The Boom-box Experiment
On Saturday September 26th I went to a small club in D.C. to witness what was advertised as "The Flaming Lips" present the "Boom-box Experiment" an Audience Participation Event." I really wasn't sure what to expect. I have never listened to a Flaming Lips album to this day; I have only heard about three recorded songs. My interest in the concert was the fact that they were performing songs from their album "Zaireeka."
In October of 1997, I was hanging out with my friends. It got late so I went home, but what I didn't know was that one of them had a copy of "Zaireeka." Well why am I making such a big deal about this? "Zaireeka" is like no other album created. "Zaireeka" is packaged as a four CD set. In order to listen to it, you need to set up four CD players and play the 4 CDs at the same time. You don't just listen to the music; you experience the sound moving around the room from speaker to speaker. Songs are created not only to entertain, but to disorient as well. When I saw that The Flaming Lips were giving a performance in downtown D.C., I decided that it would probably be an interesting event. My friends were also interested so we all purchased our $8 tickets and went to the show.
In her book Greenwich Village 1963, Sally Banes writes, "Popular culture stands for a sensual pleasure, consumption, passivity, ease of interpretation, ease of interpretation, realism, and narrativity. The avant-garde equates formalism with intellectual pleasure, interaction, activity, difficulty of interpretation, and abstraction." Popular culture entertains the audience; the avant-garde challenges the spectator. One of the key series of events in the Greenwich Village avant-garde scene of 1963 was called Happenings. Happenings were events "where the play of chance and group improvisation took over from the authority of any single artistic intention." Banes argues that the happenings of the 60's contributed to the period of social change that followed, she writes, "the concept of "the Happenings," as spread through the mass media, was a ubiquitous figure for the expression of freedom, spontaneity, and an appreciation of art in life." Happenings affected the way an audience and the artist experience and interact with art.
Around the time of The Flaming Lips concert, Jaron Lanier spoke at the University of Maryland. Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality, enjoys making electronic music with his computer. Speaking about electronic music, Lanier mentioned that the biggest knock against music constructed with a computer is that it is so bad and merely replicates the sound of traditional non-computerized music. Lanier did not disagree. He argued that the music is poor because it is created within a program that contains an ideological framework that works against music. He argued that it is repetitive because the program is structured to replicate the structure of known forms of music. In order to make original good music with a computer, Lanier suggests that the computer artist needs to challenge the limits of the program.
What does computerized music and the 60's avant-garde have to do with The Flaming Lips? An examination of the "Boom-box Experiment" I attended will help to explain. The show was at the "Black Cat." After going to the club for about five years, I had never seen any band set up the way the club was set up that night. Usually the club has a set of large speakers set up to the left and right of the stage; The Flaming Lips had three sets of speakers set up around the club. I was in for a loud night. The stage, which is usually where the band sets up their instruments, consisted of 40 folding chairs, 20 on each side, facing each other. On each chair was an old boom-box, and under each chair was a bag of audiocassette tapes. The band had also distributed copies of a home made program. Each program had two sides. On the front side was a list of the songs that would be "preformed" that night as well as a section entitled "Welcome to tonight's show," which read,
The performance - On the stage, the band asked for forty volunteers from the audience. I decided that I wanted to stand in the middle of the club so that I could optimally hear all of the speakers, declining to volunteer. The band instructed the volunteers to load the first cassette tape into their boom-box, and then counted off until three so that everyone could press play at the same time. The first two tapes were test tapes that resulted in each tape stating the assigned number assigned to the boom-box in sequence. The speakers counted of from one to forty, only with a couple of numbers running together because of the impossible task of having everyone push play at the same exact time (which directly ties into the happenings aspect of chance). The third song, entitled, "The Big Ol' Bug is the New Baby Now" was a spoken word composition that told the story of a dog and his new favorite toy. Like the Happenings, the ordinary becomes the focus for The Flaming Lips. The next four songs were amazing pop compositions that utilized the extraordinary technique of presentation by introducing new sounds, such as crying babies, grasshoppers and lawnmowers (again stressing the ordinary) into the composition while maintaining the structure and formula of a good Rock & Roll song. The Flaming Lips did not waste the form by just switching the music from one speaker to the next; they used each speaker and each boom-box to build tension and texture to the composition. For example, in "Heralding a Better Ego" The Flaming Lips recorded 40 drummers playing, introducing each drummer one at a time increasing the volume of noise with the layering of each introduction.
