Monday, May 02, 2005

Applied Economic Bovineology Theory

Just So You Know

I’m going to continue the amateur econoblogging, this time courtesy of Loyal Reader #0016/EDog.

DEMOCRATIC
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICANISM
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

More below the fold.


Posted by Johno on 05/02/05 at 01:22 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Now I’ve Got a Reasonable Economy! (with apologies to Johnny Rotten)

Music Wonkery

Late last week I came upon a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that caught my fancy, called Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music. The abstract reads

This paper considers economic issues and trends in the rock and roll industry, broadly defined. The analysis focuses on concert revenues, the main source of performers ‘ income. Issues considered include: price measurement; concert price acceleration in the 1990s; the increased concentration of revenue among performers; reasons for the secondary ticket market; methods for ranking performers; copyright protection; and technological change.

For economists, this is actually a pretty interesting idea; I don’t know of any solid studies that exist on the economics of the music biz.

However, I hadn’t reached page two before I found something so egregiously lazy and wrong that I had to put the paper down and stop reading. Authors Marie Connolly and Alan B. Kreuger, both of that cidadel of Rock known as Princeton, of course have to start their paper by defining what the “Rock and Roll Industry” is in the first place. Leaving aside the incredible conceptual and grammatical slippage inherent in categorizing popular music over the last few decades as “The Rock and Roll Industry,” the coauthors do a pretty good job of nailing down what their sample set will be:

Here, we will define popular music as music that has a wide following, is produced by contemporary artists and composers, and does not require public subsidy to survive. This definition rules out classical music and publicly supported orchestras. It includes rock and roll, pop, rap, bebop, jazz, blues and many other genres. What about Pavarotti? Well, we warned you that the border of the definition can be fuzzy. If the three tenors attract a large following and are financially viable, we would include them in the popular music industry as well.

So far so good, except for the weird decision to separate out bebop from jazz, and the continued insistence on using “rock and roll” as the defining paradigm of blues-based (mainly) white-people music as though Billy Joel can be comfortably put in a basket of commodities alongside Minor Threat.

But that’s where the going gets really nutty. The authors write,

Why is popular music worthy of a handbook chapter? There are several responses. . . .[F]or many fans popular music transcends usual market economics and raises spirits and aspirations. In this vein, for example, Bruce Springsteen once commented, “in some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity, if I’m doing my job right.” Dewey Finn, the character played by Jack Black in the hit movie, School of Rock, went even further, immodestly claiming, “One great rock show can change the world.” The rock and roll industry arguably started as a social movement intended to bring about political, economic and cultural change, as much as it did as a business. Certainly, popular music is an important cultural industry. [My emphasis]

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. “Rock and Roll” did not arguably start as a social movement yadda yadda, unless by “argument” you mean “irritatingly lazy statement that will cause people to argue with you.” “Rock and Roll” did not start as a social movement except in the fusty cheap-pulp pages of Rolling Stone compilation books full of lazy mythologizing and glory-days reminiscing about the time in 1967 when the Airplane played that one benefit for the Diggers that raised some cash for some homeless people to eat with. Leary was there too! With LSD! Ahh...those were the days! What was the explicit sociopolitical agenda of “My Ding-a-Ling?” Or of the film soundtrack extract “Rock Around the Clock?”

“Rock and Roll,” to use the authors’ term, started for two reasons: for artists to get paid, and for artists to get laid. Just because the martini set thought Lead Belly’s singing was perfect for their Worker’s Struggle don’t make it a movement. Just because Bruce Springsteen writes bad poetry about factories and bad cops doesn’t make it a movement. No matter what it might from time to time temporarily become (and rarely for long, or to much end), the music business has always been a business, whether the incentive for the performer is increased social capital, a tangible good, or currency.

I don’t mean to shovel all my vitriol on these two well-meaning economists, but it really bugs me that every time a new discipline discovers that music is worthy of study they feel compelled to try to reinvent the Stratocaster. In this case, it’s as if dozens of journal articles, hundreds of books, and thousands of published interviews don’t already exist in the popular press, musicology, sociology and history-- articles that have long since evolved a highly refined set of assumptions about the history of popular music that no longer have much room for arbitrary handwaving about Rock And Roll as a Social Movement For Uh Making The World Better And Stuff. That’s high school term paper thinking. In internet terms, these authors have not RTFFAQ and are acting like total n00bz begging to be pwned. QED. DOA. SOL. etc.

Rock and Roll changes lives because people hear the music and are compelled to do something. It’s internal; it’s individual; it’s atomized, ephemeral, and (unfortunately for economists) almost totally unmeasurable. Rock and Roll does not, NOT NOT NOT, change lives because an artist sits down in the studio and says, “today, I’m going to change the world.” That’s what got us “We Are The World! A paper on the economics of the concert industry need not even go down this road if it aims to be taken seriously.

As for the rest of the paper, I haven’t been able to pick it up again thanks to my lingering irritation. The lesson for today is: even the most revolutionary theses can be derailed by lazy hand-waving in the introduction.


Posted by Johno on 05/02/05 at 12:35 PM
Music Wonkery • Permalink

No more Civ III at 2:30 in the morning

Holy Shit!

The Universe is a demanding place.  It was not enough that I spent most of a year groveling before HR drones, dutifully following up on every lead, no matter how tenuous, sending emails and trolling through the nether recesses of internet job postings.  I had to demonstrate that I really, really wanted to work.

