Chad Orzel's Blog, page 3

“CERN Invented the Web” Isn’t an Argument for Anything

I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I’m thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn’t go into much detail. It’s probably worth explaining at greater-than-Twitter length, though, and a little too inside-baseball for Forbes, so I’ll write something about it here.

At its core, the “CERN invented WWW” argument is a “Basic research pays off in unexpected ways” argument, and in that sense, it’s fine. The problem is, it’s not anything more than that– its fine as an argument for funding basic research as a general matter, but it’s not an argument for anything in particular.

What bugs me is now when it’s used as a general “Basic research is good” argument, but that it’s used as a catch-all argument for giving particle physicists whatever they want for whatever they decide they want to do next. It’s used to steamroll past a number of other, perfectly valid, arguments about funding priorities within the general area of basic physics research, and that gets really tiresome.

Inventing WWW is great, but it’s not an argument for particle physics in particular, precisely because it was a weird spin-off that nobody expected, or knew what to do with. In fact, you can argue that much of the impact of the Web was enabled precisely because CERN didn’t really understand it, and Time Berners-Lee just went and did it, and gave the whole thing away. You can easily imagine a different arrangement where Web-like network technologies were developed by people who better understood the implications, and operated in a more proprietary way from the start.

As an argument for funding particle physics in particular, though, the argument undermines itself precisely due to the chance nature of the discovery. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and the fact that CERN stumbled into a transformative discovery once doesn’t mean you can expect anything remotely similar to happen again.

The success of the Web is all too often invoked as a way around a very different funding argument, though, where it doesn’t really apply, which is an argument about the relative importance of Big Science. That is, a side spin-off like the Web is a great argument for funding basic science in general, but it doesn’t say anything about the relative merits of spending a billion dollars on building a next-generation particle collider, as opposed to funding a thousand million-dollar grants for smaller projects in less abstract areas of physics.

There are arguments that go both ways on that, and none of them have anything to do with the Web. On the Big Science side, you can argue that working at an extremely large scale necessarily involves pushing the limits of engineering and networking and working in those big limits might offer greater opportunities for discovery. On the small-science side, you can argue that a greater diversity of projects and researchers offers more chances for the unexpected to happen compared to the same investment in a single enormous project.

I’m not sure what the right answer to that question is– given my background, I’m naturally inclined toward the “lots of small projects (in subfields like the one I work in)” model, but I can see some merit to the arguments about working at scale. I think it is a legitimate question, though, one that needs to be considered seriously, and not one that can be headed off by using WWW as a Get Funding Forever trump card for particle physics.

The Central Problem of Academic Hiring

A bunch of people in my social-media feeds are sharing this post by Alana Cattapan titled Time-sucking academic job applications don’t know enormity of what they ask. It describes an ad asking for two sample course syllabi “not merely syllabi for courses previously taught — but rather syllabi for specific courses in the hiring department,” and expresses outrage at the imposition on the time of people applying for the job. She argues that the burden falls particularly heavily on groups that are already disadvantaged, such as people currently in contingent faculty positions.

It’s a good argument, as far as it goes, and as someone who has been on the hiring side of more faculty searches than I care to think about, the thought of having to review sample syllabi for every applicant in a pool is… not exactly an appealing prospect. At the same time, though, I can see how a hiring committee would end up implementing this for the best of reasons.

Many of the standard materials used in academic hiring are famously rife with biases– letters of reference being the most obviously problematic, but even the use of CV’s can create issues, as it lends itself to paper-counting and lazy credentialism (“They’re from Bigname University, they must be good…”). Given these well-known problems, I can see a chain of reasoning leading to the sample-syllabus request as a measure to help avoid biases in the hiring process. A sample syllabus is much more concrete than the usual “teaching philosophy” (which tends to be met with boilerplate piffle), particularly if it’s for a specific course familiar to the members of the hiring committee. It offers a relatively objective way to sort out who really understands what’s involved in teaching, that doesn’t rely on name recognition or personal networking. I can even imagine some faculty earnestly arguing that this would give an advantage to people in contingent-faculty jobs, who have lots of teaching experience and would thus be better able to craft a good syllabus than some wet-behind-the-ears grad student from a prestigious university.

