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tyler.com hello I'm very honored today to be here with Ted Joya Ted is probably my favorite writer on music and also my favorite person to read and follow on Twitter and he has a new book out which has been made a big splash called music
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a subversive history Ted welcome well thank you for having me so let's start with some questions about music do you think our Collective memory for music is decaying more rapidly because Communications Technologies move so much faster and preserve things so much
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better what people don't understand is that for most of History music was a kind of cloud storage for societies I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don't have semiconductors or spaceships and if you
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go to any traditional community and you try to find the historian generally it's a singer and music would preserve culture it would preserve folklore well nowadays we were we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things and so I think there's a strange shift both we rely on the cloud to preserve our music but also we no longer rely on music to preserve our culture this is potentially a dangerous thing because it could create a
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situation where our musical lives grow more and more distant from our actual social lives with the people around us and our larger Community does music today still carry new ideas so if you think about radio in the 1960s there's
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the idea of drug culture of psychedelia anti-war protests those are often carried by music and by the radio but today the internet carries the ideas more or less for free and do we even need music for that there's a very prevalent view now that music is just
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diversion or Idol entertainment you know Steph Pinker is the great exponent of this he calls music auditory cheesecake and he'll tell you that music is just for brain stimulation and so for example I would listen to a song the same way I
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might drink a martini or use recreational drugs I really think this misses the point I do think music is embedded in ideas and culture and takes place in the world at a much more intricate level than Pinker understands you know for example hardly a week goes
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by when I don't read about a musician somewhere in the world getting into trouble with politicians know Putin will try to stop a a group from performing in Saudi Arabia somebody will be thrown into prison for a song you know recently
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the Hong Kong protests have used music very actively I just read the other day about a protest song in Hong Kong where the composer has to remain anonymous because it's so dangerous to have composed this song and this is a good
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reminder of how powerful music is and it's not just diversion you know another example recently there was a rap song in Thailand that criticized the government and this really shook up the politicians and the funny thing is they tried to
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respond to it and so the government released its own rap song which of course was widely mocked and ridiculed but it tells you that the people in position of authorities know that music conveys ideas it conveys power and it's
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just not Idol entertainment and one of the things I've tried to do in my my history books for example is to show that show that larger power of music is the Advent of streaming for music a net gain or a net loss for the quality of
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music not counting convenience of the listener but just the quality of the music don't they now put all the good stuff in the first 30 seconds of the song well that's right you have to have people hold on for a few seconds in order for you to get your royalty from
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the stream so people have actually changed how they compose music to match the technology but I will say that's always been the case to some extent I do believe every kind of new technology changes how people sing and perform now
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if you go back into the 1920s the first really Advanced microphones were developed and this allowed people to sing differently and so all of a sudden Bing Crosby comes along he can use these new microphones and he can sing in a
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very whispery conversational voice which is very expressive so if you compare for example recordings made in 1925 with 1935 a completely different way of singing took place so we're going through the same thing right now people
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are singing differently to prosper on streaming sites I don't think that bothers me as much as the economic impact of streaming and also just the impact on sound quality with the compressed sound in fact I would say that music is the only form of
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entertainment in which the technology has gotten worse during my lifetime I go to movies now it's this big screen and Surround Sound video games put the pong that I used to play to shame TV is so good it's being called a golden age of
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Television but in music most of us listen to songs on these lousy handheld devices most people in my generation had better sound systems as teenagers than they do now so that worries me more uh than the whole idea of how songs are written I'm really
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concerned about the technology lessening the whole listening experience why has music been special in this regard you can still buy an audio file sound system but it seems fewer people are interested I think the key thing is that the
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technology stopped advancing so people aren't excited about it anymore I think it's very useful to go back and look at record companies in the 1930s 1940s you know RCA was the premier record company back then but they were also the Apple
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computer of their day you know RC CA invented new microphones they invented the 45 RPM single they invented a lot of sound Technologies and they did it to enhance the listening experience you know classic example in the 1960s RCA
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really commercialized color television the reason they did it is because they owned NBC and they understood if you improve the technology for the audience it will get people to consume the TV shows what happened in the 1980s record
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labels stopped investing in new technology so the way Colombia would invent the long playing album or Sony would invent the Walkman that stopped and so they handed technology off to Silicon Valley which had very different reasons they didn't want to increase the
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listening experience they wanted to sell devices or advertising so I do believe that there's a a fundamental change people can it's true by high degree audio equipment but they don't because the companies in the music industry have
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stopped innovating now you also have a background in management consulting and Venture Capital so tell us does Spotify have a viable business model yes or no I'm well known as a Critic of streaming and I also believe that the
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economics of streaming are fundamentally flawed but I don't believe it's going to go away I do believe there's going to be a painful retrenching and downsizing we already see Netflix which has $15 billion do in debt announced the other day they're going to borrow two
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billion more they've got a huge audience but they can't even cover their costs they've been negative cash flow every quarter for five straight years Spotify still isn't profitable I believe Spotify will become profitable but they're going
