Since January, I’ve been making a monthly “tapeover” mixtape made a from a batch of random, pre-recorded, sealed tapes I bought for 99 cents a piece. I wrote more about it and shared the mixes in the latest newsletter.
Defined by negatives
I’ve long been inspired by the punk band Wire’s rules of negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.”
In How Music Works, David Byrne writes about the early style of the Talking Heads playing CBGBs as a three-piece combo, how “it was less a band than an outline for a band,” and how they, too, defined themselves against the “overwhelming” sense of what had come before:
The only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. Some others in that scene had similar ideas. The Ramones didn’t allow guitar solos, for example, but we took reductionism pretty damn far. It was a performance style defined by negatives—no show-offy solos… no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights (our instructions to club lighting people were “Turn them all on at the beginning and turn them off at the end”), no rehearsed stage patter (I announced the song titles and said “Thank you” and nothing more), and no singing like a black man. The lyrics too were stripped bare. I told myself I would use no clichéd rock phrases, no “Ohh, baby”s or words that I wouldn’t use in daily speech, except ironically, or as a reference to another song.
It was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left? Who knows? With the objectionable bits removed, does it then become more “real”? More honest? I don’t think so anymore. I eventually realized that the simple act of getting on stage is in itself artificial, but the dogma provided a place to start. We could at least pretend we had jettisoned our baggage (or other people’s baggage, as we imagined it) and would therefore be forced to come up with something new.
In Jonathan Gould’s “The Origin Story of ‘Stop Making Sense,” he writes about how director Jonathan Demme defined his film of the band by what he wasn’t going to do:
Demme made it clear that he wanted to focus the whole production solely on the band’s performance. Unexceptional as this might sound, it was a departure from the way that rock concerts had previously been presented on film, from Richard Lester’s mock-documentary “A Hard Day’s Night” to Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” by dispensing with a “backstory” of the musicians coming and going; the logistics of staging the show; interviews with the band members, promoters, and fans; and the fervent response of the crowd. Instead, Demme proposed to simply film the band onstage, expertly, while avoiding the rhythmic, fast-paced, jump-cut style of editing associated with the music videos being shown on the recently established platform MTV.
In Rob Walker’s recent newsletter, “‘No’ Rules,” he talks about how extreme self-imposed constraints can spur creative leaps and your signature work. (Rob has an assignment he gives to students, “Always/Never,” in which he has his students make a list of 3 things their work must always do, and 3 things their work must never do.) But, Rob says, you are totally within your rights to eventually break your own rules and start subtracting the subtractions.
In fact, it might be crucial to your artistic survival to break your own rules. Jonathan Gould points out that while Jonathan Demme took a minimalist approach, by the time Stop Making Sense came around the Talking Heads had “jettisoned many of the musical and theatrical restrictions they had originally placed on themselves.”
Rob pointed out their amazing Live in Rome concert from 1980 as an example of the great leaps they had already made in just a few years:
You can see the same progression with a band like The White Stripes — at first, they began with their extreme constraints of threes: voice, guitar, drums; red, white, black, etc. Slowly, they broke their own rules, added in other instruments on later albums, expanding their sound. (Their biggest single, “Seven Nation Army,” was radical at the time because they included a bass line! Okay, so it wasn’t actually a bass line, it was Jack White’s guitar tuned down an octave with a whammy pedal, but everybody thought it was a bass, so it seemed like they were breaking their rules…)
I love this idea of subtraction and addition, contraction and expansion, breaking your own rules…
(Thanks to Rob for all this — subscribe to his newsletter and buy The Art of Noticing! Here’s an interview between the two of us.)
McCartney on not-knowing and doing it now
I think anybody who is a Beatles fan sort of identifies with one Beatle or the other. When I was a kid, I wanted to be John. The older I get, the more I want to be Paul, granny music and all, moving his own microphone.
One thing I’m interested in is Paul’s insistence that he doesn’t really know where the music comes from. Years ago, I clipped this paragraph from a 2016 interview:
You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ‘I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.
John Higgs expands on this in his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche:
After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’
Another thing I admire is that McCartney doesn’t torture himself too much with his songwriting process. More from Love and Let Die:
McCartney places great emphasis on starting and finishing work immediately, before you have had the chance to overanalyse or come up with an excuse not to do it. This is an attitude that he credits his father with instilling in him. Whenever Paul or his brother Mike would try to get out of a chore by saying they would do it tomorrow, their father would tell them ‘D.I.N. – do it now’. As he explains, ‘you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through’. This approach paid dividends when he came to work with John Lennon. Every time they sat down to write a song they would finish it, and they never once came away from a writing session having failed to come up with something. “I’m all for that way of working,’ he has said. ‘Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.’
“There was no writer’s block or hoping for inspiration in McCartney’s writing life,” Higgs writes. “The music just came and all he had to do was get it down before it was lost.”
(I also think it’s interesting that McCartney says he used to pull The Fool card in Tarot readings.)
Increasingly, I look to incorporate “not knowing” and “do it now” into my work. Whether it’s a newsletter or a blackout poem or a collage, or whatever, I try to walk into the studio not knowing exactly what I’m going to do — I just show up and I say to myself that I’ve got to have something by the time I leave. This constraint of time and space usually leads to something, if not something good.