And yet, Cattapan’s “too much burden on the applicant” argument is a good one. Which is just another reminder that academic hiring is a lot like Churchill’s famous quip about democracy: whatever system you’re using is the worst possible one, except for all the others.

And, like most discussions of academic hiring, this is frustrating because it dances around what’s really the central problem with academic hiring, namely that the job market for faculty positions absolutely sucks, and has for decades. A single tenure-track opening will generally draw triple-digit numbers of applications, and maybe 40% of those will be obviously unqualified. Which leaves the people doing the hiring with literally dozens of applications that they have to cut down somehow. It’s a process that will necessarily leave large numbers of perfectly well qualified people shut out of jobs through no particular fault of their own, just because there aren’t nearly enough jobs to go around.

Given that market situation, most arguments about why this or that method of winnowing the field of candidates is Bad feel frustratingly pointless. We can drop some measures as too burdensome for applicants, and others as too riddled with bias, but none of that changes the fact that somehow, 149 of 150 applicants need to be disappointed at the end of the process. And it’s never really clear what should replace those problematic methods that would do a substantially better job of weeding out 99.3% of the applicants without introducing new problems.

At some level the fairest thing to do would be to make the easy cut of removing the obviously unqualified and then using a random number generator to pick who gets invited to campus for interviews. I doubt that would make anybody any happier, though.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a throw-up-your-hands anti-measurement argument. I’d love it if somebody could find a relatively objective and reasonably efficient means of picking job candidates out of a large pool, and I certainly think it’s worth exploring new and different ways of measuring academic “quality,” like the sort of thing Bee at Backreaction talks about. (I’d settle for more essays and blog posts saying “This is what you should do,” rather than “This is what you shouldn’t do”…) But it’s also important to note that all of these things are small perturbations to the real central problem of academic hiring, namely that there are too few jobs for too many applicants.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: February

Another month, another collection of physics posts from Forbes:

— Quantum Loopholes And The Problem Of Free Will: In one of those odd bits of synchronicity, a previous post about whether dark matter and energy might affect atoms in a way that allowed for “free will” was followed shortly by a news release about an experiment looking at quantum entanglement with astronomical sources acting as “random number generators.” This pushes the point when local interactions might’ve generated any correlation between measurements back in time a thousand-plus years, which in turn ties into the question of “free will.”

— Scientific Knowledge Is Made To Be Used: Some thoughts on a division in attitudes between science and other academic disciplines, where the way we do science naturally leads to more discussion of applications.

— Why Writing About Math Is The Best Part Of Common Core: In which I say nice things about the way my kids are being taught about math.

— Why Do We Spend So Much Time Teaching Historical Physics?: I’m teaching the badly misnamed “modern physics” course this term, and finding it frustrating because the book I’m using isn’t historical enough.

— How Do You Create Quantum Entanglement?: Prompted by a conversation with a colleague from history, a sketch of the main ways experimental physicists establish correlations between the quantum states of particles.

A good month traffic-wise, though I was surprised by the detailed dynamics of some of these– in particular, I expected an immediate negative response to the Common Core thing, but in fact that took a while to take off, and most of the response was positive. The only one that didn’t do well by my half-joking metric of “Get more views than there are students at Union” was the science-knowledge one, and that was probably justified as it was just kind of noodling around.

So, there was February. March brings with it the end of my current crushingly heavy teaching load, which should give a little more opportunity for substantive blogging. Maybe.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: January

It’s a new month now, so it’s time to share links to what I wrote for Forbes last month:

— Small College Astronomers Predict Big Stellar Explosion: I mostly leave astronomy stories to others, but I heard about this from a friend at Calvin College, and it’s a story that hits a lot of my pet issues, so I wrote it up.

