Walkie Talkies #3 – Karaoke and Cover Art

Antique toy walkie talkie

So, after taking a couple days off from walkie-talkies due to a complete lack of sleep and several other projects that demanded my attention, I’m back to meander about my house while I discuss a quote from one of my recent readings. Today’s walkie-talkie is based on a quote from Rob Sheffield in his book about karaoke, Turn Around Bright Eyes.

He wrote, “In the karaoke universe, we can be whoever we want. We express ourselves by turning into colorful and disastrous parodies of pop stars who are already appalling parodies of human beings. And somehow, that’s how we end up as our most sincere version of ourselves. When you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side.”

This is a very powerful, insightful quote into not just karaoke, but really the music industry as a whole. One thing that I have noticed, especially recently, is just how often pop stars will parody themselves and others. What really bothers me about that is, really, music is about expressing the colors of your soul, your emotions, your feelings. Each of us has a unique voice, a unique way of bringing to light the melodies and harmonies within each of us. Because, at its core, music is part of physics. It’s a physical thing that’s shared among all living beings. Everything vibrates, just by the nature of atomic power. Music is simply an extension of those vibrations.

Those vibrations are what keep us alive and keep us moving. The reason certain music connects with us, whereas certain other music doesn’t, is because the vibrations are unique to us. The vibrations that connect with us, that vibe with us, as the kids would say these days, are the songs that connect with us the most. The cool thing about karaoke, and really just singing along in general, is that we can then put ourselves in the shoes of the singer.

And I think that’s the other reason this quote really struck me as relevant today, as this idea is related to a salient point that I’m going to be writing about at length soon. That is, cover art. Cover artists tend to parody the songs and artists that they are portraying through their cover performances. And the great irony of this, as Rob was saying, and Rob being a writer for Rolling Stone would know this probably better than most, is that most pop stars are already parodies of themselves, parodies of human beings, parodies of what it means to be an artist and a performer.

What’s funny is when we do karaoke, when we sing songs in karaoke that we love, we become that artist. But we then somehow become a slightly different version of that artist. Music allows us to connect with our core selves, our most intimate feelings, and there are things that music can do, things that music can express, which nothing else can. When you’re singing a song that really connects with you, where the lyrics truly resonate with your thoughts and your feelings and your singing, you can tell how somebody is really feeling. You can tell who somebody really is just from the way they perform music. If someone sounds angry when they sing, it’s because they are angry deep down. If they’re happy, they’re going to show that through their singing. The cool thing about karaoke is it’s a shared experience.

After all, Music is meant to be a shared experience. Yet for so many years, music was often a solitary listening experience for me. I had very few friends that enjoyed the music that I did, so the people that did enjoy the music that I did were my best friends. These are people that are no longer part of my life in any way, shape, or form except in fading memory. The only friend I have now that enjoys music with me is my own wife. And that’s a tragedy, because music is meant to be shared with people. Like our feelings, it’s not meant to be locked up in a cage like a songbird.

But what really gets me about this quote is where Rob says, when you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side. That’s a very interesting observation, that when you sing a karaoke song, or a cover song for that matter, what you don’t necessarily know is how is this song going to affect me? How is it going to change the way that I feel about myself, about others, about the song itself? Because music can be interpreted in so many different ways. Some music just repulses us, it makes us angry and wish that piece didn’t exist in our universe. Other songs make us our happiest, best selves, and only music can do that in quite the way it does. Music often allows us to shed an outer layer or three, and we should take this removing of dead or artificial layers into making better cover art and music and karaoke.

So, cover art and karaoke kind of share a similar area of performance. Of course, the difference with karaoke is that it’s okay to be bad, to sing badly. In fact, karaoke means “empty orchestra”, in Japanese. The whole idea of karaoke is all about the voice that you are portraying. And again, sometimes that voice is a parody. Sometimes that voice is your true voice, and it’s very off-key, and it’s very embarrassing. But when you’re doing karaoke, that’s okay. It’s okay to be bad, because you’re bringing forth the best version of yourself when you’re singing. And unless you’re true to yourself when you’re singing, people are going to know that you’re faking it.

