Last night, I went to
Vienna Teng's concert at the
Highline Ballroom with Brett, who was in town this week. Vienna's touring her new album,
Aims. Her sound in this record is rather different from her earlier work -- it's louder, more electronic, more
contemporary. But it's still the Vienna we all know and love, and it's not the first time she's tried something new (see "
Grandmother Song" and "
Radio" from her previous album,
Inland Territory).
One of the aspects of Vienna the songwriter that I admire is how she incorporates a wonderfully diverse array of experiences, abstract concepts, and places into her work. One never forgets that she's a true renaissance woman -- she just finished up a dual degree in business and environmental science (one of her passions is environmental sustainability), and she was a computer scientist out of Stanford undergrad.
Aims's album artwork, for example, is quite inspired -- it's a population density map of Detroit:
It makes the demographics/stats/sociology nerd in me really happy. I've always loved maps -- centuries-old ship's maps, star charts, subway maps, hilariously inaccurate classical and medieval maps (like those inspired by Herodotus, for example), Tolkien's maps... (The maps room is probably the coolest underrated exhibit in the
Vatican Museums compound.) Maps that convey information beyond mere geography, like this one, are even better.
On the subject of demographics... I can't wait until
The Signal and the Noise comes out in paperback! It's another case of excellent concept meets brilliant cover design (the art department at Penguin has turned out some really thoughtful covers these few years;
Moonwalking with Einstein and
The Painted Boy come to mind):
I get the sense that Vienna must have read some
Nate Silver, and not just because she's an intelligent, multi-talented person with a mathematical brain and two advanced degrees. This occurred to me while listening to two particular songs on the
Aims album, "
In the 99" and "
The Hymn of Acxiom." The former includes the phrase "said the signal to the noise" -- while the phrase (or a variation thereof) didn't originate with Nate Silver, Vienna
does use the line in a song about social (im)mobility and economic stratification. "The Hymn of Acxiom" was, more obviously, inspired by
Acxiom, a marketing/advertising company that compiles databases of personal information. It's actually rather creepy how much it knows about us -- Vienna even said as much when she was introducing the song. (Just a year and a half ago, she'd said in an
interview that she was trying to figure out how to merge the worlds of music and sustainability -- I suppose she found it!) Even in her
Inland Territory days, one could sense from her music that she was highly aware of, and engaged with, the social context in which she was writing (see "
Stray Italian Greyhound," inspired by the 2008 presidential election, and "
No Gringo," a commentary on the illegal immigration issue).
The first step to addressing any issue is understanding it -- which is especially difficult with broad, longterm problems like climate change, food security, infectious diseases, &c. I particularly admire people like Vienna Teng and Nate Silver because they're not necessarily on the front lines, not really within the system or calling the shots, but they've nonetheless found ways to achieve great things in fields that they love and simultaneously contribute to our understanding of how our world works and how we might face the challenges of living in it. (Vienna's taken the approach of having two mostly separate careers, music and sustainability, that inform each other; Nate Silver has found an innovative way to apply his expertise, quantitative analysis, to a largely unrelated field.) Interestingly -- and I'm sure it's no coincidence -- all of these areas deal with multitudes, the masses, the People.
One of the great advantages of civilization, which elevates
homo sapiens above non-sentient species, is our ability to consider and attempt to solve problems which affect humanity as a whole, as opposed to merely dealing with issues that affect our genetic kin and the small populations we interact with regularly. We're capable of viewing our species (and indeed, our world) as collectively valuable -- even the pieces we can't see -- and of thinking in the big picture, in the long-term, in lightyears rather than miles and millennia rather than mere decades. We acknowledge that which is greater than the individual, the genetic, even the human, and embrace the possibility that comes with it. (I am one, but I am of the many, and my words, actions, ideas may one day sway the multitudes, whether they know it or not.)
