From a young age I was raised listening to country music, and one of my favorite music artists was Toby Keith. He always mentioned Honky Tonks in his songs and what a great deal of fun they were, so the term “Honky Tonk” has always been associated with a place for a good time.

The history of Honky Tonk is rather interesting to me because it turned the name of a specific place into the name of music born from that place. While searching for the first usage of the word on Google Ngram, I found that Honky Tonk originated around 1917. But upon searching for the first use of the word through Proquest I could only find an article from Bits of New York Life published on May 18, 1921. It is used in the sentence “The strains have vigor, the indelible impress of dare devil honky tonk improvisation.” The article was written about a strike against Tin Pan Alley (an old music publisher) because the singers believed they weren’t being paid enough for their work. Some of the wording is old for me so I don’t understand completely, but I believe the writer meant that the songs produced by the musicians during the strike were like that of songs from a Honk Tonk, which at the time was a rougher kind of bar with lots of drinking, dancing, music, gambling, and some prostitution.

A lot of the music played in these Honky Tonks were African American genres like the Blues or Jazz, which eventually evolved over time to become a new genre of bar music.

I really think it’s amazing how music can evolve by just being played in a certain place. There was no corporate interference, it was the people that made this music. The rough-n-tough guys that frequented the rowdy Honky Tonk bars and enjoyed a good beat made this music that has lasted to the present day. In a way I think that Honky Tonk is a bit ‘purer’ than most music genres that were artifically created by business from the start, even Folk music has forced origins.

To summarize, Honky Tonks were originally a type of bar known to be rougher than most. In these bars, musicians played their songs and other patrons were drinking and dancing the night away. Over time, the musicians began to change their songs to better fit their crowd, give it move of a beat to dance to, and sing with words and feelings everyone there would understand. T

Their efforts made the truly American genre of Honky Tonk last for just about a century. And I’m forever grateful to be able to listen to it.

The music of the past shapes the music of the future. Music is constantly changing and evolving and inspiring others to go further and create their own unique style. Today, the most popular genres of music would probably be rap, pop, hip-hop, and rock. But what came before these genres? How were they created? What was the catalyst for our modern music revolution?

Race.

Now, a lot of people like to say race had nothing to do with it, that music is a race-free industry. They couldn’t be more wrong. Karl Hagstrom Miller published the book Segregating Sound in 2010, here he discusses the influence of past racialized genres in music. In an attempt to create a single genre to represent the Southern identity, the music industry made the Folk genre. They wanted a genre that was pure and untouched by modern society and in their search for the perfect source, the talents of marginal Black singers came to light.

As we discussed in class, the music industry was looking for a group on the outer edges of society. The community that fit the bill was rural African Americans in small towns or sharecrop workers. After the discovery of their target group, many weren’t happy. Racial discrimination was still rampant at the time and giving a Black person a chance to become famous could be seen as dangerous. But some record companies still went through with their plans, and thus the folk genre was born.

Not only was the folk genre initially owned by African Americans, the blues were too. Many Black artists had their work categorized into one of these two genres because it was the only place that they ‘belonged.’ As the popularity of Black music rose, white artists became inspired to create their own music based off of the African American genres.

On the music news site, Digital Music News, Paul Resnikoff published an article about how the music industry is still dominated by white men even though most of modern music was born from Black artists. Rock n’ Roll, rap, and pop were all developed from the African American blues, and the country genre came from the folk genre. Now, there are plenty of artists of color in the music industry producing songs of whichever genre they choose.

But the issue comes in when you look at the owners of the music industry. Resnikoff comments that he “can’t name one Black executive from Pandora, Live Nation, Apple, Spotify, AEG, or SXSW” – all major music producers. There might be a few African Americans leading the industry here and there, but they are nowhere near as well known and influential as the white people that create the face of the company. If African Americans have had such a huge influence on modern music culture, why are Black executives being erased from the public view?

The only answer that I can personally come up with to this question is deep, internalized racism in the music industry. White people still feel like they are the ones to own and control genres that they had no business in creating in the first place. It’s like someone on earth taking credit for Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. I can only hope that I can see the diversity in the music industry grow so we can hopefully see some awesome new content produced to inspire a new generation of artists.