Cover art is very different. When you cover a song, you’re either trying to directly parody the original song, you’re trying to blend that song with your own style, or you’re trying to force another style on top of it. Or you just take that song, you make it your own, and you find your own way to express it, rearrange it, remix it, to fit the way that you want it to be. We need covers of our favorite songs to be that way to express some unspoken feelings, some unspoken thoughts that you have not been able to vocalize.

Music is a language, a language of love, a language of emotion, a language of nature. And lyrics are simply poetry put to music. And there was a time where I thought all the great poets were dead until I realized, oh yeah, the great poets of our age are all songwriters because it’s way more commercially viable to be a songwriter. So, listen to some of these pop songs, and if you really listen, you’ll recognize some of these songs have incredible lyrics. They might sound simple on the surface, but the best songs, the ones that stick around on the charts, have something to say.

The main problem with music of the last couple of years is reflected in the fact that so many writers are credited on these songs. But it’s not like 20 people are sitting down in a room and coming up with a song like in a board meeting. What happens is you have like four or five people that, by committee, decide to do a Google search – or some equivalent – and put in words they want to include in the song. Then they find lyrics with lines, melodies, harmonies, or instrumentation they like, contact the rights holders to these songs, and ask if they can use these elements if they give credit. The rights holders either decline outright or agree to let them be included in exchange for a percentage of the song’s profits. Music has become this corporate machine, and at this point, there ain’t much soul left.

However, when you have songwriters who are an actual songwriting team that come up with their own original stuff, there’s a completely different quality to the finished product.  You can tell the difference between someone just piecing things together, frankenstitching lyrics into something that seems coherent, but it’s not. You’re stealing hooks, choruses, even entire verses, just frankensteining songs together. A lot of so-called experts, Ph.D. level individuals, think that every song that could ever be written has already been written. That’s ridiculous. Yes, there are only so many chords and words in the English language. If you have monkeys just hitting random buttons on a keyboard, they’ll come up with some lines of Shakespeare here and there. They’d probably still come up with more coherent material than most of today’s Top 40 charts. Anyway, I digress somewhat.

There’s more to music, and more to karaoke, than just the lyric themselves. There’s more to the songs we love than just the melody itself, the lyrics, the instrumentation, and the blending of those elements. Karaoke is freeing ourselves from artifice, freeing ourselves from the expectations and demands placed upon us in everyday life. Cover art is an inversion of karaoke, where you are pretending to be somebody that you’re not. So, whereas karaoke is freeing yourself, cover art is putting yourself in a cage. Even it sounds pretty, you’re a songbird in a cage when you do cover art unless you are doing it as your truest possible self.

Many cover artists are not doing that. Some are. The ones that succeed are the ones that are essentially using cover art as a form of therapy, connecting deeper with themselves, as a form of self-care. But if you’re trying to be commercial and profit-focused, you have to go with whatever’s in demand, whatever people are looking for, whatever sounds good in the moment. A true cover artist should just go with whatever song feels good to them now.

There are two cover artists in particular that are at the top of my mind… Right now, they are definitely in the latter camp. They are trying to add their own personality to the songs they cover and perform. They make real efforts to make these songs their own and own them. (This is what is considered “ruining” a song, by cover artists making their own definitive versions, usually entirely by accident.) Well, both these lovely cover artists, both female, are dealing with some personal crises right now. One of them is reeling from an extremely abusive relationship. The other is still young enough where she’s had some problems but has the resources and tools to get through this rough patch. She had a pretty rough year last year. A rot year, she called it. But she’s young enough, she can bounce back easily.

The other, the one that the younger one idolizes, she’s a little bit older, not much younger than me. And she’s looking to have to start her life completely over this year at the same age I was when I met Tom. But again, this lovely, talented, amazing woman has the music on her side. She has the music inside of her.

When we are struggling, when our place has been ripped away from us against our will, often the best solution that I’ve found is to reach out and find music that speaks our language. We must gain the ability to take these precious lullabies and make their melodies and lyrics part of our vocabulary. Make them part of our auras.

