Get down with your atonal self

 Podcasts are one of those wonderful things that I admire the hell out of but don't use all that much. Text is, all things considered, better, and there's a tendency to find dozens of these files filling up space that could be better occupied by Norwegian death metal. (Dimmu Borgir, if you must know.) Still, it's completely populist radio, massively facilitated by Apple, since anybody can put podcasts up on iTunes for free. Everybody's in showbiz, with a million channels of talk radio. It's kind of exciting.

Still, I've been very sparing in my subscriptions. One was the Firesign Theatre's podcast, though that was less of a new thing than an audio dump of all sorts of Firesign rarities and curiosities. It's less an ongoing commitment than an archive, but still worth a mention.

The other podcast is from Naxos Records. It's not a big surprise to find that a classical music label is smart, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic about their music, but their podcasts cover the more arcane and fun parts, like Charles Ives's band music and the alt-classical rebellion. There are also thick meaty chunks of music, and interviews. (And, well, since it's classical music, I don't have to be up to the minute on it.)

So I got around to listening to an interview with composer Charles Wuorinen. He's a twelve-tone composer who, although he doesn't transcend the frankly dodgy musical approach (a feat, that up until now I've only heard Alban Berg accomplish), he successfully avoids the trap of having it all sound alike. And he has an affinity for percussion pieces, which is a good thing. Although I've had an old Nonesuch vinyl LP of his forever and have checked his stuff out of  one library or other over the decades, but I know next to nothing about him personally. So, an ideal 20 minutes!

I wasn't disappointed: I got a good sense of why Wuorinen does what he does, and a blipvert version of his musical career. The really fun part, and the stuff worth reporting on, is when he lights into current popular music. He's a composer for whom structure is tremendously important, And while he doesn't believe that complexity of conception alone justifies a piece, he does differentiate art and entertainment by saying that entertainment is stuff that requires no effort, while art is stuff that demands something of the audience, with reward being all the greater. (I think that is true for him, and if that were true in general, I would be in High Art's camp completely. But it's a post-Warhol, post Cage art world out there, and there's a lot of high art-like stuff that requires only  tolerance and the indulgence of the artist.) But he lays into the stuff on the radio these days, and I found myself agreeing with him. The number of three-chord pop-songs without hooks or surprises are just as awful as he makes them out to be.

"And then there's pitch-free pop!" he exclaims. It's his term for rap/hip hop.

And the composer becomes my friend.

Not because I hate hip hop or rap: I was a P-Funk acolyte since the 70's, and have my share of  Afrika Bambaataa vinyl, and while my iPod is light on contemporary hip-hop, I enjoy it as much as any pasty old white guy. No, He's my friend because that phrase is so compact and deadly, so unfair but still accurate, and crystallizes what's wrong. Pitch-free pop is precisely what you get when you have unimaginative rhymes and unremarkable beats--of which there's too much out there.

One of the reason why this old white guy think rap works is that the same digital studios that allowed independent low-budget music production also allowed an unprecedented degree of waveform processing. While street poetry recited over a beat box and other people's records isn't necessarily the formula for mainstream success, one of the things that worked was the measured difference of the processed,darkened, processed, compressed and limited beats. THe authenticity was most of it, but it's what happens when people, non-academic, non-corporate, non-comfortable people, started grabbing the actual waveforms with both hands and mucking with it.

But once you start to get corporate and comfortable with it what you get is just what Mr. Wuorinen indicts: pitch-free pop.

Thank you, Mr. W. One nasty phrase indeed.