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Adam Smith’s law of competition is supposed to create an optimal economy of consumers and producers. When a better product appears on the market, the consumer rewards the producer with his or her custom. This spurs the producer’s competitor to create an even better product, etc. ensuring a cycle of continual improvement.

But this law breaks down when it comes to bands. With the sheer number of musical acts these days, the competition should be fierce and the consumer should be able to choose from the very best available. But for three reasons, this is not the case.

First, because our culture has abandoned communal music-making, performing in a band is one of the few accepted ways of expressing our musicality. Group singing in classrooms, churches, bars, games, etc. is a normal part of most cultures, and used to be part of ours. Now music instruction has been cut from many schools, and recorded music has replaced singalongs. We no longer sing our national anthem. Most parties in restaurants can’t even manage to sing “Happy Birthday” all in the same key. Almost everybody of whatever ability enjoys making music, but the socially-encouraged path is only to perform music for others, to be a “rock star.”

Second, since the cost of music to the modern consumer is negligible, the value of any one band to the consumer is not very high. There is a glut. While each band is competing for the attention of the consumer, the consumer does not see him/herself as part of this economy. He/she can have essentially all the music he/she needs at any time, and has no reason to seek for anything more.

Third, the ubiquity of bands creates a bottleneck. The journalistic, academic and commercial forces that have traditionally provided some discernment and encouragement of excellence are overwhelmed, and have largely abandoned the task. Talented bands and untalented bands all end up in the same pool, never to be evaluated. And when a band is randomly elevated from this pool, it is more likely than not to be unremarkable, even as it becomes the talk of the town.

We have broken the invisible hand that used to feed us.

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In 1999, the year 2000 was going to be the end of the world. Because of the Y2K bug, our computer-dependent civilization would fall into chaos come New Year’s Day. “Two thousand zero zero/Party over/Oops, out of time.”

But Y2K was not a bug; it was a failure of imagination. Adopting a protocol that didn’t allow for more than two-digit years showed our disregard for consequences, our disbelief in the future.

Hand in hand with our cynical poseur nihilism, the fatuous punk-rock death-wish: “No future for me. No future for you.” Romanticized destruction by a generation who mostly hadn’t experienced it. But the spiritual crisis was real.

Yet the world didn’t end. The programmers fixed it. The politicians got on it. We did believe in the future after all.

Then came 9/11, our real Y2K. The Columbine killers’ ethos adopted as a religious war. The chickens we weren’t even counting came home to roost.

And 16 years on, we’re still stuck with that Millennium Glitch. Waiting for our future.

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In 1969, as an 11-year old Beatles fan, I learned that Paul was dead. The devastating evidence in the clues laced into songs and album art was irrefutable. My only nagging doubt was how they’d found someone who looked, sounded and wrote songs exactly like Paul McCartney.

Since then, the belief in far-fetched conspiracies and other preposterous notions has moved steadily from the fringes toward the mainstream. Many seemingly intelligent people can spout 9/11 Truth theories or climate change denialism, with a wealth of evidence at their fingertips, but with no apparent ability to consider likelihoods or judge human behavior.

Today’s conspiracy theories contain the hallmarks of the “Paul Is Dead” scare: The eagerness to use a few stray anomalies or unanswered questions to fabricate a highly unlikely scenarios; and the blithe dismissal of the preponderance of contradictory evidence as part of a cover up. These theories all posit unbroached secrecy and frictionless cooperation among hundreds or thousands of co-conspirators.

A healthy skepticism of authority has given way to a political program of paranoia, to the point where even genuine whistleblowers or speakers of truth to power, like Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky, are dismissed as accomplices in a grand conspiracy.

It is almost as if some evil group were creating and spreading cockamamie theories as false flags to engender cynicism, in an effort to distract us and disengage us from the reality of politics, democracy and the hard work of thinking logically and carefully.

Recently at a music conference “radio panel” I found myself apologizing for the number of genres I use on my new album (country, power pop, electro pop, bluegrass, jazz, world music; with lyrics comic, political, psychological, philosophical). Until I realized there was nothing to apologize for. For me, genre diversity is not an accident, it’s a feature.
 
Coming of age musically in the ’70s, when radio would segue from Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” to Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer,” genre diversity was a given. The Beatles’ White Album was my cornerstone. It gave me, and, I assumed, everyone else – music consumers and producers alike – carte blanche.
 
Genres have always fascinated me. They start as products of distinct cultures or subcultures. But as they are absorbed into the mainstream, they become styles and ultimately end up as feels.
 