So, when you find an artist and their oeuvre completely speaks to you and you can just spin their records on repeat constantly, that’s when you know that you’ve found the music for your own personal soul. That artist has become your Personal Jesus. And since each of us has a different soul, even when we share music, even we share musical tastes, that person that you love and adore that loves the song along with you, they don’t love it for the same reason that you love it necessarily. There’s probably a different line or a different melody that stays in their head other than you. People focus on different things based on our own personal experiences. The vibrations within the atoms that make up our bodies and our minds are all somewhat different. Therefore, our minds, infinitely complex as they are, have an infinite number of ways to interpret a given lyric or chord progression choice.

The problem is, there’s all these experts people believe that are saying, oh, all the best songs have already been written, so you might as well just cover them, ad infinitum. That’s such a horribly reductive way of looking at music, looking at art in general. Yeah, we do live in a world where there’s so much content that it does all start sounding the same. But that’s only true if you allow it to sound the same. People need to put themselves back into their art. Cover artists, most especially, need to start thinking more like karaoke bar singers. They need to take these songs back from the soulless corporate machine and generative AI overlords taking over social media. I think if you kind of blend the best of karaoke and the best of cover art, we’re probably going to end up in a very different musical landscape than we’re in now. I can’t see how it can’t be better.

Fortunately, I’m starting to see some cover artists choose less popular songs, especially more obscure ones that just aren’t well publicized and overlooked B-sides, often favoring independent artists. This is starting to become a thing, and I love it. People are tired of homogenization. People want to find music that speaks to them, that is different, that allows them to speak a different language more suitable for them through either melody or lyric or instrumentation.

Yeah, I think this is probably my most impassioned walkie-talkie so far. I hope that you got something out of this, and I hope that you have already found your music. And if you haven’t, that’s the first thing you need to do right now. Go find your music. You need to go back to the artists that you loved in your youth and rediscover them. In doing so, you will discover yourself. Perhaps again for the first time in years, and perhaps, for the very first time.

~ The “Phoenix”

Walkie Talkies #4 – Education is Putting the Feast on the Table

So, today’s walkie-talkie is happening a little later than usual. Tom is getting an extensive tattoo on her left arm, so I’m home alone. I had a terrible night. I don’t really want to talk about why, and the day hasn’t gotten much better. But I am doing a walkie-talkie because I absolutely need to take my mind off things that I cannot possibly change.

Today’s quote that was randomly selected from my index cards was from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” It was suggested by authors of another book, and I really like the introduction, but once I got into the first couple chapters, I found myself not really agreeing with a lot of things that he said, especially things that had to do with religion. But there are several quotes I was able to pull from what I did read before I put the book down indefinitely. Today, I wanted to talk about what he calls the “great books conviction.”

He says, “That conviction was that nature is the only thing that counts in education, that the human desire to know is permanent, that all it really needs is the proper nourishment, and that education is merely putting the feast on the table.”

Me, I initially went to college to be a history teacher. But because of very limited offerings in that department at the small private college in New Hampshire I went to, I ended up transitioning over to English. There I discovered the field of forensic reading. Now the problem with studying in that field is that it’s tied closely to criminal justice. Yes, I am a big fan of public safety. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the judicial system. So, because the forensic reading department is closer to the judicial system than law enforcement, I didn’t want to do that, either. I decided on studying to be an English teacher.

But the problem is, I left that school in New Hampshire. due to a myriad of issues. So, the next two years of school I felt like I was playing catch-up because many of my class credits didn’t transfer from the old school to a local college in Massachusetts. I ended up having to retake a whole bunch of prerequisites. One of them was Writing 102, which is a pretty standard course. The issue is that I passed it previously in New Hampshire, obviously with flying colors because I am a writer, first and foremost. For whatever reason, they wouldn’t accept that from my previous school.

Well, I just could not seem to pass it in my new school. The first time I just dropped it. They decided to make it an online-only course that semester for whatever reason. Then, the teacher was an idiot, and didn’t ever upload things properly or mark things properly. So, I put it off until my fourth year of college, which would have been my senior year.