Television, time, and constraint
I lot of my work is about the freedom of artistic constraint, so it’s fun to think about constraint in mediums I’m not as familiar with.
In his new book, Avidly Reads Screen Time, Philip Maciak writes about television as a medium of constraint, particularly in regards to time:
Its various genres are often defined by their temporal boundaries: the half-hour sitcom, the hour-long drama, the limited miniseries, the live broadcast. They’re defined by the hour they’re designed to air: daytime, prime time, late night. More dramatically than even the theater or the Victorian serial, and just as much as radio drama, the most instantly recognizable modes of TV, even today, were shaped in their infancy by the simple question of how much time is available to show them, when, and over how long a period…. And that’s only thinking about questions of length and duration. These forms also evolved historically in relation to time slots, commercial breaks, or even seasons of the year.
“The history of television,” he writes, “is a history of how those constraints became generative, rather than limiting.”
Maciak points out that Twin Peaks, for example, was a genuinely weird show that “improvised, unnervingly, self-consciously, with the genre conventions of the daytime soap and the cop show.” But it was also conventionally structured to air on network, “a prime time soap. Its shape was recognizable despite the uncanniness of its contents. And while that shape itself got stranger over the course of the series, its innovations were smuggled in initially through a form that was ultimately familiar to viewers.”
We’re now in the era of streaming, in which any time constraints on television are like “vestigial tails,” remnants of their ancestral forms.
Sitcoms on streamers often run around a half hour, and they often look like sitcoms from decades earlier. Same with prime time serials. But they don’t have to. Freed from time slots and commercial breaks, they don’t need to adhere to specific runtimes. They don’t air at specific times. Any adherence they have to the old forms is merely a matter of tradition…. These are the new constraints. There are no constraints.
Watching TV right now, you can start to see the varied results of “there are no constraints.”
I have been mildly dissatisfied with the final seasons of many shows recently, and I realized that all of them are screwing around with time in different ways. (Tiny spoilers ahead.)
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is using flash-forwards to show us what happens to the characters several decades after the show’s main action.
Barry took a big leap in the middle of season 4 — episode 5 starts off 8 years after the end of episode 4.
Succession in season 4 is paced (as far as I can tell) one day per episode.
I wondered how the last season of Ted Lasso — by far the most disappointing show in the batch — fits into the picture here, if it does at all.
In “‘Ted Lasso’ Has Lost Its Way,” critic David Sims says the show is “is a pure example of the excesses that can flourish on streaming television. The show has no time slot to worry about, and none of the formal or thematic constraints of network television.”
The question any workplace sitcom faces is how much to stray from the status quo; audiences need some sense that things can change, but not so much that the show’s formula is threatened…. Ted Lasso might have debuted as a sitcom, but it now obeys the freewheeling standards of premium dramas, pushing its episode lengths to make grand social statements about depression, workplace dynamics, and the changing standards of 21st-century masculinity.
(I personally thought the hour-long “Sunflowers” episode was the most decent thing they’ve done this season, so I’m not so sure the problem is ballooning runtimes.)
Sims’ take on Ted Lasso made me think about this bit from an interview with Abbott Elementary creator and showrunner Quinta Brunson:
Are you already thinking about ways to avoid your show getting stuck in ruts? I am, but the difference is, with the 22-minute sitcom, the basics are “situation” and “comedy.” It’s in the name. We don’t have to do much. I was tuning into “The Fresh Prince” to see Will do something that Uncle Phil yells at him for and to see Jazz get thrown out of the house. Whereas with most of the streaming comedies, you’re expecting a certain amount of development from these characters. If you don’t get it, you feel a little let down, because you’re expecting this high art. I simply want to make people laugh. That’s all I’m here for. Which is the beauty of the 22-minute sitcom: It can only do so much.
There’s a clarity there that I really admire. Brunson knows she’s working within a form, and the game is to do as much as you can within it. In her words, the “beauty” of the form is that “it can only do so much.”
Which brings me to my favorite show: HBO’s Somebody Somewhere. A half-hour comedy that is weird, and tender, and bawdy, and shows you things you’re not used to seeing on the screen. It gets away with a lot, and part of that has to do with the fact that it doesn’t take up a lot of time.
As Mark Duplass recently tweeted, “Every now and then the companies say ‘fuck it’ to their mandates and let us make one like this.”
Enjoy it while it lasts…
The best song ever written about success
In my opinion, the best song about artistic success is The White Stripes’ “Little Room,” the sixth track off of their breakout album, White Blood Cells.
Here is the song in its entirety:
Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!
A perfect 50 seconds. I’ve never heard it put more succinctly.
Here’s Meg and Jack doing the song on Letterman with “Fell in Love with a Girl”:
It’s autobiographical, obviously: The first two White Stripes records were recorded in Jack White’s living room in Detroit. For White Blood Cells, they traveled to Memphis to record in an actual studio. (A bigger room.)
In this brilliant clip from the 2010 documentary Under Great White Northern Lights, Jack White talks about the “secret” of the White Stripes: Constraints.
One part of my brain says I’m tired of trying to come up with things in this box, but I force myself to do it, because I know something good can come out of it, if I really work inside it…. Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want — that just kills creativity.
(You might recognize that quote from chapter 10 of Steal Like An Artist.)
Related reading: “Suckcess.”
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