Politics and Art

Politics and art are a tricky combination.

When I was in graduate school I was a BIG fan of didactic, political art. And damn the torpedoes. My field was the turn of the 20th century in American literature, an era that had plenty of troubling issues worth an artist's time to think about and make art about. It was also the early 1990s, and although I wasn't out of the closet myself at that point, it was impossible not to notice the real issues going on around me, with HIV and AIDS, with government policy, with the end of the Cold War, and so on.

I was never NOT aware that putting strong political statements about the times you live in into your art can "date" your work as fast as clinging too tightly to an of-the-moment fashion. And the beauty and artistry of the art can suffer, too. It's easier to be strident and call people's attention to things than to delve into them in a way that connects heart AND head. Art's path to truth needn't be linear to be a true path. Didactic art can get too linear.

Still, didactic art that really tries to talk about Big Questions can be damned exciting. So I was often passionate in my defense of novels from my period that were not necessarily "great literature" but were literature AND great because they captured something about their times that "better" works didn't.

But now it comes time to make more art of my own and, not surprisingly, I have to wrestle with questions of whether and how to incorporate my personal convictions into my work, and whether the works in which I'm passionate but more vague are stronger than the ones in which I'm specific, and the specificity sometimes robs the work of the room for interpretation and personal reaction that can be the key to audience's really investing themselves and their own passions.

In theory one can have it all--if not in each work of art, then in the arc of one's whole career--but that merely defers the confrontation or moves it to a different level.

I've had a song kicking around for a couple of years, with the working title of "Good Men." It's a political song. I notice that I'm both attracted to it and have strong needs about it *because* of its political content, and that it scares me in ways that some of my other work doesn't. I think what's scary is the feeling that it would be all too easy to be crappy in this context. And many are the types of crap I could make.

The gist of the song, originally, was that I had gotten a little tired of seeing gay men ranting on internet hookup sites about how there were no "good men" out there. It's not that I don't know my share of bad gay dating stories, either ones that have happened to me or to my friends. But I know plenty of great gay men, so the lament about how there weren't ANY good men ANYWHERE often struck me as an overstatement. Look around. Great gay men are everywhere. Whether each of us is guaranteed one as a life partner, yeah, that's trickier, but it's a different question.

Thing is, the original thrust of the song was kind of snarky. And not in a good way. I'm blessed with a pretty good relationship, and so I don't have to wrestle with whatever feelings of loneliness might be troubling people who say "there are no good men." (Well. Except to the degree that one can feel lonely even in a relationship. But that's Adult Commitment 202 or 303, and the song was about Adult Dating 101, Male Same Sex Version.) It didn't feel particularly productive to write a song about how other people were whiny.

The thing that held my attention was the snippet of chorus I came up with. Which centered on a question: where are the good men we dream of?

At my age, although I came out just after the worst of the original HIV crisis, it's pretty hard not to recall how devastating that time was. I have one lover who is the ONLY person left alive from the friendship circle he came out into. And he's only a year older than I. It's become somewhat rote to talk about how an entire generation of gay and bisexual men was lost. Obviously it wasn't an ENTIRE generation .... I know several people in my own age bracket and older. But it was indeed a HUGE number of people. My ex Woody, who worked in GLBT community centers in the 1990s, can still talk about going to one or two memorial services a week. Often for people he'd known fairly well.

The answer to the question "where are the good men we dream of?" became pretty apparent to me the more I thought about it. "Gone."

As I say, this song has been kicking around for a while. Nearly three years ago, in the summer and fall of 2005, I was briefly in a band project with some friends from work. I know this tune was in the works at that point because I remember playing it for them.

Politics aren't the only tricky thing about art, of course: technique matters, too. My songwriting technique wasn't particularly solid at that point (whatever it may be now, it's definitely a lot better). The song didn't have so much a chord progression as a lead keyboard line that suggested a progression. My MIDI keyboard was the shiny new toy at that point and I was exploring it for all it was worth. And it was a GOOD lead riff (well. Decent, anyway. Very good considering my underlying skill level at the time). Problem was, the chorus and verse sounded a lot alike. And the melody over it was a bit repetitive.

The project fizzled out for a variety of reasons not long after that, and I filed the song away for future reference. Went on to other things, practiced my craft.