Unfortunately, once I got there, I ended up with this professor who was this old hag, pardon my choice of words. She didn’t understand why a fourth-year student was in a freshman class, and she didn’t like it. I was going to class with these 18- and 19-year-olds, and I’m pushing 22 at this point in school. The first couple essays I wrote, she magically lost them. Then I got zeros on them because she claimed she didn’t get them. I realized she just didn’t like me because I was an incredible writer compared to anyone she’d ever seen. Therefore, she probably thought I was plagiarizing. In fact, I had been accused of plagiarism at the New Hampshire school, but anyone who knows me knows I would never plagiarize. I always cite my sources. The accusations were dismissed, but they still pissed me off in a major way.

One day, about halfway through my second semester of my fourth year of school, I show up for class after my part-time job, and the teacher sits us down and says we’re going to learn the parts of speech. I raise my hand and say this is stuff I learned in third or fourth grade. She tells me to quiet down and listen. I get up and tell her I’m not dealing with this; it’s elementary school stuff. She tells me to sit down and learn to write properly. I give her both barrels with my middle fingers and quite emphatically tell her to GFY. I walk out, and after that defiant display, several students follow me in solidarity. A few days later, I was put on academic suspension. She clearly reported me. The bitch just hated me and hated teaching in general at that point. How she was still a professor in such a key prerequisite course I have no idea. But that essentially ended my college career. I never returned to campus after that.

And before you think, well, that was an impulsive thing to do, I already knew that position at my work was opening up. Had I the chance to live that moment over again, I would do it EXACTLY the same! No one is going to tell me that I don’t know how to write and discredit me out of hand.

Anyway, you might think, what does any of this have to do with that quote? Long before this, long before even college, I realized, thanks to Ben Franklin, that you do not need to go to college to have a strong education. You just need to find the right books that teach you the right things about how the world works. Reading gives you an unparalleled opportunity to understand different perspectives on how people think, how people do things, how things have been done, how ideas have evolved over time.

I always was an avid reader. Problem is, I was very disorganized and I spent so much of my time playing video games, following sports, and doing foolish things that young people do, especially playing trading card games. I was spending way too much money on Yu-Gi-Oh, for example. I would read, but rather sporadically, and I never took good notes when I did. I tended to speed read through a book and not retain very much. My comprehension, and especially my retention, was just awful. I just stopped reading for a few years, outside of blogs and news articles.

I think my sudden disinterest in reading was that the whole idea of education had turned me off. By the time I was put on suspension, I’d planned to quit entirely. When I was offered a full-time position at my current work, it was easy to do so. Because I was on academic suspension, my student loans became due. Naturally, I had to start paying for them anyway. I thought, I’d rather work anyway. It would easily both cover my student loans and allow me to save up for the future.

So, what this quote reminds me of is that I always had a desire to learn. But school took so much money that I didn’t even have, put me in massive amounts of debt, mortgaging my future, and I never got a degree out of it. I failed several classes in the last couple of years because I just wasn’t interested and never showed up. I was bored. I had no interest in half the things that we were being taught because it was just not interesting to me.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve just quit after my second year and instead gone on like the Harvard website and looked at their curriculum. Even at this point, around 2007, they were putting curriculum for free online, along with the reading lists and assignments. So, I really should have just quit school. But the problem is I would have been on the street because my parents only let me come home to go to school locally if I kept going to school. And the only reason they didn’t kick me out after I got suspended from the college in Massachusetts was because I’d already secured a full-time job.

Fortunately, that full-time job ended up being more of an education than my four fruitless years of college. I was there part-time for two years, and I worked there for the better part of the next four years. So, I basically got a degree by working, but I got paid for it. So that’s kind of neat, all that practical work experience in a field I was good at, that being SEO, blogging, and digital marketing. I learned some sales and accounting skills as I went along, too.

So yeah, I agree with people that say practical experience is more important than book learning. Again, humans have an innate desire to know things. We’re just curious creatures. It’s just how we are. But the problem is that education does not teach us how to educate ourselves because then they would make their jobs unnecessary.