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to do it by putting the squeeze on people so musicians will suffer even more probably in the future than they have in the past so what's good for Spotify is not good for the whole music ecosystem let me make one more Point
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here I think it's very important if you go back a few years ago there was a value chain in music started with the musician worked for the record label the records went to the record distributor they went to the retailer who sold the record to the
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consumer at that point everybody in that chain had a vested interest in a healthy music ecosystem in which people enjoyed songs the more people enjoyed songs the Better Business was for everybody that chain has been broken now Apple would
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give away songs for free to sell devices they don't care about the viability of the music sub economy for them it could be a loss leader Google doesn't care about music they would give music away for free to sell ads in fact they do
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that on YouTube so the fundamental change here is you now have a distribution system for music in which some of the players do not have a vested interest in the broader musical experience and ecosystem this is tremendously dangerous and that's the
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real reason why I fear the growth of streaming is because the people involved in streaming don't like music in fact and this is amazing the CEO of Spotify said we're not in the music business we sell subscriptions we don't sell music
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we sell subscriptions that's very dangerous and that tells you that you have parties here that are going in completely different directions and it's not going to be good for the health of our musical culture what's the chance we
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simply regret the entire Advent of the internet well I don't think that's true I I am not one of these leites and I hear people in the music industry saying oh Tad everything would be great if the internet would just go away and the
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record labels wanted to make that happen so they sued everybody they sued Napster uh in fact I say that the record labels had their strategy which I call the Three L's which was lobbying legislation and litigation and I don't think those are
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strategies the strategy they should have is the consumer experience and I wish that the record labels had invested in new recording Technologies super vinyl better technology for The Listener instead of just suing everybody and
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trying to pass new laws as you well know if you compare American popular music in 1963 to American popular music in 1968 over a period of 5 years it sounds really quite completely different and you can tell upon hearing music from
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either year which year it's from that doesn't seem to be the case today is there still real innovation in American popul music well what happened in the 1960s is an anomaly I don't think it will ever happen again and what happened
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is you must give credit to The Beatles because everyone was imitating The Beatles and they changed their sounds every six months every year you know people always tell me T well do you like the high Brown music and the low Brown music I said no no the
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real conflict is not between high and low the real challenge in music is the formula where formula emerges and then everybody imitates the formula and that's what deadens your musical culture is the repetition of the formula and the
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Beatles for a period of 5 six years made sure there was no formula this is amazing it never happened before it probably will never happen again but if you tried to imitate The Beatles in 1964 65 you soon we out of date for example the monkeys tried to do exactly that the
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monkeys imitated a certain Beetle sound but by the time the first episode was on TV the Beatles were already off to something else so I do think you had this amazing period for five six years where there was no set formula in the
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music business it was an amazing time I think we should enjoy it for what it was uh but I don't think we should expect it to come back what's the most subtle Beetle song the most subtle Beetle song yes well that's that that's a hard one
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I'm one of these strange chronologists who believe believe the Beatles just got better and better and I think each album you could make a case each album is better than the last so when you get to side two of Abby Road for me and when
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they stitched together all these song fragments these weren't even completed songs these were just things they had been sitting on and they sound some way to bring it all together into this album in which they had a a complete Suite to
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literally end their career on the album to me that's probably the epitome of of both subtlety and artistic expression but if we look at Trend so in the 1960s we have what we now call Classic Rock and the Beatles also in the' 70s the
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early 1980s rap comes along it's still with us maybe that's surprising in the early 90s you might say there's Electronica but what has been since then that's new what's the next big thing or has it stopped well there's a certain irony here the music business always
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prided itself on disrupting the culture with some new sound but the big thing in the last 20 years is the music business itself has been disrupted they're on the receiving end and tech companies in Silicon Valley have done the disrupting
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and what they're disrupting is not the sound of music it's actually the whole socioeconomic setting of music now you ask yourself what did the music industry do to respond to this what was their big innovation and it's almost laughable if
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you go back to the early years of this century when the internet was taking over music distribution and the music culture the biggest innovation in music was and this is sad to say was the TV reality show singing contest I mean this
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was this was this was the big innovation that the music industry used to respond to this complete disruption and everything else well we'll do American Idol you know we'll do America's Got Talent it would be it would be funny if
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it wasn't so pathetic I want to make one more observation though there are periods in music where it seems like there's a law and that we've reached some happy end point my historical research tells me that those happy end
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points never last p take for example the rise of rock and roll 5 years earlier the music industry thought they had it all solved oh people want lifestyle music will'll do romantic ballads by Sinatra they came out with mood music albums they invented these amazing
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albums called bachelor pad albums back then and Novelty songs and the music industry 1952 1953 thought they had it all figured out they thought they had reached the perfect song for every moment in your day and then 5 years later rock and roll
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changed everything with disruption and they how did this happen but what they don't realize people want disruption the same thing happened in the 1970s the early 1970s it's the gentle singer songwriter you could take those Carol
