Musical stylistic isomorphism

Back in the 80’s, a friend noticed the isomorphism between punk rock and rap. Stripped-down, edgy, violently angry, atonal, lots of yelling. Music for angry young men.

I was very late in discovering both the highly-technical grindcore/death metal styles, and highly-technical IDM like Venetian Snares. I’m noticing now how similar they are/were. Very complex, almost (or in the case of IDM, definitely) impossible rhythms, lots of atonality, and harsh, violent anger. Music that really challenges– almost flips off– the audience. Brashly, unapologetically, and defiantly intellectual, with a “statistical density” (Zappa, the first IDM’er!?) that says, “Just you try and figure this shit out!”. And they both came into popularity at the same time, the mid-to-late 2000’s.

What I found interesting about the rap/punk isomorphism in the 80’s is that one evolved out of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock scene, and fairly independently, since the two scenes were fairly antagonistic (and, at the time, racially-divided too). A similar kind of parallel evolution seems to have happened with grindcore and IDM: one emergedout of the dance/disco scene, the other out of the rock/metal scene, and not too much overlap between those two scenes.

Of course, the trends have moved on, and I see parallel evolutions happening in the realm of ambient-noise and metal-noise: noisy non-rhythmic clouds of sound, converging on white noise, but one coming from a group making the noise via computers, and the other from a group making them via guitars.

Zappa’s love-hate relationship

Scott Thunes in his blog mentions Zappa having the weirdest love-hate relationship with jazz that he’d ever seen.

In reading what Zappa has written or said in interviews, I’ve determined that Zappa had a weird love-hate relationship with everything. Love-hate relationships are just how Zappa approached the universe. They were his mode of relating to things.

He had a weird love-hate relationship with modern music, as evidenced by countless interviews and also his 1984 speech to ASUC, printed in its entirety in his 1988 autobiography.

He also had a weird love-hate relationship with rock and pop music as well– writing catchy rock tunes and then giving them lyrics like “Titties n’ Beer”.

He had an especially weird love-hate relationship with musicians in general– his bit in his autobiogaphy about the “human element” evidences this, and many interview quotes both dissing and praising the various musicians he’d hired and worked with.

He had a very weird love-hate relationship with politics– he absolutely hated it, derided it as “the entertainment branch of industry”, despised watching it on the news, but he couldn’t stay away from it, and kept on top of it religiously.

He had a weird love-hate relationship with parenting, considering he hated the whole Ozzie n’ Harriet stereotype and loathed doing any kind of family activities with his kids, but he definitely loved his kids and was a doting dad.

And, as reported in some unauthorized biographies and also by his and his wife’s own admission in interviews and in the book (“Gail has said in interviews that what makes our relationship work is that we hardly talk to each other”), they had a weird love-hate relationship with each other as well.

Zappa’s whole thing was love-hate relationships. He was notorious for exalting and deriding things at the same time, taking them very seriously and also snidely dismissing them at the same time. He was so rich in irony, he couldn’t do anything without taking the piss out of it.

It’s all eyebrows.

A musical tale of two preznits

Class, coolness, modesty, dignity, soul, and chops. Damn, never knew he could actually play.

Compared to… ass-clown with no sense of rhythm and no clue:

Yikes.

Of course, that’s how it works

Enjoyed Hofstader's essay on computer-generated music. His perception seems entirely correct to me, as someone who has spent a lot of time both composing and improvising music.

Most music genres have very rote, rigid formats, and are essentially random variations bounded by the rules of that particular genre. Pop and rock songs are almost entirely formulaic. The rules of classical harmony are quite rigid, and forms like sonatas, symphonies, ballets, and fugues are excruciatingly well-defined– so much so that violating them caused famous scandals (c.f. Beethoven's Ninth, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, etc.). This hasn't changed very much– good luck getting something on the radio that doesn't fit the "format" of that station. Even "experimental" music has gone through phases of rigid trendiness: serial music and minimalism were formulaic and mechanistic almost by definition. Even "free" 60's jams were extremely programmatic: drums, bass, guitar, 2-chord or 3-chord vamps, and a random assortment of the same old tired blues licks and modes. Same goes for modal jazz. I've spent my life improvising, and the old jazz cliche holds true: "If you make a mistake, just play it twice". I was known as a damned good soloist, and  all I did was let my fingers do random things within the confines of a key or chord progression, and try to visit the dominant note of the chord when it changes, so that it sounded like I meant to do that.

So why can't a computer write music just as well as a human? The things are already writing poetry anyway.