I think of what my mom used to say to me, that a parent’s job is to make their job unnecessary. That alone is an interesting quote that I need to go into more detail in future. But I think that the whole point of an educator is to make their job unnecessary, to give students the tools and skills to succeed in a given field. If you’re going to invest tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in school, you should be going only to learn super-specialized knowledge that you can’t necessarily glean from some random book.

Sure, I wanted to get a ”proper” education, but the problem is, I knew that not only would I not make enough money to make it, if I had, let’s just say for the sake of argument, I had gotten my degree, gotten my master’s in education, and started teaching. I still would have been stuck living at home with my parents. There’s no way I would have made nearly enough to pay my college loans off while also living on my own. Basically, had I kept going with university education, my entire paycheck would have been going to my student loans and I’d still be living with my parents today. Yeah, I didn’t want to throw my life away like that. Actually, I probably would have ended up becoming RIP. But let’s not get too morbid here.

So yeah, human nature is that we are curious. But the idea that education merely puts the feast on the table, if you’re going to school and you’re not getting anything out of it, then it’s just not worth it. However, I assure you that it’s not your fault. It’s the information being presented in a way that’s just not useful or interesting and critical thinking and study skills not being paramount in today’s education at the ground level.

I have been corresponding with somebody, a friend of Tom’s, who is taking courses in elementary education. I encouraged her to continue her studies because clearly, we need better educators in the US. It’s not teachers that are the problem; it’s the educators, the people who hire the teachers and force them to follow these ridiculous federal rules. That’s why I want the Department of Education to go away because it’s not productive to have all these restrictive, proscriptive regulations; states and local governments should be able to handle the educational needs of their constituents. We need teachers that instill not just a love of reading in kids, but a love of active, intentional reading, having a conversation with the ideas in the book.

A long time ago, a good friend of mine said that a good book is like having a very long monologue with one person. I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but that was pretty much the idea. By taking notes and writing essays about it, you’re essentially in conversation with the author, however indirectly. If you’re not in conversation with ideas, you’re just reading the words on the page, absorbing information that gets filed away in some remote corner of your brain where it’s just sitting there and not doing anything to improve your life.

That’s why I’ve instilled in me the idea that you need to read at least a half hour a day. Some days I have a hard time, and I can’t focus because I’m autistic. Like today, I didn’t sleep well. I read literally two pages of a book because I just couldn’t focus. And that’s okay. You must give yourself some grace. But there’s great news: to be book-learned and well read, you only need to read for 30 minutes a day. The trick is, you need to take notes in that half an hour. You need to write down at least one or two things that interest you. If you didn’t find anything interesting, ask if this book is doing anything for you. Not finding that the book is speaking to you? Put it down, give it away, send it to Goodwill or whatever, and find another book. There are so many reading lists, so many great suggestions. You can always go online and look at Apple Books, Google Books, and Gutenberg.org for all kinds of free classics. I will warn you that on Gutenberg.org, a lot of the English translations of non-English works aren’t very good. If you prefer paper books, as I do, you can always go to Abe Books, which is great for used copies of good books. They are often ex-library books, which means I’m keeping them from being recycled, or worse yet, being thrown in landfills where they do no one any good.

Yes, at the end of the day, practical real-life experience is better, is greater than book learning. But you need at least some book learning because books contain ideas that we can absorb without having to experience things ourselves. Having the benefit of even some fraction of someone else’s life experience is extremely valuable. While our own life experience is important, using books to gain some insights we may not otherwise have for just half an hour a day is enough to put you ahead of most other people in the reading and self-education department. That half hour a day provides the necessary mental and intellectual nourishment to make you think.

When I read, every day that I write, something from my reading works its way into my writing. I have written in my journal today, and anytime that I do that, I have been productive. Sorry, this was a major ramble, very unfocused, and it was Major Pain to edit. Take care, everybody, and see you soon.

~ The “Phoenix”

Photo courtesy of Gustavo Belemmi, “Antique toy walkie-talkie,” under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 International License

Amelia Desertsong is a former content marketing specialist turned essayist and creative nonfiction author. She writes articles on many niche hobbies and obscure curiosities, pretty much whatever tickles her fancy.

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