The point of sweating what's done

Until now, most of what I've blogged started out as emails.  I had to pour out my thoughts to somebody.  They were all in my head, and they needed an outlet.  I wrote those emails to someone who cares about me, but who cares nothing about Scott or the music.  That wasn't enough.

I looked at my writing, and I thought it was pretty good.  I had created something, and it was something that I needed to share.  I felt a need to show it to a larger audience, to people who might understand what I was saying.  I have written before, but I'm not sure I've ever truly experienced this creative need before, the need for an audience.

After rewriting, and editing, and more editing, I posted each installment.  Then I mentioned them on Facebook, and looked at my pageview statistics in Blogger, and checked Facebook again to see how many likes and comments I got.

I used to want people to like me.  Now I want people to "like" me.

Being slightly dense, it actually took me until today to realize that what I felt, when I tried to drum up an audience that would appreciate my writing, was a miniature version of the same need that is felt by artists everywhere, and by Scott Miller in particular.  It's the impulse that he wrote about, again and again.  It's the impulse that gave a name and a theme to this blog.

As Scott expressed it, when he was asked directly (Ask Scott, 9/11/2000) about the desire for fame:

Fame is probably the strongest de facto experience of the sacred that most people will ever get. What constitutes the sacred is a hairy topic, but if you've had close contact with a very famous person, and were left groping for a way to express how he or she was simply more radiant than an ordinary person, that is the sacred. Not a developed experience of the sacred, but the real thing.

The same general mechanism compels people to want to accrue fame. I'm a sufferer of this disease, and I know [the] need to separate the work from the acclaim. There are times and places when working ambitiously toward fame works cleanly, but it's usually it's a pretty polluting burn. Having to fascinate people is usually a bad business for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if you're in the process of soliciting fame, you're by definition unqualified to relate to anyone as an artist. An artist's job is to relate the truth of experience, and if in fact what you're doing is selecting for which simulated experiential truth will fly, you will acquire the habit of replacing truth with schlock when schlock flies. It's not an absolute rule, but it is a real and insidious tendency.

Wanting to be "liked".  It really does makes me feel cheapened, even polluted.  Scott was right about that.  There we were, biting nails like debutantes and waiting for a call...

And here I am, sweating what's done, obsessing over whether my carefully selected words found their targets.  Maybe they reached you through the air.  Did I sparkle and charm, just like Paris in the spring?  How many tickets to me did I sell?

Of course, wanting fame, even wanting it desperately, is one thing.  An artist's temptation to compromise his creative integrity for fame is a very different and far more corrosive thing.  The "pernicious effects of fame-whoring," to which I don't believe Scott succumbed, will be the subject of a future post (credit to Kate Evans for that description, and for locating Scott's quote above).

I think too much — I always do

It is clear that Scott Miller's works resonated strongly with self-described nerds, including me.  Scott himself confessed to being a music nerd:  "I think I am a nerd.  I definitely sound like a nerd when I read my own writing." (Ask Scott, 10/1/2007).

Personally, I take "nerd" as an intellectual compliment.  I am quite sure that I wouldn't call Scott a nerd in the stereotypical and unflattering sense of the word.  As a performer, he dazzled on stage, and was a legitimate rock star, if only to a limited audience.  As a person, every account from those who met or corresponded with him is consistent:  he was intellectually dazzling, but also generous, earnest, approachable, and self-deprecating.  He was sociable in a way that many nerds aren't.

Perhaps the nerdiest of nerds are those with Asperger's Syndrome.  I will begin by saying, as unequivocally as I can (with no medical education), that I don't think Scott Miller had Asperger's Syndrome.

