Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' & Lyrics

Myth prefigures art, art prefigures physics, and physics prefigure the unthinking efficiencies of resulting orthodoxies. I've heard this song quite a few times this summer, not least because it has climbed to #1 on the charts. Like all their other work, Coldplay's trademark poppy-flows lull you into swaying trances, and as the overwhelmed words wash over you, the song becomes something like a holograph. Beautiful, rotating, floating just beyond your grasp, you never quite get at what they're about by just listening.

The band's music in general and this song in particular are vessels, it seems, for world music and for an entirely different commercial model, bearing other artists and styles away from nearly a century of American dominance, ostensibly from what has become a usurious, hyper-vigilant Industry, a rusting monolith thoroughly ill-suited to digital distribution. The album 'Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends' is themed around guerillas and insurgencies, around love in all its diversely and promiscuously international forms, around the global cycles of war and peace. Song and album were both produced by Brian Eno and released exclusively on iTunes on May 5th, with Europe having to wait quite a while for production of a physical CD. By the 30th of June, the album had sold more digital downloads than any in history.

The clearly audible first line, "I used to rule the world," is a tip-off to greater depths and possible endurance, as is its title from the Frida Kahlo painting of watermelons; the album's cover art is from the 1830 painting by Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. I dawdled a while before searching out the lyrics, but sure enough, frontman Chris Martin, better known in the US as Gwyneth Paltrow's husband (for whom he wrote the intimately disclosing song 'Yellow'), penned a title-track meditation on imperial strivings and deceits: "Revolutionaries wait...for my head on a silver plate. Just a puppet on a lonely string...oh who would ever want to be king?"

Martin thinks Saint Peter will never call his name. Not sure about that, but funny enough, the song and album's release are an artist's crowning achievements, ones which surely demanded an intense devotion to craft, which surely plant new guidons for others to follow. The viddy is of them playing to an adoring, seemingly thrown-together crowd at the BBC Centre. Here are the lyrics:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
Once you knew there was never, never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world


It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People could not believe what I'd become
Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world

"The Arc of The Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lobbyists Bounced Out Of The Party

Barack Obama is keeping Howard Dean on as DNC Chair, no surprise there. The shocker is that two days after getting control of the party, he directed the DNC to no longer accept lobbyist or political action committee (PAC) contributions. I'm not sure how the pundits are processing this yet, but it's a 9.0 on the political Richter scale, an extremely low-probability, high-impact event. It's easily the biggest shake-up in American politics since the New Deal, and isn't even comparable. It's revolutionary, and if it can be sustained will fundamentally change the steering mechanisms of the United States.

Some implications:

1) Barack Obama has personally changed the framework of American politics
Accomplished in one fell swoop. He's betting that small contributions like the ones gotten from his 2 million financial supporters will grow even larger, and sustain the central party over time. This makes politicians answer to small donors, not corporations or specialized interests.

2) It will expose McCain's massive corporate support
McCain is planning on taking $85 million in public funding, and then going to the RNC to make up what will likely be a $200+ million gap between now and November. The RNC gets almost all its funding from PACs and corporations; McCain has no choice but to take their money, a fact Obama can hammer home to win over the "working man and woman" vote.

3) What if enough people don't donate to the DNC?
As with any bold approach, there are risks. The Mighty Wurlitzer a/k/a Republican Attack Machine may react very quickly by accusing the DNC of milking people dry, squandering their hard-earned cash, etc. My bet is that won't happen for months and can be easily warded off by pointing to the benefits of answering to individual contributors over corporations. Still, this does represent an impressive, perhaps even amazing amount of faith in the American people.

4) Corporations hate this
And they're vengeful, hoard-guarding creatures. Imagine if you're a lobbyist; this is the fear that tingles on down spines and spreads around sphincters. The problem isn't so much losing traction with the Democrats, who have only been getting roughly 15% of the total lobbying largesse in the wake of the late 90's K Street Project, which traded regular corporate bribes for votes. It's that the Republicans, at some point, will be forced to follow suit. Until they do, the elephants are up a tree.

