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July 1st, 2011 -
In our travels as The Ron Jonsons, we have played in many places. North and
south Georgia, a few spots in South Carolina, and Tokyo...in that one weird dream
I had (the one where Spence is a carrot and Josh can cry hot sauce). In our
travels, I have noticed something about the audience. It was a theory I had that I
couldn't ever prove, until I heard a Hugh Laurie interview. He was talking about his
new album to be released in the fall called “Let Them Talk” (dear Mr. Laurie, you
may take this as an official plug/endorsement. Check payable to The Ron
Jonsons). I, for one, an extremely excited about the album, and if you're looking
for some sweet old fashion blues music, buy it! But it was a line that Hugh Laurie
said that proved my theory. Or rather, proved it and upped the scale of my theory.
Let's say there are 2 concert halls. The first concert hall caters to a large number
of people. It stands to reason that since they serve more people, they would be
more concerned with selling as many tickets as possible. The 2nd concert hall
services a smaller number of people, so for them to make money, they need to
depend on repeat customers. They only seat 4000 in a town of 5500, so they need
as many repeat customers as possible. Going by this model, the first concert hall
would want to book bands that attract as many people as possible. Their question
would be “how many people can you bring?”. Hall 2 would be more concerned
with how many fans they could get to come back- “how many loyal fans do you
have?”. My theory is this: all other things being equal, people listen to a live
performance and are either interested in the skills of the band, or grouping the
band into a category/genre. Audience members either think the band is good
based on if they are skilled at their instruments or good compared to another
band they like.
This situation above has actually played out. 2 cities that are near and dear to The
Ron Jonsons are proof of this. But it took Hugh Laurie's interview to both prove
and expand on it. He mentioned in his interview that playing music in America is
very different than in jolly ol' England. He said Americans in general know within
10 seconds if you are a good musician or not. Americans are interested in how
good your chops are. But British people will take half the concert to decide if they
like you because they are trying to figure out what music you are, what's your
style, who do you sound like, what are your influences. The Brits pick you apart to
see if you are good enough for them to like based on your history and
background. Americans just go “These guys are good. Who are they? Thesaurus
Slam? I'm totally gonna buy their album!” I can say I totally agree with Laurie in
that the fans who are concerned with chops first are way more fun to play for.
Once they approve of your skills, the crowd is yours. But then again, fans who
pick us apart and still come to the conclusion that we rock are a greater personal
victory to the band cause we feel like we've passed a test. So that begs the
question. Are you a fan that is concerned with talent and ability, or are you a fan
concerned with pedigree and history? Do you listen to where a band leads new
music or where that can take old music to a new place? Do you listen for the past
or for the future?
- Michael Butts, The Ron Jonsons
In our travels as The Ron Jonsons, we have played in many places. North and
south Georgia, a few spots in South Carolina, and Tokyo...in that one weird dream
I had (the one where Spence is a carrot and Josh can cry hot sauce). In our
travels, I have noticed something about the audience. It was a theory I had that I
couldn't ever prove, until I heard a Hugh Laurie interview. He was talking about his
new album to be released in the fall called “Let Them Talk” (dear Mr. Laurie, you
may take this as an official plug/endorsement. Check payable to The Ron
Jonsons). I, for one, an extremely excited about the album, and if you're looking
for some sweet old fashion blues music, buy it! But it was a line that Hugh Laurie
said that proved my theory. Or rather, proved it and upped the scale of my theory.
Let's say there are 2 concert halls. The first concert hall caters to a large number
of people. It stands to reason that since they serve more people, they would be
more concerned with selling as many tickets as possible. The 2nd concert hall
services a smaller number of people, so for them to make money, they need to
depend on repeat customers. They only seat 4000 in a town of 5500, so they need
as many repeat customers as possible. Going by this model, the first concert hall
would want to book bands that attract as many people as possible. Their question
would be “how many people can you bring?”. Hall 2 would be more concerned
with how many fans they could get to come back- “how many loyal fans do you
have?”. My theory is this: all other things being equal, people listen to a live
performance and are either interested in the skills of the band, or grouping the
band into a category/genre. Audience members either think the band is good
based on if they are skilled at their instruments or good compared to another
band they like.