— For Scientists, Recognition Is A Weird And Contingent Thing: Vera Rubin tops the list of great women in science who died in 2016, but AMO physics lost two great women but less famous women as well. I spent a while thinking about why they had such different levels of status.

— Squeezing Through A Loophole In The Laws Of Physics To Cool A Drum: A detailed look at a new experiment from NIST in Boulder, using squeezed light to reach temperatures below the standard quantum limit.

— How Much Scientific Research Is Wasted?: There was a claim floating around that 85% of biomedical research is a waste of time. On closer inspection, it turned out to be underwhelming, but the general question of what counts as waste in science is interesting.

— Do Dark Matter And Dark Energy Affect Ordinary Atoms?: A post in which I almost violate Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, because the answer is “Yes, but not so you’d notice.”

As always, I’m basically happy with these, though I was running a fever while I wrote the last one, so it might not be the clearest thing I’ve ever done. I’m also very pleased to have gotten nice email from two of the people mentioned in these posts thanking me for the stories. I’m always nervous when I recognize the name of a scientist in my inbox, for fear that they’re writing to complain that I misunderstood or misrepresented them, so a “Nice job!” message is wonderful.

This month also showed the typical lack of correlation between effort and traffic– the post I worked hardest on was the one about Vera Rubin, Debbie Jin, and Katharine Gebbie, but it got the fewest views of the lot, even with the last couple being overshadowed by momentous political events. The astronomy one was dashed off really quickly, and did the best, because there’s a boundless audience for astronomy.

And, so, that was January. On to the next thing.

New Book Alert: “Breakfast With Einstein”

So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn’t have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I’m feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I’ll give a quick summary of the details:

— As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers.

— The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog.

— The working title of the book is Breakfast With Einstein, and the subject matter is basically this talk I gave at TEDxAlbany:

The basic idea is to use ordinary morning activities as a hook to talk about the quantum physics underlying everyday phenomena.

— The due date for the book is in December 2017, publication to be sometime in 2018. Probably. You know, publishing– everything is subject to change.

— There is not yet a US publisher for this book– we’ve had some interest, but to my great sorrow and annoyance, Eureka didn’t sell well, and that makes things difficult. We’re still working on getting a publisher for this side of the Atlantic, and when that happens, I’ll post another cell-phone photo of legal documents. If you’re a publisher and this sounds interesting, please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with my agent…

I’ve known about this for a while– we agreed to the deal on election day last November, so at least one good thing happened that day– but transatlantic business deals are more complicated, so it took a while to get everything set up. And now, I’ve signed the contracts, and I guess I need to write the book. Once I have brains and time for that, which is not this morning.

The traditional photo of a pile of signed contracts for a new book, just before mailing them.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: December

This one’s late because I acquired a second class for the Winter term on very short notice. I was scheduled to teach our sophomore-level “Modern Physics” class, plus the lab, but a colleague who was scheduled to teach relativity for non-majors had a medical issue, and I’m the only other one on staff who’s ever taught it, so now I’m doing two courses instead of one. Whee!

Anyway, here are my December posts from Forbes:

— Science Is Not THAT Special: Another in a long series of posts grumbling about the way we set science off from other pursuits and act as if the problems facing it are unique. In reality, a lot of what we talk about as issues of science education are challenges faced by pretty much every other profession as well, with less hand-wringing.

— The Surprisingly Complicated Physics of Sliding On Ice: Revisiting that time a couple of years ago when I wrote a bunch about the physics of luge, this time talking about a much more basic question: Why is ice slippery?

— “White Rabbit Project” Physics: G-Forces: I had a bunch of conversations with the producers of the new Netflix show “White Rabbit Project” a year or so ago, and some of what we talked about turned into an episode on “g-forces” in acceleration.

— ALPHA Experiment Shines New Light On Antimatter: The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has done the first spectroscopy of antihydrogen. It’s pretty rudimentary by the standards of precision measurement folks, but still an important step.