As a final reveal, all Obama's fund-raising events will (unlike McCain's) be open to the media. Wow. Transparency. No secret money in the back pocket, no new Rolex slipped in the front. No matter what happens, my family's financial support of the Obama campaign and that of nearly 2 million other individuals is vindicated. The New Kind of Politics is for real, powered by people, no apologies. I just wish that Obama hadn't done it quite yet--this is war, and he's betting his life against corporations.

My reticence is gone. So is the old Democratic Party. I would urge you to give a small donation to the DNC today, so regardless what happens from here on out, you can say you were part of a great change.

The Finest Kiss

I just learned this weekend that a real-world friend links here, and that he also happens to run the best Seattle music blog in the known universe, small as mine is on the subject. Toby's a lover of indie music to the extent he can accurately be called an expert, and his local reportage of bands is even better than the professional efforts around the Sound.

It wasn't the music that got me out here, but I grew to appreciate it fast. Since the late 80s the Pac Northwest has continued to grow into one of the most vibrant and nurturing emerging music scenes, the birthplace of the grungy "garage band" sound. It was a sarcastic revolt against the glammy, over-produced metal, pop, and alternative stuff that dominated the late 70s and 80s, so it was by definition anti-corporate. It was edgy and dangerous as a snakebite, dangerous as an OD, revelling in its alienation and managed to retain that feel even after bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and a score of lesser-known bands like Gruntruck were hitting it big world-wide and it attracted the trust-fund babies, who could actually afford heroin.

The originators were gone or cooled down, bands such as Green River, Mudhoney, and the Melvins (Kurt Cobain was a devoted fan and helped them out as a stage hand) were starting to pass the torch, but Seattle was as music-mad as Liverpool in the 1960s. Even my button-down friends and I in MBA School went down to the Off-Ramp every Tuesday for open mike night. We saw the worst band in history (Zeke) there. The lead singer came out wearing nothing except a gold lame' G-string, and it got worse when they started to play. Funny enough, they're a local-venue band stalwart 16 years later.

The Northwest was a perfect incubator for garage bands, and still is. You sure as hell can't play much music outside, and most parents would've rather parked their cars out on the street than have proto-punk metal/Iggy Pop fusion playing in the house. So grunge happened. Lord Running Boy had his first experience with Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath last night, which he immediately went wild over: "No, no, turn it up, it's gotta be louder," he cried, grabbing the volume knob and turning it up to Eleven, whirly-gigging and turning his cousin's living room into a mosh pit for the balance of the album. (Yes. Yes, I am terrified.)

The Finest Kiss is named for a song by the Boo Radleys, a UK group Toby heard when he was living in Caen. They have a website up now, and you can listen to the song here. By going to Toby's site, I also learned that Australian legend Paul Kelly, the greatest singer-songwriter you've never heard of, will be playing at the Triple Door in March, right where I first ran into him. We're going. And I'll be enjoying the future of music via the Finest Kiss.

Musical Hezbollah - Radiohead's 'House Of Cards'

Revolutions often take a long time to really get rolling, and sometimes longer to prevail. More often, they get squashed and leave nothing more than a greasy spot behind on concrete. Like Jim Morrison boiled it down in his song Five to One, "they've got the guns, but we got the numbers." True. But those guns are always a real big problem.

Back in the early '90s, a music industry veteran and I were jawing about how computer technology was sure to doom the recording labels. All you had to do was park songs by every band from every where on servers, sell them for 25 cents a piece, let people download them, and give the band 2/3rds of the money. Simple. You'd kill the industry's inequities, its control over artists. No doubt it's fortunate that we didn't run off and start up a company based on that idea, as we would've (at minimum) spent a lot of time dodging dive-bombing lawyers and corporate cruise missiles. As the industry in question has convincingly demonstrated, amongst other things by suing senior citizens whose grandkids downloaded a movie while visiting the house on Thanksgiving, or slamming college kids into jail for peer-to-peer file-shares over their school's computers, it just doesn't. Want. To be. Killed.