This situation above has actually played out. 2 cities that are near and dear to The
Ron Jonsons are proof of this. But it took Hugh Laurie's interview to both prove
and expand on it. He mentioned in his interview that playing music in America is
very different than in jolly ol' England. He said Americans in general know within
10 seconds if you are a good musician or not. Americans are interested in how
good your chops are. But British people will take half the concert to decide if they
like you because they are trying to figure out what music you are, what's your
style, who do you sound like, what are your influences. The Brits pick you apart to
see if you are good enough for them to like based on your history and
background. Americans just go “These guys are good. Who are they? Thesaurus
Slam? I'm totally gonna buy their album!” I can say I totally agree with Laurie in
that the fans who are concerned with chops first are way more fun to play for.
Once they approve of your skills, the crowd is yours. But then again, fans who
pick us apart and still come to the conclusion that we rock are a greater personal
victory to the band cause we feel like we've passed a test. So that begs the
question. Are you a fan that is concerned with talent and ability, or are you a fan
concerned with pedigree and history? Do you listen to where a band leads new
music or where that can take old music to a new place? Do you listen for the past
or for the future?
- Michael Butts, The Ron Jonsons
| That's right, he's also an MD in the field of sweet, old-fashioned British blues music. |
April 4th, 2011 -
Week after week, I type about the awesomeness of music. But I'm not gonna talk
about how music makes us feel all warm and squishy this week (no Thesaurus
Slam reference this week, sorry). No no, this week, I'm bringing you 4 crazy music
facts/stories that will kick you in the teeth.
1. Scientists have had a hunch for a long time that music does strange things to
people. But it's only recently that they have started to study it. They have found
that music completely gets in our heads and goes nuts. I'm not talking about
those stupid 'play your baby Mozart and he'll be smarter'. I'm talking about stuff
like nearly curing stroke victims. It's true- people who had brain damage to their
vocal and speech centers after a stroke (read: can't talk) found that they could
relearn to talk by singing. People who can't control their body movements due to
Parkinson's can walk relatively well when they listen to a song or metronome.
Scientist have also just learned that music (specifically drums and tempo)
stimulates both the frontal lobe (part of the brain found only in humans that deals
with higher thinking and problem solving) AND the cerebellum (the primeval
fight/flight section that appears in all vertebrates). The best part: science can't
fully explain any of it. Their best guess is that because music activates so many
parts of our brain at once (and is not located in one single area) that music can
connect parts of our brain that don't normally connect. Again, that's just a
scientific way of saying “look, we don't know how it works, it just works ok!”
2. Sticking with the science theme, have you ever seen cartoon characters sing
and cause all the glass in the room to shatter? Well that's actually real. You see,
EVERYTHING has its own natural frequency that it wants to vibrate at. Glass,
wood, metal, people, everything. The reason nothing explodes when we play
Justin Bieber (well....ALMOST nothing) is that to get something to shatter from its
frequency, you have to match the frequency exactly AND play that frequency
reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally loudly. Also most frequencies are well outside of the range
people can hear or replicate. Astronomers reversed this idea and have been able
to “hear” the cosmos. They aren't hearing actual sounds (no air in space), but
they can detect the vibrations or pulses cosmic objects emit and modulate them
into the normal hearing range of people. For instance: a black hole produces a B-
flat (Bb) 57 octaves below the lowest note humans can hear (Josh is now looking
for a black hole string for his bass).