— What Should You Expect From Low-Energy Physics In 2017? It’s Hard To Say: I was reading posts about (high-energy) physics news to look for in 2017, and realized I couldn’t write an AMO physics equivalent. So I wrote about why I couldn’t make predictions about my home field.

So there, two weeks into January, is what I wrote about in December. I’ve got a couple of posts up already this month, but we’ll save them for the January recap, which I’ll try to get posted before March. No promises, though, because this extra class has thrown things into disarray…

The Hold Steady at Brooklyn Bowl 12/2/16

There are only a couple of bands I’d drive a significant distance to see live, and now I’ve made the trip to NYC to see two of them. I went to see the Afghan Whigs in 2014, and this past Friday, I drove to Brooklyn for a Hold Steady show. And this time, I have a cool picture as a bonus…

Me with Craig Finn of the Hold Steady.

The origin of the picture, obviously, needs a little explaining. The current set of shows is a four-night stand (originally three, but they added one after the first three sold out) at the Brooklyn Bowl, reuniting with keyboardist Franz Nicolay for the 10th anniversary of their album Boys and Girls in America. They did a fan club presale thing for the shows, which included a package with all three shows and a happy hour at Friday’s sound check.

Obviously, I didn’t buy tickets for all three shows, but way back in 2013 or so, I contributed to a crowdfunded EP they did. We’ve never been able to work out the timing for the bonus item I bought then, so when I bought a ticket for Friday’s show, I contacted the people who ran the crowdfunding to see if I could swap it for a spot at the sound check event. They agreed, so I made the trip down a little earlier than I otherwise might’ve, and got to see my favorite band rehearse…

The sound check was fascinating in the way that seeing behind the scenes with people who are really good at what they do is always fascinating. They ran through a few songs that turned up in the set list that night– “Adderall,” “Stevie Nix,” “Charlemagne in Sweatpants”– and went over “Don’t Let Me Explode” about three times to sort out some issue that was completely inaudible to me. There was a bit of back-and-forth after the first pass between Franz Nicolay and Steve Selvidge (who only joined the band after Franz left) about what key they were in, but whatever it was that they were hearing wasn’t super obvious. And whatever it was must’ve gotten fixed, because they played it during the show later that night. This was, obviously, a very late stage in the rehearsal process, so they were mostly fine-tuning stuff, and the atmosphere was pretty loose and fun, though much more low-key than the real show.

The sound check was also the first definitive proof I’ve seen that Craig Finn’s guitar is actually connected to anything when he’s on stage– I’ve seen them twice before, and one of those times he never even pretended to play, but even when he had a guitar, I don’t think I heard anything that definitely came from it. It does work, though, because in the bit of “Charlemagne in Sweatpants” where Selvidge and original guitarist Tad Kubler trade off solos for a bit, Finn played a solo, too (and got teased by Kubler about it…). They also paid off another crowdfunding bonus, for a guy from Montana who had bought a “sound check jam,” and came on stage to play “Magazines” using Finn’s guitar (I have video of this on my phone, but haven’t watched it).

They also took a couple of requests– “Spinners,” and… I forget if “Multitude of Casualties” was the request, or if “Stevie Nix” was– and answered some questions from the crowd. After the sound check, there was a happy hour while the opener (The So So Glos) set up their gear and did a little soundchecking of their own. At least some of the band members hung around for the happy hour (Franz Nicolay had his family there, so he was just playing with a small child)– I spent a few minutes talking bowling and booze with bassist Galen Polivka, and Craig Finn worked the room, talking with just about everyone, signing, and taking photos. As you can see above.

(I wish I could say I had a deep and meaningful conversation with him, but really, it was just inconsequential small talk. I asked what the “North” on his hat meant, and he explained that some people he knows in Minneapolis were trying to “re-brand” the “upper midwest” as “the North,” on the grounds that Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan don’t really have all the much in common with, say, Missouri. The other guys I was talking with before Finn stopped by asked a couple of questions about doing a run of shows, and then we took pictures (my phone was embarrassingly Difficult about this) and he moved on.)

