The post-truth era of music: Fakers, liars and scams in modern music production
Time for a music digression.
It has become something of a cliche to say that we live in a post-truth era. Lies and their proliferation have degraded peoples' ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and the internet has facilitated the spread of lies in a way that no previous medium has. Not. Very. Original.
And yes, even music has been hit by the post-truth thing. What's old-hat here is nonsense like "auto-tune," and similar software. If you have any awareness of music, you probably know that most of the people whom you think are singers are actually having the pitch of their voices modulated by computers to make them sound like they are in tune. In reality, they can't hold a tune. It gets worse. Now, there is software to make all of the beats hit their marks in each measure, perfectly. Nobody is singing or playing anything anymore in popular music.
OK, though, I knew that. I grumble about popular music all the time. I'm a hipster. It's in the contract. Here's the thing about my brand of hipsterism, though. I grumble about other hipsters' taste in music. I think they suck. Why? They listen to people who don't know how to play their instruments. Somewhere along the line, it got uncool to know how to play your instrument. So, hipster indie bands stopped playing music and started making weird noises because they didn't know how to play. And the weirder the noises, the more critics loved them. Naked emperors, all.
Mostly, it's noise being played by kids who never practice.
Kids! Practice your scales! And everything else.
[That'll keep 'em off my lawn!]
That brings me to what I do like. That's actually a pretty broad range. I listen to music from all around the world, from styles that run the gamut, with just a few things that don't tickle my fancy. Like... pop. But that's not where I'm going here.
Instrument-wise, guitar. I love guitar. You may notice that in the clips. Over-represented. Why? Who cares? It is a versatile instrument. But that brings me to my current facepalm moment on post-truth in music.
The "fake guitarist" controversy. Whether or not you are aware of this will have a lot to do with your age, taste in music, and lots of other stuff, but it is eating up a bunch of internet space right now. Here's the deal. For a certain segment of the music community, what happens is that people practice guitar, and then post clips of themselves playing, either on youtube, or even more frequently now, on instagram. I guess that's where the kids are these days, youtube being old, unhip and a place for fuddy-duddies like me. Sometimes, then, they sell lessons! Play like me! For a modest fee!
Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight, if you're good at something, never do it for free. (I clearly suck as a writer.)
What distinguishes a "real" guitarist from a "fake" guitarist? The fakers do things like play the passages slowly, then speed up the video digitally so that they look and sound blazing-fast, giving you a one-minute video of fretboard magic conveying the impression that the kid in his (it's usually a "his") bedroom is secretly the greatest guitarist ever to live. People click "like," legends spread, the moon-landing was obviously faked, vaccines cause autism, and all sorts of other stupid things that gullible people believe, and that's before I get into the conspiracy theories about modern politics with which I won't sully this post.
This has, as I have recently discovered, been going on for quite a while. Why did I just find out about it? Well, the blow-up has picked up speed over the last week or two, so there's that, but there is actually another element here worth pointing out, and it does connect to... vaguely, politics 'n other stuff. 'N stuff.
You see, this all happens a) on guitar, rather than other instruments, but more importantly for my personal purposes b) pretty much within the various subgenres and offshoots of metal. That'd be one of the few genres of music that I, well, don't like.
As I mentioned, this "fake guitar" thing has been going on for years. Should you be surprised? Of course not. Post-truth. This is our world. Some kid with some video editing software and a modicum of skill can make himself look like Buckethead (I'll get to him), so of course it's going to happen. Be skeptical of everything. This is our world. Let's address the other stuff.
An interesting comment that I'll attribute to Rick Beato (very interesting fellow on youtube) is that you don't see this stuff for violin virtuosos. Or piano virtuosos. Or mandolinists. Banjo players... Take your pick.
Why guitarists? What makes... us such showboaters to the point that it promotes fakery? Or did I just answer my own question? Next, that metal thing. Part of why it took me so long to notice that this was happening was that I don't listen to metal. This is primarily a phenomenon within the metal guitar community, where it's just all about speed, speed, speed. That makes it a simpler process to play a passage slowly, and speed up the video!
