passion vs. snobbery: the cautionary tale of Murky Coffee
July 21st, 2008 • Creativity, Culture • No comments
I deal with people who have strong opinions about what they do. They are passionate experts. Some of them are musicians, some are programmers, some are something else. Some complain about being accused of being snobs about whatever their thing is — some wear it as a badge of honor. But truly, snobbery is destructive — it drives people away.
It’s the opposite of what the specialist needs to do, which is to share their love and enthusiasm for whatever their thing is, whether it’s modern chamber music, database design, or fine bicycles.
If you are deeply passionate about a thing and you have a refined appreciation for it that you are impelled to share, you are giving a great gift to your audience/customer base/community. If you’re derogatory towards the unwashed masses who aren’t connoisseurs like you, they will hate you and you deserve it.
It’s tricky, though, because if your appreciation for your thing far exceeds that of your audience (as it should) it will be very easy for people to feel criticized and shamed — even if you don’t have this attitude. You need to bend over backwards to show that you wish to share your passion, not humiliate those who don’t share it already.
The truly passionate experts I meet are able to give me a glimpse of what’s great about their thing, infect me with their enthusiasm and give me a bit of knowledge. I feel my world has expanded. The snob makes me feel diminished, slightly stupid and defective for not spending my life focused on their specialty.
The recent internet catfight between my local coffee shop and an internet critic just makes everyone look bad. It’s a textbook example about how to destroy your audience rather than educating it.
Here’s the original article by the customer and the poorly-considered rejoinder by the owner of Murky Coffee with his follow-up. The vitriol in the comments of both blogs is something to behold.
I’ve had the coffee at Murky Coffee. It really is wonderful, and I believe the owner and staff are sincere in their fanatical love of the brew. This is an opportunity for them to consider whether they are welcoming the public into sharing this appreciation, or unwittingly creating a velvet-rope experience that makes people feel shut out.
UPDATE: A Friend Writes:
None of these articles has touched on the fact that certain patrons of retail establishments actually prefer and even seek out so-called ‘exclusivity’, as in, they are dying to be the one person whom [substitute badly-behaved idiot of your choice] treats well, or the one who can always get a good table, or who can otherwise pass effortlessly beyond any red velvet rope. It is imperative that others be visibly mistreated in order that the contrast shall be as marked and as manifest as possible. Without this desire (on the part of customers, I’m sayin’) to be elevated above others, you would never have a story like the coffee story.
Well said.
Robert Frost schools us on life balance
July 18th, 2008 • Uncategorized • No comments
I recently rediscovered an old favorite, Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time. I hesitate to say any more about it, because it’s really impossible to add anything to the poem without taking more away from it.
The poem has a lovely payoff for anyone who strives to combine work for money with work for other satisfactions. I could write a little summary of what I think it’s saying … but then I’d be substituting my halting prose for Frost’s poetry. I think he says it just fine.
Why I don’t blog more often
July 16th, 2008 • Bloggery • No comments
It ruins my life. it’s too easy to be obsessive about thinking of material, noting other blogs and news items to link, checking the stats, etc.
Ecto makes it a little better because i can just write a little note like this without opening up my WordPress control panel, which makes one thing lead to another.
Reality Shopping and the group psyche
July 12th, 2008 • Uncategorized • No comments
This Onion interview with Matt Taibbi, who I only know as an annoying and smug guy who comes on the annoying and smug Bill Maher show that I watch religiously, is brilliant in many respects. The topic is superficially political, but it’s really about the national psyche.
Taibbi is a keen observer of the way people in groups distort reality for emotional reasons. Never mind whether you like his politics or his blunt and profane manner of expressing himself. He deserves notice if only for the wonderful phrase reality shopping, which describes groups that have been gripped by a particularly virulent form of groupthink.
the 2000 election was a situation where if you were on the Bush side, you believed X set of facts, and if you were on the Democratic side, you believed Y set of facts. The wound was never healed. You got a situation where people decided to reality-shop and search for their own sets of facts at their own news sources, and they just kind of stopped coming to this common meeting-place where we all had the same commonly accepted set of facts.
This is part of what psychoanalysts call a perverse attitude toward reality. My colleague Susan Long has written a wonderful book titled The Perverse Organisation and its Deadly Sins, about the forces that push people into this destructive frame of mind.
The perverse state of mind acknowledges reality, but at the same time, denies it. This leads to a state of fixed ideation and fantasy to protect against the pain of seeing and not seeing at the same time.