I was actually starting to be drunk by the end of the happy hour– they had good local microbrews on tap at the venue, and some of them were pretty potent– and there were about three hours to kill before the opening act was scheduled to start, so I walked off to a Moroccan place that had been recommended by the guys I was talking to at happy hour, who lived in the area, and got some very good food and cleared my head.

The So So Glos were one of the opening acts on the last Hold Steady tour, so they obviously know each other (and the lead singer would come out at the end of the encore to cover “American Music” with the Hold Steady). They’ve gotten a bit of radio play with “ADD Life” (which I actually find slightly annoying), and turned in a good, high-energy opening set. As is often the case, I was struck by how the guy who played the tricky guitar parts stayed pretty still, while the rhythm guitarist jumped around a whole lot…

And then, the main event… They’re one of only two acts I’ve seen three times (the other is Bob Dylan), and every show I’ve been to has been excellent. This was a bit different than past shows, in that they don’t have a new record to promote, but are celebrating an old one. And, of course, the big selling point of these shows is that they’re back with Franz Nicolay, so the set list was very heavy on stuff from a few albums ago– I don’t think they played anything from either Heaven is Whenever or Teeth Dreams (other than “Spinners” in the sound check)– and stuff with prominent keyboard parts. This means that some of my favorites didn’t make the set list– “Cattle and the Creeping Things,” “You Gotta Dance,” “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night,” “Most People Are DJ’s”– but, you know, if they were going to play all my favorite songs, the show would run about six hours.

They did a good mix of stuff, with several songs I haven’t heard live before– the set-opening “Positive Jam” (first track off their first album), “Don’t Let Me Explode,” and “Killer Parties” (which is a semi-traditional closing number, though in this case they went into “American Music” after it). It was neat to see the difference in energy level between the sound check run-throughs and the final performances– a great advertisement for live performances with a friendly crowd– and they remain a really tight band. Selvidge and Kubler are great guitarists but not exactly showy– Kubler sometimes turns his back to the crowd when playing really involved solos– but Finn remains a tremendously energetic front man, and it’s amazing how much dancing Nicolay manages despite being required to stay behind his keyboard.

And, of course, it’s 2016, so there’s already a video clip from Friday’s show online:

On the drive down and back, I had my whole Hold Steady collection on shuffle play (including a couple of live shows that haven’t been officially released), and as always, I was struck by how unlikely some of their success seems. I mean, these are really complicated songs with key changes and time-signature changes left and right, and really dense lyrics full of literary and religious references. Even the sing-along parts seem too complicated to work– “Chips Ahoy!” has a shout-along bit that goes eight syllables (“Whoa-oh-oh, oh-oh oh-oh-oh!”).

And yet, through some combination of formidable musical talent and sheer charisma, it all works brilliantly, especially live. Yeah, fine, they’re not selling out stadiums, but they can pack a venue with fans who turn out to spend a couple hours shouting along with all those dense lyrics and complicated musical transitions. As Craig Finn regularly notes from the stage, there is “So! Much! Joy!” in what they do, and it was totally worth the drive down to Brooklyn and back to be a part of it.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: November

I’m not posting as much as I did last year, when I was on sabbatical (gasp, shock, surprise), so making Forbes-blog links dump posts a monthly thing is probably just about sustainable.

— What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends: Some thoughts about, well, the math you need to learn to be a physicist. Which may not be all that much, depending on your choice of subfield. Prompted a nice response from Peter Woit, too.

— Physics And The Science Of Finding Missing Pieces: One of several recent-ish posts prompted by my last term teaching from Matter and Interactions.

— How To Make A White Dwarf With Lasers And Cold Atoms: An explanation of ultracold plasma physics, prompted by a visit and a very nice colloquium talk by Tom Killian from Rice.