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King albums or James Taylor albums you could play them for Grandma grandma would love them you couldn't have something that was more beautiful and had wider appeal but people wanted disruption again so the end of the 70s you had punk rock disco new wave and the
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important thing to understand is not only is there disruption in music people crave the disruption so look at right now right now we're told that we've reached this happily ever after tech companies are going to use artificial
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intelligence to find the perfect song for every moment in our day it will be curated there'll be these wonderful feedback groups robots will create the perfect musical life my belief based on my understanding of music history is
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that won't happen there will be disruption and it will come from an unexpected place and this happily ever after we've supposedly reached won't last what's the popular song You're most embarrassed to admit to really liking what are the popular you know I
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mentioned the monkeys before I like the monkeys so do I Last Train to Clarksville is that Gilbert O Sullivan I'm a big fan of and that's kind of terrible I I love well-crafted pop music I love what really embarrasses you what admission can I squeeze out of you
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squeeze out when I was a teenager I listened to Emerson L and Palmer you know right that's embarrassing right before right before I discovered Jazz I was listening to Keith Emerson you know this was the Quant I was in as was jazz
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in a way it well it prepared me for jazz it really did when I was a teenager I was playing piano and this was the problem I was I faced I liked Rock because of its emotional immediacy but it didn't have the sophistication I wanted and then I loved
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classical music like Bach for the sophistication but it didn't have the emotional immediacy and I said I need something that brings together both and then I walked into a jazz club literally I walked into the
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lighthouse in Hermosa Beach California I was a high school student I sat down the music started and within 10 seconds I said to myself this is what I've been waiting for really no it was this epipal moment so but before that it
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was Keith Emerson who is the best Shaman in the history of rock music it's a key theme in your book right music a subverse of History the importance of the shaman the rebel The Outsider I would say Bob Dylan I think that there's this mystical
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aspect of Music in which it becomes very hypnotic but it's also embedded in the culture it's lifechanging it reaches on a personal level but also has these broader social levels I don't think anybody's brought that together better
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in my lifetime than Bob Dylan and I was very happy when he won the Nobel Prize I know purists were angry songs are not not literature but I believe if hey if you go back to the roots Homer was a singer if you go back to the roots Sappo
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was a singer the origins of literature is song and so for someone like Dyan he would capture that for me was Jim Morrison a wonderful Shaman but a terrible musician and poet I think he W I mean how many times can you rhyme fire and
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higher I am the Lizard King right shame and like I think okay I will not dismiss the importance of someone's Charisma and their personal magnetism and someone like Jim Morrison possessed that definitely and you have to give the doors credit for that but if you were
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evaluating Morrison just on his songwriting skills I don't I don't think they hold up you know it's funny one of my favorite pianists friedrick golded did these demon variations on Light My Fire and I just thought he was a
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brilliant musician but that was just not the piece you could turn into theme and variations it was even worse than di abell's Melody that Beethoven worked with is G de better as a Beethoven player or a jazz musician well he's famous more as a
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Beethoven player and he's great but he's very underrated as a jazz musician gold but also is a Beethoven player his sonat is number one number 25 or maybe the the two best recordings of those sonatas well go gold is an amazing guy you know
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I don't I don't know why he's forgotten he's also a great composer you know his his compositions should should be uh resurrected and occasionally I see someone play them but but a fascinating guy and he's one of these people that was punished by being
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able to do too many things well because Society wants to put you in a pigeon hole I felt this in my own life Society wants to put you in a certain pigeon hole that you just do this and if you don't want to live in that narrow space
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you're punished and Golda was like that if we think about the accelerated advancement of women in music so today it might be St Vincent Laura Marling but there are many many more do they fit into the shaman model the same way that
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the men do well my book shows that again and again throughout history music were innovator musicians U female musicians were innovators and then once their work was assimilated by the broader Society these Origins were hidden from View and one of
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the reasons why women were innovators is because their music tended to tap more into the emotional power of music if you go back to Plato Plato it's very clear that there two kind kind of music there's a music that he
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favors which instills order in society it sings the Praises of Great Men and it brings people together for the social good but he understood that there was a second kind of music that was really involved in personal emotion and self-expression he Associated that
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with women and rightly so because that really comes out of safo and it comes out of these what I call the Three L's of of of female singing the lullabi the love song and the lament always associated with women and so the idea
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that women have a special place in musical culture going back for thousands of years is something I take very seriously and I think it's surprising in fact nowadays how much connection there is between the music women sing now and
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the or origins of of the music that came out of women thousands of years ago why are restaurants so much noisier today and they're still getting noisier well I believe this is in fact I got to say prefer the quiet restaurant but I
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understand everybody else wants the noisy restaurant and I do think we're going back to Rene Gerard territory where everything's imitation where you you choose the restaurant not on what's the best food but what other people are
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doing that I can imitate and because of this there are two restaurants on Town you go in the one with the most people and so I I I think that imitative Behavior patterns explain much more in society than we care to admit but there's much more noise pollution more
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generally restaurants are noisier it seems that music in general is louder and in terms of dynamic compression the range is much narrower so why is there this General tendency toward more noise why are markets under supplying peace
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and quiet because they want to stand out you know it's interesting you go back in my book I talk about the very first musicians who were hunter gatherers and what they did was fascinating is back then there were no loud sounds you could live your whole