Beyond the musical limitations of the song, though, something else was troubling me. I was serious and passionate about the topic of how there was a generation of gay and bi men gone. It was something that we used to talk about the lingering impact of when I did men's health organizing. The lack of role models. The fact that a lot of gay and bi men my age are sort of "pioneering" the process of living into our 40s and 50s because so many men 10 or 20 years older than us never made it this far. How hard that feels.

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world--which I'm never not noticing, even if I care a great deal about the queer communities--there's a whole 'nother series of crises putting young people in harm's way. Particularly the war in Iraq.

What blocked me about the song three years ago wasn't just the musical stuff I needed to get more experience about. There was a BIG part of me that didn't want to just write another impact-of-AIDS song. Not if it meant rehashing the 1980s and 1990s and ignoring my own time .... when friends are STILL vulnerable to HIV, but when there's a lot else going on too.

Trying to talk about the waste of human life due to indifference and apathy in ALL their forms--indifference to queer men, treating younger men and women as cannon fodder for wars whose justification never looked fully solid even at the outset, and dead wrong now .... well, that really was beyond my abilities.

Three years have gone by and I've taken another poke at it.

I feel quite a bit more confident now. Among other things, I have much better ideas about how to differentiate the verses and choruses. It hasn't taken me much effort to chuck some simple solutions at that part of the problem. ("Simple" now that I know more.)

The first verse of the old song contained some strong images that I've kept intact. And they've provided some jumping-off points for later verses.

I'm still ambivalent about the results. I have this funny feeling that nobody would necessarily perceive the original link to the history of the HIV crisis if I didn't write a long blog post about it. *I* know which lines in the first verse are directly about that.

The rest of the song sort of veers off into my frustration about the Iraq War and the culture of political inaction around it. Which I'm part of myself.

And a big part of me thinks that writing a song about how so many of us have been less active than we ought to have been is just one more failure to do enough.

I mean, I can't tell you how much I do NOT want to be one of those people who writes about saving the whales, or some other form of tilting at windmills, without really DOING something.

I fully believe that making political art IS a form of action. But it's a tricky one. It's VERY easy to get misled that you've accomplished more than you have.

And to make crappy art in the process. Failing at both the art AND the politics.

And yet, the song has a good shape in its current form. I can imagine investing my own emotion in the process of working on it further, of singing it. Sometimes the meaning of these things, and whatever impact they wind up having, comes out in the doing, not in the thinking about doing.

It may take on additional life if I sit and connect with it more deeply. If I open up more fully to the rage behind the frustrations I'm working out in writing it. Or if I put it across in a way that lets other people connect with whatever feelings THEY have about all this.

Or. Not.

Hard to tell, sometimes.

Top Of My Lungs

I think it was the Behind The Music episode on Heart in which Ann Wilson talked about having to *discover* that high-powered voice of hers. Apparently she and Nancy had been playing and singing for years, as kids, but it wasn't until they got the band together and started playing live that Ann was pushed by circumstance to really reach for some of those high-notes-with-power that she's well known for.

I'm thinking about this because I'm pushing myself to keep at my vocal technique. It's a truism that most untrained singers sing too low in their range (or below it). I took no more than five "adult education" singing classes twenty years ago and that was one of the FIRST things the teacher told us. She said it's particularly true for men, who believe that we're supposed to have lower voices than (whoever).

Nevertheless, when I started writing and singing my own songs I often composed fairly low in my range. A) There's any number of bass and baritone rock singers whose tone I admire (Philip Oakey, Stephin Merritt, etc), and B) it genuinely felt more comfortable.

More than one friend has reported back to me that the songs in which I reach higher in my range happen to be the ones that work better for them. And that some of the low songs don't work. No matter how I feel about my voice, this is good information.

I've often felt kind of like the comment that Geena Davis makes about her kid sister in A League Of Their Own regarding high pitches: can't hit 'em, can't lay off 'em. Except for me it's the LOW pitches. ;-)

Since I have no objection to learning to sing better *anywhere* in my range, though--other than some emotional discomfort I know better than to give in to--I've kept at working the higher end of my range as well.

Yesterday I came home from brunch with a good friend and the house was empty, so I plugged in my guitar and started rocking out live on some of the new songs I'm working on. Part of the process I'm trying to go through this time it to have played and sung these things more often before committing them to media.