The labels also refuse to change their business model, which tells me how much of a killing the people who run record labels must've grown accustomed to, must still be making. (If bands have a smash hit with their first album, they don't make any money.) Apparently by preference, they're bleeding like wounded Godzillas in black-and-white movies, tottering around smoking landscapes, breathing fire and lashing out with huge tails to crush people under buildings and toy cars, roaring the inarticulate rages of terrible lizards. For 15 years, with news of the RIAA going after thousands of defenseless music lovers and quite literally ruining their lives, I've been yelling, "Die, you dumb-ass dinosaurs, die!" And finally...it's happening.

The popular Brit band Radiohead announced this month that they're leaving their label, as in, they're not going to have one. They just put up their new album, In Rainbows, on inrainbows.com. Here's how it works: you go there, download it in MP3 format, and pay them what you feel like they deserve. Seems like they trust their fans more than they do their business managers. Hmm. Managers can still dismiss the move as crazy, because Radiohead, being a band, is a bunch of pie-eyed anarchists, who even published the virulently anti-American political album Hail to the Thief in 2004. In Rainbows sold 1.2 million copies on the first day of its release, and that might be a little worrisome, but they're thinking it's sure to slow down, and anyway, pay-as-you-wish (PAYW) is a laughable, unpredictable business model. Not serious.

Then Nine Inch Nails announced on Monday it was going with the PAYW model. Then Oasis. Then Jamiroquai. And yesterday, Madonna left her label to take a $120 million contract with a concert promoter, Live Nation, for a three-record deal. Live Nation has never distributed a record before. There are those who say this isn't the death knell of the record labels, that bands still need to be fronted lots of money for equipment, tours, and promotion, and that labels do add a lot of value. These are all status quo positions, and ignore that music is entering a Web 3.0 phase, wherein tools + users + audiences + promotion are all relationships under the direct control of the artists, and they're all web-mediated.

If it's not the death knell of record labels, then they're going to have to immediately remove their heads from their gluteal cleavage and wrap them around a multiverse which looks increasingly chaotic. For music, top-notch production costs a fraction of what it used to, a band's MySpace page adds a lot of promotional value for zero cost, and there's now room for many different price and distribution models. A Rolling Stone writer can get an interview by sending an email. The likely common denominator is that bands will have to build audiences by playing in front of people, feeding performances back onto the web, and relying on word of mouth. How frightening!

By the way, In Rainbows is going to be Album of the Year. And one of my favorite bands, stuck down in the skinny part of statistical distribution's Long Tail, the appropriately titled Slender Means, is playing at the Tractor Tavern tomorrow night in Ballard.

I Hereby Veto My Impeachment

We may yet live to hear those words.

Nonetheless, after the weathervane has spent its sweet time boxing the compass this year, the wind has changed, and it blows in a new direction. Consider: the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just told the truth about Iraq today in front of Congress. That's definitely new. He does not bear the distinctive brand of Cheney Farms (imagine what the symbol would be...) and he lacked the demeanor of tense obedience so characteristic of those in the cabal. He spoke without fear.

Also consider: The Weekly Standard and the NeoCons lined up right behind Hillary Clinton in the past few days, and Hillary gets a sudden jump in the polls. Now the obscure congressional inherent contempt rule is being dusted off in the face of Executive Privilege being thrown over the testimony of 4 members of the President's inner circle, and Congress need only claim its rights to put them into a District of Columbia jail.

Yesterday, a social lapdog (Larry King) asked Cheney directly if it was he who ordered the White House Counsel and Chief of Staff to a dying Attorney General's bedside to re-authorize his vital political wiretapping program. King reported that Cheney says he didn't recall doing so. (Whence the sudden temerity, Larry?) To top it off, Cheney admitted he was wrong two years ago, when he said that "the insurgency is in its last throes."