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life in prehistoric times and maybe never hear a loud sound unless you went near like a waterfall or maybe during a thunderstorm but for the most part everything was quiet so that's why there's a plausible theory that the early hunter gatherers invented Coral
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singing to hunt they were scavengers and they didn't try to kill the lion themselves they let the lion kill the prey then they would sing together to scare away the lion and they would get the food and so that tells you that back
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then loud sounds were so rare that they were an amazing expression of power well the thing to remember is even today loud sounds are an expression of power notoriety so you have competition in terms of sound and the restaurants
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believe and maybe rightly that they're going to stand out with the noisier environment now once again I will avoid those restaurants I'll go to The Quiet One but I really think you have just there was the same way there was an arms
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race in the 1960s there's a noise race in society right now when and why did jazz sto being cool well you know cool sto being cool you know I wrote this book called the birth and death of the cool a few years ago and it was a shock
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to me because I was going to write a history of cool as sort of this Timeless thing people always want to be cool and then as I was doing the research I realized that in fact the cool ethos was something that had a beginning and an end and around the year 2000 cool
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became uncool and why did that happen well I've got a larger Theory and which is still very primitive about these 50-year Cycles between hot and cool and Society I think we're in the middle of a hot phase right now it's a culture of
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anger we live in I mean I don't think anyone can deny that uh but I do believe that you had this birth of the cool with Miles Davis recording that around the year 1950 and for the next 50 years we had a cool society in which cool Jazz
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was was at its peak there was certain cool techniques that you used in your day-to-day life life which were irony humor you would deflect aggression with irony or with a joke and then around 2000 and people will say 911 made this happen but I think the roots
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were already before that is everything changed people now Pride themselves on their frankness I'm going to say it just the way it is I'm going to say it right to your face and so it goes from cool to hot so back to your your your earlier
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question when did Jazz stop being cool well as as cool itself phased out Jazz lost a lot of its audience and Jazz itself had to to embrace a more of a hot Dynamic uh to thrive in the new setting can Jazz today still sound hot in a
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musical world where basically all rhythms have been tried out people have heard everything so if you play you know VZ ionization for someone today they might like it even it doesn't sound that weird but they're not deeply impressed
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it doesn't sound that radical they've heard rap they've heard Electronica or The rhythms of jazz just boring in 2019 well I think there's a larger question there that relates to that you know as as you as you may know I listen to lots
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of new music over the course of a given Year I'll listen to more than a thousand newly released recordings and every year you put out a great list of what is best from what you listen to I'll that's right my 100 best on your homeage and
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and I spend two to three hours per day listening to new music one of the things I've observed is that the most creative music happening these days usually usually is at the intersections of different genres because the genres themselves
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have been overcome with the formula as I said a little while ago the formula is the curse and so if you try to get on country radio there's a certain set sound you imitate and it leads to this sameness but there's Amazing Music being
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made in the intersection of the genres you know for example in jazz right now there's Amazing Music happening in Los Angeles and London of musicians who are taking jazz music and contemporary music and dance beats and hipop and R&B even
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some other classical and folk ingredients they're bringing it all together and it does sound exciting and it sounds new and it doesn't sound cliched but it's only because they're leaving the formula behind unfortunately and this is the real mismatch in our
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society the music industry rewards you for following the formula that's how you get on radio that's how you get a record contract but in fact the creative world rewards you for going into these intersections between the genres why are the blues
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disappearing from popular music that's interesting and I I think we're reversing this this whole amazing process that happened during the 20th century I like to think of the African influence as reversing what I call the
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Pythagorean Paradigm which emerged 2500 years ago where Pythagoras developed the first scales in Western music but even more important he developed this mathematical notion of music that every note came in a scale every scale was tuned and you always
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played in tune we accept this so instinctively that we don't even think twice when you go to the orchestra the first thing they do is tune up well in the 20th century with this infusion from blues and jazz you could play notes that
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were no longer in tune you could bend the note you could distort the sound and this was an amazing reversal of 2500 years of mathematical Pythagorean music but early classical music did that plenty right was the Pythagorean tradition ever so dominant
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if you go back and course it's hard to speculate on music sounded like 2,000 years ago but if you read the books they are obsessed with tuning and scales the the music guides from ancient times are obsessed with tuning systems
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and they tried to squeeze out sounds that didn't fit into the scale so you had a reversal in the 20th century with with the Advent of black music but now that's dying out in many ways just autotune the idea is every note's going
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to be perfectly in tune or a lot of this digital music everything is perfectly in tune and the bent Blues notes are disappearing but isn't it that Distortion and note bending have been picked up by say Indie music and they're
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being done in more commercially appealing ways than the blues and maybe the blues is a bit exhausted I think for a while it was being assimilated in popular music but I believe that has stopped in the last 5 10 years I would love to see some PhD student study hit
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records of different decades and figure out how frequently notes deviate from pitch and how that's changed over time I think you would find an amazing reduction in that so we're going back to this mathematical vision of music as
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everything is perfectly in tune and perfectly organized and perfectly aligned rhythmically there's less syncopation in music uh everything is becoming regularized now probably the Advent of digital Technologies leads to it but I think we
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need a new African infusion in our music that shakes things up and gets us away from mathematics and back towards sound and rap music is not that new infusion for you yes well rap music is also becoming formulaic so I mean rap I mean