In my short life, I’ve witnessed a rapid evolution of technology. We went from large, clunky mobile phones with antenna about as long as the main body of the phone was to slim, compact cell phones with hundreds of apps and features for us to use to interact with our world. Everyone has a computer, a camera, a game console, and a phone in their pocket nowadays. The world is at our fingertips, nothing is out of reach.

I believe that I have a unique view in regards to experiencing my own rapid change in perceiving time and space. When I lived in Alaska, it was on a small island called Kodiak, at the time there were about 6,000 residents (the majority being either Coast Guard, fisherman, or military).

Due to being in such a secluded part of the world, we were late in receiving new technology. I was born in 1997, cell phones were already in use around the globe by then as well as CDs and personal computers. But we had none of that. I had never even heard of a cell phone before I moved to the Lower 48. We were still using tapes to play and record music, watched movies on VHS, and my favorite pastime was playing in the mud and climbing trees.

So basically, we were living at least a decade or two in the past. And boy did I learn that quickly when we moved to Massachusetts in 2006. My entire concept of space and time was based off of that island, I don’t remember ever leaving it so I thought it was the entire world. My family left on a ferry to the mainland, and I sat on the deck watching the only place I had ever known disappear.

Then we went by car cross-country from Anchorage, Alaska all the way to Massachusetts. I had never seen a road with more than two lanes, I had never seen an 18-wheeler, flashing billboards and shiny CDs and automatic doors… it was all new. So I pretty much had a two week crash course on the truths of the mainland and the vast amounts of new technology I had to wrap my head around.

My sense of time and space was warped at an alarming rate. My concept space had the most prominent change. I had considered ‘space’ to be the island and the ocean around it. Then my sense of time became scrambled as I was faced with what I saw as a ‘future world.’ I felt like we had jumped through time to the future, but in reality my concept of time had been severely limited on the island. It took time, but I was able to accept a new view on space and time around me.

Artificial Intelligence used to be fiction and fantasy, but today we are moving closer and closer to creating robots with the capacity to think like a human. But… if they think like a human, does that mean they’re one too? Can a machine be called intelligent if humans are the ones that have given them that information through programming in the first place?

I’m just going to express my own thoughts on the issue in this blog post.

The main argument that robots are not ‘really’ intelligent is that the information is programmed into them and not ideas of their own. But think about human children, are they not intelligent because we give them the tools they need to learn? Are students intelligent if the information is taught to them by a teacher? No. We call them intelligent. Now how are machines different?

I will admit that I have a severe lack of empathy for humans and I tend to connect emotionally with non-human beings, like animals. Even though my computer can’t talk to me and respond to me like my cat does, I still feel it has its own kind of sentience. He’s moody, he likes to play pranks, and finds he jump-scares hilarious. Those are all things he does to me on a regular basis. People who don’t connect with their technology would see it as a malfunctioning computer that needs to be fixed, but I see it as a personality. Yea, I have a very odd way of thinking.

I found an interesting article from Wired about robots with emotions. A Japanese company created an emotional robot named Pepper that has “more emotional intelligence than your average toddler.” Pepper can read facial expressions and analyze voices to determine the person’s emotion and decide how to respond correctly. Many people who have encountered Pepper say that the robot seemed to actually have a will to help and make people happy. How much more intelligent can you get? Pepper is even learning about American behaviors and how different the culture is from Japan. They need to learn how to respond to an entirely new audience, which is amazing!

Some robots have even been given the capacity to form their own opinions based on information they are given. Now, if a robot can synthesize their own thoughts, are they intelligent? Heck, IBM’s supercomputer Watson learned how to swear. Scientists were trying to help it learn modern speech patterns, so they gave Watson access to Urban Dictionary. After going through the site, Watson learned about swearing and how to use each one correctly in conversation or as a response. A researcher asked Watson a question at one point, and Watson responded “bullshit.” An absolutely hilarious example, but it helps solidify my belief that machines are intelligent.

The way our brains process thought is probably very unique to our species, and the best way to describe it is through Vannevar Bush’s Raytheon project. He crafted the plans for what could be called the world’s first computer database, the Memex.