To me, genre is a musical consideration like key or tempo. What genre best lends itself to the subject matter of the song? But more than that, genre is an interesting avenue of exploration. What kinds of effects can be created by juxtaposing genres or merging genres? This has been my approach to making music since I first started.
 
There is nothing particularly novel about genre hopping. Historically, it has been more the norm than the exception. Mozart evoked Turkish janissary bands, wrote German Lieder and Italian Opera. Stephen Foster, the father of American popular song, wrote Irish ballads, minstrel songs and waltzes. Genre hopping was purely practical; different genres represented different markets for selling music.
 
But in our time, for people like me, genre is a choice. I like mixing genres within one song, butting up one against another, or melding two together. And I am far from alone. Many of my favorite musicians do the same thing, some much more so than I. It’s fun. You can try it at home.
 
Since I first tried it, I’ve gotten lots of push-back to my ecumenical attitude. I remember arguing at age twelve with a bandmate over using kalimba on a song. Commercially, it has not been perhaps the wisest tack for me. Apparently, it makes radio programmers heads explode. But I make music the way I want music to be.
 
I understand the resistance. First, music is hard to talk about, and hard to categorize. People want to get a handle on it. Genre non-specificity makes it all the more challenging. Second, I believe genres function, consciously or unconsciously, as sort of cultural stereotypes. Genre hopping can be jarring and, in a sense, dissonant, because it makes us question our stereotypes.
 
There is an idea that music that hops from style to style somehow lacks integrity or authenticity. Fans want their favorite genres to retain their stylistic individuality; the genres to stay separate but (un)equal. The assumption seems to be that one should make music in the style that one was first exposed to as a child (one’s so-called “roots”). Well, I suppose, as someone who grew up on the wide open ears of ’70s radio and the White Album, that’s what I do.

Anyone who has gotten up to sing an original song in front of a crowd walks a tightrope between the twin poles of humiliating rejection and triumphant embrace. Regardless of what she is singing about, the singer-songwriter trades in intimacy. She makes herself vulnerable, exposes herself by the very act of raising her voice to sing her own song in public. She begs our indulgence.

But what makes us grant that indulgence? To come across, she must disarm and woo not only the hostile or indifferent crowd, but the indulgent crowd as well.

A beautiful voice, a catchy melody, a clever turn of phrase, a charming persona, a passionate delivery can capture our attention and seduce us. To make us hang onto every word – the singer songwriter’s holy grail – she must have something to say.

But what to say? The confessional singer-songwriter writes from her own life. But it is certainly not her life experiences that make us want to listen. The political writer tells us what’s wrong with the world. But political opinions don’t make us want to listen. The theatrical or comic writer makes observations about character or life in general. But a set of observations isn’t enough.

What we really are listening for are original and universal truths. That’s all. So that when she raises her voice in front of the crowd, we know it’s not about her, it’s about us all.

Musician Bemoans Death of the Music Business

It all sounded very appealing thirty years ago when a Bay Area programmer first explained to me the concept of the entire catalog of recorded music being accessible from a home computer. I wanted that.

But between ’84 and when it actually came to pass, I made a career in music. Thanks to longstanding statutes and agreements for remuneration of songwriters, I reaped a small bounty writing songs for kids TV. I developed a vested interest in the music racket.

The Music Racket

Songwriting is largely done on spec. Most songs aren’t hits and make no money. But when a song is a hit, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Each broadcast, mechanical sale, re-use in another medium, means another payment, practically in perpetuity. It’s a populist method. Theoretically it rewards talent and compensates writers for the unpaid toil of honing their craft and writing songs that aren’t hits. It’s a racket.

Pandora’s Box

But that racket’s been systematically undone by Pandora, Napster, Mega, Spotify. Between stealing and streaming – which amount to about the same thing – there’s less and less in it for songwriters and musicians. And Pandora & co have opened a Pandora’s Box: film, publishing, journalism, and even education, are all being “democratized” and de-professionalized.

This digital onslaught is not merely a technological inevitability. It’s a racket too. The Tim Westergrens and Kim Dotcoms have become multimillionaires by concertedly undermining the livelihoods of a vast creative class. They’re shrinking the pie and taking most of what’s left.

New Business Model

At this point, I’m supposed to talk about the need for a new paradigm: an increase in streaming rates; more attractive (and expensive) subscription services; a surcharge on the manufacturers of digital devices, web services, service providers and pipelines. Those ideas all sound great but I fear they are weak tea to the methamphetamine of free.

Who Can Argue with Free?

Because, face it, everybody wants a limitless music library, free news, free education. Who wouldn’t? A generation has grown up believing that’s how it works.