The members of the band did not stand idly by; they performed. Wayne, the lead singer of the band, stood in front of one section of twenty boom-boxes, and the Stephen, the bass player, stood in front of the other. The drummer stood in the back and controlled the sequencing; he entered the performance only once, when he took a megaphone and accompanied one of the songs by yelling into it. The performance of Wayne and Stephen resembled a happening more than it resembled Rock & Roll. They literally orchestrated the music. Even though most of the music was prerecorded and their movements had no impact on the sound, they appeared to control the music; creating the loudest sound of a guitar by raising their arms and then bringing the sound to silence by dropping their arms. They appeared as shamans of an invisible orchestra.
In the act of creating and presenting music in this way, The Flaming Lips are making a statement. They are arguing that pop music can be meaningful and interesting, but they feel that it has hit a dead end. They feel that every musical idea within the form has been used so it all becomes cliché. In Lanier's assessment of electronic music, the form must be challenged if an artist wants to continue making meaningful art. People make Rock music that is played on two speakers, everyone takes that for granted; The Flaming Lips are challenging the form by proving that Rock music can be made for four, forty or even a hundred speakers, if a band wants to.
With The Boom-box Experiment, The Flaming Lips have created a sort of 90's Rock & Roll Happening. The Flaming Lips wanted and realized that every performance would be different in that they knew it is impossible for forty people to push play at the same exact time and that the speed of electronic equipment, especially cheap boom-boxes, is different for every "instrument." This created a feel similar to Banes' description of the Happening when she writes, "the result was a performance that to many seemed refreshingly free of professional mannerisms, that in its very unprofessionalism appeared somehow less clumsy and more relaxed - more, that is, at home." Like Happenings, though the content of the event was very structured, and even prerecorded, there was still a very spontaneous feel to the concert.
The Flaming Lip's use of the audience to participate in the performance mirrors "the use of nonprofessionals" which was "an important feature of the Happening." This similarity might reflect on the attempt the Greenwich Village artists and The Flaming Lips to build community through their art. Banes mentions two major arguments about the creation of an avant-garde culture in 1963 Greenwich Village . The first argument is that the artists and dwellers of the Village were trying to compensate for the loss of the community of small-town America by creating an artistic community. The second argument is that the artists were drawn to the historic bohemia of Greenwich Village in an attempt to escape from the conservative communities of mid-America which was offering an unsatisfying form of community to the future inhabitants of Greenwich Village . The Flaming Lips do not have the same reasons for community building. Very rarely nowadays is Rock music a community experience for long. There are movements such as Grunge that grow as a local community until corporate America is able to exploit it until the movement enters the mainstream. Then millions of kids are independently listening to their own copies of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Rock & Roll began as a community experience. Before record players became inexpensive, kids would gather at the "hop" or at a party to listen to the newest records. They experienced music as a community. Now, the ease of acquiring and using technology allows individuals to create their own tastes and listening experience away from their friends or their local jukebox joint. The Flaming Lips, by creating music that creates a problem with technology for the audience forces the audience to create a listening community. That community can be four kids with their CD players, 30 kids and their car stereos or 40 kids with boom-boxes in a small club.
There are obvious problems with both types of communities created by these "Happenings." The major problem shared by both is whether or not the community created will last or create good for humanity. Art for art's sake, or rock for entertainment's sake is one thing, but creating important socially conscious meaning that will be heard and/or seen is another. In the case of Greenwich Village , the danger of leaving an unsatisfying community in order to create a utopian community is that the problems of poverty and ethnic tension of the old community are forgotten and ignored. In addition, the problems of the larger society are neglected because there is so mush focus on creating a better community. Banes argues that serving their own artists becomes extremely problematic in relationship to the larger Greenwich Village community. She writes,
The Flaming Lips ended the performance with a song entitled, "Altruism" or "That's the Crotch Calling the Devil Black". The program notes describe the song by writing,
In October of 1997, I was hanging out with my friends. It got late so I went home, but what I didn't know was that one of them had a copy of "Zaireeka." Well why am I making such a big deal about this? "Zaireeka" is like no other album created. "Zaireeka" is packaged as a four CD set. In order to listen to it, you need to set up four CD players and play the 4 CDs at the same time. You don't just listen to the music; you experience the sound moving around the room from speaker to speaker. Songs are created not only to entertain, but to disorient as well. When I saw that The Flaming Lips were giving a performance in downtown D.C., I decided that it would probably be an interesting event. My friends were also interested so we all purchased our $8 tickets and went to the show.