— Here’s The Physics That Got Left Out Of ‘Arrival’: As noted previously, the movie adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” is very god but would’ve been better if they’d kept more of the physics from the original story. This is an explanation of that physics.

– Three Candidates For The ‘Hamilton’ Of Physics: Because I needed something frivolous and morale-boosting, some suggestions for splashy Broadway biographies of some notable physicists.

So, that’s the month of November for you. The math and Arrival posts did really well, traffic-wise, but I’m probably happiest with the cold plasma one. But, you know, such is science blogging.

On Feelings and Votes

This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there’s a recurring theme in my recent social media that’s really bugging me, and I need to vent. I’m going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I’m going to unfollow basically everybody that isn’t a weird Twitter bot or a band that I like, and try to avoid politics until the end of the year. Also, I’ll do some physics stuff.

This morning saw the umpteenth reshared tweetstorm (no link because it doesn’t matter who it was) berating people who write about how liberals ought to reach out to working-class whites– as I did a little while back— for caring too much about the “feelings” of white people. While there are undoubtedly some disingenuous op-eds being written for which that’s true, I think it misses an extremely important point about this whole thing. That is, it’s true that these pieces are concerned about the feelings of white people, but only as a means to an end. What really matters isn’t their feelings, but their votes.

And all the stuff being thrown out there as progressives work through the Kübler-Ross model need those votes. You think it’s ridiculous that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.5 million votes but still lost, so you want to get rid of the Electoral College? Great. To do that, you need to amend the Constitution, which requires control of Congress and/or a whole bunch of state legislatures, most of which are in Republican hands, because they get the votes of those working-class whites. You want to ditch the Electoral College, you need to change those votes.

Think those working-class whites have too much power because of gerrymandered districts that over-weight rural areas? You’re probably right, but if you want to fix it, you need to control the legislatures that make the districts, and those are mostly in Republican hands because they get the votes of those people in rural districts. You want to stop gerrymandering and protect voting rights, you need to change those votes.

There are a whole host of things wrong with our current system. Fixing any of them requires winning elections, particularly those off-year legislative elections where Democrats underperform even when they’re winning statewide and national elections. Winning some of those is going to require getting the people who vote in those elections to change their votes, and hopefully their minds.

And that is why pundits and those who play pundit in a half-assed way on their blogs are saying you should care about the feelings of those working-class whites: because they vote, and you need their votes. And you’re not going to get those votes by berating them and insulting them and disparaging their feelings. You get their votes by understanding where they’re coming from, offering them something they want, and treating them with respect.

And again, this does not mean you need to cater to their basest impulses. Fundamental principles of tolerance and equality are not negotiable, and can not be compromised. But you don’t have to pander to racism to move some votes– most of the policies in the Democratic platform are already clearly better for those people than the Republican alternatives. It’s just a matter of pitching them in a way that makes that clear.

As an attempt at a concrete example, look at issues of affirmative action and immigration. If you’re dealing with someone who’s concerned about immigrants or people of color “taking our jobs,” you’re not likely to bring them to your side by lecturing them about how they’re not really entitled to that job, they’re just the beneficiary of hundreds of years of racist policy, and so on. You might be right about the history, but that’s not terribly persuasive to somebody who’s worried about having a stable income and health insurance to support their family. But you don’t need to go full “build a wall,” either– something like “The real problem is that there ought to be enough good jobs for both you and them, and here’s what we’re going to do to make that happen” could work. (It has the disadvantage of needing a plan to create jobs for all, admittedly, but as the recent election shows, such a plan doesn’t even need to be all that plausible.) That steps around the implicit racism of the original concern in a way that preserves their feelings, gets their vote for better policy, and doesn’t compromise any fundamental principles.

(Yes, this is basically the Bernie Sanders strategy. I would’ve been all for Bernie’s economic program; I don’t think he would’ve been a viable candidate in the general election, though.)