In contrast, consider jazz. Obviously, my favorite. Consider Charlie Hunter, who is arguably the greatest guitarist in jazz today, from a technical standpoint. Here. Listen. Then watch.
As you listen, hopefully what you get is that there's no blood in this guy's veins. Just funk. Then, watch, and try to match up the image with the sound. Do you notice that there's no bassist?
That's because he's playing that all by himself. That contraption isn't just a normal guitar. He originally used an 8-string contraption, then stripped it down to 7, but he has three bass strings, and four guitar strings, with fanned frets, and two sets of pick-ups. He plays the bass parts and the guitar parts at the same time. This is the logical extrapolation of what Lenny Breau and Joe Pass were doing, years ago, extrapolating from George Van Eps. Maybe those are just names to you, but think about what Charlie Hunter has to do to his brain to make this work. Not his fingers, but his brain. He has to get his left index and middle fingers to play bass parts while his ring and pinky fingers play lead lines while separating out how he picks the parts with his right hand.
Forget about speed. Just try to imagine how you have to organize your brain to do that. What's amazing here isn't the speed. Listen, and it just sounds like a really "in the pocket" jazz-funk band. What's amazing is how he thinks and splits his brain.
Could someone fake that? How slowly would you have to play to get the editing to work?
OK, you could have a guitarist and a bassist play the lines separately, but then someone would have to make his fingers basically match up, and that itself is nuts.
And Charlie has been doing this since the 1990s. I know. I first saw him live in the mid-90s. Front row. Never took my eyes off his fingers, or my jaw off the floor. The front row floor was littered with dudes' jaws. I don't do drugs, and never have. Watching him felt reality-melting enough, as a guitarist.
And it's still more reality-melting than the fastest shredders around because it is so much more complex than mere speed. I've watched some of the fakers, and the people playing the fast stuff for real, and in my opinion... what's the point? When there's Charlie Hunter out there, what's the point?
Interesting to note that Charlie Hunter is a Bay Area native, and his guitar teacher was a guy named Joe Satriani. That's a famous name, to anyone who actually has followed this "fake guitar" thing, because the real-and-fake speed demons are all living in that guy's shadow. Me? I never cared for him. But, he trained a lot of really great musicians. As a teacher, he did a lot of great for the world.
And that genre brings me to Buckethead. Let's deal with that stage name. "Buckethead," not to be confused with Lord Buckethead, is one of the more impressive guitar virtuosos in the world today, even though most of what he plays is of little interest to me. Metal. He has dealt with crippling stage fright by wearing a KFC bucket and Michael Meyers mask on his head, so that nobody could see his face. That, plus the "Buckethead" moniker and wacky stage shows, and he simply "hides" on stage. Mostly, he hid in his bedroom, practicing, and practicing, and practicing, until he became one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived.
Why do I know who Buckethead is if I don't listen to metal? Because Buckethead is so much more than a metal guitarist. Jazz, funk, acoustic weirdness... whatever. He can do anything. Check this out. Note, in particular, what happens at 3:37.
Nobody has ever accused Buckethead of being a faker. Aside from the fact that he's been at this for decades, there's no glory in going from that beautifully weird acoustic picking to some Chet Atkins style country picking when your fanbase is ostensibly a bunch of metalheads.
No. Glory. At. All.
And that brings me to country and bluegrass. Genres that do value speed. David Grier, Bryan Sutton, Jim Hurst, Larry Keel... I could keep going with just the modern players, without even getting into the good, old boys, like Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Clarence White... Speed? Just listen to the genre. Country? Have you ever even heard of Scotty Anderson? There is so much out there, but the fake guitar thing just doesn't seem to have hit the country/bluegrass scene, much less jazz.
Why not? Constant live playing. See that clip up there of Buckethead? He's paid his dues. Live performance after live performance. Same with Charlie Hunter. The fake guitarist thing is an internet phenomenon built around people who aren't working as touring musicians, or in a few cases, tour in such a way that they can stay far enough back from the stage that they don't have gawking dudes three feet from the fretboard capable of noticing when the sounds don't sync perfectly with their movements because they're at the concert more for a lesson than for musical enjoyment anyway.
