Oh man, watching bank commercials from before the financial crisis is kinda painful/funny. Talk about schadenfreude.

WaMu
History
Founded: 1889 - Seattle, Washington
De-mutualized: 1983
Sale and effective dissolution: 2009
Major Acquisitions:
10/2005 - Providian (subprime credit card provider): $6.5 bn.
2002 - Homeside Lending, Inc., Florida - WaMu covered really covered all of the housing boom regions.
2001 - Fleet Mortgage Corp.
2001 - PNC Mortage
2001 - Bank United Corp. of Texas - broad retail financial services, including mortgage origination.
2000 - Alta Residential Mortgage Trust - California
etc. source: [WaMu Wikipedia Page]

Hilarious ads (in retrospect)

What if money was no object?

Just saw this thought provoking video. The video is above. For those of you who don't want to watch, I'll summarize.

Video Recap:
Why spend your life doing things you don't want to do, so you can continue doing what you don't want to do? I would venture that the primary purpose of working for most people is to sustain his or her life. But if you don't like your life, what is the purpose of sustaining it?

Put another way, what is the point of doing something you don't like if the end result is more of what you don't like? Since going to work makes up a good 75% of a persons waking life, you are really just working so that you can work more in the future.

It is better to not worry about money and do what you love. If you work long enough at what you love, you will eventually become an expert. Experts get the money. So, live poor to do what you love while you're young, reap the profits of your expertise later.

Analysis:
The reply to this critique of working at a job you don't love, I think, would be twofold: (1) the alternative is worse; or (2) by spending 75% of your day working, you gain access to activities which occur in the 25% of your day which would be otherwise inaccessible, i.e. going to an expensive concert, taking a fancy vacation. Point 2 is especially important when you are young. When you are young, you are much more willing to experiment and do new things. Skydiving? Sure, why not. This is valuable. It makes you a more interesting person. The real benefit, I think, is that it makes you more valuable. New experiences shape how you think and change how you analyze things.

I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. The 25% of your nonworking time has to be amazing to compensate for the 75% of time which sucks.

I think there is another issue, however. Lets say that a person chooses to follow their dreams. What is the trade off? Well, she doesn't have the money (at least initially) to do other entertaining things. Outside of what she has chosen to do for a profession, other fun experiences are unavailable. Is this trade off worth it?

Put another way, if she chooses to go deep into one of her interests, she renders the other interests inaccessible. This is an opportunity cost type issue. Not only has she shut off 75% of her day (which is devoted to working), but she has rendered the other 25% much less valuable because she is money-barred (read: too poor) from many experiences. So, in that case, she really has to enjoy the 75% of her day devoted to working at her chosen interest.

The long term sustainability of this path is predicated on becoming an expert within her chosen field. Which necessarily means the exclusion of other potentially interesting fields. Moreover, how does one become an expert in a field without foregoing other interesting opportunities? New experiences add to the development of expertise. If all experts within a given field followed the same path, I would think the field would soon grow stagnant and fossilized.

I think the best solution is to get your feet wet. Work jobs you don't like but which make money. If the tradeoff isn't worth it, switch.

First Song

As many of you must know Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) released his fifth album on November 15th 2010. I have listening through it a few times now and feel like I have picked up on a few things. Many things have been said about GT since he started touring and releasing CDs in the early 2000s. Like most people I discovered GT after he released his third album Night Ripper. On first listening to GT I simply couldn't comprehend it. The song moved from one sample to another too quickly. I imagine the experience is similar to if you took a formula one car and placed it in the 19th century. It takes a long time to get used to the pace of the songs. The key is to not try to identify and follow each song. Just find the melody and get ready for a ride through the pop music landscape.

So what is there to make of GT's new album All Day? There clearly is musicianship on display. Merging all of these samples in a clean and interesting way is no easy feat. If you think otherwise I invite you to try it yourself. Download Audacity and give it a try.

But here is the interesting part: Is what GT is doing the same thing as what the artist he samples are doing? That is, is he just like any other artist? Do people like his music because of the way the samples are arranged or do they just like the samples themselves?
Is Girl Talk just like any other artist?

Yes, I think GT is just like any other artist. What do other artists do? They manipulate and arrange sounds into an original pattern. In this respect GT is the same as an Alicia Keys. After all, the samples are just sounds. What matters is the arrangement of the sounds. Importantly, on GT's previous albums there is a traceable melody that is independent of the samples' melody. This is much more apparent when mashes nearly 10 samples into a 5-10 second segment. When he does this there is barely enough time to recognize the song let alone recognize the melody of the original song. So I think it is fair to say that GT does compose a melody out of samples and that is enough to make him just like any other artist in that respect. Granted, he is being "more" artistic the more samples he uses in a given fixed time frame.

But here is the rub.

How many people like the frenzied samples more than hearing a song in a different, interesting context? I have started to think that I like GT because he changes the way I hear the originial song. Because he is not bound by copyrights or having to come up with original compositions he is free to improve a song any way he wants. Would a Ludacris song sound better with the keyboards from a Boston song laying down the beat? Emphatically yes! Therein lies the genius of GT. He takes what we like seperately and combines them into new awesome sonic surprise. If that is what I (and I suspect others) like about GT then do we really like GT as an artist? 