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it's interesting 30 years ago NWA did an album that was so dangerous the FBI tried to shut down the record label nowadays that same album has been enshrined as a National Historical uh Treasure by the Library of Congress you know the
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Smithsonian last year announced they're putting together a panel of 50 academics and Scholars to come up with the official Smithsonian guide to hipop so uh rap and hip hop is also becoming streamlined and mainstreamed and also
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you see and this has been going on for a number of years rappers to have really big sales team up with a pop star so you have that Melody which is often very autotuned and once again very much this Pythagorean mathematical approach and so
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there's people trying to tame hip hop and so it's hard to understand where the disruption is going to come from I tend to think there will be a big disruption in music over the next few years but it won't be a repetition of jazz or hip-hop
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or something from the past there'll be something new coming at us which will surprise us or Prosperity peace time and racial integration bad for the blues well that's a big question I think that you look at the blues and it's definitely a music of
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Anguish and tragedy and personal suffering but from a completely different point of view the blues did other things as well it it it bred our musical techniques and also it was a music of Lifestyle values I tend to think that the blues anticipated the
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sexual revolution of the 1960s I mean all the things that were sung about in blues music in 1920s were about these lifestyle excesses that didn't reach mainstream Society for 4050 years but we had them in the 20s too right the 30s are
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sexually more conservative than the 20s had been it seems well there was but in fact it's very interesting to go back and see this for the first 10 20 years of the 20th century if you wanted to sing about sex and a song you would put
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a picture of black people on the cover of the sheet music and the idea was that it was acceptable you know won't you come home Bill Bailey it's a song about an adulterous Affair you could sing that song you could publish that song but you had to
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associate it with black Lifestyles and there were a bunch of other songs as well whenever you sang about something that was sexy or dirty you'd put black people on the cover of the sheet music and so this is how it entered the music
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industry you you're right there were certain Behavior patterns there that were were everywhere but where it really went mainstream and came out and was considered acceptable it's acceptable in many people's eyes to have uh free love
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or altered mind states that was the 1960s and that came out of Blues Music first when it first was sung about on the airwaves how and why was John Hammond such an amazing spotter of musical Talent well those people have disappeared those people have
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disappeared why is that and I don't know I really don't know but I I do think there was this notion of having a talent scout who knew a lot about music had been around for many years really understood the ups and downs often was a
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musician too and someone like Hammond then could discover Billy Holiday or retha Franklin or Bob Dylan or the or Bruce Springstein he discovered count b b you could go on for for a long time out of his cumulative experience in the
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1960s though the record industry decided that the best way to scout new Talent was to rely on young people and this and this is sad but true they they believe that this the path to success was to match their music to the musical
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Taste of a 16-year-old and because of that they needed young people that understood that Vibe and for a while that worked really well but what you sacrificed over the long run was having people like John Hammond who had seen music changed up and down in and out
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over a period of decades and brought that larger Vision but it's a larg I think it's a larger thing of how do how do record labels spot Talent then how do they spotted now what they're doing now doesn't seem to be working they they're
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having enormous trouble building careers of younger musicians even if the first album does well there's this sophomore curse and I do think that it would be good if they took more time understanding the process of discovery because discovering talent for
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a record label is as important as R&D for a tech company let's dry a around of overrated versus underrated let's go heavy metal music overrated or underrated I think it's underrated I think if you say that you like metal
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music that's supposedly shameful or maybe you've got some dark satanic impulses but metal music has persisted at very high levels of virtuosity and they take musicianship seriously they take the entertainment aspect of it seriously sometimes it's almost
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performance aren't now I don't I'm not personally a huge fan of metal music but I think in terms of the whole music ecosystem it's tremendously underrated Leo Tolstoy I think dovi was better I know that's controversial so Tolstoy but you know okay let me clarify
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this I think Tolstoy is overrated as a novelist but he's underrated as a social figure because he influenced people that that joined these communes are still tolstoyan communes out there in Britain many people adopted vegetarianism
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because of Tolstoy people changed the how how they viewed marriage the impact he had on the broader Society has been hidden from view the Soviet Union tried to change tolstoy's image because he was so dangerous so they reframed him as
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just a novelist so iist to some extent well yeah no very much so but I would think that if you view tolto just as a novelist you don't understand the full scope of his influence horror fiction overrated or underrated I believe all
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genre fiction deserves more credit uh from serious literary figures I believe it it it's there's tremendous amount of creativity Stephen King's one of the best writers out there I mean how those those novels are beautifully crafted and
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in terms even of things like character development pot structure so no horror fiction is underrated Elton John Elton John in the 19 70s underrated Elton John after the 1970s overrated his early material is amazing is amazing and the
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just the number of good songs including ones that were never hits and his singing his singing is extraordinary he can still approach his singing is still good don't get me wrong but way Elton sang in the 1970s very underrated R overrated or
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underrated overrated why too once again it feels too much like a formula for me but say the first two or three albums wasn't it something new I'm going to pass on that murmur a letter never sent or I'm like I say I to me it sounds
36:35
formic and but once again I have to I'd have to go back and listen again to give you a more authoritative view on that Stan Kenton terrible person in his private life so this is what did he do I think he sexually abused his daughter
36:48
you know and and and I don't have all the details at hand and I and those kind of aspects I don't like to probe into but there's this whole whole issue of how do we deal with Michael Jackson how do you deal with Roman palansky my general belief is that most of the time