In her book Greenwich Village 1963, Sally Banes writes, "Popular culture stands for a sensual pleasure, consumption, passivity, ease of interpretation, ease of interpretation, realism, and narrativity. The avant-garde equates formalism with intellectual pleasure, interaction, activity, difficulty of interpretation, and abstraction." Popular culture entertains the audience; the avant-garde challenges the spectator. One of the key series of events in the Greenwich Village avant-garde scene of 1963 was called Happenings. Happenings were events "where the play of chance and group improvisation took over from the authority of any single artistic intention." Banes argues that the happenings of the 60's contributed to the period of social change that followed, she writes, "the concept of "the Happenings," as spread through the mass media, was a ubiquitous figure for the expression of freedom, spontaneity, and an appreciation of art in life." Happenings affected the way an audience and the artist experience and interact with art.
Around the time of The Flaming Lips concert, Jaron Lanier spoke at the University of Maryland. Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality, enjoys making electronic music with his computer. Speaking about electronic music, Lanier mentioned that the biggest knock against music constructed with a computer is that it is so bad and merely replicates the sound of traditional non-computerized music. Lanier did not disagree. He argued that the music is poor because it is created within a program that contains an ideological framework that works against music. He argued that it is repetitive because the program is structured to replicate the structure of known forms of music. In order to make original good music with a computer, Lanier suggests that the computer artist needs to challenge the limits of the program.
What does computerized music and the 60's avant-garde have to do with The Flaming Lips? An examination of the "Boom-box Experiment" I attended will help to explain. The show was at the "Black Cat." After going to the club for about five years, I had never seen any band set up the way the club was set up that night. Usually the club has a set of large speakers set up to the left and right of the stage; The Flaming Lips had three sets of speakers set up around the club. I was in for a loud night. The stage, which is usually where the band sets up their instruments, consisted of 40 folding chairs, 20 on each side, facing each other. On each chair was an old boom-box, and under each chair was a bag of audiocassette tapes. The band had also distributed copies of a home made program. Each program had two sides. On the front side was a list of the songs that would be "preformed" that night as well as a section entitled "Welcome to tonight's show," which read,
-
We've been calling these events "The Boom-Box Experiment" because we feel each concert is helping an idea, one that's been going on for almost two years now, evolve... The compositions you'll hear tonight have been part of this "evolution". Some parts of these were even heard at the first "parking lot experiment" back in October of '96, and have, in my opinion, become more musical and more unexpected as well as being more technically organized as each event has happened. What will be happening tonight is similar to the "parking lot experiments" in that what you'll be hearing are pre-recorded tapes. But, performance is done with hand held boom-boxes, forty of them, using volunteers from the audience to engage and manipulate each separate sound source. Me (Wayne) and Stephen will be guiding the engaging and manipulation and Michael is the center monitor source. This is the first time some of these compositions will be heard by both the audience and the creators... So we hope it goes well and we hope you like it. As we are still skeptical about its "entertainment" value...
The performance - On the stage, the band asked for forty volunteers from the audience. I decided that I wanted to stand in the middle of the club so that I could optimally hear all of the speakers, declining to volunteer. The band instructed the volunteers to load the first cassette tape into their boom-box, and then counted off until three so that everyone could press play at the same time. The first two tapes were test tapes that resulted in each tape stating the assigned number assigned to the boom-box in sequence. The speakers counted of from one to forty, only with a couple of numbers running together because of the impossible task of having everyone push play at the same exact time (which directly ties into the happenings aspect of chance). The third song, entitled, "The Big Ol' Bug is the New Baby Now" was a spoken word composition that told the story of a dog and his new favorite toy. Like the Happenings, the ordinary becomes the focus for The Flaming Lips. The next four songs were amazing pop compositions that utilized the extraordinary technique of presentation by introducing new sounds, such as crying babies, grasshoppers and lawnmowers (again stressing the ordinary) into the composition while maintaining the structure and formula of a good Rock & Roll song. The Flaming Lips did not waste the form by just switching the music from one speaker to the next; they used each speaker and each boom-box to build tension and texture to the composition. For example, in "Heralding a Better Ego" The Flaming Lips recorded 40 drummers playing, introducing each drummer one at a time increasing the volume of noise with the layering of each introduction.