Got partway through one song that isn't too low in my range, necessarily (the new material incorporates some of my learning about where I should place my voice better) .... but started to feel as if I was missing a bet by not letting myself go higher. But I'm not quite smart enough to change keys on the fly. So I just went up an octave.

And, perhaps a little like Ann Wilson, I found I had some notes in me that I hadn't thought of.

Everything wasn't fabulous .... the verse I was in ends on some high notes that maybe *aren't* in my range, if I'm up in that octave. (Or that I'll have to keep working at.) Maybe I'd have to re-key the song down a step to be able to go up an octave. I probably want to sing the earlier verse in the original octave, save the reaching-higher for the middle bit. That would suit the emotional arc of the tune.

Still. Some high notes. Pretty good tone and pitch. Loud, too.

I was all kind of "whoah." That was me singing that. Interesting.

Practice makes better.

Continuing On

How things change when you forget to update your secondary blog in a while. Today I'm taking a break from Live Journal (there's a bit of a political protest going on because LJ's new owners have showed some cluelessness about customer relations, combined with some actions that make some folks worried that the cluelessness is the flip side of some potential censorship). So here I am, and I notice that I've said almost nothing about how productive and interesting the last few weeks have been.

Well, they have. In my last post here, I noticed that I'd broken a bit of a creative logjam. Boy, did I ever. I finally got a LOT of my semi-finished music tracks into a "finished" state. As with anything like this, I can think of a billion things that I wish I'd done better with those tracks. But it was time to let them go, put them out in the world, stop fiddling with them. So I did.

The end result was a almost-thirty-minute-long collection of instrumentals with a linking motif or two that I called "Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar," and an almost-hour-long collection of "pop songs" released as "Spring Hill Light And Power." Both went up on a new web site, http://www.dirigibleego.com, for my Dirigible Ego "band" project.

Um. Yeah. 90 minutes of music.

I've been getting positive comments on the material from various friends. Including from other musicians, *including* from people whose own work had been among my inspirations over the last few years. So while I'm still intensely aware, at times, of "how the song sounds in my head" versus "how it REALLY sounds out in the world," I can't deny that people have had positive reactions to what I've done. Sometimes unexpected ones .... in the sense that, sure, people are interested in part because they're my friends, but when they mention liking a track that I was ambivalent about (which. um. could be ANY of them, on any given day), or when they're moved by something I wrote. Yeah. That's good.

In particular, as I keep saying, I got a lot more confidence in my vocals, and more skill at rendering them well.

So that was a couple of weeks ago, and things have moved right along. I think I said, in my last post, that I was hoping to get some things out the door because I was getting backlogged on "new" material and wanted to stop obsessing over the old stuff. That remains the case. My Nano this morning carries draft demos of five new songs, and that isn't all of what I've got in work.

Add to that: one friend has stepped forward recently to say that he'd like to play with me. He likes my stuff, he wants to contribute ... and he's actually *come over* to the house twice now to start rehearsing.

This is kind of a big deal. A *number* of my friends have said, in the past, that they'd like to collaborate with me. Sometime. But most of them have lived at a distance, and *all* of them are at least as busy as I am. Or something seems to get in the way. More than once I've emailed someone a track I was working on and ... not heard for a long time. I've gotten VERY good at talking back to the little voices inside that say "they wanted to work with you until they heard how weak your material is." It's life: there are a lot of people I would "want to" work with that I haven't, or don't have time to. It's not really a comment on anything other than the impossibility of having it all. (Good lord, my family member Pepper has been *begging* me to play music with her for *years*. I just can't get motivated .... we're stylistically distinct enough that it just hasn't called to me yet.)

So to have someone actively seeking to work with me, because he likes what I'm doing. Yeah. That's really great.

It's a very new collaboration, it's already forcing me to take leadership and ownership of what I do. That's new territory, a bit scary, so I haven't made any big announcements about who it is or that we're working together. I need to give it time to breathe, time to let myself inhabit it.

But it's really awesome.

Of course, I'm laying down vocals for some of these new demos and thinking "Gah. I'm much better than I WAS and not at all where I WANT TO BE." ;-) So the struggle continues.

Still. These new demos represent so many levels of improvement over the past, in terms of imagination and how fast I can get new clunky ideas out and less-clunky.

Truly, for all the self-doubt (that I suspect I would carry around with me even if I were, let's say, Bono), my God, I seem to get a lot done.