Now, this is a clear no-no for those who are well-versed in stand-up culture.  The comedians, obviously, but also their fans who love and follow those stand-up comedians, and who realize how hard it is to write, practice, perfect, and eventually perform a bit in front of an audience.  You just don’t do other people’s bits.  It’s just not done.

One thing I wondered: why?  This is clearly not the case in music.  Particularly, for bands who choose to perform note-for-note renditions of AC/DC tunes for thousands of dollars per gig, and who might tour through Davenport, Iowa.  Of songs that AC/DC no doubt slaved over to create, and love to death.  They’ve got lawyers, they can send lawyers after these bands.  At the least, they can publicly shame them on their Myspace blogs.  But they don’t.

Now, there’s a difference here, of course.  People who go to see AC/DC cover bands are well aware that they’re not seeing the real AC/DC, and that the material they’re seeing performed is a cover version.  The pleasure is in the recreation; how these beloved songs are faithfully rendered, with an eye toward verisimilitude above all.

Here’s a thing I immediately thought when I saw everyone getting all worked up over this.  Now before you go sending off hate mail, this is more a thought experiment than anything else, but I think it might be a productive one.  What if Nick Madson approaches stand-up comedy in the same way that the Davenport-area AC/DC cover bands approach AC/DC songs–as fodder for faithful recreation?

What if, in other words, Madson’s not at all privy to stand-up culture, where this sort of stuff is viewed as plagiarism or THIEVERY, but approaches this work in the same way as a cover band would?  What if the audience knew that this stuff was Patton Oswalt’s, and there was some sort of pleasure they derived from hearing his jokes performed live?  What if for the audience, hearing a comedian cover-act offered the same sort of pleasure as hearing a cover band? I know this sounds ridiculous, but then again, most of my music-geek friends think that going and seeing professional cover bands play local bars is a ridiculous waste of money.

What if this: “when confronted by other comedians about this flagrant plagiarism, Madson tells them that he writes for those guys, and that these are actually his bits,” emerged how and why a tangential myth would–a made-up thing that gives people more of a full sense of their own anger, by explaining more about this act?  Again, not that I necessarily believe this–it’s a thought experiment–but still.

The point I want to make, or the question I want to ask–to stand-ups, in particular–is this: what is it about stand-up material, stand-up as artful performance, that absolutely eliminates the capacity for “covers” like this?  I’ve seen countless bands at countless small shows play cover songs without acknowledging the original material–either that sort of thing isn’t part of their performance schtick, or they assume you know it or why else are you here.  Comedy seems a more “personal” and auto-biographical medium of creative expression than pop or rock music–but I think most comedians would admit to fudging a lot of their “real” stories (and that’s totally fine of course)–and I think this feeds into it somehow.  But I’m really curious to hear from people about this–again, to learn more about the culture of stand-up acts–why are stand-up routines off-limits for this sort of thing?

Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).

2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

Andy Partridge, acerbic as ever, to Wolfgang’s Vault.  A lot of good stuff here for XTC fans. And the good news: XTC reissues soon!  Maybe! (Vinyl plz.)

3. “I have nothing against one person sending a track to another person saying, ‘Hey, check this track out; it’s great!’ That’s like a fan-to-fan thing. But these big websites like Pirate Bay are just another corporation. It’s the future Clear Channel. They have nothing to do with good. They are just evil. It’s the worst. They take our music and put it out for free before we have released it to our record label. There’s no fanfare, there’s nothing, it’s just like ‘Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence. Click Here.’ There’s no sense of jubilation.”

Erlend Øye’s take on filesharing from this Prefixmag interview with Kings of Convenience.

4. “‘From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,’ he wrote. ‘And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.’

John Philip Sousa, railing against those confounded music machines.  Part of a neat little Arstechnica piece about copyright holders’ fears of new technologies. (Further reading: Mark Rose)

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”

This is Scott Plagenhoef’s response (scroll down to the comments) to my response to Maura’s response to that study attempting to causally link downloading habits to other forms of consumption. One of the things I wasn’t really able to get into in the ridiculously quick conversation I had with Maura over IM that afternoon is exactly the quandary that Scott raises above. Which can be answered pretty briefly, actually: The reason that no one really discusses why “people stopped giving a shit about music altogether,” if this is in fact the case, is because the sorts of research that end up in newspapers and on tech blogs aren’t designed, from the beginning, to answer questions like this.

I mentioned this in an earlier post here, but it bears repeating. It’s not an issue of a study being “longitudinal” or not. Both quantitative and qualitative research are both perfectly equipped to conduct research over time. What is the issue at hand is the questions and problems that different forms of research are equipped to address. This particular survey, like others that get picked up by wire services, seeks to place the messy, chaotic activities involved with mundane music consumption within a framework that reifies the market categories that we all find so frustrating to begin with. These researchers, from what I can tell, are interested in making connections between downloading and buying habits, and are thus asserting that those are the most important considerations to take into account when talking about music in everyday life.

Which is fine, don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of utility in this sort of research, namely the capacity to accumulate data from nearly 2,000 respondents in a quick amount of time. But this sort of research also tells us little to nothing about the myriad other functions and roles of music in people’s everyday lives. It tells us nothing about the ways that people engage with music in situations that have nothing to do with market ideologies. We don’t hear the voices of individual Norwegian 15-year-olds, whose responses to questions about what they think of music’s purpose or utility might address Scott’s above question in illuminating ways. But also in ways that don’t necessarily travel well through venues like newsapers and tech blogs, which, even though online, are still burdened by the tyranny of word-count and simple, easy-to-follow facts. Quantitative research travels well because it’s easily translatable into dichotomies, because it can be made to hew closely to simple arguments about right and wrong.

This is a research topic I’m preparing to embark upon in the fall, and a topic I will summarily blog the fuck out of, either here or elsewhere. At this point, I’m inclined to disagree with Scott’s assertion, but only because it’s predicated on the assumption that there’s one particular way to “give a shit about music”, and that it’s also possible for everyone to suddenly stop doing that. Talking to people about what music does for them when it’s mediated through the Web and Internet will hopefully reveal new paradigms through which we can understand how people invest meaning in art that’s become infinitely accessible, replicable, and freshly sedimented in the most mundane of everyday activities (answering one’s phone, for instance).

Scott’s been thinking about this stuff for quite some time, and has even expounded upon his ideas in a very entertaining book. But let’s think about the data he’s using to support his claim:

“dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago …plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales.”

If “not giving a shit about music” means “not buying or engaging with music in the ways we did in the 80s and 90s,” then yes, his point is fine. But it’s also tautological. We need to consider the vast amount of other ways that people are imagining their connections with music, occasioned by the new technologies through which they’re experiencing it. Once audiences have broken an imaginary tether to the traditional musical commodity, what new forms of relationships are going to emerge?