about a day’s work I want to get wrapped on this gaming subsection, then get at least one and probably two bits of “serious” writing and content done, then I get to start doing the same thing I’m doing now with gaming, but with music which is a whooooooole different game. In spite of appearances, I remain first and foremost a musician, and I’m getting awfully long in the tooth to keep all that knowledge to myself too. Plus…yeah. Let me get on or I’ll stay here talking until I starve to death.

    Love y’all, see ya soon!
    -jh

  • International Women’s Day: Wendy O. Williams

    When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.

    Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!

    I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!

    Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.

    A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.

    It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!

    Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)

    Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.

    Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.

    It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.

    There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.

    Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.

    Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”

    So speaketh Mama Wendy

    One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.

    Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.

    After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.

    Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:

    The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.

    Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:

    “We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”

    With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.

    I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.

    Don’t forget: I am entirely funded by your contributions through the Musk For A Minute initiative Please consider adding your support via the official Musk For A Minute Go Fund Me campaign, directly via my PayPal, and there are other options including crypto here! Engagement is vital to our growth so please like, share, subscribe, follow, and do all you can to tell help people find out about my work!

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  • Why Rock Music Has Sucked For 15 Years (2009)

    Introduction & Argument

    Originally posted to LowGenius.Net 6-Feb-2009.  As I’ve been going through this process of tracking down and curating my old content, once in a while I come across something that still makes sense word for word.  This article is now in seventh grade, so to speak – twelve years old – and as I re-read it for spellchecking and so forth I realize that pretty much every word still rings, and I wonder whether that reflects my own stagnation in musical taste, or if I’m unwittingly just being the grouchy old man, or if this is just an ongoing and unfortunate reality that I desperately hope finds a cure. 

    In the end I suspect it’s probably a little of all three.  But I still wouldn’t change a word.

    And for the record I know there’s bands out there that don’t suck.  Some of them are friends of mine.  It’s a hook to get you to read the bigger point about the emotional commitment of the artist to their art and why that’s required for art to be great.

    Yes, I know.  It doesn’t all suck, but there’s not much room for nuance in a headline.

    And most of it HAS sucked, and sucked hard.  There’s always been a problem of style over substance in music, and in every other part of the entertainment business.  Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, the suck has so far outweighed the substance that I’m really afraid a lot of people my daughter’s age (20) [she’s now 32 -jh, 2021] are losing the ability to even recognize quality music anymore.

    Why does it suck?  Oh, let me count the ways.  The world is filled with bands and performers who are, at best, marginally talented.  They rely on studio tricks and technology to substitute for talent, but the talent is only one part of the issue, and it’s a small part.

    No, the real problem is this:  what we’ve got now, by and large, is an entire generation of recycled imitative crap pretending to be the heroes they grew up loving.  There’s nothing wrong with having influences and incorporating those influences into your work; that is, after all, where everything starts.

    All these wannabe’s and pretenders spend years trying to learn how to imitate their idols, getting the chops and the techniques and the riffs and the styles down pat, but they don’t get it.  What makes great music is not how well you play your instrument, or how many notes you can cram into a single beat, or how fluid and tasteful your fills are.  What makes music great is one thing, and one thing only:

    The heart of the musician.

    THAT is what people don’t seem to get anymore.  It’s all just flash and show and technical know-how, and there’s not an ounce of genuine passion involved, except for maybe the passion for money, ego gratification, and easy sex.  Any asshole with corporate backing can make a record that will sell a half-million copies, but it takes something that you can’t buy, you can’t learn, and you can’t imitate, to touch hearts and move souls.

    What’s Missing

    Musicians don’t put themselves in to the music anymore…and what’s worse, the music public doesn’t ask them to.  Instead, it seems like people are going to concerts so they can hear the songs played note-for-note as they sound on the CD.  Not only is that not the point of live music, that’s directly contradictory to the very idea of live music.

    VOLUME does not make music good.  There is nothing even a tiny little bit special about seeing an artist go up and pantomime themselves.  If that’s what music is about to you, then you may as well just say to hell with it, save some money, and start doing “listening party” tours where the musicians aren’t even involved – just get five thousand people together in a hockey rink with a giant PA and play the damn CD!

    No.  Live music is about broken strings and spur-of-the-moment extemporaneous speeches and singers who are hoarse at the end of the night and blood and sweat and tears and most of all, it’s about power.  Not amplification power, but the power to move human beings.  Speaking as a musician, I don’t much care if I get every note right when I’m playing live.  What I care about is whether I can make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry or sad or wistful or hurt or horny.  I care about making you love and making you hate.  Even agreeing with what I say isn’t important, but feeling what I feel, THAT is what matters.

