Hitmen from the future? Hitmen from the past!
Break out the Aquanet, tune the guitars to A, and fetch me my finest spandex jumpsuit! It’s 1988 all over again in my lab right now. Via the miracle of modern technology that is iTunes, I have just purchased Queensrÿche’s seminal Rock Opera “Operation: Mindcrime”. Just look at that random umlaut over the “y”…you could smell the Rock from a mile off.
I was 13 when this album first came out, and I still have the cassette somewhere. I damn near wore the thing out listening to the story of young Nikki and his slow descent in madness as a drug addicted hitman working for the shadowy Dr. X. The social commentary is as valid today as it was twenty years ago, and, funnily enough, there was a Bush in power then too…
Did I mention it has the full live album too?!
I remember lying in my bedroom with the cassette in my Walkman, volume turned up enough to hear every single detail of the music. One of the reasons I have bad hearing today, no doubt. The album is incredibly complex and is rightly hailed as one of the greatest Prog Rock albums ever recorded. Listening to Scott Rockenfield’s incredible, complex, polyrhythmic drums pounding under the wailing alto voice of Geoff Tate was enough to make my hair stand on end. In fact, if I listen carefully now it still does. And that amazes me.
My good friend Iain, now at UCSF and doing very well for himself I might add, played bass in a band with me here in Memphis for a while. We have fairly similar tastes in music, and spent many a good drunken hour deconstructing Tool riffs and chatting about all the gigs we’ve been too (between the two of us, literally hundreds). But when Queensrÿche played in San Francisco recently, I begged Iain to go so that I could attend vicariously, but he flat out refused. More than that he dared to criticize the band and their music.
Alright, I admit, it’s a bit cheesy. Michael Kamen’s string arrangements are very operatic, and blend with the ghostly/heavenly choir. And, well I can think of no other band who would have the audacity to include “Raison d’être” in their lyrics.. and make it rhyme:
No chance for contact
There’s no raison d’être
My only hope is one day I’ll forget
But still, how can I have a response so visceral to this, and Iain one so disdainful?
Nature have been running a series of articles on music and science and there’s been some interesting commentary on both the Nature podcast and NeuroPod, the Nature Neuroscience podcast. One point I thought very interesting was that we (humans) find music appealing and exciting when it defies our expectations. When the performer plays something differently to how we predict it will be played. That might be a different note, a key change or even something more simple like dotting their crotchets (for God’s sake, Grant, stop giggling!). I can see the logic behind this, and I think it’s why I love Prog Rock so much: because it is unpredictable. And even when you know the song and can anticipate the changes (essential if like some of us you also play a musical instrument), it is still possible to marvel at the imagination of the original authors.
But still, isn’t it interesting how two people with fairly similar backgrounds and socio-economic standing can have such widely varying tastes? Although, despite my best efforts, Iain remains steadfastly Scotch Scots to his very core, I don’t think this is to blame. We like a lot of the same things, and yet have very different tastes in others. And musically this fascinates me. Iain doesn’t like the taste of beer and I don’t like vodka, so that one is easy to explain…but is the simple genetics of gustation and olfaction also responsible for our divergent tastes in music? And what of others like us who might like (shudder) Hip-Hop or some other perfectly ghastly nonsense (like Scat Jazz, or Opera).
Where is this programmed? How much is nature vs. nurture? How rigid is the programming and is it alterable?
Just some thoughts to ponder why I work on my air-guitar solo… excuse me, that’s my cue…
Last updated:
Thursday, 07 Aug
2008 - 19:00 UTC
Rush. The Brighton Centre. Sometime in 1980. Or maybe ’twas 1981. The whole of 2112. In dubbly.
Dubbly just makes everything sound better.
Sunny Day Real Estate at the 9:30 club in DC, circa 2000-that band changed my life.
The concert and band that will forever mark my youth-The Smashing Pumpkins.
Lollapalooza, 1994 front row, caught Billy Corgan’s pick and I actually shed tears during the concert that night…Siamese Dream was my bible in those days…it was like Billy knew me.
OK my melodrama is over for the day! Great post.
Re: the top picture – the mix of androgyny and hard-core-dom has always confused me.
That aside, the question of whether musical taste can be genetically pre-determined is an interesting one. We certainly have the sheer volume of genetic code to contain it. Whether or not we do, I don’t know. Taste (gustation) is pretty well-defined, relatively speaking. Some people are gentically, “super-tasters” to whom many vegetable extracts taste horrifically bitter. As to why people shy away from things I love, such as chicken liver, that has to be nurture over nature. Many societies hold on to the belief that offal = ick.