While researching one topic, let’s use World War II as an example of research, a person can look for basic and obvious information on the topic like summarizing articles and history textbooks. Then they could be interested in the events leading up to the war, so they search for the history of Germany in the early 20th century.

From there, they look at the economy and the economic depression Germany was in at the time. The depression coincided with an election, so delve into information on that specific election. See how the multitude of political parties and candidates divided the country so badly that there was no real majority in the vote so someone with only a fraction of the vote was elected, Hitler.

The research can go on and on from that to look into concentration camps, D-Day, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. From the previous research on German economy and politics, they can analyze how the crisis in Germany led to each atrocity during World War II.

Humans tend to jump around from one subject to another that the previous subject reminded them of, like I described above, and then circle back to the main topic and connect the dots. We don’t think linearly, like Carr tried to suggest with his rigid system of organization. When do people ever do things in logical order? Look at pictures of people putting together IKEA furniture and you’ll understand. But I digress, the point I’m trying to make is that humans have very spontaneous thoughts that lead us to new ideas and possibly new inventions. An ant probably has a linear thought process like what Carr described. If humans were like that, we would have never progressed this far without our ability to think of almost anything, even if it doesn’t exist.

Now this isn’t going to be ask analytical as all my previous blog posts, I’m going to talk about my beliefs and whether or not I feel like I fit into the ideology of Idealism or Realism.

By no means am I a religious person, my parents grew up with religion but chose not to pass it on to my sister and I so we could form our own beliefs. So Idealism is immediately off the table. But with Realists they are searching for logical reason behind actions and behavior. Like how we mentioned a Realist talking about a sunset, they liked it because it reminded them of another sunset they saw in another place. They’re always making connections and boxing in their world from anything that isn’t scientifically legitimate or explainable.

So, I conclude, that I am neither.

Now I know it was said in class that you have to be one or the other, but hear me out. I believe in nothing. Sounds strange, huh? Allow me to elaborate. I don’t care about whether or not something exists in the world. There could be a god. There could not. There could be aliens. There could not. Both are equally plausible because neither have been proven and most likely won’t be. I don’t search for reasons behind everything, if I was sitting with the Realist and Idealist watching the sunset I would just be thinking about it, right there, in front of me. This is a unique sunset on this one day, in one place, and in one mind.

I usually describe my system of beliefs as Apatheist. I don’t care about the existence or nonexistence of something for it doesn’t affect my life. I don’t care for more meaning in everyday things other than it exists. If I happen upon a fight between an Idealist and a Realist, I would simply say they are both right. And they are both wrong. You cannot prove the legitimacy of either belief because that is what it is, a belief.

Some may think that my life must be sad and dull because I don’t care about anything. But that’s far from the truth. I find more joy in life than most people, I find, because I don’t question the world. I’m not going to get an answer, so I will just let it be. The world exists, I exist, and I’m experiencing the world. That is all.  

The “Public Self” and the “Private Self” are two identities that each person carries with them for just about their entire life. You develop it at a young age when you learn how to behave at home and that you need to act differently in front of others. The famous philosopher, Plato, was the first to suggest the existence of such selves. It came about when literacy was just beginning to catch on in society, more and more people learning to read each day. The time came when literate people could read aloud to non-literate people from a slate carved with symbols. Then these literate people began to do something unheard of, read silently. Reading was not usually just for the sake of oneself all alone, it was to be shared with others. But silent reading introduced humans to the self in their brain they never knew they had.

In modern times we divide these two selves based on when and where they are presented. Your public self is shown, of course, in public and tends to be more conservative, polite, and well-mannered. In contrast, your private self can be any range from almost the same as your public self to being a complete hooligan. Our private selves come out when we’re alone or with those we are very close to, walking around in your underwear is an activity your private self might indulge in and your public self abstains from. In the past there was a very clear divide between the two selves, but in today’s world the public self is starting to disappear.

People aren’t really caring as much to hold up proper appearances in public, some will just act like they’re still in their living room when they’re at the mall. If you pay close attention, you can find common groups of people that are losing, or rather discarding, their public selves. From my personal experience, I believe that men’s public self is deteriorating much faster than women’s. More specifically, young men/teenage boys. I don’t have hard scientific facts to back up my argument, it’s purely based on my observations and experiences.