    It seems like today’s crop of musical impressionists have completely missed that point.  You know, Zeppelin had some really terrible shows, from a standpoint of technical musicianship [Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary Special anyone? -jh, 2021]…but people loved them because they went out there and put their hearts in to what they were doing.  They reached down, picked you up, and ripped your face off, and they made you come along on their ride for three hours whether you wanted to go or not.

    This is why 4 Peace remains my favorite “Kalamazoo Scene” band even though a lot of people would say they were far from the “best” band on the scene.  Not because they were the world’s greatest musicians – certainly they had legitimate talent and instrumental skill, but that’s not the point.   What made them my favorites was simply that when they picked up their instruments, everything else in their world stopped and for that half-hour or 90 minutes or whatever, their hearts and souls were right there on display, pouring out of their speakers and into your face with all of the fire and fury that four pissed off Gen-Xers could muster.  I don’t take anything away from any of the other bands on the scene, but that’s the band that, for me, consistently grabbed me by the throat and flat-out refused to let go until they’d had their say.

    By the same token on a wider scale, that’s why I’m still a huge Pearl Jam fan, and why I dig Chris Cornell much…and why I absolutely loathe bands like Staind and Puddle of Mudd.  I don’t care HOW great they are as technical musicians, all they are is shallow imitations of bands who actually went out and put their balls and hearts and souls in to what they were doing.

    Watch this: Pearl Jam, “Alive” (SNL 1992) [Sorry it’s a FB post; NBC yanks this clip within seconds every time it’s posted to YouTube.  Hilarious note: originally it linked to a file on Google Videos, that’s how old this article is. -jh, 2010]

    That’s what a band looks like when they’ve got their heart on.  More important, that’s what a band feels like when they’re in the groove.  You can almost smell the nerves and excitement – this was by far the most exposure they’d had at that point – but by the time Ed rips that first “SAHHHHHn” out, they’ve forgotten where they are, they’ve forgotten the cameras, the crowd, Sharon Stone, the millions watching at home…all that matters, all that exists in those five minds for that five minutes is the groove.

    The Magic

    You can’t learn that, you can’t imitate it, you can’t bottle it, you can’t package it, you can’t put a surcharge and $20 for parking on it, you can’t control it, you can’t capture it, you can’t imitate it.  All you can do is grab that sucker by the tail and hold on tight while it takes you where it wants to go.

    That, my friends ($1 J. McCain) is the magic.  That is why I’m a musician.  Not because it gets me laid or makes me money or gratifies my ego, although it does do all those things at times.

    I’m a musician because I have to be.  Because whether it’s just me playing with myself (pun definitely intended) in a basement, or me and my band, whoever they might be at the moment, playing to a couple thousand people, that magic, that power, that undefinable thing that leaves me hollowed out and spent in a way that no sex, no money, no fast car, no drug, no woman, no THING ever could…that’s what matters, and I don’t give a rip if you can fool ten million people into buying your pathetic imitations and flimsy, saccharine parody:  that is what the people and friends I respect from John Lennon to John Riemer have and were born having…and that is what almost nobody who so callously refers to themselves as musicians in 2009 could ever understand because they don’t have it, they can’t have it, and they wouldn’t know what it was if it slapped them in the face.

    I don’t need a record contract or a multi-million-dollar tour or fifty grand in flashpots or computer-controlled laser shows, and I don’t much care if Britney or the Jonas Brothers or Coldplay are selling millions of records while I sit in a drafty shack in rural North Carolina re-rolling smokes from the butts of the ones I hand-rolled earlier.  I don’t need a billion hits on a MySpace page [chuckles in 2021] or a billion dowloads of MP3’s to prove that, because it’s mine and nobody can take it away, nobody can water it down, nobody can say it’s fake or not good enough or not ‘accessible.’

    That is what’s inside me, and that is what flows through me when I play regardless of who, if anyone, is watching, listening, or even gives a rat’s ass, and that is what is most emphatically NOT in 99% of the shallow, commercial crap that pollutes the airwaves today, and the best and worst part of it is that it doesn’t have to be a big secret, it doesn’t have to be hidden or kept private or kept away from anyone finding out.  It can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away, it can’t be bought or sold.  It just is.  Some of us have it, some of us don’t, but it’s sure doesn’t seem like anyone who is passing themselves off as a musician or rock star in 2009 could ever come close to understanding what that feels like.

    And THAT is why rock music has sucked for 15 years.

    [All of this applies to my writing, too.  If you pay attention you’re probably seeing a theme by now.  I’m real big on authenticity and sincerity and meaning it.]