I see perverse frames on mind in organizations and groups of all types. Scott Adams, the Kafka of our age, is the poet of the perverse in his Dilbert. Sometimes I see couples who can’t come close to agreeing on the bare facts of their lives together, let alone come to mutual understanding of one another’s inner experience. Usually one or both members are reality shopping. Spotting this sort of thing is a useful knack to acquire.
Taibbi’s got a book out. I suppose I’ll read it.
The magic of buy-in Part I
July 4th, 2008 • Business, Conflict • No comments
Here’s something I see all the time with couples, families, music groups, and businesses of all sorts.
Somebody has an idea that will affect everyone, and some risk is involved. The idea could be “let’s go to a movie” or “let’s go camping” or “I think we should approach X manager for representation” or “let’s make this capital investment”.
All of these ideas require agreement form the other parties, and all of them could go badly or well. The movie could be lousy, it could rain, the manager might be the wrong one, the investment might turn out to be bad. Got it?
Now, with some of these families/music ensembles/businesses, once everyone has decided to go ahead, there is no whining or recrimination. There is a feeling of “we all signed on to this, and whatever rain falls falls on all of us. We are in this together”. Let’s call this Type I.
With some others, whenever a drop of rain falls, the pointing fingers come out. “I never wanted to go camping in the first place”, “the investment was your idea”, etc. Call this Type II.
It’s easy to see which groups will survive adversity and which ones will disintegrate. It is a world of difference. I bet you can think of when you’ve been in Type I relationships/teams/etc and when you’ve been in Type II. Think of how different they felt. Where do you feel most free to offer ideas? Where do you feel that others will back you up when you take chances? Where do you feel you have to watch your back?
What kind of team/family/etc do you want to be in? What makes for a family that survives adversity, a business that’s agile enough to adapt to market changes, or a band that’s resilient enough to survive success?
Business people call it Buy-In to describe the thing that Type I’s have that Type II’s don’t have.
What do you do in your relationships that makes for a Type I place versus a Type II place? What dark impulses and fears make you finger-point or withdraw from your buy-in, that makes it more of a Type II place?
Who owns the orchestra?
May 29th, 2008 • Band Dynamics, Leadership, Music • No comments
Even though orchestras are bigger and more complex organisms than chamber groups or bands, the same questions of ownership apply. Orchestras have formal boards of directors and union contracts, which are supposed to represent the interests of the larger community and the musicians, respectively. This can bring the issues to light in ways that in rock bands tens to be vague.
These questions are all over the place in the debacle taking place in Columbus, Ohio. The Columbus symphony is within a couple of days of closing down altogether. Drew McManus has been covering these sad developments in his blog, which is always instructive and entertaining. I recommend reading all of the posts with “Columbus” in the title for a case study of how music groups can be torn apart. Here is a letter from the orchestra musicians in Cleveland and Cincinnati to the board and management of the Columbus Symphony. It’s a good read. notice how much of the letter makes the point that the whole community hs a stake inthe orchestra.
Who owns the band?
May 27th, 2008 • Band Dynamics, Leadership • No comments
This comes from some recent conversations I’ve had with musicians. The notion of “who owns this?” for bands and chamber groups can be complex. Even with a well-worked-out band agreement it can be complicated. When a music group is young, lots of people support the band from lending a couch to crash on to running the merch table to contributing money and in-kind goods and services. The fans contribute to the band by telling their friends and by … well, being fans. In both the classical world and the pop/rock/etc world, managers invest time on the hope there will be revenues in the future.
It should never be unclear who actually, legally owns the band and the band’s assets (especially publishing rights). But these others need to be considered.
In business they use a horrible word for these others: “stakeholders”. I don’t know why I hate that word, except it’s vague and it sounds like business-school jargon. A business has owners, called shareholders. Stakeholders include people such as the employees, the customers, the community, etc. They mostly don’t have a legal say in how things go, but the business wouldn’t exist without them and they can cause trouble if they’re dealt with too callously. Think of the fanatical customers of Apple or BMW or Harley-Davidson.
When a band or a business has a rabid customer/fan base, this is a good thing, of course. But these people do feel they have a stake in things. Think of all of the times the fans become critical of an artist’s new work. Some of the best artists have needed to anger the stakeholders in order to break new ground. Bob Dylan and Miles Davis are great examples of this. We know the fans felt betrayed — they thought that Dylan or Miles was “theirs”. I wonder what the reactions were from the stakeholders who were close to them.