Hi! Guilty!
You can't do this if you are a real touring musician, particularly in a niche genre. The instagram guitarist thing is, for reasons of age in particular, not appealing to genres that are embraced by the old fuddy-duddies.
I don't want to overstate the age thing, though. Metal is, at this point, an old genre. Older than I am. My tastes in music are idiosyncratic, and not many people are as attached as I am to music that nears the century-mark. The bigger point is the social change. Social media and the shift away from older models of music consumption.
When you combine social media with knee-jerk reactions to showboating, badness always ensues.
With respect to the fake guitar thing, at a very big level, I don't care. I can keep listening to Charlie Hunter, Buckethead, country, bluegrass, and plenty of other real guitarists, piano players, violin virtuosos, and other stuff that matters, and anyone who wants to watch stupid instagram videos of fakers can do so. Politics don't work that way.
In my first book, I wrote about this. Elections aren't like markets. My term for it was "the principle of voter interdependence." In a market, I buy a Charlie Hunter cd, like an old geezer, and I get my Charlie Hunter cd. You buy your phony lessons from a guitar faker on instagram, and you get cheated, but that's not my problem because it's not my money. On the other hand, if I vote for an honest candidate, and you vote for a lying scumbag, I don't get the honest candidate as my governing representative unless enough other voters do likewise. If enough other voters vote for the lying scumbag because the post-truth era has diminished their ability to separate fact from fiction, I'm stuck being ruled by a con artist. See Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections, (Oxford University Press 2011).
So, fine. If you want to go listen to some instagram faker metal "guitarist" who sped up his videos to pretend that he's Buckethead, that's not my problem. The problem is that there are people gullible enough to fall for that, because the same thing that makes them fall for that makes them fall for other stuff.
Damn. This stuff has hit the music world too. There is nowhere to hide.
It has become something of a cliche to say that we live in a post-truth era. Lies and their proliferation have degraded peoples' ability to distinguish fact from fiction, and the internet has facilitated the spread of lies in a way that no previous medium has. Not. Very. Original.
And yes, even music has been hit by the post-truth thing. What's old-hat here is nonsense like "auto-tune," and similar software. If you have any awareness of music, you probably know that most of the people whom you think are singers are actually having the pitch of their voices modulated by computers to make them sound like they are in tune. In reality, they can't hold a tune. It gets worse. Now, there is software to make all of the beats hit their marks in each measure, perfectly. Nobody is singing or playing anything anymore in popular music.
OK, though, I knew that. I grumble about popular music all the time. I'm a hipster. It's in the contract. Here's the thing about my brand of hipsterism, though. I grumble about other hipsters' taste in music. I think they suck. Why? They listen to people who don't know how to play their instruments. Somewhere along the line, it got uncool to know how to play your instrument. So, hipster indie bands stopped playing music and started making weird noises because they didn't know how to play. And the weirder the noises, the more critics loved them. Naked emperors, all.
Mostly, it's noise being played by kids who never practice.
Kids! Practice your scales! And everything else.
[That'll keep 'em off my lawn!]
That brings me to what I do like. That's actually a pretty broad range. I listen to music from all around the world, from styles that run the gamut, with just a few things that don't tickle my fancy. Like... pop. But that's not where I'm going here.
Instrument-wise, guitar. I love guitar. You may notice that in the clips. Over-represented. Why? Who cares? It is a versatile instrument. But that brings me to my current facepalm moment on post-truth in music.
The "fake guitarist" controversy. Whether or not you are aware of this will have a lot to do with your age, taste in music, and lots of other stuff, but it is eating up a bunch of internet space right now. Here's the deal. For a certain segment of the music community, what happens is that people practice guitar, and then post clips of themselves playing, either on youtube, or even more frequently now, on instagram. I guess that's where the kids are these days, youtube being old, unhip and a place for fuddy-duddies like me. Sometimes, then, they sell lessons! Play like me! For a modest fee!
Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight, if you're good at something, never do it for free. (I clearly suck as a writer.)
What distinguishes a "real" guitarist from a "fake" guitarist? The fakers do things like play the passages slowly, then speed up the video digitally so that they look and sound blazing-fast, giving you a one-minute video of fretboard magic conveying the impression that the kid in his (it's usually a "his") bedroom is secretly the greatest guitarist ever to live. People click "like," legends spread, the moon-landing was obviously faked, vaccines cause autism, and all sorts of other stupid things that gullible people believe, and that's before I get into the conspiracy theories about modern politics with which I won't sully this post.
This has, as I have recently discovered, been going on for quite a while. Why did I just find out about it? Well, the blow-up has picked up speed over the last week or two, so there's that, but there is actually another element here worth pointing out, and it does connect to... vaguely, politics 'n other stuff. 'N stuff.
You see, this all happens a) on guitar, rather than other instruments, but more importantly for my personal purposes b) pretty much within the various subgenres and offshoots of metal. That'd be one of the few genres of music that I, well, don't like.
As I mentioned, this "fake guitar" thing has been going on for years. Should you be surprised? Of course not. Post-truth. This is our world. Some kid with some video editing software and a modicum of skill can make himself look like Buckethead (I'll get to him), so of course it's going to happen. Be skeptical of everything. This is our world. Let's address the other stuff.
An interesting comment that I'll attribute to Rick Beato (very interesting fellow on youtube) is that you don't see this stuff for violin virtuosos. Or piano virtuosos. Or mandolinists. Banjo players... Take your pick.
Why guitarists? What makes... us such showboaters to the point that it promotes fakery? Or did I just answer my own question? Next, that metal thing. Part of why it took me so long to notice that this was happening was that I don't listen to metal. This is primarily a phenomenon within the metal guitar community, where it's just all about speed, speed, speed. That makes it a simpler process to play a passage slowly, and speed up the video!
In contrast, consider jazz. Obviously, my favorite. Consider Charlie Hunter, who is arguably the greatest guitarist in jazz today, from a technical standpoint. Here. Listen. Then watch.
As you listen, hopefully what you get is that there's no blood in this guy's veins. Just funk. Then, watch, and try to match up the image with the sound. Do you notice that there's no bassist?
That's because he's playing that all by himself. That contraption isn't just a normal guitar. He originally used an 8-string contraption, then stripped it down to 7, but he has three bass strings, and four guitar strings, with fanned frets, and two sets of pick-ups. He plays the bass parts and the guitar parts at the same time. This is the logical extrapolation of what Lenny Breau and Joe Pass were doing, years ago, extrapolating from George Van Eps. Maybe those are just names to you, but think about what Charlie Hunter has to do to his brain to make this work. Not his fingers, but his brain. He has to get his left index and middle fingers to play bass parts while his ring and pinky fingers play lead lines while separating out how he picks the parts with his right hand.
Forget about speed. Just try to imagine how you have to organize your brain to do that. What's amazing here isn't the speed. Listen, and it just sounds like a really "in the pocket" jazz-funk band. What's amazing is how he thinks and splits his brain.
Could someone fake that? How slowly would you have to play to get the editing to work?
OK, you could have a guitarist and a bassist play the lines separately, but then someone would have to make his fingers basically match up, and that itself is nuts.
And Charlie has been doing this since the 1990s. I know. I first saw him live in the mid-90s. Front row. Never took my eyes off his fingers, or my jaw off the floor. The front row floor was littered with dudes' jaws. I don't do drugs, and never have. Watching him felt reality-melting enough, as a guitarist.
And it's still more reality-melting than the fastest shredders around because it is so much more complex than mere speed. I've watched some of the fakers, and the people playing the fast stuff for real, and in my opinion... what's the point? When there's Charlie Hunter out there, what's the point?