The members of the band did not stand idly by; they performed. Wayne, the lead singer of the band, stood in front of one section of twenty boom-boxes, and the Stephen, the bass player, stood in front of the other. The drummer stood in the back and controlled the sequencing; he entered the performance only once, when he took a megaphone and accompanied one of the songs by yelling into it. The performance of Wayne and Stephen resembled a happening more than it resembled Rock & Roll. They literally orchestrated the music. Even though most of the music was prerecorded and their movements had no impact on the sound, they appeared to control the music; creating the loudest sound of a guitar by raising their arms and then bringing the sound to silence by dropping their arms. They appeared as shamans of an invisible orchestra.
In the act of creating and presenting music in this way, The Flaming Lips are making a statement. They are arguing that pop music can be meaningful and interesting, but they feel that it has hit a dead end. They feel that every musical idea within the form has been used so it all becomes cliché. In Lanier's assessment of electronic music, the form must be challenged if an artist wants to continue making meaningful art. People make Rock music that is played on two speakers, everyone takes that for granted; The Flaming Lips are challenging the form by proving that Rock music can be made for four, forty or even a hundred speakers, if a band wants to.
With The Boom-box Experiment, The Flaming Lips have created a sort of 90's Rock & Roll Happening. The Flaming Lips wanted and realized that every performance would be different in that they knew it is impossible for forty people to push play at the same exact time and that the speed of electronic equipment, especially cheap boom-boxes, is different for every "instrument." This created a feel similar to Banes' description of the Happening when she writes, "the result was a performance that to many seemed refreshingly free of professional mannerisms, that in its very unprofessionalism appeared somehow less clumsy and more relaxed - more, that is, at home." Like Happenings, though the content of the event was very structured, and even prerecorded, there was still a very spontaneous feel to the concert.
The Flaming Lip's use of the audience to participate in the performance mirrors "the use of nonprofessionals" which was "an important feature of the Happening." This similarity might reflect on the attempt the Greenwich Village artists and The Flaming Lips to build community through their art. Banes mentions two major arguments about the creation of an avant-garde culture in 1963 Greenwich Village . The first argument is that the artists and dwellers of the Village were trying to compensate for the loss of the community of small-town America by creating an artistic community. The second argument is that the artists were drawn to the historic bohemia of Greenwich Village in an attempt to escape from the conservative communities of mid-America which was offering an unsatisfying form of community to the future inhabitants of Greenwich Village . The Flaming Lips do not have the same reasons for community building. Very rarely nowadays is Rock music a community experience for long. There are movements such as Grunge that grow as a local community until corporate America is able to exploit it until the movement enters the mainstream. Then millions of kids are independently listening to their own copies of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Rock & Roll began as a community experience. Before record players became inexpensive, kids would gather at the "hop" or at a party to listen to the newest records. They experienced music as a community. Now, the ease of acquiring and using technology allows individuals to create their own tastes and listening experience away from their friends or their local jukebox joint. The Flaming Lips, by creating music that creates a problem with technology for the audience forces the audience to create a listening community. That community can be four kids with their CD players, 30 kids and their car stereos or 40 kids with boom-boxes in a small club.
There are obvious problems with both types of communities created by these "Happenings." The major problem shared by both is whether or not the community created will last or create good for humanity. Art for art's sake, or rock for entertainment's sake is one thing, but creating important socially conscious meaning that will be heard and/or seen is another. In the case of Greenwich Village , the danger of leaving an unsatisfying community in order to create a utopian community is that the problems of poverty and ethnic tension of the old community are forgotten and ignored. In addition, the problems of the larger society are neglected because there is so mush focus on creating a better community. Banes argues that serving their own artists becomes extremely problematic in relationship to the larger Greenwich Village community. She writes,
-
There was a vivid sense of community in the Village, yet the underlying and largely unacknowledged paradox of this activist civic spirit was that two different groups lived in the Village - "Villagers" and locals (i.e., artists and intellectuals vs. members of the ethnic community) - and these two groups often had conflicting interests.
The Flaming Lips ended the performance with a song entitled, "Altruism" or "That's the Crotch Calling the Devil Black". The program notes describe the song by writing,
-
A recording of Meg Ryan's fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally is lengthened and slowed so that her voice now resembles Kim Gordon's moaning on those early Sonic Youth records. A pulsating synth-bass loop builds behind her, gaining momentum and pitch until she climaxes. Me and Stephen guide the melody that accompanies Meg's thrust. Using up to 28 different notes to create the composition's oppressive melody. The combination of moods arrived at by the end of the performance leaves one feeling sad that the lust has been satisfied... what now?