Soundtrack people

As a DJ, I occasionally run into an odd breed of client known as “Soundtrack People.”  These are individuals who base their entire musical life upon the soundtracks to movies.  Every song that they choose for their wedding can be directly linked to a specific film, and the more popular the movie, the more likely that the song will be included in the wedding. It’s bizarre.  The entirety of the entire musical selections is typically generated from less than a dozen albums, and they frequently say things like, “You can play any song from the My Best Friend's Wedding soundtrack. Every song is great.”

Or “Can you play Bette Davis Eyes, but the Gywneth Paltrow version of the song from the Duets soundtrack?”

Or “Can you play that song that plays in the background as Forrest Gump is running across the country?  Not the first song.  The second one.  The one after he crosses the Mississippi for the third time.”

And if an actor or actress actually sang or danced to a song in the film and that film has anything to do with a wedding or a party ( Rupert Everett, Julia Roberts and cast singing Say a Little Prayer in the film My Best Friend’s Wedding), the song is a guaranteed, off-the-charts, must-play #1 hit with this breed of client.

Sadly, these are the songs that most often fail at a wedding, Say a Little Prayer included. As much as the bride wants her family and friends to seem as hip and fun as Julia Roberts and company appear in that film, it just isn’t going to happen. I’m sorry, people, but you simply cannot recreate the falsified, albeit festive, atmosphere that professional actors, skilled directors, sophisticated lighting and multiple camera angles were required to produce.

More importantly, basing the extent of your musical interest upon the films Fever Pitch, The Wedding Singer, Coyote Ugly, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction and Singles is… well… a little sad.

Don’t you think?

Skipping his best material

And while I’m on the subject of the Dylan concert, can I also add that I did not appreciate John Mellencamp’s set list, which did not include Jack and Diane, ROCK in the USA and Hurts So Good, which are his first, second, and fourth most popular downloads in the iTunes Music Store, and dare I say, three of his most famous songs of all time.

What was he thinking? Though I enjoyed his new music quite a bit, he can’t just ignore the fact that almost everyone in the audience grew up listening to his music in the 1980s, when he achieved his greatest level of fame, and that songs like Jack and Diane were favorites for almost everyone in the stadium that night.

This would be like going to a Dylan Thomas poetry reading and not hearing Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

Or going to a Robert Frost reading and not hearing The Road Not Taken.

Or going to a Billy Collin’s reading (finally someone alive) and not hearing Introduction to Poetry.

I’m sure that after twenty-five years, he might be tired of singing Jack and Diane.  I’m sure that he wants to be remembered for more than a few songs.  He may even want to promote new music in hopes of selling some albums.  But you cannot just ignore your fans or their desires. 

Play the new music, but leave time for the music that many of us came to hear as well.

Inaccessible and annoying

My wife and I went to see Bob Dylan a couple nights ago for our anniversary. As he stepped on stage, a booming voice declared him to be “the great American storyteller” among many other praiseworthy monikers. While this may have been true at one time, this is simply not the case anymore as far as his live performances go. Try as we did, my wife and I couldn’t understand most of what the man was saying. His voice is completely ruined, so much so that the majority of the words that he sings are cracked and jumbled and utterly indiscernible.

My wife’s tweet from that night reads:

At a Bob Dylan concert. I can't understand a word. I think he's singing about scooby doo and eggs in bed...

Though I am happy to have seen the man perform, he should really consider hanging up the touring boots, as it’s unfair to his fans to pay a lot of money to listen to a performance as muddled as this. As a musician and a performer, your music should at least be accessible to your audience.

This got me thinking about writing. My book club just finished Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions, the second book I’ve read by the author, and for the second time, I finished the book angry and annoyed with Saramago. Yes, he’s a Nobel-laureate, so it’s hard for me, with my one measly little book to criticize, but criticize I will.

I contend that Saramago writes in a style that makes his work utterly inaccessible to his readers. Specifically, his paragraphs often go on for pages and pages, he writes single sentences that can be a page long or more, he does not use dialogue attribution, he shuns the use of the period whenever possible, and he rarely gives any of his characters names.

Why?

Literary minds greater than my own, as well as die-hard Saramago fans, will claim that these stylistic choices are used to emphasize his ideas about identity, the universal human voice, and a bunch of other nonsense. While this may or may not be true, I contend that an author’s first responsibility to the reader is to produce text that is assessable and discernable. Stories that can be read without the constant need to re-read. Ideas that do not require page-long sentences to convey. When I read a Saramago novel, I feel like I’m reading a story that was purposely written in such a way so as to exclude a majority of readers from the work. I feel like I’m being bathed in literary elitism and authorial pretension on a grand scale.

I end up thinking of Saramago as a jerk.

This isn’t to say that I have not enjoyed his books. While utterly depressing, I thought that Blindness was an excellent story, wrapped up in a nearly indiscernible collection of words. And while I didn’t enjoy Death with Interruptions nearly as much, it was a compelling premise and a thought-provoking story, once one managed to conquer the lack of dialogue attribution and the endless array of endless sentences and paragraphs.

As an author, my greatest desire is for my stories to be read and enjoyed by as many people as possible. I want my novels to be assessable and intriguing works of fiction that a reader can put down and pick back up whenever necessary. I want the reader to understand my words, follow my thoughts, connect with my mind, and recognize which character is speaking without having to re-read the gargantuan paragraph three times!

Saramago chooses to be difficult for reasons that I will never fully understand.

Dylan can’t help but be indiscernible.

Saramago by choice, and Dylan as a result of the ravages of time. Both ineffective in reaching their audiences, in this author’s humble and perhaps overstated opinion.