November 14, 1996
"I'm gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle
for the legal tender..."
Today is the day of unexplained phenonenon.
What is this doing here?
$$$ MUSIC TO GET RICH BY $$$
Basically, there are two kinds of music:
* "Classical" music, which is the kind written by dead German
guys and is played by people wearing tuxedos;
* "Regular" music, which can be written by anybody and played
by anybody,and gets on the radio a lot.
If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular music.
These days, classical music is popular with only about three hundred people,
the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public television. Classical
music tends to go on for days, which is why it is played by "orchestras",
or groups of four hundred and fifty to five hundred people whose parents
madethem practice classical music when all the other kids were out learning
how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide up the labour. One group will
play a batch of music or "movement", then everybody sits back
and reads magazines from little magazine stands while the "conductor"
consults his notes and decides which musicians will play next. Sometimes
the conductor singles out a musician who has been chewing gum or fooling
around and forces him or her to play all alone while the other musicians
snicker. If you ever have to be in an orchestra, you should try to sit in
back, near the guy who plays the triangle. You'll hardly ever get called
on.
Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:
* Instruments you blow into and eventually have to get the spit out of (tubas,
whistles, cormorants, tribunes);
* Instruments you hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones);
* Instruments that are easily concealed (piccolos);
* Furniture (pianos), and
* Instruments that could turn out to be worth a million skillion dollars
(violins).
The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonius Stradivarius,
which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship
and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of pure heroin in a secret
compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.
Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated:
you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly.
So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular
music is rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll comes from the blues, a kind of music
developed by American slaves. It is alled the "blues" because
it is very sad. Blues lyrics generally go like this:
My woman she done left me
My children left me too
My mule done kicked my kidneys
And my income tax is due
For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people. Blues musicians
played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950's,
young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified
version called "rock 'n' roll", which became enormously popular
and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to
the blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible,
and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.
The principal difference between rock 'n' roll and classical music is that
your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no
words, whereas your average rock 'n' roll song has one melody (sometimes
less) and about a dozen words. When rock 'n' roll composers are in a hurry
to finish songs so they can get to the important luncheon dates, they sometimes
make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960's hit
rock 'n' roll song "Sittin' in La La":
Sittin' in la la waitin' for my ya ya
Uh huh, uh huh
Sittin' in la la waitin' for my ya ya
Uh huh, uh huh
Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for "la
la" and "ya ya", but before he could get around to it, somebody
released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is
"Land of a Thousand Dances", whose composer evidently got called
away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:
I said na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na
The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music,
which is popular with people who likes songs about drunken infidelity but
requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music,
which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands;
and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and supermarkets
but can be sung only by groupsof heavily sedated suburbanites. You should
steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market
for these is miniscule. You will never see hordes of fans clamoring for
the autograph of a bagpiper.
No boring monologue tonight.
NO angst-ridden introspection. No reminiscing about those lazy, hazy days
of Beirut '87 with Tanhia: The Gucci Freedom Fighter. No, not that for me
tonight. Maybe I'll get some sleep.
Peace
Drew