I have a family member with Asperger's.  In childhood and beyond, Asperger's often manifests in serious difficulties in comprehending social interaction.  They may be brilliant, verbal, and multi-talented, but they lack the social intuition that comes naturally to others.  They may need to be taught to do things like looking at a person they're talking to, instead of looking downward.  They may need to learn that there's a purpose for this, enabling them to systematically evaluate the facial expressions of others, and match them against a mental catalog of what a particular facial position might mean.  They might need to be taught appropriate responses to make, if the other person's face shows signals of boredom or distress.  There are web sites (such as the aptly named wrongplanet.net) where alienated "Aspies" commiserate about their feelings of "pretending" to be human.

As for me, I am a nerd, not an Aspie.  I've had this checked and confirmed by qualified medical practitioners, and my diagnosis is "nerd."  :)

Nevertheless, I perceive a clear difference between the way I communicate and the way others do.  I don't hold myself back from saying certain things that pop into my head, even when I know that nobody wants to hear them.  Specifically, I am drawn to analogies, drawn to puns, drawn to making a connection between one thing and another seemingly unrelated thing.  That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation.

I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get, and yet I find them so compelling that I speak them, in hopes that someone will feel the same resonance that I feel.

In this song, from the Loud Family album Interbabe Concern, Scott held a mirror up to that compulsion to say things others won't understand.  But far more painfully, he perfectly captured my self-image at the lowest points of my college years, in my nerdiest and most socially inept moments:

Maybe I say the dull things I say
Maybe they reach her through the air
Maybe I'm thinking of it as a task
Maybe it really is a task, and I'm not up to the task
Maybe the answer is don't ask

Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell
Don't respond, she can tell ...

Maybe I see the things I look at (maybe I should know)
Maybe I look right past what's wrong (maybe I don't know)
Maybe she thinks in terms of sets of boys
Maybe she knows the set of boys, and I'm not in the set of boys
Maybe the signal is the noise

I became attached to the song, and to my own interpretation of the lyrics, years before I came across the official music video:



The video (directed by Sondra Russell) is interesting and amusing, and it doesn't contradict my interpretation at all, but the video moves the focus elsewhere, and makes it harder to find one's own meaning among the possibilities that are offered by the lyrics.  My interpretation turns on this:

For an electrical engineer/computer science major, like Scott, the last line is weighty.

The signal/noise metaphor can be understood by most people on a surface level, but it is even more compelling to those who share his engineering background, and appreciate the signal/noise metaphor at a deeper level.  I know that Scott took courses, just as I did, concerning the problem of distinguishing an information-bearing electrical signal from background noise.

So there he is, the narrator of the song (not necessarily Scott himself) — a man trying to understand signals from a woman.  That's a totally commonplace situation.

Why can't he read her signals?  He's had math and engineering coursework in digital signal processing.  He knows algorithms that he can apply to the waveforms, he can visualize all the zigzags on the screen of the oscilloscope.  He knows how to filter out the noise — because that's what electrical engineers do.

In case of doubt, here's support from the official video: 

A wizardly Ernie Kovacs figure sweeps his hand, and an oscilloscope line emerges in its path.

For those who missed the signal, Scott gives us a closer look – sure enough, that's a signal on an oscilloscope.

And despite all of his expertise, it isn't working.  He knows there must be a signal, other people can read the signals, but he can't isolate the signal from the noise.

Maybe the signal is the noise.

Impossible.  An electrical engineer knows better, and cannot believe that to be true.  It's an oxymoron coming from his lips — the signal is not the noise.

But maybe.  Maybe it is a social truth.  There's another line in this song:  "Respect the weight of the sounds in the room."

The "noise" is background.  It is context.  It's "the sounds in the room."  It's all the stuff he should see, but doesn't see.  It's right in front of him.  Just like me, he somehow looks right past it, and it doesn't even register.

He knows he's smart, and that he should be able to figure this social stuff out.  He wants so desperately to have it all fall into place, to have that light-bulb moment of clarity when previously unrelated things connect.

He knows he's missing something important.  I can hear the pain in his voice.  He knows, he knows so much, but he just doesn't get it.