Think Different

One way or another, musicians need to carve out a new racket in the changed landscape. I’d like to keep a populist approach, but maybe something more radical is in order: public subsidy. If digitalization is the engine of efficiency and economic growth it’s hyped to be, why should it put us out of work? Let’s harness it to put us “out of work” productively. Pay us a stipend to do what we do.

After years of Silicon Valley companies foisting “revolutionary” gadgets on us, and touting “world-changing” blah blah blah, perhaps we should take the digital agenda at its word. Music wants to be free. So does rent and food.

The Digital One Percent, rather than fighting government with their strange right-wing libertarian bedfellows, should join us in pushing for a massive expansion of government art subsidies. Beginning with those in the “intellectual property” industries, let’s put the entire creative class on the government dole, with commensurate tax increases to cover the expense.

That sounds like a racket I’d want to get into.

Being of a certain age – I’m 55 – and a music guy, I naturally share some of the perspectives of my late boomer cohort. Newer, we’ve learned, is not always better. We’ve experienced the depth of analog recording, we remember the visual richness of Super 8, we’ve watched Antonioni without a fast-forward button and understand the value of a longer attention span.

But sometimes the opinions of colleagues, friends and acquaintances in my demographic shade into cranky middle-age guy prejudice. Specifically when it comes to pop music.

I’ve been a casual-to-heavy listener to pop music since about 1966, and a lifelong student of the pop song. I tuned out briefly in the late ‘90s when my kids were little and tuned back in in the early 2000s. I make a point of listening to pop radio from time to time. Because to me there’s nothing better than a great pop song.

With this in mind, I decided to look through the top 100 songs from each year of from the last six decades. After scanning the charts, and listening to any unfamiliar cuts, I can say that current pop music (2012-2013) is no worse nor any better now than average. There are lots of mediocre songs that are popular, and some good ones, and occasional great ones. It was ever thus. This is the result I expected and was based entirely on my own subjective judgment about the songs on the lists.

This is not to say that tastes and programming decisions don’t fluctuate over the years to render some eras more fertile with creativity than others. The music of the mid-to-late 60s and early 70s seemed to yield more good hit songs than average, while the 80s were particularly rife with bad hit songs.

What this survey reinforced for me is the notion that pop music has more continuity than not, that it is primarily young people’s music, and that if you don’t like one song, just wait for the next one to come on.

When did the “dream” become a metaphor for ambition? When did dreaming become an entitlement to success for aspiring American Idols? The one thing besides “hard work” necessary for achieving fame and fortune, as we are frequently assured by celebrities?

Once upon a time, a dream was in the realm of the imagination, a fancy, something unobtainable. “Lips that once were mine/Tender eyes that shine/They will light my way tonight/I’ll see you in my dreams.” ¹

A dream was something desperately desired: “Out of my dreams and into your arms I long to fly.” ²

It was a consolation prize: “I need you so, that I could die/I love you so and that is why/Whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream.” ³

Or a noble attitude in a struggle against overwhelming odds: “To dream the impossible dream/To fight the unbeatable foe/To bear with unbearable sorrow/To run where the brave dare not go.” ⁴

Martin Luther King, Jr. used his dream to imbue African American aspirations with a Biblical loftiness and inevitability:  “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Somewhere along the way it morphed into willful delusion: “If you dream, then you can do anything/If you dream, you’re halfway to destiny/If you dream, dream the impossible/If you dream, ’cause a dream’s unstoppable.” ⁵

And our preference for dreams over reality doesn’t end with pop songs. When a quarter of our electorate believes Obama is a Kenyan socialist dictator, or that 9/11 was an inside job, our society is long way toward putting itself to sleep. Our financial system nearly collapsed because it placed bets on mortgages of fictional value. Even our philosophy and cosmology entertain delusion delusions: reality is a construct; we live in one alternate universe among an infinite multiverse. There is a systemic problem.

We can trace the genesis of our national somnambulance to James Truslow Adams and his 1931 coining of the term “the American dream.” But Adams’s dream is a societal ideal not an individual birthright.  Somehow, his notion that one is not a prisoner of birth or circumstance has transmogrified into the valuing of the imaginary and the illusory over the real and the practical.

What’s become of our lauded American pragmatism? Wake up!

¹“I’ll See You in My Dreams” by Gus Kahn & Isham Jones

² “Out of My Dreams” by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein, III

³ “All I Have to Do is Dream” by Felice & Boudleaux Bryant

⁴“To Dream the Impossible Dream” Joe Darion & Mitch Leigh

⁵ “If You Dream” by J. Valentine, Harvey Mason, Jerry Franklin, Joseph Bereal Jr., Robert Newt, Kristina Stevens, Dureel Babbs & Thai Jones