Rich Guy Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project
Swoopy Hang
On
What’s interesting
about Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project is that it’s got music
in the title; it’s not the Experience Rock and Roll Project. As the second
big pop music museum in the country–a second attempt by searching, tormented
baby boomers worried that their youthful passion might not be remembered by
the ages as the world-changing force they believe it to have been–it’s
the first to consider, obliquely, if not exactly in its content, an explosive
musical century that includes Hank Williams and Duke Ellington, and might note
Louis Jordan as something more than a distinguished stepping-stone to the conception
of Little Richard. I haven’t been there, so I don’t actually know.
What I do know is this: the fourth-richest man in the world owned the guitar
Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, plus numerous other pieces of Hendrixiana.
Shamed that Seattle’s sole tribute to Hendrix, a native Seattleite, was
a heated rock at the zoo, he aspired to build a museum in which to enshrine
the guitar. Negotiations with Hendrix’s estate went badly, and Allen consoled
himself by brightly switching his project from a temple to Jimi to a temple
for music itself. Music: which this writer considers to be a vast and nebulous
thing that is greater than poetry, greater than language, greater than mathematics,
maybe greater than all its cousins except the sense of sound itself.
The E.M.P. and its accompanying
website earnestly maintain that their purpose is to teach the kids to rock.
The stuff on the webpage is funny to a jaded big-city know-it-all like myself,
stuff like the Guitar Lick of the Day, and a Term of the Day (the day I wrote
this it was "compression," a studio term that I doubt any young aspirant,
regardless of precociousness, would be interested in, or for that matter could
understand from just the recorded examples on the Web), but I wonder if some
kid who wanted to make music would actually find it useful. Certainly, when
I was in junior high and learning to play guitar, I found some good basic instructional
substance from such corny sources as PBS’ Rockschool. The fact is
that hard information on how to play rock music is very scarce out there in
the terrible suburban world. Which raises the question–if he really wanted
to bring rock power to the kids, why didn’t he buy a shitload of cheap
electric guitars, hire a bunch of unemployed musicians as instructors and dispatch
them in Rockmobiles to the far corners of the nation?
Because he wanted to build
a big cool building. Which, really, I have no beef with. And I imagine a kid
would most thoroughly enjoy a giant fake tree made of guitars, or a massive
"swoopy" building that a monorail passes through. It’s kind of
like the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, except it’s not about
rockets and biplanes, it’s about music. Why not? Why shouldn’t a billionaire
spend money on his hobbies, just like an amateur guitarist of less spectacular
means?
And that’s precisely
what Allen is–a hobbyist and an amateur guitarist. I’m fascinated
by these tales of Allen hiring top-drawer rock musicians to play his parties–Carlos
Santana, for instance–and then leaping up onstage with them to play guitar
on the encores. Surely it’d be difficult to find a famous rock guy who
got paid a ton of dough for the private gig to come out and say, Yeah, we let
the guy who paid us come onstage, and of course he was lousy, but what the fuck,
he was a really nice guy, and he flew us first-class, and he paid us double
our regular guarantee and we got a day off in Venice besides. But I’m pretty
sure that’s the case. The website itself is almost purely the domain of
the amateur guitarist. Nothing on the front page addresses the drummer or the
keyboardist, much less the trumpeter or the turntablist. There’s a link
to bass tablature, but that’s kind of the guitar that the less aggressive
kid whose friend already has a guitar gets stuck with. And there’s nothing
about learning how to sing, which Patti Smith, interviewed on the site, might
be able to tell you is something that in fact can be learned, that can
be created out of the sheer will to sing, and doesn’t have to be a gift
from the Lord.
The amateur guitarist is
the would-be rock star Everyman. A friend of mine went to Berklee College of
Music in Boston, and said that it’s a terrible place to go if you’re
a guitar player, because there’re hundreds of them, but an awesome place
to go if you’re a French horn player, because there’re like three.
People who play instruments other than guitar tend to revile guitar players,
because guitar players tend to know the least about music. Because, really,
they’re not interested in music, they’re interested in guitar
playing. And that’s the vibe I get from the E.M.P. site.
A couple years back, the
conventional wisdom was that music was beginning to wane as the central element
of youth culture; rather than identifying themselves by the music they listened
to, young people were beginning to define themselves by activities. Skateboarding,
snowboarding, video games, website design, etc. In 1998 it seemed just as likely
for a tv actor to appear on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone
as it would be for a singer. So there was a great surge of music companies trying
to bundle their artists with video games and snowboarding videos, and in general
to create sources of income other than simple CD sales. Due to the advent of
MP3 file-sharing, it might not be unwise for a person who earns his money making
music to keep investigating these avenues. But it’s also arguable that
Napster–and perhaps the thrill of minor piracy that accompanies it–has
provided music with a function as an activity, and thus–in tandem with
the teen pop, which trains young people to be music consumers at ridiculously
early ages–maybe the teen/pop symbiosis has a couple decades left in it
yet. So maybe this indirect relationship with a potentially revitalized music
culture justifies Allen’s right to have a big fat Frank Gehry-designed
gloat fest.
But it’s intriguing
to me that the E.M.P. site shows little concern for the computer itself as an
instrument. In five years it will be possible for a kid who wants to play music
to have at his command an almost infinite capacity for multitrack recording,
along with every guitar, keyboard, bass, drum and horn sound that’s been
fashionable in the past 50 years, sitting right there on his hard drive. You
can get this today for a few thousand bucks; in five years it very well might
be cheaper than the cost of a Sears-catalog Christmas-gift guitar. Rather than
learning an instrument and searching for compatriots who play the bass and the
drums, any kid with a G4 will sensibly opt to replicate any musical ensemble
he could dream up. The palace of the amateur guitarist that Paul Allen has built
may well become an equivalent to a vaudeville hall of fame.