In an earlier post, I touched on the conflict of creation and distribution that arises when you get involved with documenting music on video. Technology facilitates the creation of high-quality images. The creation technology increasingly interacts with technology that makes distribution just as easy.
With a $4000 broadcast-quality camera in your hand, or sitting at a powerbook with Final Cut, this ease of action also affects aesthetics. What I mean is this. We’ve now left an era when just getting footage was a big deal, and editing it an even bigger one, with higher attendant costs. Those costs imposed a certain regime on aesthetic choices. When lots of money is at stake, people tend to withdraw into what they ‘know will work’. When less money is at stake, the freedom to look at things a different way arises. If you’re spending $1000 an hour to keep cameras, lights and crew on set, the first thing you’ll shoot will be the safe stuff. And when you’re documenting a live event, it means that the safe approach will displace other ways of looking at the same event.
Similarly, when you’re editing, if the suite costs $1000 an hour to rent, no-one wants to try things differently. Differently in that case will tend to mean what a tightly worked out storyboard pre-determines. That can be fine for many things where the final product is pre-imagined. But when you’re dealing with live performance, its essence is a significant amount of indeterminacy. Even if you know that the singer is going to sing a standard, its going to be the unexpected, the thing specific to that performance that matters, and you can’t storyboard that.
The music video, of course, is the exact opposite of what I’m talking about. Yes, the superficial purpose of music videos is to sell the song. That isn’t to say that music videos can be reduced to ads, there is a difference, or at least there can be. The more profound purpose of music videos is to create canonic forms of the song, whether the song is familiar or just released. That’s the opposite of performance – performances aren’t canonic. but recordings can be. A friend with an excellent weblog pointed me to an enormous collection of links to YouTube music videos from the 80’s, and if you spend waste any time clicking them you see this in action. The bigger the act, the more the band had access to the high-end production values of the day, and especially the high-end technology. Those acts that were more marginal couldn’t afford it.
The result is that most of the high-end acts’ videos are unwatchable: the ‘wow’ effect that was obtained at huge cost looks laughable in a video for Funkytown, the Lipps, Inc. magnum opus, but despite its flaws, De La Soul’s Say No Go totally stands up. Same thing for Public Enemy’s older videos (and newer). Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible stands up precisely because everything in the video could be easily replicated today, no cheesy technology. Everything, perhaps but the models…what engages is in the ‘good’ videos is something very close to what performance offers – the tic, the mannerism, the peculiarity of something specific to that particular moment when the camera rolled made it great, something that isn’t part of the audio recording, since (of course) all videos are lipsynched.
The Beatles introduced multitracking, and creating music in recorded form ceased to be a real-time event. At the time of Rubber Soul or Revolver, the number of bands who could have access to the highest-end technology has always been small. The astonishing thing, on the face of it, is that faced with something so unfamiliar, that a rock and roll band like the Beatles could, in such a short period of time (2 albums, a year) become so creative with the technology. Listening to Revolver, Rubber Soul or Sgt Pepper is still astonishing.
There is something in this that relates to people like Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Here were two people who took skills developed in an older medium, and quickly established a complete mastery of a radically new way of acting, and presenting comedy and drama, in an incredibly short period of time. If anything, film must have required an even greater shift of thinking for a vaudeville performer than multitracking did for a recording artist.
How could they have gotten so good, so fast, with something that given its newness and its rarity, must have been so expensive? I suspect that the answer is time. There exists a film by (I think) the BBC, that restores, in take after take, the process by which Chaplin created his films. I saw this film years ago. If memory serves, there is a sequence of eighty takes of one sequence in which Chaplin endlessly refines the timing and placement of every element in the scene. This includes props, lights, other actors, every imaginable element of the scene is repeatedly refined to perfection. The final product is a single gag of a few seconds length that seems totally spontaneous, in the same way that George Martin’s experiments sound, still, completely unforced.
I don’t think that this is just money: it’s the understanding on the part of people who control the resources that for new technologies like film or multitrack recording to have value, they need a compelling example of what can be done, and to do that, you need time to play, removed from the economic constraints that the new medium would otherwise impose. Keaton, Chaplin and the Beatles represent the same phenomenon: the creative mind matched to the promising technology without economics driving them to do ‘what they know will work’.
The problem is, I think, that a viewer or listener of the time, just introduced to Keaton or the Beatles, will first misattribute the wonder they feel to the performer alone – and then, if they go further, and as a musician, for example attempt to recreate what they heard, undergo a phase shift and misattribute only to the technology the wonder. Eventually, this means that people begin to simply like technology, and stop asking if what’s been done with it is any good. In some way that’s understandable, because the technology that drives the thing becomes more and more available and cheap, but the talent to use it creatively never becomes any less rare.