37:05
you've got to separate Artistry from personal life most of the time but I do believe that there's a certain crossing point you know like Hitler in painting for example you know you you don't put a painting exhibit of Hitler on regardless
37:19
of what the quality is but it was also bad in that sense it's over but I but the whole question is should Michael Jackson's music be off the air what my general belief is Kenton Kenton was a great innovator in jazz but I believe
37:32
that that that does not and I I want to be very clear about this because I feel this very strongly your artistic skill your intellectual ability your talents do not give you permission to violate rules of human decency in your private
37:47
life that said you do evaluate the artistry for the most part on different terms but I don't like at all these artists that think that they can exploit people just because they're famous K-pop is any of it interesting I have yet to
37:59
hear the K-pop album that that excites me so but I do believe in principle the idea that we're getting musical Innovations from outside the english- speaking world that are going global is a good thing personally I don't k-pop's not my cup of tea but I I love this idea
38:17
that that someone can upload something on the internet today in Indonesia and I can hear it at home tomorrow who is the great underrated 20th century CL classical music composer my favorite is Shostakovich who to me is is is at the
38:32
peak so that's that and for variety of reasons both in terms of just the sheer Artistry of the works and also his ability in his personal life to take oppression and tragedy and not only overcome it but use it as an impetus to get even to a higher level on his creative platform where should the Neo fight start with Shas stovich well I love the Symphonies and the string quartets but those PRS and fugues oh that that's that's maybe my favorite
39:01
classical piano work of the 20th century which recording the Jarrett one is probably the place to start surprisingly enough I would say Keith Jarrett yeah John or Paul who was better I am more of a Paul fan because he had the better
39:15
musical craft but you got but he needed John because John had the edginess I this is my view is if it was just Paul without John it would have become sentimental and you wouldn't want to listen to it if it was just John without Paul it would have become
39:30
incomprehensible so you needed both but if I had to pick one I'd go for Paul because with my background as a musician Paul mastered the craft more what is it that you sing in the shower unfortunately it's the same thing
39:42
everybody else sings which is probably some lousy commercial jingle or some pop tune I heard the previous day I'd love to tell you that I work through Opera Aras or I do the vag narian repertoire but no it's it's probably the the Juicy
39:55
Fruit jingle or the Beverly Hills theme song is Prince actually an interesting musician yes and there's so much quantity but what what is there in Prince When you go back to it it sounds better I like this stuff right before he
40:07
died he was going to go back just piano and voice it was jazzier it was more downscaled and a little of that was recorded but I I would have loved to have seen where Prince would have gone if he had lived another 10 years do you think music today is helping a sexual
40:22
Revolution or hurting it speaking of prince it's very interesting if you go back to the earliest songs in human history they were linked to fertility rituals there was an idea that the king would have sex with a goddess which usually the high priestess
40:40
had to step in because it was hard to find a real goddess and there were songs associated with it they were very explicit some of them I couldn't even say dear Tyler because I would I would get into trouble uh because the the
40:50
explicit quality of the lyrics the point I would make is songs these days are very similar you know someone studied recent hit songs and 92% of them refer to sexuality and the typical hit song has 10 and a half reproductive phrases
41:06
that's the word the the researcher use they're they're not just the dirty Parts they're reproductive phrases in the songs so I do think there is and this I bring back up my new book the longstanding connection between music
41:18
and sexuality and even as we see a new victorianism and sexual primness entering our larger mainstream culture there's a tremendous force that forces popular music to address sexual issues but is music in some way anti-sex or a substitute for sex or maybe some kinds
41:38
of romantic music like Bruce Springsteen they're best for people who are not in love and if you're actually in love you don't need Bruce Springsteen and now we're DST in music and internet and we have less sex well I I believe actually
41:49
Darwin was right he thought music was linked to sexual selection and and we use music to attract a mate when you created it right but now we're in a world where you don't have to create it it's very interesting there's market
42:01
research and focus groups about how people use Music in their day-to-day life and take for example this you're going to bring a date back to your apartment for romantic dinner so what do you worry about well the first thing I have to worry about is
42:16
my place is a mess I got to clean it up so that's number one the second thing you worry about is well what food am I going to fix but number three on people's list when you interview them is the music because they understand the music is
42:28
going to seal the deal if there's going to be something really romantic that music is essential so people will agonize for hours over which music to play and I think that that we miss this people view music as distan from
42:45
people's everyday life but in fact people put music to work every day and one of the Premier ways they do it is in Romance so let's say you are not married married and you're 27 years old and you're having a date over what music do
43:00
you put on in 2019 under those conditions it's got to always be cogal because that is sexier it's generally appealing it's not going to offend anyone why I must say upfront I am no expert on seduction so you're now getting me out of my main level of
43:19
expertise but I would think that if you were a Seducer you would want something that was romantic on the surface but very sexualized right below that and no one was better at these multi-layered interpretation of lyrics than Frank
43:36
Sinatra you I always call him the daah of Pop singing because it was always the surface level and various levels that you could deconstruct and if you are planning for that romantic date hey go for Frank what was music like in ancient
43:51
Greece what do you think well I do believe that that there were different types of music and there was this officially sanctioned music that was preserved but there was a more exciting music from Outsiders that people liked but but also feared and here's an
44:06
interesting thing if you're a music student nowadays one of the first things you learn are the musical modes these are essentially the building block scales of music and they have names there's like the frian mode there's the
44:18
lydian mode but what no one tells you is the frians and the lydians were the enslaved populations in Greece and so they had these exciting sounds those were the those were the dangerous modes and so the exciting sounds were associated with these ensl enslave
44:32
people and Outsiders unfortunately the musical culture that's preserved is the kind that supported the ruling class for example the the most popular lyric poet in ancient Greece was pindar who sang the Praises of heroic men and powerful
44:51
people so this is the establishment music but there was another kind of of music that was darker deeper and more emotionally intense what are three parts of the world where their musics are currently seriously underrated well I
45:04
tend to think that the places to look are the countries that have large population bases diversity but don't get heard often on the radio or don't get picked up much by record labels so let's take for example Brazil and Indonesia you know it's very
45:24
interesting there's a jazz player named Joey Alexander he's a kid he was like a child prodigy he got a record contract around age 14 he's from Indonesia but he had to move out to New York is now winning Awards and showing up on the