The security apparatus which underpins every doomed ruler must be excised in secret, and this must occur before an impeachment or other means of ouster can occur. The grip is being loosened, the apparatus has chosen to pass itself to another, and those of us who can help it do so, must. He who hath an ear, let him hear, she that hath an eye, let her see:

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I truly deliver."

Horatio, 'Hamlet'

Polity, Declination, and Re-Boot Pt. III

Have you ever noticed how the the things least repeated tend to be the most interesting? Science, as a religion, is not allowed to truck with them. True, whole worlds often do things almost exactly the same way twice and thrice and three million times. Yet even the Law of Gravity is not an absolute. Newton's apples will always fall from their trees, unless they're subjected to a tornado. Then they'll be sucked up into a vortex, and fail to hit our waiting heads. This isn't to say gravity has not attained the status of physical law. Just that science has simplified it, failed to understand its source, and downplayed anomalous conditions which can supercede it. And I can't see how that is helpful.

For the last fifty years, public school science teachers have taught that gravity makes all objects fall at the same speed, obscuring or expunging the notion that their maxim is only true in a theoretical vacuum. A feather, with its low specific density and high aerodynamic drag, falls slower through an atmosphere than a cannonball. The Newtonian experiment in which a feather reached the ground as quickly as a cannonball from the leaning tower of Pisa, quoted to my class when I was 17 as gospel, was pure scientific superstition. A functioning adult with a PhD in Physics once insisted in all seriousness to me that all objects fall at the same rate, and he would brook no disagreement. Hmm. And what scientists have measured the differential rate of terminal velocities between falling feathers and cannonballs? Some, hopefully. Perhaps eccentric hermeticists, or heretics who desperately needed practical answers. Engineers, not scientists. People who had no time for fear or dogma, but needed to solve practical problems, tending to keep their data as private knowledge.

Philosophies, seeking practical solutions, provide less absolutist windows into the soul of man than religions. Philosophers may have much baggage we can disagree with, but at least they don't claim to be chosen of God. Their quest by and large has been to point ways out of the closed mazes of religion, to get people to think of the universe less like an ongoing game of cut-and-dried angles and DNA strand tic-tac-toe, rather more like dimensions in which a particle can be in two places at the same time. Which, I admit, is a concept borne of practical science. The continuum on which science and religion dwell blurs into interesting nether-worlds of philosophy, just as communism and capitalism have their demi-states. In preparation for more, here's a whirlwind distillation of a few influential historians and philosophies as provided by Church and Empire in his post on Historiography:

* Plutarch--Great Men and their Character. His thesis is that the very character of men changes history. His study of Mark Antony suggests that his love for Cleopatra blinded him to his duties in Rome and was destroyed by Augustus; who, it turned out, was not a lightweight.

* Historical Forces. This is the assertion that certain ideas, movements, etc., become irresistible forces that will have their way. An example is Christianity being such a force that would eventually not only survive persecution, but emerge victorious over the Roman Empire. Another is the dominance of Science in the West over Theology and Philosophy as the authority for determining Truth.

* Toynbee--Challenge and response. Toynbee's theory is that all civilizations are faced with a crisis which is either one of ideas, or one of technology. How they respond determines whether they will survive. An example is the Fall of Rome. Many blame Christianity for sapping the Pagan strength of Rome and causing her downfall. Toynbee points out that the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) used Christianity to revitalize and reform the Roman Empire for another thousand years.

* Hegel--Dialectic. Hegel's Theory of History says that for every old idea, there is a new one which conflicts with it. Out of the struggle a new idea is created (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis). He felt that this was how God led us to perfection and revealed new truth. History is just the product of conflict

* Darwin--Not a historian, but he took Hegel's idea and applied them to science. His biological application led to the Origin of Species. Herbert Spencer and others then used his biological ideas to support their ideas that a struggle among races of people and differing nations led to the strongest and most able nations ruling the world. Victory in combat meant the superiority of a nation or people.