Women are expected to dress nicely, but modestly, act sweet and polite, and always wear makeup. The Telegraph in the UK surveyed employers to see whether they would hire a woman not wearing makeup. A shocking 67% would have a “dim view of female staff” if they were not wearing makeup. At this point, wearing makeup is no longer a choice but a necessity for most women today. The self putting on and displaying this picture-perfect face is the public self. We’re always being forced into a submissive role by society controlling our success based on the appearance and personality of our public selves. To me, I feel like a dog on a chain.

Men have little to no expectations from society. Sure, they’ll be asked to dress nicely in proper work attire (probably just a button-up and slacks) and keep their hair groomed. There are few restrictions on men’s behavior in public, in fact men are expected to be loud and demanding. Just take a ride on the subway and you’ll see men taking up three seats by ‘man-spreading.’ And nothing is done about it. It’s like they’re being given permission to have neon lights over them reading “HERE I AM” because of how they always make their presence known. Now moving from grown men, let’s look to teenage boys.

Teenage girls are held to similar, if not stricter, regulations than adult women. Teenage boys on the other hand are given full reign. They don’t have to care even the slightest about their appearance. Ever seen a teenage boy dressed like a randomized Sim character? That’s what most seem to wear. They could be wearing a neon orange shirt, pea green cargo shorts, a snap-back looking like it’s been through a paper shredder, and mismatched shoes and nobody will question or think badly of them. If a girl were to dress in a similar fashion they’d have people shaking their heads and thinking “She really doesn’t care about her appearance, how lazy.”

The main point of my argument is that men’s public selves are deteriorating without much stopping them and women are still being held to the highest standards for how they appear to others. It’s a real issue in our society that I know probably won’t be addressed for a long time because of all the misogynistic men (most importantly, male politicians) believing that women need to work even harder to get paid even though we just barely make 80 cents to a man’s dollar. I want to feel a little more freedom, feel like my contribution to society isn’t dictated by what I put on my face, and I especially want to be respected and valued for my intelligence rather than my physical body.

(NOTE: I am uploading all of my posts at once because I have been crafting and editing each one)

Modern music is notorious for its volume and glass-shattering bass that can shake a person to the core. You really don’t think that music can be amped up much more at this point without causing ears to bleed. But is louder really better?

When audio editing became commonplace in the music industry, there was a full out “Loudness War” to try and attract more attention. The BBC published an article titled “Why is modern music so loud?” where the outcome of the war is analyzed. Since the 80’s music has been increasing its volume, obviously, but it’s also becoming flatter. The volume difference between voice, instruments, and other sound effects all but vanishes. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is used as an example, the video shows how each remastering of the song has increased the volume of the background music dramatically to match Michael’s voice- which is also amplified.

So, louder is better right? Nope. Many diehard fans of music noticed the change in the way their favorite band’s music was edited. Metallica fans in particular were up in arms about the changes that flattened out the music on the CD album, Death Magnetic. In order to make music louder, recording companies need to compress it and flatten out the sound waves until just about every note is the same volume. This compression has been proven to distort many instrument’s natural sound and make the edited song sound warped. The diehard fans of Metallica searched far and wide for the old style the knew and loved, which unexpectedly showed up in the game Guitar Hero. Upon hearing the drastic difference in sound, the Metalheads rallied together to have the unedited versions of the songs released instead.

Some people can argue that louder music makes people notice you more in a positive way, but a lot of music fans point out how much the natural sound is being distorted through the aggressive editing process. Personally, I agree with the Metallica fans. I find that I’m attracted to music with a more dynamic range of sounds, I’ll leave a few examples below (they might not be too dynamic but better than most). Of course I still fall victim to the allure of pop culture, but I recognize that I can’t always resist it. It’s not bad to like music that’s been compressed and flattened. The music industry is essentially shoving it down our throats so sooner or later we’ll just accept it as a part of our modern culture. I’ve accepted, but I will always be seeking that depth in amplitude to experience the thrill of natural sound that keeps you on your toes with its ever changing volume.

Article Source

Machine Dreams

Le Bien Qui Fait Mal (French)

Feeling Good

(I have a very dynamic range of music tastes)