The narrator of the song may or may not have been a proxy for Scott's self-image... but that was me.  I recognized myself, the kid who used to overthink everything.  Unable to communicate normally.  Drawn to nerdy math/engineering analogies, and compelled to share them.  Hopelessly paralyzed by uncertainty, by too many maybes.

In my previous post, I wrote that there were three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head.  The first was the pure musical experience, different from any other, and tuned to cut through my defenses.

The second piece of the puzzle was Scott's seeming understanding of me — the mutual experiences reflected in some of his songs.  That cemented my personal bond with him.

The third might be the most addictive.  As I wrote above, "That moment of light-bulb inspiration, when unrelated things connect, gives me a rewarding rush of stimulation."  "I'm drawn to obscure references that others probably don't get..."  Scott's lyrics are full of those.

That language of mutually-understood obscure references, the frisson of shared secrets known only to an inner circle — engineers, literati, philosophers, music nerds, whatever — continues to hook me on these songs.  There's still a little dopamine rush, each time a hidden meaning clicks and my light bulb goes on.

And it's not only the obscure references embedded within the songs, but also the songs themselves, which became a secret that I shared with the too-small group of Scott Miller's devoted fans.  It's no accident that the phrase "cult following" is commonly used to describe fandom of this sort, with its cultish mysteries (i.e., trivia) known only to True Gamesters.

Musical complexity, mutual personal experiences, and obscure shared references.

That's why I listened to one CD in 2000, and within weeks, rushed to buy everything he'd recorded in the 80s and 90s.  The magnetic power of that combination yielded an effect that no other artist has ever had on me.

But I guess I'm weird that way.

Keys and vulnerabilities

I'm a pretty rational, unemotional guy.  But there has always been a chink in my armor.  Music.  Music affects me more strongly than most people, I think.

A sad occurrence in real life can make me cry, sometimes.  A particular event might bring me to tears once or twice.  Very little except my mother's death and the events of 9/11 were able to bring me to tears more times than that — but even then, the sadness faded, and the ability to make me cry weakened over time.

But there are two words, two notes of music that bring me to tears without fail, every time I even think about them.  They're not from Scott Miller.  They're the final words of the musical Into the Woods:  "I wish."  As I wrote this paragraph, it had the same effect on me, undiminished, and wholly predictable.  Stephen Sondheim precisely targeted my weakness and dropped a bomb into it, not unlike Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.

Sondheim did it with genius-level talent, but it doesn't take a Sondheim to slide through that gap in my armor.  Any stupid movie or TV show can make me cry, if the score is in a minor key and there's something on the screen that resonates with my life, my hopes, or my fears.  It happens again and again.  It always makes me feel foolish and easily manipulated.

As you already know if you've read this far, Scott Miller resonated with me.  I rank him with Sondheim; perhaps others might not.  No matter.

There are three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head.  The music, the pure sonic experience, was the first piece of the puzzle.  Scott Miller was equipped with a jailer's ring of minor keys; a circle of fifths, jangling with about a zillion chords.

It was all perfectly modulated to go cleanly through the hole in my armor.

Sleeping through heaven

In the first half of the 1980s, I was a college radio DJ.  I thought my musical tastes were pretty cool, far ahead of the crowd, and I took some pride in that.  But it didn't make my life okay.  My personal life, in those days, was often a perfect storm of solitude, introversion, youthful misery and angst.

Somehow, I remained entirely unaware of a band called Game Theory.  Even while taking a course in mathematics on the subject of game theory, in 1983, I was clueless that there was a record or two, probably on the station's shelves, right under my nose, that I would have loved.  I would have noticed that name if I had seen it.

By the time Real Nighttime was released (1985), I was no longer a DJ, but still was listening to my college station, still thinking myself a musical sophisticate.  In retrospect, that album is so much in line with my tastes at the time that it's inconceivable that I might have heard it and ignored it.

If someone had banged on my door and told me what I was sleeping through, my 20s would have been enriched beyond belief.  I can imagine my 23-year-old self wearing out the grooves of the song "24," and continuing to find more resonances in it over the years.