It’s sometimes important to break the constraints of the stakeholders, but it’s a sign of bad planning if a music group, or a business, gets taken by surprise by this. The fans would like you to make the last record over and over again, and you may need to challenge them. Their trust in you will go a long way. But you can’t abuse it, and there’s always risk involved. They may feel that you are trying to break their hearts.
So what’s the moral of the story? I think it’s this: whenever you ask people to support your group in any way, they will emotionally come to feel the group is “theirs”. This is what made people buy the new CD without hearing it first — back in the day when people bought CDs.
Ignore this at your peril.
How to Work With a Prima Donna
May 25th, 2008 • Band Dynamics, Leadership • 1 comment
Here’s an article of mine in the February Atlas Plugged.
How To Work With A Prima Donna
Michael Jolkovski, PhD
“Prima Donna” (Italian for Leading lady) and Diva are terms originally used to describe the temperamental and demanding tendencies of Opera stars, the rock stars of the 18th through the early 20th centuries. The music may have changed but these demanding tendencies flourish in every medium and genre.
In my practice, I spend a lot of time with my musician clients discussing the problems of working with Prima Donnas — as well as trying to moderate their own career-killing Prima Donna tendencies Read more »
I’m not at liberty to say
May 25th, 2008 • Band Dynamics, Bloggery, Music • 1 comment
The only thing worse than a blog that goes quiet is a sheepish post by the author while coming back to the blog. So I’ll spare you. I’ve been having some good experiences with my psychology-of-music-groups project, but the good parts have been explicitly or implicitly under a promise of confidentiality. so I have some good tales to tell that I can’t tell.
This, along with being absurdly busy, is pretty much why I haven’t said anything in this space for a long time. I have been thinking a lot about clever ways I can speak in public about what I have been learning, but it’s not easy.
So, there, I’ve broken silence. More to come.
What makes a band gel?
January 11th, 2008 • Band Dynamics • No comments
Not a hair-care preparation — what makes a band develop that unifies je-ne-sais? A new blog by dumbdrummer explores the question. This is highly worthwhile. I don’t have time to say more.
(via Madame Monet)
Sophocles is alive and well and writing for the British tabloids
January 11th, 2008 • Psychoanalysis • 1 comment
As evidenced by this story on twins separated at birth who discovered their familial bond after … marrying
UPDATE: It’s not just in the tabloids.
FURTHER UPDATE: If you were skeptical of this story from the beginning, you seem to have been right.
Back in the saddle 2008
January 1st, 2008 • Bloggery • No comments
Best wishes all around for the new year. I’ve been neglecting the blog along with everything else, but I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve got a bunch of projects I’ll be rolling out in the the new year, all pertaining to the psychodyamics of music groups. Stay tuned.
Listening to the 20th Century
January 1st, 2008 • Music • No comments
I’ve been reading Alex Ross’s wonderful tome The Rest is Noise. A history of 20th Century music, it ties together what was happening musically as the vocabulary of the 20th Century was developed, along with what was happening politically and economically. If you want an antidote to the impression that “serious” composers lived on Mount Olympus somewhere, away from the gritty concerns of commercialism and popularity, you couldn’t do better.
Todays musicians have to find a way to reach an audience and make an income under conditions of uncertainty and flux. The old ways of doing things are breaking down and it’s unclear which of the new ways will endure. As Mr. Byrne might say, “same as it ever was”. This is the way it’s been for musicians since … Haydn? Mozart? Beethoven? This was especially tumultuous in the 20th Century.
Another theme that pervades Ross’s book is the flimsy and artificial boundary between “serious” and “popular” music — and how the real story is more complex and interesting. I know that serious and popular music have been cross-fertilizing since at least the Middle Ages. I didn’t know about the classical training of some leading Harlem Renaissance musicians, or how deeply interested some European musicians were in African-American music.
I thought I knew 20th Century music history fairly well but Ross enriches the connections through his deep appreciation of the music. He is a deft writer, integrating masses of research without becoming ponderous. His voice is remarkably even-handed, and he avoids the temptation to create paper heroes and monsters. His empathy for the plights of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Strauss, and others tempers his judgment for their complicity with Stalin and Hitler. Ross doesn’t let anyone completely off the hook, either … Copland doesn’t look so heroic with his naive dalliance with Communism and his use as a new-Deal propagandist. It comes through that the great powers were interested in the great power of music as a means of controlling the masses. A chilling and cautionary tale.
The music samples linked from his blog are tied to each chapter. they enrigh the reading wonderfully — especiailly for those pieces you know but don’t know you know.
I should probably finish the book before waxing enthusiastic. I’m only up to John Cage right now. but it’s an awesome book.
