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Dedicated to Garage Bands

(Picture: DS)

Garage Bands

(6.5.2023) The other day, when I was crossing the street, I noticed two boys, crossing the street with me, carrying musical instruments (strings) and obviously coming from a musical lesson. And these two boys, while crossing the street, made strange noises, as if they were giving cues to each other, as if going through a song they just had developed (or were developing, while crossing the street). Or at least they were behaving as if they were in a band, and perhaps these two boys were planning to have a band, and perhaps everything was to start, here and now, while they were crossing the street, making strange noises. If felt as if there was playfulness in the air, and creative energy, hopes and everything of which dreams are made of, and there is a name for this state of being, when everything seems possible and nothing has yet been decided: you were going to have a garage band, your were going to be in a garage band. Due to a lack of rehearsing space, you had to choose the best that was just available for your band. And this was a garage. The perfect place for everything of which dreams (and dramas) are made of. And I am not interested in Garage Rock here (a musical genre), nor in a software named GarageBand. I am interested in that state of being, when enthusiasm and potential come together, and playfulness, and when creative life is probably best. In the beginning. When everything seems possible, nothing is available, but everything, everything makes sense. And again: ›garage‹ is just a name for it, it is about the state of being. And literally anything can be, as we will see, a ›garage band‹ something.

1) What Makes a Song?

Okay, there is this bouncy keyboard riff you just have ›written‹. You do think that it sounds catchy. You play it to your guitar-player friend, but he says that it does sound too commercial. But you still think that it does sound catchy. Both of you are fourteen, fifteen years old. You are going to have a band, but for the moment, you just meet here and there to play together. Or you play at a party for some friends, in a house up the street, or in a garage. And what you don’t know is that the riff will be one day the opening riff of a song called Take on me. And what you don’t know either is: for the rest of your life you will have an argument with your friend, about what exactly made that song. Was it just the refrain plus the verse, or was it also the bouncy keyboard riff (that your friend thought, sounded too commercial). What is a song at all? Is it everything that happens during the three minutes during which a song is played on the radio? Or is it, in a more abstracted sense, the line which is sung, plus, perhaps, the harmonies. Which would mean that your keyboard riff was just a part of the arrangement, and not a part of the song (this has commercial implications for sure). But this is a feeble position. A song is everything that happens during the aforementioned three minutes. If the song opens with a riff, redolent of playfulness, the atmosphere is set. With the verse the scene is set, a playful, but also a melancholic scene, full of longing, and then a refrain spirals up into world-famous heights. And it is true: nobody can sing the keyboard riff. But nobody can sing the refrain either (two and a half octaves, and twice a difficult, a very wide interval). Brief: The song is made of these three ingredients: the keyboard riff, the verse and the chorus; a bridge brings in colorful harmonies, but it only comes later. So, yes, the riff is definitely a part of the song. No question. So please stop that silly argument. It is un-garage-band-man-like. Thank you.

2) From the Band to the Garage Band Hedge Fund

I think that the history of music, and also the history of pop culture could, perhaps should be written from that rather hidden side: from the raw, garage band side of being. When everything seems possible, but nothing is yet available, and everything makes sense. This is, as it seems to me, where the creative energy does live, perhaps an unspoilt energy, and success may come later (or perhaps it does never come), and one may write the history also from the angle of what might come later (the success, the argument, the marketing, the institutionalization, the fame), but the magic in, respectively: before all that, is caught by the name of garage band. And perhaps that state of being is the best, the most happy state of being in a creative person’s life. The dreamy state, when one feels to be connected with a mighty potential that yet has to be explored and exploited (and dreams enhance, if two people are dreaming it together, and spend much time together dreaming it, interactively, so-to-speak). And this potential does exist. And the real history is just what – really – happens in the end, and on the surface. But creative life is more, more hidden, and more precious. One has to go back to the raw state, to discover the magic again, caught by the name of garage band.

In the mean time ›garage band‹ has become a metaphor. And there are not only garage bands, there are, for example, garage band hedge funds.
Okay, there are Charlie and Jamie (in the movie The Big Short), two guys that run a fund together. They bet on the American housing market to crash, and they will get rich in the end. But for the moment, the two young men are still kind of unspoilt. They feel a horror, in view of a seemingly fraudulent system, and they try, two young and ethical people, to get a journalist friend to publish the story of what is just happening, in the fraudulent system.
But the journalist does not want to put his career at risk, and he is not going to publish a story based on what two friends from school are telling him, two friends who are, momentarily, running a garage-band-hedge-fund. This is what the Wall Street journalist says. To his pals from school. But the garage band will turn out to be right. What they are trying to say is true. But, for the moment, nobody is taking them seriously, and Jamie and Charlie fail to get through, despite being heard.

Garage band, here, means just: outsiders, not part of the establishment, not someone representing the big and mighty institutions, nor authority. But garage band, here, means also: lucid, insightful, naive and ethical, not yet disillusioned. Not yet spoilt. Right in everything, but completely, or at least: more or less powerless.

3) Garage Band Everything

One has to notice that the ›garage‹, in the context of the history of big tech, probably has become a mythology, a mythic space, the holy creative space, where everything, everything was meant to start. This is perhaps also the reason for which a software, meant to help musical production, had been called GarageBand. While it was about a keyboard riff in the history of the pop song, it was about the question whether the Mac was to be an open system, or if special tools were being needed to simply open it. This was the raw state of things, the magical state of being, the history of things-still-being undecided, with a mighty potential that was to be exploited in the one, or the other way (and an argument, also here, an argument was to follow: what is a computer? whose idea was it, who exactly did develop it, and on what level?).

As a scholar I am thinking also of the state of being in which, obviously the humanities are. The people in the institutions do seem to think that what they are doing is all that matters. But bloggers, independent scholars, writers are representing the garage band side of scholarship. In the humanities. See above. We will see how these things will develop in the future. But the magic is rarely to be found inside lethargic, self-referential institutions. The magic lives where the potential is being exploited. It’s the more hidden side of things. Garage band websites, yes, also garage band websites, are contributing to scholarship and to intellectual history.

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