About a decade later, sometime in the mid-90s, there was a faint knock.  I happened to tune in one night, and heard a DJ doing an hour-long retrospective on the music of Scott Miller, and his bands Game Theory and Loud Family.  "Catchy," I thought, and I typed those names into a database of random personal notes.  I turned over and went back to sleep.

Time passed.  At a record store, I saw a used CD by the Loud Family, vaguely remembered that I had liked something of theirs, and bought it.  The cover featured a bright blue sky, and a hill of beans.  I set it aside for a few months.

One day, I popped it into my CD player.  What I heard was a droning, choppy harmony, an electronically processed wordless chant.  It seemed to go on forever.  I found it very irritating.  Was this ever going to end?  After what seemed like way too long, I lost patience and decided this music was unlistenable.  Back into a box it went.

Fast forward another few months.  Now I'm 36 years old, not 24.  Early evening, in my office on the 38th floor of a skyscraper, overlooking — well, actually overlooking very little, because my office windows faced another skyscraper that almost entirely blocked my view.  Bored, but unable to leave the office, I decided to give that CD another chance.  Through inertia, more than anything else, I left it on past the point where I had given up before.  And suddenly, the irritating drone paused, resumed, burst open, and spread wings into a beautiful song — which was all the more beautiful for having pushed me, with it, out of a cocoon.

I continued to listen, increasingly realizing what a complete idiot I had been to set it aside.  After the fourth track on the CD, I hit the stop button.  I had just heard something almost entirely unlike any song I'd ever heard before, and I needed time to wrap my brain around it, to assimilate the shape of it.  I played that song again, and a third time, before I was ready to move on to the next one.

My musical world had changed.  Within weeks, I had bought most of the albums that Game Theory and Loud Family had recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, and I discovered to my amazement that some of those were even better.

In the 13 years since that belated discovery, I still have never met another person face-to-face (outside of my old college radio circles) who had ever heard of Scott Miller, Game Theory, or Loud Family.  I haven't successfully won over any new fans, not even my wife.  Occasionally I would read that yet another music critic had mentioned Scott Miller's work, referring to "the best band nobody has heard of," or an "unrecognized work of genius," "godlike genius," "certifiable genius," "20+ years of pop song genius."  A thread becomes readily apparent, and it's all true.  This review was pretty representative of them all:

...another deliciously screwed-up slab of pop genius from America's most consistently underrated singer-songwriter, Scott Miller.  Miller has labored in relative obscurity ever since the early '80s, producing album after album of hook-laden and profoundly literate rock-and-roll in his bands, Game Theory, and now, The Loud Family.  Although he is a favorite among critics and has a small cadre of obsessive and adoring fans, Miller has consistently doomed himself to demi-stardom by producing songs somewhere just on the other side of what's considered "accessible."

And eventually it must have become too much to live with.  I suppose his death shouldn't have been a surprise to me, foreshadowed as it was in so many of his lyrics.  When a guy writes his own obituary in a 1987 song, and writes another song called "Slit My Wrists," and another called "Just Gone," and puts something of that kind in every one of his albums — perhaps a hint in almost every song — I suppose I should ultimately be grateful that he stayed in my world as long as he did... as long as he could.

And still, I listen, and I read through his lyrics; I look on his works and despair.  I am Heston on the beach, raging up at the torch.  I want to go bang on every door.

About this blog

The goal for this blog, as it develops, is to be a personal and academic exploration of the writings of Scott Miller (1960-2013), the inventive genius who led the bands Game Theory and The Loud Family.  Miller wrote intellectually complex lyrics to match the musical complexity of his songs, and authored a book of musical criticism.

The original name of the blog, “Sword Swallower,” referred to one of Miller's enduring themes: the frustration of performing to meet the expectations of others, while trying to meet far higher self-expectations.  The song can be heard here.

The original URL for the blog, ticketstome.blogspot.com, is a nod to another example:  “I won't go knocking doors to find out how many tickets to me I can sell.”