45:38
Grammys when his Jazz album came out somebody told me this was the first time in history an album by an Indonesian music had made the Billboard Chart that's amazing you know Indonesia has a huge population and a great musical culture of very diverse
45:56
one too and and so I would look at places you I I try to listen to music from all over the world so I'm always trying to figure out what is happening in Indonesia just two days ago I I did a search on band camp for any recording in
46:09
the last month from Jakarta just I'm trying to to to find these things and so I would look at those large countries with diverse populations that have been left out of the music industry's radar screen why is the music of the pygmies
46:24
so good well good listen to how they sing you know there's a a view in the public mind that if you listen to tr traditional African music it's just intense rhythms but that's not true at all and the the pygmy music a lot of this is this vocal
46:41
poliany and they sing stuff and I swear you could not write it down and just if you're if you're a trained musician you have a good year you can listen to this over and over again and you can listen to it the the 20th time and you're still
46:53
saying what's going on here how are they doing this so yeah know that's that's one of these great musical experiences where people can go through their whole life and not hear it but they really should track it down what's the solution
47:03
to contemporary classical music being too academic or would you not accept that premise contemporary classical music now is great there's a lot of exciting things happening and and classical composers are mixing up classical music with rock and Jazz and
47:19
folk Styles and there's all sorts of interesting things happening but the problem is is they created a Public Image over the course of 50 years that classical music was just noise and difficult to listen to so they've got to
47:33
overcome their own reputation but if you sit down and listen to contemporary classical music seriously over the course of several months people would be amazed at how much they enjoy it after Philip Glass what is it from contemporary classical music that will
47:46
last well this is interesting because like I say there I me you could listen to Jennifer Higden or David L there bunch of great composers out there Carolyn Shaw wow I mean just amazing stuff I don't know if it's found an
47:58
audience yet it deserves to find an audience it deserves to last but the question is going to be more a socioeconomic one will these great composers that are around us now get the platform they need to reach people what percent of the people who go to the
48:13
Opera actually enjoy it well you know it's interesting I came to Opera late and and when I did I actually had to force myself to listen to Opera after at a certain point I realized this was a gap in my Musical education so there was
48:27
a period day after day I would just listen to the Opera and I would study it to fill that Gap uh but I've met many people that are passionate about my older brother Dana I mean this is he writes operas it's just I you know this
48:39
is interesting I was named after my uncle Ted who died before I was born he was a Merchant Marine never went to college died in a plane crash and my mother says that Uncle Ted was the smart one in the family and that you know
48:54
supposedly he had all Dante's Divine Comedy memorized in Italian you could just open up to the book at any line and say it and he could quote from it he corresponded with the great Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein on Mozart because my uncle was an expert on Mozart
49:09
he's just a sailor never went to college uh when they came out with an album by heiden's brother of mu music they had to get my uncle write the line you mean Michael josephi that's right yeah at at that time the only biographies were
49:24
written in German so they had to go to my uncle the Sailor to help them with the liner notes anyway the story I'm told is that when he was 11 years old or 12 years old he snuck at a home one night where he hid clothes in his bed and then snuck out the window took
49:40
the street car into downtown LA to see the Opera 12 years old so that's passion so yeah there are people out there that are absolutely passionate by Opera they will live and die for it God bless them but you don't sell seasoned tickets just on
49:57
the basis of those people and there are a lot of folks that are just going there to get their cultural street cred and you mentioned your brother Dana who's been a well-known poet CEO he ran National Endowment for the Arts where do
50:07
you and he most disagree about music well like I say he he he loves Samuel barar more than you do or what would it be he's like I say Dana loves Opera he loves Opera he's passionate about Opera uh and Opera's like I say I've I've
50:23
gotten an education in Opera but it was it was very pragmatic doing that I'm more of a jazz person but even you know Dana knows a remarkable amount of jazz you D you get Dana involved in a music conversation even though that's not his
50:37
specialty you know he can you know I he can keep up with me point for point on everything now we've been talking about music but you've had other lives in fact was it a waste of time to get a Stanford MBA well I did it for the worst possible
50:50
reason I mean I just I I I came from a poor family and when I went to college I felt I owed it to my parents to get some marketable skills and even though I knew that jazz was my thing and I was practicing the piano three hours a day and and I was
51:10
very interested in arts and culture I got this MBA to have those marketable skills because I felt that that I owed that uh to Mom and Dad but as it turned out it has proven very useful you know you'd be surprised how much of my music
51:23
research I rely on what I learned at the Boston Consulting Group in McKenzie just applying those analytical skills what would be an example of that well let me give you an example when I was at the Boston Consulting Group we were analyzing new product introductions so
51:37
the idea new product is coming out new computer or something and you have to predict how it's going to sell over the next 5 10 years and so we had these mathematical formulas we used to predict the spread of an innovation and I found
51:53
that these mathematical formulas had all been developed to track diseases these were the same formulas they used you know the World Health Organization if there's a new flu somewhere they use the same formulas to track the spread of a
52:07
disease that that we use to track the spread of an innovation now fast forward 15 years later I'm working on researching the history of jazz and I'm studying New Orleans and it was such an unhealthy City in fact New Orleans was
52:20
the unhealthiest city in the United States at the time when Jazz was was invented and I asked myself could there be a connection between the spread of disease and the spread of a musical Innovation because based on what I learned at the
52:36
Boston Consulting Group there might and then I started looking at other situations and I found a surprising number of situations in history where unhealthy settings and situations had created artistic revolutions you know most people date the start of the
52:50
Renaissance to the year 1350 in the city forign that they don't realize 1348 was the Great Great Plague in forence what people don't realize the Troubador revolution spread from the south of France into the rest of Europe it
53:03
followed the exact same dissemination patterns the Black Death did so classic example I am taking analytical tools that I learned at the Boston Consulting Group in McKenzie and I'm applying it to music problems I've done this in many
53:17
instances a lot of my work on Blues is taking uh aspects of things I learned back then was it a waste of time to get a philosoph opy politics and economics degree from Oxford yeah in in full disclosure to you I have to say that I
53:31
was able to get a degree from Oxford in philosophy politics and economics without ever studying the economics I I used sort of a loophole I didn't do any economics most of my Approach was philosophy and I'm really extremely abstract kind of philosophy interests me
53:50
you mean like analytic philosophy well yeah but I I which I studied at Oxford but I you know existentialism and I mean I dug into everything I dug into I still read a lot of philosophy and I believe it has made me a much better music