To my mind, that’s why The Beach Boys Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson’s Smile aren’t comparable to the Beatles: even if you allow that Ringo wasn’t a creative wellspring, the ratio of talent to deadwood in the two bands is vastly different. When I hear either of those records, I hear an inadequacy of the talent (Brian Wilson) to overcome the leadenness of the deadwood. Because the guys he’s working with aren’t in on the plan, technology moves in to compensate, not augment what’s there. In the case of Smile, the ludicrously extended time between its inception as a project and eventual release isn’t in any way the same as the time factor for Chaplin, Keaton or the Beatles. In their case, the time was still concentrated in the period when the creators could confront the technology without being burdened by a predetermined idea of what it was good for, ‘what worked’. The entire last decade and a half of the creation of Smile was a time when anyone could buy and use the same technology that drives Smile: the time to confront and shape it was gone.
As an aside to this, the case of Os Mutantes is interesting. This group were the psychedelic rock side of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement. Listeners hearing them for the first time usually assume that they were a Beatles imitation, but the reality is different. Certainly, the Beatles were a huge influence, and in particular the George Martin era Beatles that I’ve been discussing. What is interesting is that the reason that many people characterize them as a Beatles copy band is the range of sounds that are similar to the Beatles sound of the time. Hearing them today for the first time, this seems obvious and unproblematic. But the mystery is, how do two teenage brothers in a third world country get hold of the same multitrack sound that the Beatles had, at the same time the Beatles were creating it? According to a recent article, they analyzed the Beatles’ sound, and then went about creating kitchen sink ways of recreating what interested them. What they created was a rigged-together system, specific to them, not high-tech lab equipment or a consumer good.
I think that that non-consumer approach, the sense of profound understanding of what the sound they’re using really is, is critical to why Os Mutantes were, and are, compelling to those who really listen to them. What the Beatles did, and what Os Mutantes did was to confront the technology in terms of their own talent, in a kind of vacuum, and in a concentrated period of time. Fascinatingly, Os Mutantes are reforming and touring, and they’re smart enough to realise that although doubtless they could go out and buy pedals and effects boxes to recreate their sound, they’re re-assembling the hand-built equipment again instead.
The compelling examples the Beatles provided of creative use of technology transformed the way we hear music, and what we expect of it. But it also, I think, devalued the real-time aspect of music – whether that be the ‘off the floor’ live recording, or the sense of amazement at a truly great performance.
I wrote in an earlier post something about my own confrontation with the realities of single-camera, single take records of performance when editing the Maracatu videos. The second video is clearly the more compelling, because the camera is consistent: its relation to the band is more exciting. But consistent is an interesting term here, because of course, its not at all consistent. The actual visuals are assembled from shots of the song, but also from other songs, sometimes with different instrumentation, different placement of players on the stage. Already you’re in the Chaplin mode, trying to hide the tracks (Chaplin regularly destroyed all the takes except the ones used, erasing the process in the course of doing so) while creating the illusion of spontaneous events that happen to be caught on camera.
But more depends on the quality of the image than the specifics of time and space. So the static camera of the first edited Maracatu is what really happened. But it completely fails to capture the excitement of the event, so it isn’t. On the other hand, there’s a short edit about two thirds of the way through the second Maracatu video where the woman playing the Surdu at the right of the stage is in med-close, drumming frenziedly. Her actions capture the frenzy of the overall sound of the band, but that sound comes from 11 people, not one: the image displaces all of the energy of 11 people into one. It’s deceptive but useful: it’s a rhetorical shot, in the sense that it gives a plausible form to an assertion that can be easily accepted by the viewer as a representation of what really happened. It isn’t what really happened: but it’s more like what really happened than what the camera captured at the moment that sound was being made.
I said in a recent post that live music is life, in a heightened state. That’s what you have to aim to convey. But you have to remain connected to life, in the same way that the euphoria of a great concert isn’t so sublime as to disconnect us from our selves. That notion of the sublime, which seemed to be fading away as a serious aesthetic goal around the time that the first silent films appeared, perhaps could only exist as long as no overwhelming, easily reproducable system for inducing the fantasies that Wagner and Rossini and Mozart manufactured existed. Film always was operatic in that sense of intensification, but it intensified the actual, not the fantastic.
That, to me, is why as beautiful and marvellous as Melies’ films are, they still carry the corruptibility of the wow factor in the Funkytown video. You can remember or imagine why these things were compelling. But understanding compulsion is not the same as being compelled.
When you allow intensification to surpass a certain constraint, you no longer are engaged with the thing in itself, the performance. What you are concerned with is disconnecting the viewer from their understanding that the event presented was like that, that it could be like that, that these musicians, this music really is like that. When you start to present things as they never could really be, you begin to associate the heightened state of life that live music is with the inadequacy of the viewer, who never sees things like this. Instead, the task is to connect the viewer with the potential that they could see something like this, and it would be like this.
