An archive of the Change Music Variety Show Blog
Jambox Songs:
Classical Music
Hoochie Coochie Poochie
(Don't Funk With Our) Fame
Plucktress
Rendered Pimpless
Sweet Weaving Dancer
Remember Me
Change Me Blues
Party Right Now!
Believe In Me! (A Foxtrot)
Why Don't You Take It Off?
Coda To The Code of Admirable Puff
My other sites:
A Change Music Manifesto
When I was about eighteen years old I was thoroughly sick of all the old fat rock and roll stars. I'd heard every fantasy rock cliche, every bombastic, self-important guitar solo; suffered through the meandering experiments and pseudo-country inversions presented to me throughout the seventies, and was done with it.
When I played my own free-floating excursions into melodic invention with my friend Slash Brannon I heard something new and different. It was easy to mistake the fumblings of innocence with the divine spark of creation. I still wonder if it isn't really the only way to create music that is true, this obscure and heedless tumbling through notes unknown, harmonies never before heard, changes written by the deaf presumptuousness of youth.
I seized on a central conceit and boldly decided that we could by step critical dismissal by inventing a new musical genre for ourselves, many years before the electronica crowd started naming every other dance beat another obscure name.
It was some of the Beatles best songs that suggested the idea to me, and the ambition of music in the seventies in general that made it clear: Music that changes drastically and notably at least once per song. Though we failed miserably at realizing this dream of songs that took you from one strong melody to the next seamlessly and with style and fascination, I can point out some songs that did what I hoped my Change Music would be.
"Uncle Admiral Albert Halsey" by Paul McCartney, is perhaps the greatest work of Change Music ever written. I used to always hold it up as the explanation of what I was getting at when I spoke of Jambox writing change music. I think Paul knows what I'm talking about. He recently did it again, as if it were something he does when he wants to, deliberately, as a style of his own, in his last album "Memory Almost Full". The song "Mr. Bellamy" is much like "Uncle Albert" and listening to either song will reveal exactly what I mean by Change Music.
I explained it to anyone who would listen by emphasizing that it would help stop critics from saying that our music was either rock or folk or jazz or funk. I liked the idea that if I was to be pigeonholed, I would name the pigeonhole. I wasn't aware that what we were doing, while not the change music of my ambitions, was so chaotic and indifferent to any kind of rational expression that it was a genre unto itself. You could simply call it bad, off-key, rhythmically crap music if you wanted and it would be hard to argue the point. But you might as well call it Change Music and the hell with it.
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