54:03
writer my first music book the imperfect art was essentially applying philosophical Concepts and using them to build a new aesthetic philosophy out of jazz practices and I think in my latest book I've come back to some of it I I really
54:21
believe that that understanding the history of philosophy and contemporary thought helps me at every stage in my music writing how was your own Sicilian Mexican family background shaped your approach to music history and criticism
54:35
and the ideas in your book music a subversive history well you know I came from a very complex ethnic past and it's often a question is how much of that shows up in your own musical preferences you know I grew up in the
54:50
thick of an Italian family where I was always around my Italian relatives some of them that didn't speak English uh and to some extent my Mexican relatives as well and I look at the Italian culture's love of Melody and the Italian composers great
55:10
emphasis on Melody and I know in my own musical preferences Melody is so important to me now this is why I wrote a book on West Coast Jazz and cool Jazz just people like Chad Baker or Paul Desmond and people say Well they're not
55:25
hot enough Ted those aren't the real Jazz musicians but I have a real soft spot in my heart for any jazz musician that really Masters the art of crafting a melody and sometimes I wonder if that's my Italian Heritage coming to the
55:38
Forefront does music criticism have an economic future newspapers are laying off their music critics right well this is a big thing you know I've got um my sons are both interested in arts and culture my nephews are and it seems
55:52
everybody in my family wants to be a writer and I always say why doesn't somebody in the family want to trade mortgage derivatives or something like why does everybody want to be a writer you know uh and the the truth is it's hard at this phase in history to make a
56:08
living as a writer so the one thing I tell people is if you're going to do this you must find some area of expertise and that you know that better than anybody else and so I I still think that in music if you want to be a music
56:24
writer you can do it but you must have the goal of being one of the few people in the world that really knows your section of music as well as anybody and then it's not just writing people will call on you to do liner notes give talks
56:37
they'll want to consult your expertise you'll get called to be a a judge on panels so the key thing as a writer is to develop the expertise and then to use writing as one aspect of what you do can you ever trust someone who does not have
56:50
actually good taste in music well they might you might be able to trust them in other things but uh there's no substitute for for Taste and discrimination in music and I think wh marcalus was right he said and this is controversial but he
57:06
said if you take somebody who spent their whole life just eating McDonald's hamburgers you could take them to the best Michelin starred restaurant in the world they would enjoy it because they would not have cultivated their
57:19
taste to understand that well music is no different and so unless you've cultivated your taste your ability to appreciate especially new sounds will be severely limited so let's say a smart 18-year-old comes to you and that person
57:34
has been listening to good popular music but says now I've learned there's more out there I want to cultivate better taste in music what do you tell them to do well I tell them the same thing I tell anybody in any field whatsoever
57:46
which is work to get outside your comfort zone and I don't care what you do I don't care whether you're a scientist or an engineer or a teacher or a music critic or a music fan the most broadening experiences you will have in your life is when you go outside your
58:03
own comfort zone into new territory so I would tell them to do what I do I have consistently over a period of years tried to expose myself to new kinds of music that I hadn't heard before and if you do that you will learn but also you'll enjoy it I mean this is
58:22
this is the path to enjoyment is is to open years up to these new experiences for our final segment I have a few questions about what I call the Ted Joya production function is it better to work and read to music or should those be
58:34
separate activities it depends I believe you can make a very strong philosophical case for what I call the New Age philosophy of music and that philosophy is that music should be integrated into every aspect of your life or can be
58:51
integrated into every aspect of your life I believe that now what I have have to say is in practice the new age music that did this was lousy and unlistenable so that's I mean that but I still believe very much in principle that
59:04
music it's okay to have music integrated in your life I know it's very fashionable to say oh background music is awful or music should always be in the foreground but after having done all the research I've done in music history
59:16
I now see the exact opposite I'll just give a couple examples it's amazing how many surgeons use music while they operate 60% of Surgeons will have a song on while they're cutting you open we now learn that at the highest level of peak athletic performance a lot
59:32
of care is taken to what songs you listen to while you do while you do your athletic work and so and I could give you 50 other examples but the point is there's nothing wrong with music being integrated into life experiences and in
59:46
fact we should cultivate that how is it you manag to listen to so much music I think the most important skill anyone can develop is time management skills how you use your day but there is one principle I want to stress because this
1:00:00
is very important to me and when people ask me for advice and once again this cuts across all Fields but this is the advice I give in your life you will be evaluated on your output your boss will evaluate you on your output if you're a writer like me
1:00:18
the audience will evaluate you on your output but your input is just is important if you don't have good input you cannot maintain good output the problem is no one manages your input the boss never cares about your input the
1:00:34
boss doesn't care about what books you read your boss doesn't ask you what newspapers you read the boss doesn't ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consumed but I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I
1:00:49
was not zealous in managing high quality inputs into my mind every day of my life that's why I spend maybe two hours a day writing I'm a writer I spend two hours a day writing but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day
1:01:08
listening to music people think that that's creating a problem in my schedule but in fact I say no no this is the reason why I'm able to do this because I have constant good quality input that is the only reason why I can maintain the
1:01:24
output and what's your most significant tip for how we can learn to listen to music better the most important thing right now is to understand that the best music in our society is under the radar screen for many complex reasons record labels are looking for
1:01:43
the formula radio stations are following the formula even these amazing curated playlists are just a feedback loop they'll tell you what to listen to next week BAS based on what you listened to last week and because they're a feedback
1:01:58
loop they won't show you anything new or interesting so what you need to do is if you really want to broaden your horizons as a listener is to get exposed to new things and pick somebody it doesn't have to be me I mean I recommend a new album
1:02:11
pretty much every day on my Twitter feed and every year I talk about the hundred best albums of the year and I focus specifically on albums most people would never hear otherwise so you can turn to me but it doesn't have to be me find somebody who
1:02:26
you trust as a guide and let them open your ears to these new experiences and if you do that you will be rewarded infinitely because music is an amazing part of our life and if you don't enjoy the riches of it you're selling yourself
1:02:41
short Ted Joya thank you very much and for all of our listeners and readers I very much recommend Ted's new book again that's music a subverse of History thank you Dad thank you for having [Music] me thanks for listening to conversations
1:02:57
with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show