Brian Woodbury

You Are Not Your Brain

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— Check out the video for “The Brain” – link at the bottom. —

We’ve grown accustomed to headlines breathlessly intoning the latest claptrap from neuroscience: “Brain study shows grandmaster chess players think differently than amateurs do.” “Your brain is like 100 billion mini-computers all working together.”  “Scared of the dentist? This is why, say neuroscientists.”

Of course, neuroscience has made amazing discoveries. But the popular ideas drawn from it are often foolish and, I think, dangerous.

Sure, it’s neat that an fMRI of your brain lights up in a certain way when you order Chinese takeout. But when your “ordering Chinese takeout” neuron is isolated, will that really give us any better understanding of how and why you order Chinese takeout? 

There’s no disputing that when you do stuff, your brain is involved. But the fact that your brain is involved doesn’t mean your brain is the proper focus for understanding that behavior, nor that your brain is the “cause” of that behavior.  

To say that some process in your brain makes you order Chinese takeout so that it can activate the brain’s pleasure centers sounds foolish because it doesn’t explain anything. It posits a theoretical something – yet to be observed – to explain a subjective experience we all are familiar with. 

In the Pixar movie Inside Out, the mind is portrayed as a sensory input – behavior output device. The data from the character’s senses combine with a small number of discrete emotions to somehow control the character’s actions. This is the rugged individualist concept of mind. Mind as an autonomous internal organ. 

But the mind is neither completely internal nor completely autonomous. The mind exists in the context of the environment. You know about Chinese takeout because there is such a thing as Chinese takeout to be known. You’ve learned of it, you’ve eaten it. Your mind is also something that happens in the environment of other minds. You come to consciousness through recognizing other consciousnesses. 

The problem of subjectivity and objectivity is a longstanding one in philosophy. Simply because advancements have been made in studying the brain doesn’t mean subjectivity – the experience of consciousness – can be discounted. Objectivity itself is a concept conveyed and grasped subjectively. 

The neurocentric perspective is a mechanistic and, ultimately, a solipsistic view of the world, where human agency is immaterial, and consciousness is an inconvenience explained away as a byproduct of biological processes, or, worse, as an “illusion” (illusion to whom?).

With all that in mind, I wrote this song. It’s a comedic reductio ad absurdum, each verse portraying a different straw man in the argument. It’s also an homage to the great comic songwriter Tom Lehrer, who was my teacher in college, and remains an inspiration to this day. Peter Lurye made and played the piano arrangement, in his most Lehreran manner. 

To give the song even more levity, for the video, I worked with animator Matt Lintschinger, who created another layer of absurdity with personified brains as foils to my Mr. Science character. 

Let me know what you think.

Further reading: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads; Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Let’s Build a Future, While Supplies Last

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A going-out-of-business sale for all time.

The degradation of the natural world began at a time we were more beholden to nature than it was to us. I won’t call it an innocent time, because man’s innocence has long been in question, and was anyway always placed at a time before now. But, working against the elements, and sometimes against our fellow humans, we brought homes, townships, cities, and a new civilization to this new-to-us old world.

Our vaunted frontier spirit became a national creed. Through these simple, natural, rural, down-home, out-in-the-country, back-to-the-land impulses and exploits, amid our seemingly endless bounty, we have slowly and inexorably taken much of the non-human world to the brink of extinction.

I had two realization a few years ago: First, that to end our destruction of nature, we’re going to have to abandon a lot of it, to not live in it. To not build a house in the middle of a forest and a fire zone, or lay a road through a wildlife sanctuary. Let alone tear it up for mining, or put a pipeline through it. It became clear that living in nature was not always congruent with honoring and worshipping it.

Second, I saw that to transition quickly off fossil fuels is ironically going to take a lot of fossil fuels. The infrastructure for a sustainable world will need massive energy inputs. And I saw that in both these ways, it was a race against time. It’s like when you realize, just after you’ve poured yourself a second bowl of cereal, there’s barely enough milk. Except the cereal just keeps pouring.

“While Supplies Last” is an attempt to take this subject on. John thomas Oaks is a brilliant, versatile, musically restless and incredibly prolific songwriter I met in the BMI Lehmann Engel Musical Theater Workshop in the late ’90s. He is a Christian who writes both religious and secular songs. Though I’m not religious, I respond deeply to Christian music, and I think Jt’s background brings a deep spirituality and a rich Americana to his setting of the lyrics.

