Matt Meshulam's Brain Dump

In the wake of Michael Jackson’s death, I keep thinking about two videos. The first is the South Park episode pictured above, in which it is revealed that Americans must ritualistically sacrifice Britney Spears by photographing her to death:

Kyle: What is going on?! Why do you want Britney Spears to die?!
Bob Summers: Well nobody wants her to die, little boy. We all simply… need her to. Do you understand?
Kyle: NO!
Paparazzo 8: Look, kid, throughout history people have found it necessary to engage in… human sacrifice.
Bob Summers: In ancient times, humans would commonly pick one lovely girl, adorn her with jewels, treat her like a goddess, and then… watch her die.
Paparazzo 9: We like to think we’re more civilized now, but the truth is our lust for torture and death is no different than it was in gladidator times.
Paparazzo 10: Only difference is that now we like to watch people put to death through magazines and photographs.
Canadian Paparazzo: It’s a damn shame too. Old ways were bettah. Used to be we just picked someone by lottery and then stoned them to death.
Woman: Stonin’ to death was too violent. Rather have the sacrifice kill itself.
Kyle: You mean everyone has been wanting Britney Spears to kill herself?
Man: Britney was chosen a long time ago, to be built up and adored, and then sacrificed. For harvest.

In typical South Park fashion, our society’s obsession with celebrity, especially celebrity “meltdowns,” was comically exaggerated in a most unsettling way. Everyone knows that a big part of why famous people exhibit self-destructive behavior is the pressure imposed by fans and “the media.” Michael Jackson was subjected to this pressure for virtually his entire life, not to mention his father’s treatment of him.

The other video touches on a similar theme in a much more thoughtful way. At the most recent TED conference, Author Elizabeth Gilbert gave a fantastic talk on creativity and how it is conceptualized in different societies. The bottom line is that in western culture, our focus on individualism puts an incredible amount of pressure on talented artists to live up to their best works:

[In] ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then. People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity “daemons.” Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. [...]

[During the Renaissance] people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.

And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is the vessel, the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

I highly encourage you to watch the full video below:

And to bring it around full circle, here’s a portion of the 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson. This segment begins just moments after Jackson infamously dangled his baby son from the balcony of a Berlin hotel.

Update (2009-06-29): This isn’t to say that I consider Britney Spears an ‘artist.’ Rather, the fact that Michael Jackson was both a huge celebrity and a gifted artist created a unique set of pressures that, at least in part, led to his downfall.

So a few days ago, I talked about the mixtape I made for my friend Matt. Overall I think I did quite well; he’s gotten really into Sparks and The War on Drugs, and he at least liked the vast majority of the songs. Here’s the mix that he made for me (no links to artists because I’m lazy):

1. Disco Inferno – It’s a Kid’s World
2. Pulp – Mis-Shapes
3. Television – Friction
4. The Fall – The Classical
5. Built To Spill – Distopian Dream Girl
6. Can – Paperhouse
7. Gang Gang Dance – First Communion
8. Phoenix – Lisztomania
9. Dirty Projectors – Cannibal Resource
10. Aphex Twin – Girl/Boy Song
11. Cocteau Twins – Heaven Or Las Vegas
12. Au – RR vs. D
13. Beat Happening – You Turn Me On
14. Mclusky – Alan Is A Cowboy Killer
15. Magazine – Definitive Gaze
16. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Death To Everyone
17. Silver Jews – Advice To The Graduate

I was pleased that there were a good number of artists I’d never even heard of before: Disco Inferno, Au, Beat Happening, Mclusky, and Magazine. I’ve listened to albums by Can and Aphex Twin before, but had kind of forgotten about them even though I liked them the last time I checked them out. I had been meaning to listen to Built to Spill, Gang Gang Dance, Dirty Projectors, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and the rest of the artists weren’t really on my radar.

After just a few listens, the artists that grabbed me were Disco Inferno, Cocteau Twins, Au, Gang Gang Dance, and Beat Happening. I picked up the Cocteau Twins album Treasure at Second Hand Tunes (buying a CD! Imagine that!) and it’s been in constant rotation in my car, a rare honor.

I wasn’t sure how effective a mixtape exchange would be with someone who likes so much of the same music as I do. The goal, after all, is to expand one’s musical horizons and tastes. In this case, I realized that the result wasn’t so much about expanding horizons as filling in gaps. More than half of the songs on Matt’s mix for me came out over 15 years ago. Many of them are bands that influenced contemporary artists that I like. All in all, the exchange was a success, and I highly recommend trying it out if you have a friend or two with similar tastes in music.

So as you may recall, I take the task of creating mixtapes very seriously. My most recent mix was an exchange with my friend Matt. This exchange presented a unique challenge, since our musical tastes are incredibly similar, and he keeps pretty good tabs on my Last.fm profile. Despite these hurdles, I’m pretty happy with how the mix came out.

I started assembling the mixtape by comparing our Last.fm profiles, which keep track of every song we listen to. Out of the 100 artists I listen to most frequently, Matt had zero listens logged for 20 of them. I was able to toss out many of them based on what I know about his taste in music. Out of the 20 artists, I wound up putting five on the mix.

Then I did the same comparison, but looking at my top 100 artists over only the past six months. There were about 35 artists that Matt hadn’t heard, which I found to be surprisingly high. Seven artists from the short-term list (but not in my overall top 100) made it to the mix. The remaining five songs either came from artists that I don’t listen to very frequently, or artists that Matt had listened to once or twice, but not recently.

Enough analysis, here’s the tracklist:

01. Electrelane – To The East
02. Holy Fuck – Korock
03. The Sea and Cake – a Fuller Moon +
04. Cornelius – New Music Machine *+
05. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Melt Me *
06. Annuals – Springtime +
07. PAS/CAL – O Honey We’re Ridiculous +
08. Marnie Stern – Shea Stadium +
09. Ponytail – 7 Souls +
10. Mice Parade – Steady As She Goes *
11. Secret Machines – The Road Leads Where It’s Led
12. Why? – The Vowels Pt. 2 +
13. Chairlift – Planet Health +
14. José González – How Low *
15. Sparks – Hasta Mañana Monsieur *+
16. The War on Drugs – Taking The Farm
17. Water Bears – Esophagus