I feel a bit sad about one thing. This is clearly a classic work, and it will suffer the fate of the classics — it will be assigned reading and students will approach it expecting something dessicated and stuffy. It’s a treat to read this as a brand-new work. And it’s pleasant to imagine future readers biting into it and finding it full of juice, to their surprise and delight. Just like listeners surprised by the life and passion in “classic” music works.
Why am I interested in how record deals work?
December 19th, 2007 • Business • 1 comment
Because they seem better than dealing with insurance companies.
David Byrne tells how it all works
December 19th, 2007 • Business, Creativity, Culture, Music • No comments
In today’s Wired magazine site, David Byrne has written a small textbook on the recorded-music industry that summarizes the major approaches that are available today. The included audio clips of his interviews with innovators of different business models are well worth the time.
He sets out six models of recorded-music distribution, which he calls The Six Possibilities:
Where there was one, now there are six: Six possible music distribution models, ranging from one in which the artist is pretty much hands-off to one where the artist does nearly everything. Not surprisingly, the more involved the artist is, the more he or she can often make per unit sold. The totally DIY model is certainly not for everyone — but that’s the point. Now there’s choice.
- the 360, or equity, deal
- the standard distribution deal
- The license deal
- the profit-sharing deal
- the manufacturing and distribution deal
- the self-distribution model
I have two immediate thoughts about this. One is that everyone is making this up as they go along. Musicians need to think about what they want to accomplish and invent/ tweak/ hack business procedures that move them toward that goal — and this is how it always has been. Another is how similar this is to how it is for other innovators, particularly tech-sector entrepreneurs. Which is why the story is in Wired in the first place.
I recommend this article to anyone trying to sell recorded music. There’s a companion article with a dialogue between Byrne and Thom Yorke. As above, Wired has embedded audio of the longer conversation that adds a great deal. As a commentator noted, Yorke sounds exactly like Nigel Tufnel.
Worldwide Atonality Day
December 15th, 2007 • Culture, Music • No comments
Chart-topping Alex Ross reckons that this December 17 is the hundredth anniversary of atonality. Sez he:
Celebrate as you wish. On that date in 1907, Arnold Schoenberg sketched the song “Ich darf nicht dankend” (”I must not in gratitude [sink down before you]“), music in which conventional tonal harmonies grow exceedingly scarce.
But shouldn’t Alex recognize this as a day of a-tonement?
UPDATE: A Google search on “Schoenberg” brought up this ad. This proves something, I’m just not sure what.
Welcome Music Connection readers
December 14th, 2007 • Band Dynamics, Music, Uncategorized • 1 comment
My article Leadership, Conflict & Teamwork: Building A Band To Go The Distance is now up on the Music Connection website. I’ve started getting some traffic from the article already.
Look for the special 30th anniversary issue on the newstand. I would be very pleased to hear from you. There is so much more to be said on the topic — this is just scratching the surface.
How will musicians make a living?
December 13th, 2007 • Business, Music • No comments
These are interesting times. The musicians I talk to are all scratching for new ways to make a living. These anxieties filter into their daily lives and I hear about it constantly. So even though I am not remotely a player in the industry, I’ve become interested in the topic. As I wrote a few days ago, 1000 years of history shows this is not a new problem.
I personally believe that creative solutions are out there. One colorful and energetic, if intemperate, commentator is Bob Lefsetz, who delivers unbridled observations in his email letter. His take on the Aspen Live conference of industry muckymucks is posted on Seth Godin’s blog. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.
Oh, yeah, the psychoanalysis
December 12th, 2007 • Psychoanalysis • No comments
I am writing more freely about the music world than the psychoanalytic world. There’s a reason for this. I spend my days doing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, mostly, and when I have an observation to talk about I need to be enormously careful about sharing it in a way that doesn’t remotely compromise anyone’s privacy. And when I can’t be sure about this, I keep it under my hat. Whereas writing about Radiohead or Stockhausen, I don’t have any confidential relationship there so I can speak as freely as I like.
But psychoanalysis is pertinent to any human expereince, so I’m not that worried about this aspect of the blog being neglected.
The Radiohead pay-what-you-want deal, part 786
December 12th, 2007 • Business, Music • 2 comments
This has been so commented upon, I’ve been afraid there’s nothing to add. The NYTimes has a follow-up piece today.
But I think it boils down to this: Radiohead treats it audience with some trust. It’s so easy to treat them as the enemy. If you treat your audience / fans / customers as the enemy, they will become your enemy.