3. Can you remember a time before you heard your favorite band? Some of us
can, but take it a step further, what about before you heard 'Mary Had a Little
Lamb'? Certain songs have just always been around for us. It's hard for some of
use to fully grasp what music was like before records and iPods. But it's not hard
for others. There is a tribe in Africa called the Mafa. They live on a mountain chain
in north Cameron and they have never heard of anything we associate with music.
They rarely go to market, they don't go to church, they don't have radio. They don't
know what a piano is...they don't even have a word for “music” in their language.
They had never heard of any western music until they were visited recently (I like
to hope that the first western music they heard was Iron Maiden). However, they
do make music; everyone in their village can sing. They play a type of flute that is
made of solid iron and can only produce 1 note. Ever blown across the top of a
Coke bottle and heard a note? Now imagine that bottle weighs 9lbs and you have
to blow with “explosive force” to get a note. Now imagine doing that for hours at a
time almost every day.
4. While music and musical notation go back thousands of years, we have very
little knowledge of what ancient music sounded like. How did Homer sing The
Iliad? What songs did David play to King Saul? Very very little music has survived
history. But recently, some extremely ancient music was discovered where no
one ever thought to look (and I'm not only talking about location). Kerala is an area
in the far south of India. Every year, the Brahmin priest performs a ceremony of
fire to cleanse their village. They chant mantra near-constantly and are not
allowed to leave their hut for 12 days, at which point they will walk around the
village and burn the hut to the ground as an offering to the fire goddess. Hard
core- but someone noticed something odd about the ceremony. The mantras that
the Brahmins were chanting didn't make any sense. They recorded the chants
and found something amazing. The chants had definite patterns and rules and
order to them, but they matched no known language. They didn't even come close
to any known language or music. The closest thing anyone could find to the
chants was bird songs. Through their oral history, the Kerala brahmins had
preserved songs and prayers from thousands of years ago, possibly when people
were still in the stone age and language was still being invented. Very hardcore.
- Michael Butts, The Ron Jonsons
(Ed. And here’s one I found: http://blogs.discovermagazine.
com/80beats/2009/09/02/monkeys-like-happy-monkey-music-and-metallica/ )
Week after week, I type about the awesomeness of music. But I'm not gonna talk
about how music makes us feel all warm and squishy this week (no Thesaurus
Slam reference this week, sorry). No no, this week, I'm bringing you 4 crazy music
facts/stories that will kick you in the teeth.
1. Scientists have had a hunch for a long time that music does strange things to
people. But it's only recently that they have started to study it. They have found
that music completely gets in our heads and goes nuts. I'm not talking about
those stupid 'play your baby Mozart and he'll be smarter'. I'm talking about stuff
like nearly curing stroke victims. It's true- people who had brain damage to their
vocal and speech centers after a stroke (read: can't talk) found that they could
relearn to talk by singing. People who can't control their body movements due to
Parkinson's can walk relatively well when they listen to a song or metronome.
Scientist have also just learned that music (specifically drums and tempo)
stimulates both the frontal lobe (part of the brain found only in humans that deals
with higher thinking and problem solving) AND the cerebellum (the primeval
fight/flight section that appears in all vertebrates). The best part: science can't
fully explain any of it. Their best guess is that because music activates so many
parts of our brain at once (and is not located in one single area) that music can
connect parts of our brain that don't normally connect. Again, that's just a
scientific way of saying “look, we don't know how it works, it just works ok!”
2. Sticking with the science theme, have you ever seen cartoon characters sing
and cause all the glass in the room to shatter? Well that's actually real. You see,
EVERYTHING has its own natural frequency that it wants to vibrate at. Glass,
wood, metal, people, everything. The reason nothing explodes when we play
Justin Bieber (well....ALMOST nothing) is that to get something to shatter from its
frequency, you have to match the frequency exactly AND play that frequency
reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally loudly. Also most frequencies are well outside of the range
people can hear or replicate. Astronomers reversed this idea and have been able
to “hear” the cosmos. They aren't hearing actual sounds (no air in space), but
they can detect the vibrations or pulses cosmic objects emit and modulate them
into the normal hearing range of people. For instance: a black hole produces a B-
flat (Bb) 57 octaves below the lowest note humans can hear (Josh is now looking
for a black hole string for his bass).