Last week, I started applying for McJobs.  While I have been getting the occasional short term techwriting gig – a week here, a week there – the work was not dependable enough to provide any kind of financial security.  So I figured a yob at Kinkos would provide a steady, if not large, amount of income to even out the feast and famine of intermittent contracting.  Among the fine institutions that I petitioned for work was the local video store.

Last Wednesday, I accepted their kind offer of employment and free movie rentals.  The Universe, now convinced that I was serious about the whole work thingy, turned the work spigot to ’11.’ Thursday, I had an interview with Northrop Grumman.  Whilst I was interviewing, I got two calls offering short term contracts.  Friday morning, Northrop offered me a job at significantly more than I was making last year.  Today, I fully expect my last two interviews to call back and offer me work; and just to rub it in, I bet someone I talked to half a year ago will call back and say that the position I interviewed for is now open, and can I start yesterday.

Not that I’m complaining.  After very nearly a year of blissful unemployment, I am ready to get back to the daily hassles of interminable commuting, smelly coworkers, cramped cubicles and (this is the important bit) the bimonthly ego validation of shekels in my checking account.  The long drought is over, and now I need to google for whomever is the patron saint of unemployed and desperate white collar IT wage slaves. 

He gets a candle and a beer. 


Posted by Buckethead on 05/02/05 at 11:47 AM
Holy Shit! • Permalink

High (Lonesome) Weirdness, or, Hasil Adkins is Haunting Me

Music Wonkery

Rockabilly weirdo Hasil Adkins is dead. I wish I had more to say about him, but all I have to go on are rumor, innuendo, and one indelible song I treasure as part of my collection.  I always meant to see him play, always meant to buy a ticket if he ever came around, but now I can’t. He lived in near total obscurity. He never had a hit, he never had radio play. What he did have was a fucked-up way of playing guitar and singing that sort of combined the berserk ravings of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins with the unmedicated sincerity of Wesley Willis (rock over Chicago… Be A Pepper, Drink Dr. Pepper). He had perfect pitch, yet sung like he was on quaaludes and sometimes strung his guitar with fishing line. When he was a child, he heard Hank Williams on the radio and assumed in the way that children do that Hank was playing all those instruments himself, so li’l Hasil taught himself to play several instruments at once.

Fat Possum Records has a good one of his, that you can buy here, and Amazon seems to have available a compilation that contains his harrowing early ‘50s hit “She Said.”

There’s not much I can say that will convince people that they would get something out of music as strange and periodically unpleasant as Hasil Adkins, which is a shame. I have a Fat Possum compilation from the mid-1990s with Adkins’ “Your Memories” on it, and I am periodically compelled to pull the disc out again and reaffirm my devotion to its wonders. “Your Memories” is a dirgelike piece in which Adkins chokes chords out of his guitar as he weeps, moans, and mutters a lovers’ lament. Is she dead? Is she gone? Was “she” a pet? The whole performance seems like it should belong on some Smithsonian Folkways archive recording from the Harry Smith collection - here it is on a compact disc recorded with modern-ish equipment and converted to a series of finely-grained ones and zeroes, and yet it seems to seep out of the speakers like oil from some forgotten hollow in the West Virginia Hills. It’s too real, too raw, too wierd in a high lonesome way, to really belong to the age of digital.

I have at home a collection of Irish folk music recorded for the Tradition label in the 1940s and 1950s before the Irish backcountry was really too tightly tied into the rest of the world. Some of the numbers are familiar enough; bodhrian drum, fiddle, pennywhistle, maybe a broadchested lad belting out threats against the Black and Tans. But others - others - are otherworldly experiences. You can imagine a middle-aged Irish lady with excellent Gaelic and only fair English standing in her chicken yard. She prepares to sing by clasping her hands behind her back like she was taught in school. She closes her eyes, turns her head so her mouth is as close as possible to the microphone. She begins to sing a song that sounds like it was handed down intact through the long years from before the coming of the Christian Monks. She sings in English but the words are unintelligible. She sings in key but the scale is wrong: flat where it should be natural, unsettled where it should resolve. The entire weight of Irish particularity; their pride, their strangeness, their history of glory, of murder, of revenge, of drowned children, of not enough to eat, of exiled lords and foreign wars on Irish soil hangs by this one thin thread of song.

West Virginian native Hasil Adkins kept spinning that thread right up until yesterday.


Posted by Johno on 05/02/05 at 11:04 AM
Music Wonkery • Permalink

What would Zarquon Do?

Entertainment

Over the weekend the Goodwyfe and I caught the filmic version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Was it good? Weeeellll.... it didn’t suck. There were some brilliant bits and it was lovely to see Douglas Adams brought to the screen with his point of view and wit intact, but the whole thing didn’t really hang together particularly well. See it, but at a matinee or at home.

Considering that a fairly large proportion of weblog readers are also Douglas Adams fans, I will refrain from tossing spoilers out here. I will just quickly note a couple real highlights: Sam Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox as a fuddled and slap-happy George W. Bush, down to the tipsy smirk and the West Texas accent (and gives Trillian the opportunity to speak the line, “Buttons are not toys!"). Somehow, it really really works. Martin Freeman from the BBC’s The Office is pitch perfect as Arthur Dent, and Alan Rickman is perfect as the depressive robot Marvin. Magrathea, the Infinite Improbability Drive, the Vogons and their penchant for brutal yet stifling bureaucracy, and the British ability to stand in line like no other race in the galaxy are all pretty much perfectly done.

Pretty much, if you don’t mind seeing one of your favorite books interpreted lovingly as a semi-disconnected series of sketches a la Monty Python, be my guest.


Posted by Johno on 05/02/05 at 10:14 AM
Entertainment • Permalink
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