Another common and maddening refrain the past few weeks has been “Why do we have to care about their feelings, when they’re hateful toward us?” The answer is, bluntly, that they don’t need your votes. They’re living in gerrymandered districts that give them too much power, and they’re winning the elections that matter. If you want to change the broken system in fundamental ways, you need to convince them to vote for policies that involve giving up some of that power. They can keep things just the way they are, or make them much, much worse, without any assistance from you.

And, yes, it’s unquestionably true that a distressingly large number of those voters are openly racist and probably not persuadable. But the hard-core racist fraction is not 100%, and you wouldn’t need a huge effect to make things better. As I said before, even if 39 out of 40 Trump voters in PA, MI, and WI was a full-on alt-right Twitter frog, flipping the vote of that one decent human being would’ve avoided our current situation. I think that would’ve been worth a little bit of effort to respect their feelings, at least long enough to win their votes.

Yes, that’s messy, and compromised, and leaves some big issues unaddressed. Welcome to politics. It’s not about feelings, on either side, it’s about getting enough votes to win elections.

Rant over, catharsis achieved. Shutting up about politics, now.

Songs vs. Performance Pieces

At dinner the other night, Kate mentioned this podcast, which excerpts a bit of a Jon Brion interview from 2006 where he makes a distinction between “songs” and “performance pieces.” As an example of the latter, he uses Led Zeppelin, saying that their recordings, as great as they are, are about those specific people in that specific time, and nobody is all that excited to hear reworked Led Zep covers.

It’s an interesting claim, but I don’t really agree (influenced in part by the fact that I don’t especially care for the examples he uses as “songs”). I had a hard time coming up with a counterexample, though, until it occurred to me this morning. I offer the following two YouTube videos, which are very different versions of the same song, both of which were hits at the time of their release:

Now, you can question whether it was really necessary to do an unplugged blues-y acoustic version of “Layla,” but Clapton did it, and it was surprisingly successful. But prior to that release, I most likely would’ve been inclined to regard the original as a “performance piece” in Brion’s sense– it’s a brilliant tune whose brilliance is all wrapped up in the specific circumstances of its creation. The whole Clapton/Duane Allman supergroup thing, plus the backstory about George Harrison and Patti Boyd. If you’d asked me in 1992, I would’ve said that an attempt to re-work and cover that would be pointless, and probably fail.

I suppose you could argue that there might be an exception coming into play given that the guy who did the cover was the same guy who wrote the original song, but I don’t think that really works, either.

I think what’s really going on is that doing interesting cover versions is really hard, and not that many people are genuinely good at it. Greg Dulli has a knack for it, and Ryan Adams. Maybe Ben Folds? Anyway, the list of bands I’d go to see thinking “Boy, I hope they cover a song by somebody else” is not long.

I would agree that there are some styles of song that lend themselves to reinterpretation more readily than others, and that songs whose appeal relies on the musical virtuosity of the original artists– like “Layla” or most Led Zeppelin– are harder to imagine covering in an interesting way. But I think that’s largely because it’s hard to do an interesting cover of any song, and that difficulty is just more obvious when you’re covering somebody who’s incredibly good at performing the way they do. Even when you look at songwriters whose work generates a lot of cover version– Bob Dylan, say, or the late Leonard Cohen– most of those covers aren’t really all that interesting. Most people who play Dylan songs do it pretty straight, adjusting a bit for their particular band’s instrumentation and so on. Only a handful of people take those songs and re-cast them in a way that makes them seem like something completely and radically new– Jimi Hendrix doing “All Along the Watchtower” being the screamingly obvious example.

(It doesn’t need to be that radical, of course. The shift from the Clash doing “Lost in the Supermarket” to the Afghan Whigs version isn’t all that drastic in terms of instrumentation or even tempo, but it feels like a whole new song in a way that’s really interesting.)

There’s probably a connection to literary parody/pastiche, here, which is another thing only a tiny handful of people are genuinely really good at. But I really ought to stop fiddling around on the Internet and go give the final exam for my class…