30 Words of Music, Day 4: feat.

There is one fact, among many, that proves that the designers of the iPod were not much for hip-hop.  Apple’s user interface, while rightly lauded, freezes when faced with four little letters: “feat.”

The marking “feat.” has nothing to do with marking and everything to do with symbolizing the free-flowing collaboration that defines the spirit and the composition of modern music.  If you glance the back of any hip-hop record, I’d guess that at least a third of those songs “feat(ure)” some other artist.  Featuring someone isn’t the sign of some side project, but rather emblematic of the fact that from its early days hip-hop culture has come up with a spirit of dynamic intermingling that sets it clearly apart from its one-band-per-record rock brethren.

A terrific new example of this is the following song, “Hard Times.”  Originally by Baby Huey and the Babysitters (here’s to awesome band names), this track is now performed by John Legend and The Roots– incredibly successful individual artists/bands in their own right.  But wait, there’s more– while John Legend takes lead lyrical duties, it features Black Thought– the vocal lead of The Roots.

Hard Times (Ft. Black Thought), John Legend and The Roots

Got that?  Your iPod won’t.  You see, anytime one artist features another, the iPod is trained to recognize that combination as an entirely new artist– linked only by alphabetic proximity.  Scrolling through the artist tab is to ramble through an endless series of permutations, and to be reminded of the many different ways that cultural perspective shapes all sorts of little experiences.

While we’re on the topic of the iPod-baffling alchemy at the heart of so much great music, here’s one more track off of Wake Up!: the new record from John Legend and The Roots.  It’s the song that John Legend was born to sing,

Day 18: A Song that You Hear Often on the Radio

Is radio disappearing or re-appearing in a different form?  Is it bit of nostalgia or a needed antidote?  A lingering habit for aging baby boomers, or something ready to be seized by youth?  As I think about it, a bit of all of the above.

A music fan since my youth, I have more awesome radio-centric memories than I can recall.  As many did, I got my start with mixtapes mashed together from live radio recordings: the first few seconds always missing as you leapt across the room; the last few seconds always polluted by the inevitable DJ chatter.  I had my yearly ritual of counting down live the top songs of the past year, pen and list in hand as if I were documenting some sort of draft.  And, as I’ve documented, much of my college years were spent over a radio mic.  If anyone is cheering for radio, it’s me.

In a hasty bit of blogger research, I tracked down an Arbitron research study from last month on the future of radio.  The findings were largely what you’d expect: huge drops in the percentage of people who think of radio as the most essential medium (strange to think that there still are 14% who still view radio in that way); and massive drops in the percentage of people who turn to radio to learn about new music.  All of these stats had the demographic skews that you’d expect: if you followed the data out the window you’d ship radio off to the AARP and forget about it.

But as we think about radio’s future, the first step is to define what radio actually is today.

Do you need a tyrant to create great products?

“Democracies don’t make great products.  You need a competent tyrant.” (Jean-Louis Gasse, former Apple executive)

This week, as Steve Jobs returned to the spotlight and President Obama stepped up to the mic for health care, I was reminded of research I did into creativity and Apple as an organization.  My research (a tiny paper, really, but doesn’t it sound more impressive to refer to it as research?) seemed to indicate that truly great creative organizations were anything but democracies.  This is quite contrary to the common perception of creative organizations like Pixar and IDEO, or even large ad agencies like my own (well, it’s not exactly my own agency… but doesn’t it sound more impressive to refer to it as my own?).  The common view of these organizations is that they are replete with roundtables, and are free-flowing egalitarian democracies.

However, Apple is most definitely not a democracy.  By all accounts, the company is an extremely intense environment, as embodied by Jobs himself.  Ideas are either praised or fiercely lambasted, and someone who was a genius a week ago can be the goat today.  But, critically, this extremely critical and often harsh environment is also a safe haven of sorts.