Disruptors. Are we over them yet?

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We live in an age of disruption. Both in technology & politics. The exploitation and corruption rival the Gilded Age. Tech giants and startups alike make end runs around hard-fought labor rights and democracy. Political opportunists go all in on accommodating them. Meanwhile, we are told that disruption is not only an economic necessity, but fashionable and beautiful. This ethos goes beyond advertisers purring reassurances and TED talks’ restatement of the blandly obvious. It is the full-scale repackaging of capitalist exploitation as a benign — nay glorious — form of consumerism. People with power changing the rules to suit themselves is nothing new. But packaging it as a liberating force for humankind is.

Like many of my songs, “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It” attempts to make its point in the negative. It is sung from a the perspective of an unsavory character. He’s boasting, and glorying in, his ability to change the rules as it suits him. He is essentially advocating the opposite of what I believe. I use this technique enough to know that it can be a challenge for the listener to discern. I contemplated singing it in a more charactery voice, but opted to sing it straight, and let the words and music succeed or fail in their mission.

Alfred Johnson is a songwriters’ songwriter with a feverish, fertile imagination, whom I deeply admire. We made several stabs at collaborating on various song ideas. At one point I presented him with a list of titles, many of them clichés with a twist, which he termed antithets (thus providing me part of the title and concept for my 4-volume magnum opus, Anthems & Antithets). This song was one of the antithets that we worked on.

Though the concept was mine, Alfred contributed a lot to the lyrics and the development of the ideas. Much of the music originated with Alfred, including the feel and the piano part of the intro, verse and bridge, with me occasionally chiming in with a melodic idea. I came up with the chorus, after more than a dozen failed attempts. I bore you with these details not for their sake alone, but to demonstrate that it is harder to build something that to tear it down, but infinitely more worthwhile.

Small Penis – a Feminist Take

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Feminism – for want of a better term – has been a liberating force for women and for men. What started with challenging received notions about femininity and women’s roles, has blossomed into a framework for human liberation. First, rape jokes were questioned, then, prison rape jokes. First, female circumcision was opposed, then, male circumcision. (Patriarchy cuts both ways.) Obviously, the pushback to feminism has been enormous and fierce, but the ideas continue to spread. Awareness of gender stereotyping, body-shaming, gender fluidity and consent now inform our thinking and behavior. 

One cliche that’s been stubbornly resistant to a feminist rethink is the small penis joke. On the political left, a small dick is the hilarious putdown that explains macho behavior like driving sports cars, collecting guns, and authoritarianism. On the right, a small dick is the cause of male sensitivity and the dreaded liberalism. More than just a joke, this casual body shaming is used figuratively and literally as a key to understanding a man’s psychology. 

A large part of what’s called toxic masculinity is exercised in the enforcement of destructive attitudes among men. Trying to live up to unrealistic body images is a form of repression, but that feminist insight hasn’t made much of a dent in our thinking. The belief that the size of a man’s penis should determine his manliness and his worth is an unspoken cultural assumption, whether one subscribes to it or not. It’s a destructive ideology, largely reinforced through jokes.

But how much can feminist thinking actually change something so seemingly biological? That remains a topic for another day and another song. “Small Penis,” the song at hand, takes equality and justice as worthy aspirations.

The four-volume music project I’m working on is called Anthems & Antithets. An antithet, in my parlance, is a song that takes a cliche and turns it on its head. Volume 3, Antipathy & Ideology, focuses on the political. It occurred to me that while small penis jokes aren’t very funny, a song bragging about having a small penis could be both funny and political. An antithet was born. A new kind of small penis joke.

For the music, rhythm and blues struck me as having the right mixture of plaint and celebration. I didn’t have the patience for a 12-bar blues form, so I made it a 9-bar blues. It’s a little shorter than average but it gets the job done. 

The Invisible Hand is Broken

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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

Millennium Glitch

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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.

Conspiracy Theories are the False Flags

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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.

Notes Toward a Manifesto on Genre Diversity

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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.

The Presumptuousness of the Singer-Songwriter

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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.

Music Wants to Be Free, Musicians Want to Be Paid

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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.

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