* Marx--Material Dialectic. Marx used Hegel's ideas and applied them to classes of people throughout history. Any ruling class controlled the "means of production" which gave them wealth and power to rule. Whenever a new method of production occurred, there was conflict between the older ruling class and a newer class using the newer and superior means of production. An example is how the Businessman and his money destroyed the power of the old Aristocracy based on land and hereditary ownership

* Turner--Geography and the Frontier. Turner's thesis said that geography determines the character of a people and, depending on the situation, gave them certain advantages and disadvantages. An example is that the English and Japanese, being Island Nations, would naturally have an advantage at sea combat. And, in an age of sea-trade they would, tend to be powerful. His thesis explicitly stated how the Frontier shaped the American mind to be open to new things and to strive for what was new. In our modern technological age, Americans are very open to new technologies.

* Radicals--History is the story of who won. This thesis says that history is little more than mythmaking. "History is the history of winners." Those who win, write the history books. Those who have lost are excluded or demonized. History is determined by who has the political power to write the books. But, for some, reading a restaurant menu is as important as reading "history."

* Boorstin--The unexpected. Daniel J. Boorstin's books suggest a thesis that ideas and practices simply come together in various places and time and can hardly be predicted. What has mattered, is that the great Creators and Discoverers have been open to the challenge and took previously unrelated ideas and put them together in a way that was entirely new. They thus change the world. An example is how an anonymous optician in Belgium created the first telescope to be used in combat. It found its way to Italy where Galileo began to look at stars with it. His findings undermined the Ptolemaic system. However, the Church used his information to create the modern Gregorian Calendar we use today. But sixteen years later in the firestorm of the Reformation, Galileo was ordered to remain silent. Boorstin is hostile to the Hegelian-Marxist-Darwinian school as it can only tell what the future is like based on the past. The Hegelians could never have predicted the impact of the telescope. Boorstin makes considerable money showing that no one can predict; you can only remain open to change. Change cannot be managed.

That the Radicals currently amongst us would manufacture history via synthetic reactions under a Diocletian bubble is clear; to them, the Outside Threat is a sulphuric acid which melts away all restraints to their ambitions, and the barbarians outside the gates are more useful than the artisans within them. There's no arguing with the short-term effectiveness of what they do, only with its unpredictable, undesireable side effects. I side with Boorstin against them, who is saying right along with the high-energy particle jockeys and the message sent from the fictional character John Connor in Terminator 2: "The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

Polity, Declination, and Re-Boot, Pt. II

Lucretius said it was fears which first made the gods. Now as when we first appeared, there are still forces hidden in the earth on which we stand, and only dimly understand. The rivers swallow us in their swirling currents, the vagabond tides of the oceans decide the climes of continents, the winds and skies remain recalcitrant, trees fall and clouds lower upon our houses as they always have. We're actors in eternal tug-of-wars which carry on between rich and poor, religion and philosophy, socialism and capitalism, research and engineering. As Will and Ariel Durant noted in Pt. I of this post, the lung of our striving meta-organism acts as a flexing systole and diastole, propelling us through a cycle of conflict with each strenuous breath, propelling us we know not where.

Our forebears sought to placate the giants in the earth through offerings, ritual, and prayer. When priests channeled our desires and our fears,with answers revealed to them by the most high gods, their prescriptions became morals, ethics, laws, which in turn became convenient to statecraft. Shamash gave laws to Hammurabi, Thoth gave them to Menes, Egeria to Pompilius, Yahweh to Moses, Jesus to the Gentiles. Priests and paupers proved symbiotically precious to kings and states, yet as their orthodoxies became more successful, then inexorably more ridiculous and rigid, they sent increasingly ripe invitations to the reliefs of comedy and blasphemy, and each regime receded in relevance. But when first coming down from Gilgamesh, a holy man with hair standing up on end charged with the electrons of divine righteousness akimbo, bearing simple solutions, he was no easy thing to dismiss.