It will be interesting to see if there are certain gene alleles that pre-dispose people to enjoy certain musical genres, like jazz or prog-rock.
Hi Michael, thanks. I bought Siamese Dream last week :) Jimmy Chamberlain was an inspiration to me as a young drummer…
Anna, hey! Simul-posting… we’re so W2.0 :)
I think it would make a fun project actually… maybe I can get a small grant…
I am reluctant to reveal the total contents of my shiny new iPod (actually, it’s an iPhone, doncha know) for fear of online humiliation. But I am having all kinds of fun uploading old CDs into iTunes.
Best gig… Hmmm, U2 in Paris, seen from three rows back, was sweaty and crushed but totally worth it. Muse were unexpectedly amazing too, the show being complete with massive balloons that turned out to be covered in UV-fluorescent dye, leaving the whole crowd with glowing hands and faces. Ah, Glasgow’s Barrowlands, good times… Gomez are very hard to beat as a live band though, their performance in Vancouver’s Commodore (a venue almost as good as the Barrowlands) being my all-time favourite.
Of course the loudest gig I’ve ever been to is a much easier question to answer. The White Stripes in Vancouver’s Plaza of Nations – a very echo-y and open glass structure. I’m sure Jack White’s guitar was largely responsible for the structural damage that closed it down.
Hmmm… favourite gig? Metallica at Earl’s Court in 1996/7? Or Biohazard, the first time I saw them was at The Marque Club in London (RIP sniff). By the end of the gig I think there were more people on stage than in the crowd :)
GWAR always put on a good show too… seen them three times now…
My early drumming days ended around the age of 6.
Since I wasn’t good at that, I found other talents and went from there.
It will be interesting to see if there are certain gene alleles that pre-dispose people to enjoy certain musical genres, like jazz or prog-rock.
Indeed Anna.
Where is this programmed? How much is nature vs. nurture? How rigid is the programming and is it alterable?
well, I blame my 5 year older brother for my taste in hard rock. We shared a tape recorder and not too surprising he didn’t want to listen to [Swedish] pop when I was 7 and he was 12. It was either to hate & hate Iron Maiden and Metallica/Black Sabbath or start liking them. I went for the drums, bass and loudness :)
Favourite gig? maybe that first big concert with the Pet Shop Boys (1992?). It was magical and I was hm… young :)
Or the Mesh concert outdoors when the sun was setting in the background. Then again, that [last] concert Nirvana played with Teenage Fanclub as starters when I happened to get let in without a ticket…. priceless.
From my end, what the hell was Ratboy all about ?
I enjoyed writing it (musically/lyrically) but to this day, have no idea about where this was going.
Conjuring up such an image though was more fun that writing the song.
Some parts of musical appreciation are determined by nature. We can find these aspects by examining what people have in common.
There is the typical phenomenon that once you get older you start disliking everything that is new. This powerful emotion can be enhanced by parenthood creating a powerful feedback loop where there is an inverse correlation to the age of the offspring and the appreciation of the music they listen too.
I propose that the general dislike of new music past a certain age is the result of the entrance into a specific stage of brain development, where the higher music appreciation center is closed for further new connections.
At the same time a feedback loop develops between the lower parenthood frontal cortex and the higher music appreciation center with a direct path to the frustration center.
The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky talked about the loss of musical novelty-seeking behavior in this NPR piece.
His experience is different from mine, however (or maybe I’m just a freak), as I had to forbid one of my technicians (much younger than I am) from playing the same Zwan album over and over. The repetition made me crazy, and I stopped the madness temporarily by bringing in some old Bauhaus and Gang of Four tapes (which then got played over and over until I hated them too). My taste in music seems much more diverse than that of many of my younger friends and students, who often seem locked into one genre, or even one strain or lineage within a genre. Perhaps I’m just slow to develop or something.
Agh, Kristi, the pain.
A grad student in Cambridge had about (let’s be generous) thirty songs in his collection, which were played over and over again. I actually developed a nervous tic every time I heard Yellow that took years to get rid of.
I always feel sorry for staff in shops or cafes where they have the same tape, same selection of music playing every day. I’d need ear plugs.
Then there is the mental jukebox that plays the same old things over again until they drive you barmy. I still remember a short stint in the field in 1998. It was some blasted desert to the west of Lake Turkana, and my job was to wander around slowly, looking at the ground for fossils that had weathered to the surface. As I paced round and round in the hot sun, my mental jukebox played Stargazer off the Rainbow album Rising. Must have been something about the forbidding hardness of the environment, but I did wish that my mental jukebox would play something more cheerful now and again.