3. Can you remember a time before you heard your favorite band? Some of us
can, but take it a step further, what about before you heard 'Mary Had a Little
Lamb'? Certain songs have just always been around for us. It's hard for some of
use to fully grasp what music was like before records and iPods. But it's not hard
for others. There is a tribe in Africa called the Mafa. They live on a mountain chain
in north Cameron and they have never heard of anything we associate with music.
They rarely go to market, they don't go to church, they don't have radio. They don't
know what a piano is...they don't even have a word for “music” in their language.
They had never heard of any western music until they were visited recently (I like
to hope that the first western music they heard was Iron Maiden). However, they
do make music; everyone in their village can sing. They play a type of flute that is
made of solid iron and can only produce 1 note. Ever blown across the top of a
Coke bottle and heard a note? Now imagine that bottle weighs 9lbs and you have
to blow with “explosive force” to get a note. Now imagine doing that for hours at a
time almost every day.
4. While music and musical notation go back thousands of years, we have very
little knowledge of what ancient music sounded like. How did Homer sing The
Iliad? What songs did David play to King Saul? Very very little music has survived
history. But recently, some extremely ancient music was discovered where no
one ever thought to look (and I'm not only talking about location). Kerala is an area
in the far south of India. Every year, the Brahmin priest performs a ceremony of
fire to cleanse their village. They chant mantra near-constantly and are not
allowed to leave their hut for 12 days, at which point they will walk around the
village and burn the hut to the ground as an offering to the fire goddess. Hard
core- but someone noticed something odd about the ceremony. The mantras that
the Brahmins were chanting didn't make any sense. They recorded the chants
and found something amazing. The chants had definite patterns and rules and
order to them, but they matched no known language. They didn't even come close
to any known language or music. The closest thing anyone could find to the
chants was bird songs. Through their oral history, the Kerala brahmins had
preserved songs and prayers from thousands of years ago, possibly when people
were still in the stone age and language was still being invented. Very hardcore.
- Michael Butts, The Ron Jonsons
(Ed. And here’s one I found: http://blogs.discovermagazine.
com/80beats/2009/09/02/monkeys-like-happy-monkey-music-and-metallica/ )
| Yup, that's a musical |
July 19th, 2011 -
For this blog, I'm going to need everyone to break out their official Ron Jonsons
Haz-Mat suit because this time we're talking about...hipsters. Ah, hipsters, those
aloof, sarcastic misfits. If you have no idea what a “hipster” is, try to think of
someone you know who is a story topper- the kind of person who says “well that
story ain't nothing, listen to this story”. Now imagine instead of them trying to top
you with a story, they try to top you with quotes from obscure movies, indie music,
and irony. That's a hipster. Time magazine once said hipsters are “the friends
who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts
silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in
America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats
and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is
exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care." Hipsters
walk up to you and throw out a band name or movie and when you say you've
never heard of it (because you're normal) they look down on you because they do.
“You've never heard of Thesaurus Slam? They're pretty obscure, I saw them at a
festival one time. They sound like Minus The Bear or Mr. Frogg. Never heard of
them either? Man, you need to listen to more stuff”. It's aggravating, I know. Also, I
wish I could say I made up those last 2 bands- I did not.
Before you take a power drill to my temple for doing research on indie-hipster
bands, I want to jump to my new scientific law- The Law of Hipster Bands. I'm still
working on the title. Anyway, if you couldn't tell from the description above,
hipsters love obscurity. If obscurity is cake, hipsters would be the fat kids. They
love it cause they know the odds are extremely good that you don't know about it
and thus, they can seem smug and superior for knowing something you don't. The
more obscure, the better! After some thought experiments I came to this
conclusion: If a band has 10,000 fans, hipsters might like it. If it has 1000 fans,
hipsters will love it. At 500 fans they love it even more. At 100 fans they think the
band is amazing and can't get any better...unless it only had 50 fans. If we keep
following this out, then we come to a point where the greatest hipster band ever
would have 0 fans. However, if a band has 0 fans, they might as well not exist.