The effigy to burn now is science, which has attained the status of religion. I don't seek to restore mere Christianity in its place, and nought else. I know not what I seek, only that as a roadmap or religion, science is incomplete. While advancing our understanding bit by bit, and better than many other formerly discredited superstitions, science remains a fragmentary and unsatisfying religion. Obviously it has been useful, bringing us our electricity, piloting our airwaves, crafting our pharmaceuticals, powering our vehicles. But it is important to out "science" itself as a ritual-based religion, one which indoctrinates and amplifies a reflexive, barren fear of non-replication. It tears matter down into building blocks well, but is horrible at understanding how to integrate them into heuristics.

In short: the deepest lie of Science is that life and its attendant forces must consistently repeat in order to be valid; if not infinitely repeatable, an action isn't true. Whereas in fact, basic impulses seek what they will, are not repeatable, and go off the charts. All anecdotal evidence richly illustrates that life seeks to novelty. The universe is a novelty-seeking organism, not a Xerox copier. Matter seeks to assemble itself across different dimensions in ever-more appealing ways. It resists extruding the same thing twice, it is reluctant to allow even a glimpse of uniformity, and this resistance is a natural law. Matter is meant to mutate, to subvert, to transmigrate, and seek the undiscovered eddies of existence.

Independent UK Singer Kate Walsh Goes #1 On iTunes

Had meant to post something re: the music industry revolution going on in parallel with blogging & podcasting. Viva la Liberated Syndication! Just stumbled upon this post by Jeff in Fukuoka (where I used to live):

Girl Hits #1 on UK iTunes with Home-Made Album

Singer songwriter Kate Walsh has gone #1 on iTunes with an album she recorded for a few hundred dollars in her friend's spare bedroom, beating out Elton John and UK pop stars Take That. iTunes made her a featured artist of the day with a free download, and it took off from there.

This is a really interesting trend. Until recently, the Major Labels controlled most of what people heard. They were the only ones with real clout distribution-wise to record stores, and most promotion on radio and TV cost more than any honest independent outfit could afford. So as an artist, either you needed the major-label machine behind you (which comes at the price of them owning the copyrights to all your music), or you toiled away in indie land, playing small clubs, getting play on college radio and generally only being heard by a few people.

But the internet has opened a whole new distribution channel, and leveled the playing field, especially in England. It's amazing how many artists are breaking on the internet in the UK. A while back it was the Arctic Monkeys, which got their start on Myspace and went on to have the biggest-selling debut week in UK history. And the alternative hip-hop act Gnarles Barkley went to number #1 in the UK with their hit "Crazy" before they even had a record in stores thanks to itunes.

I remember back in the 90's Kurt Cobain was talking about his vision where a band could home-record an album and get big without major label help. It took a while and looked impossible for several more years, but things like that are starting to happen. The major label monopoly on music distribution is slowly but surely coming to an end.

Quiche Du Jour: Rule Breakers

A great artist told me once, "You gotta learn the rules so you know how to break 'em." Although the self-portrait above does not convey much in the way of outrageous impudence to us today, it very much did back then, and Albrecht Duerer was such a successful rule-breaker he has been called by many the first "Modern Man." Artistically, he was an innovator, and socially and religiously he was a revolutionary.

I remember the first time seeing an image of one of his paintings, a rabbit, in a well-worn high school social studies book. Though utterly realistic and a wholly unsentimental likeness of a rabbit, it still managed to be a masterpiece. Later, Duerer was largely responsible for securing the city of Nuremburg's support of Martin Luther, when most of Bavaria did not.

To break a system, you get inside one you want to change, and then you start breaking its rules to make good things happen. If you keep making the good things happen, people will try to find your "corruption handle" to get you under control. They'll start to panic if they can't find it, but you'd better not have an obvious handle if you want to follow through on your revolutions, no matter how tiny they may be.