My old lab in Glasgow used to listen to a radio station that played Yellow by Coldplay, Thankyou by Dido, and Stan by Eminem (sampling Thankyou by Dido, of course) about once each per hour. We ended up saying things like “that’s two Dido’s, time for lunch”.
Apparently the best way to get rid of an “earworm” like the one Henry describes is to listen to the whole song all the way through, as it’s usually just one phrase that gets stuck. And apparently women are much more prone to it than men for some reason.
Mark: I propose that the general dislike of new music past a certain age is the result of the entrance into a specific stage of brain development, where the higher music appreciation center is closed for further new connections.
I remember reading Anne Rice and her explanaition of why all vampires went insane after a while (work with me here folks, it was a late night). They were unable to keep up with the changing of the times as years rolled past. They ended up feeling so cut off and alone they went bonkers. I have been trying to keep up with music, but I am my dad :/ “Turn that bloody noise off!”
Kristi: My taste in music seems much more diverse than that of many of my younger friends and students, who often seem locked into one genre, or even one strain or lineage within a genre.
I’ve noticed my music taste has certainly broadened as I’ve got older. Just some stuff turns me cold though. When I was a kid it was Death Metal or nothing. Now I’m as likely to relax of an evening with a
syringe full of good heroinbottleglass of Merlot and the Best of Miles Davis…Frank: Years ago, in uni, a mate of mine worked in a dept. store. He said after a while it’s like any background noise; you just tune it out. Although one day they tried to hijack the sound system and play their own tunes. Apparently (and this dates me) the tape deck looked normal, but actually played backwards at a different speed. The main office would have tapes recorded specially to play in their stores on these machines.
Cath: Earworm
I just spewed a little. Thanks… And now I have Yellow on perma-repeat in my head.
You bastards!
have you ever tried the old trick of whistling or singing something quietly when you get to work in the morning? Then count how many of your co-workers are singing it by lunchtime?
@ Cath
Ah, Glasgow’s Barrowlands, good times…
For some unknown reason, despite living in Glasgow, I’ve still to go to the Barrowlands
The closest our last band came to playing there was a trio of gigs at Glasgow’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut a few years ago.
Couple of weeks ago, I uploaded an MP3 of a mixing desk recording of Urban Dilema.
Of the oodles of gigs that I’ve done in Scotland, without question, King Tut’s was the pinnacle.
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Having spent much much more time on stage than off stage at gigs, what thus far has been my pers fav?
Very hard to say as the “n” is so small and so long ago. The best that comes to mind (and I only watched it remotely as did 1.5 billion others) has to be Live Aid back in 1985.
Now that was one hell of a gig and I strikingly recall switching on every conceivable recording device/TV in the house to ensure that the family missed nothing.
As per the above Live Aid wiki, the global line-up that day remains unprecedented.
If this was “before your time” or if you want to spin back to distant memories, there’s around 4,000 videos of the event over at YouTube
The finale at Wembley Stadium in London was the last segment I watched before bedtime that day.
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My fav quote from the whole event comes from Queen’s Freddie Mercury.
Reporter says to Freddie, “so, what’s it like to sing in-front of an audience of 1.5 billion?”
Freddie replied back brilliantly with “don’t know, haven’t done it yet”
CLASS
King Tut’s is great too, but the Barrowlands is something special. Maybe it’s the sprung floor from the dance hall days (something it has in common with the Commodore in Vancouver) – apparently it improves acoustics. It’s also fun when the band’s lead singer gets everyone to jump at the same time – the floor really does bounce! Now… was it Muse or Ash or the Divine Comedy or … who got us to do that? They’ve all blurred into each other a bit!
Ahhh… on stage… big ones that stick in the mind was opening for Lacuna Coil when they were on a tour break from The Warped Tour a few years back. Or another great one was opening for a great one: Mr. Gilby Clark (once of Guns n Roses fame). Bloody nice chap!
(for the Rock naive amongst you, he’s the one in the white T-shirt, not grinning like a Rock Ape.
Emma used the play the piano to me…
I have played Hammond on stage with Brian Robertson, ex-guitarist of Thin Lizzy…
Really! Was it a jam or a organised gig? That’s so cool. I get so nervous before those “big” gigs, but then you get on stage and the adrenaline kicks in, the nerves go and suddenly, for just an hour or so, you are GOD!