Therefore, The Law of Hipster Bands states that the perfect, greatest hipster
band cannot, nor will ever, exist. Should an amazing indie band emerge, they
would quickly form a following of hipsters jumping on the bandwagon of
obscurity, but the act of so many people knowing and liking the obscure band
would instantly negate its obscurity, causing the hipsters to abandon the band in
favor of a less known one. If you're reading this hipsters (who am I kidding “if”), I
hate to break it to you, but the perfect hipster band can scientifically not exist. So
please stop shopping at Goodwills and leave us alone.
SIDENOTE: Hipster popularity always flows from most well-known to least well-
known. This is just like how heat flows in the real world- always from a hot area to
a cold area. This means that hipster tastes obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics
(know as the Law of Entropy).
Further reading: http://www.cracked.com/funny-4573-hipster/
For this blog, I'm going to need everyone to break out their official Ron Jonsons
Haz-Mat suit because this time we're talking about...hipsters. Ah, hipsters, those
aloof, sarcastic misfits. If you have no idea what a “hipster” is, try to think of
someone you know who is a story topper- the kind of person who says “well that
story ain't nothing, listen to this story”. Now imagine instead of them trying to top
you with a story, they try to top you with quotes from obscure movies, indie music,
and irony. That's a hipster. Time magazine once said hipsters are “the friends
who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear t-shirts
silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in
America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats
and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is
exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care." Hipsters
walk up to you and throw out a band name or movie and when you say you've
never heard of it (because you're normal) they look down on you because they do.
“You've never heard of Thesaurus Slam? They're pretty obscure, I saw them at a
festival one time. They sound like Minus The Bear or Mr. Frogg. Never heard of
them either? Man, you need to listen to more stuff”. It's aggravating, I know. Also, I
wish I could say I made up those last 2 bands- I did not.
Before you take a power drill to my temple for doing research on indie-hipster
bands, I want to jump to my new scientific law- The Law of Hipster Bands. I'm still
working on the title. Anyway, if you couldn't tell from the description above,
hipsters love obscurity. If obscurity is cake, hipsters would be the fat kids. They
love it cause they know the odds are extremely good that you don't know about it
and thus, they can seem smug and superior for knowing something you don't. The
more obscure, the better! After some thought experiments I came to this
conclusion: If a band has 10,000 fans, hipsters might like it. If it has 1000 fans,
hipsters will love it. At 500 fans they love it even more. At 100 fans they think the
band is amazing and can't get any better...unless it only had 50 fans. If we keep
following this out, then we come to a point where the greatest hipster band ever
would have 0 fans. However, if a band has 0 fans, they might as well not exist.
Therefore, The Law of Hipster Bands states that the perfect, greatest hipster
band cannot, nor will ever, exist. Should an amazing indie band emerge, they
would quickly form a following of hipsters jumping on the bandwagon of
obscurity, but the act of so many people knowing and liking the obscure band
would instantly negate its obscurity, causing the hipsters to abandon the band in
favor of a less known one. If you're reading this hipsters (who am I kidding “if”), I
hate to break it to you, but the perfect hipster band can scientifically not exist. So
please stop shopping at Goodwills and leave us alone.
SIDENOTE: Hipster popularity always flows from most well-known to least well-
known. This is just like how heat flows in the real world- always from a hot area to
a cold area. This means that hipster tastes obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics
(know as the Law of Entropy).
Further reading: http://www.cracked.com/funny-4573-hipster/
| Here's science's best guess at what happens when you become the perfect, greatest hipster band. |