That is the problem with GT. I want him to be more than a very talented maker of mash-ups. I want what he does to be art.

At the moment I am listening to  Night Ripper and it is fantastic. I have very little problem calling Night Ripper a piece of art. The album is full of complete songs that have identifyable melodies created through sampling loads of songs. It just flows extremely well. By listening to Night Ripper I can see where All Day fails as a piece of art.

All Day fails as a piece of art because of the way GT uses the samples. He has shifted from changing the primary 2-3 samples every 10 seconds on Night Ripper to changing the primary samples every 40 seconds. Doing this destroys whatever flow or melody the song had going. It degrades it from art to a very good mash-up. Arguing on the same lines as above, without a melody constructed from the songs' sounds there is no reason to claim it is an original piece of art. Heres a little logical notation (without the actual algebraic notation because blogspot doesn't have the correct Greek characters for it) to describe the relationship:

1. if a song is a piece of art, then it uses sounds to create an original melody.
2. it is not the case that All Day uses sounds to create an original melody. Rather, All Day uses songs in new contexts to generate interest.
3. Therefore, All Day is not a piece of art.

or
1. if A, then B
2. ~B
3. ~A via Modus Tollens

P.S. it would probably be more correct to use predicate logic instead of propositional logic because All Day is a particular instance of Melody or Mx. This is probably way too nerdy for anyone to care but needless to say the diagram above is a significantly simplified argument.

My Grading System

I have to admit, aesthetics is an area of philosophy I have barely explored. This is probably because Jerome Balmuth taught it most semesters and I was loathe to take a course with him again. That being said I'll try my best to highlight some interesting philosophical issues.


A few years ago I came up with my own way to evaluate music. To me there are three main categories: musicianship, lyrics, and melody/catchiness.

Musicianship:

Musicianship is just that. If a song makes me step back and say "Wow, that was a sick guitar solo" or "This girl's range is amazing" then the song gets a +1 for musicianship. Musicians focus on this category much to their own detriment. This category is filled pretty much everything by Stevie Ray Vaughan that isn't a cover of Hendrix. For example, "Eruption" by Eddie Van Halen has some of the sickest guitar work this side of Hendrix but is an absolutely terrible, and I mean terrible, song. Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan and most hair metal is an example of musical greatness without a lick of lyrical greatness or catchiness.

Is it any surprise that an artist can be great while being a mediocre musician? Think about it, how many modern painters are as technically good as Rembrandt? How many even care about that? Why should it be any different with music? This is one of the reasons I absolutely hate American Idol. Who cares if you can sing a song perfectly? Do they really think they are doing justice to a song by Nina Simone when they sing it technically perfect but without any feeling? What makes it so much worse is that they sing songs that shouldn't be sung perfectly. The songs aren't about the musicianship of the singer. The songs are about the feeling the songs are supposed to convey.

Lyrics:

In this category are songs that make you take notice to a clever turn of phrase or lyrics that make you relate to the song. This is probably the most subjective of the categories. I have friends who actually think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers write good lyrics. Sample RHCP lyric: "Hey oh, listen what I say oh". That being said, I don't think lyrics are a deal breaker. I threw the lyrics category in because it helps differentiate good hip-hop and rap songs from bad hip-hop and rap songs. In these genres lyrics are incredibly important obviously.

Some artists that are excellent lyricists but aren't great at anything else: Conor Oberst, Eliot Smith, and Morrissey (debatable on multiple fronts).


Melody/Catchiness

Now this category is the most vague of all. I think it is the category most people would use to explain why they like a song ("It's so catchy! I can't get it out of my head!"). When I was thinking of this category I was trying to find a way to include some pop songs that I think have artistic merit but don't have great musicianship or lyrics. This is what immediately grabs you when you hear a song. A great song has a melody that is simple and yet complex enough to hold your attention. A great melody can be seperated from an OK melody simply through repeated listening. If upon repeated listening you start to hate the song then the melody is not interesting enough. This is what happens with routine pop songs.

So these are the categories I have employed over the last few years. Over time I have come to realize that I more frequently use these categories to justify my interest in a song. That is, I use the songs to articulate why I think other people should like this song. This realization has changed the way I think about music and artistic taste. But more on that later...

The Theme of This Blog

Through this blog I intend to explore the philosophy behind popular music. This will be kind of like The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'Oh of Homer except for music. I'm interested in the intersection of pop philosophy (nee folk philosophy as it is called) and popular culture. Proper philosophers stay away from this area for one main reason: inconsistency. Philosophers are renowned for their precision and consistency of argument. While philosophers claim to be exploring the deepest questions of the world and the meaning of life, most of what they explore is the meaning of words (insert Wittgenstein citation here). Pop music often takes the opposite position. It deals in the effects of words and makes no claim as to the larger questions of life and the world.

So, every week or so I will break down a song or two and analyze the philosophical themes. Sound like fun? 
Here it goes...