Interesting to note that Charlie Hunter is a Bay Area native, and his guitar teacher was a guy named Joe Satriani. That's a famous name, to anyone who actually has followed this "fake guitar" thing, because the real-and-fake speed demons are all living in that guy's shadow. Me? I never cared for him. But, he trained a lot of really great musicians. As a teacher, he did a lot of great for the world.
And that genre brings me to Buckethead. Let's deal with that stage name. "Buckethead," not to be confused with Lord Buckethead, is one of the more impressive guitar virtuosos in the world today, even though most of what he plays is of little interest to me. Metal. He has dealt with crippling stage fright by wearing a KFC bucket and Michael Meyers mask on his head, so that nobody could see his face. That, plus the "Buckethead" moniker and wacky stage shows, and he simply "hides" on stage. Mostly, he hid in his bedroom, practicing, and practicing, and practicing, until he became one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived.
Why do I know who Buckethead is if I don't listen to metal? Because Buckethead is so much more than a metal guitarist. Jazz, funk, acoustic weirdness... whatever. He can do anything. Check this out. Note, in particular, what happens at 3:37.
Nobody has ever accused Buckethead of being a faker. Aside from the fact that he's been at this for decades, there's no glory in going from that beautifully weird acoustic picking to some Chet Atkins style country picking when your fanbase is ostensibly a bunch of metalheads.
No. Glory. At. All.
And that brings me to country and bluegrass. Genres that do value speed. David Grier, Bryan Sutton, Jim Hurst, Larry Keel... I could keep going with just the modern players, without even getting into the good, old boys, like Doc Watson, Tony Rice, Clarence White... Speed? Just listen to the genre. Country? Have you ever even heard of Scotty Anderson? There is so much out there, but the fake guitar thing just doesn't seem to have hit the country/bluegrass scene, much less jazz.
Why not? Constant live playing. See that clip up there of Buckethead? He's paid his dues. Live performance after live performance. Same with Charlie Hunter. The fake guitarist thing is an internet phenomenon built around people who aren't working as touring musicians, or in a few cases, tour in such a way that they can stay far enough back from the stage that they don't have gawking dudes three feet from the fretboard capable of noticing when the sounds don't sync perfectly with their movements because they're at the concert more for a lesson than for musical enjoyment anyway.
Hi! Guilty!
You can't do this if you are a real touring musician, particularly in a niche genre. The instagram guitarist thing is, for reasons of age in particular, not appealing to genres that are embraced by the old fuddy-duddies.
I don't want to overstate the age thing, though. Metal is, at this point, an old genre. Older than I am. My tastes in music are idiosyncratic, and not many people are as attached as I am to music that nears the century-mark. The bigger point is the social change. Social media and the shift away from older models of music consumption.
When you combine social media with knee-jerk reactions to showboating, badness always ensues.
With respect to the fake guitar thing, at a very big level, I don't care. I can keep listening to Charlie Hunter, Buckethead, country, bluegrass, and plenty of other real guitarists, piano players, violin virtuosos, and other stuff that matters, and anyone who wants to watch stupid instagram videos of fakers can do so. Politics don't work that way.
In my first book, I wrote about this. Elections aren't like markets. My term for it was "the principle of voter interdependence." In a market, I buy a Charlie Hunter cd, like an old geezer, and I get my Charlie Hunter cd. You buy your phony lessons from a guitar faker on instagram, and you get cheated, but that's not my problem because it's not my money. On the other hand, if I vote for an honest candidate, and you vote for a lying scumbag, I don't get the honest candidate as my governing representative unless enough other voters do likewise. If enough other voters vote for the lying scumbag because the post-truth era has diminished their ability to separate fact from fiction, I'm stuck being ruled by a con artist. See Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections, (Oxford University Press 2011).
So, fine. If you want to go listen to some instagram faker metal "guitarist" who sped up his videos to pretend that he's Buckethead, that's not my problem. The problem is that there are people gullible enough to fall for that, because the same thing that makes them fall for that makes them fall for other stuff.
Damn. This stuff has hit the music world too. There is nowhere to hide.
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