Ed Batista

Derek Sivers on Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Derek Sivers does a nice job extracting leadership lessons from the Dancing Guy at Sasquatch.  That's right, this guy:

Sivers writes:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

And what proves Sivers' point about the importance of standing alone even further is that Dancing Guy was dancing for quite a long time before he finally sparked a movement: Other videos show him dancing for at least 20 minutes before the video above was shot.

It's noteworthy that the guy Sivers dubs the "First Follower" technically wasn't first.  Those other videos show a dozen people interacting with Dancing Guy before First Follower comes on the scene.  Most of those others seem self-conscious, including one man who's egged on by his friends shooting the video to actually mock Dancing Guy--not that Dancing Guy cared.

What distinguished First Follower wasn't that he was first in line, but that he shared Dancing Guy's passion, his unselfconscious playfulness.  He wasn't first, but he was the first to stick around, and that's what made the difference.  As Sivers concludes:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here - did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We're told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

(Sivers echoed aspects of this theme in a talk he gave at SXSW: "The biggest secret of promotion is that it's all about them--it's not about you.")

Anita O'Day at Newport

Good Lord, I love Anita O'Day.  One of the greatest jazz artists this country has ever seen--nearly Ella's equal as a scat-singer, but with a richer emotional palette (and a helluva back story), and unique in her ability to combine technical artistry with lyric interpretation.  Two exhibits for the prosecution: Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two, both from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.  (Thanks to YouTube user jfhancock.  And if you can explain the rationale for the extensive crowd shots when Anita was onstage looking like this, I'd be grateful.)

And as long as I have the space, here are MP3s of the audio tracks: Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two.

tags: anita+o'day newport+jazz+festival

Johnny Cash on Doing It Your Way

If you bought Johnny Cash's American Recordings when it was first released in 1994 a little insert came with your CD--a reproduction of six pages of Cash's handwritten memories of his mother's guitar-playing, learning to play guitar himself, and guitars he'd loved and lost to the rigors of life on the road.  As a child of 11 or 12, he was inspired by a friend named Jesse Barnhill...

...who lived three miles farther down the road.  Jesse had had polio, and his right hand and foot were withered, but with his left hand he made the chords as he beat a perfect rhythym with his tiny right hand.  It was an old Gibson flattop, and I thought, if I could play the guitar like that I'd sing on the radio one day.

The final passage has a lot of resonance for me as someone who's often easily distracted by trivial details and who can be overly concerned with doing things a certain way.  (The "right" way, of course.)  Not Cash--he's focused on what matters, and he makes his way the right way:

When performing, it doesn't matter the brand, the color or the cost.  All that matters is that the guitar and I are one.  I have to feel that the sound of [the] instrument comes out of me with the song, from inside, from the gut.  And it doesn't matter to me that I only know three or four chords.  With the left fingers on the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythym, sometimes it's magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together it's the right way for me to do it.  Like Jesse Barnhill did it.  Like Mama did it.

Somehow I think Johnny Cash knew more than four chords, but his larger points hits home for me all the same: Don't worry about the right way to play, just play it your way.

Cash's own style is readily apparent is this performance of "Redemption", a song he wrote for "American Recordings":

tags: johnny cash american recordings redemption

Grant Green

Years ago my brother David tried to turn me on to Grant Green, the jazz guitarist who died in 1979 at the tender age of 44.  (Against his doctors' advice, he was touring because he needed the cash, and the strain apparently caused a heart attack.  How many jazz greats have we lost because they didn't have the means to take care of themselves when their health was failing?  It's criminal.)

I loved many of Green's fellow Blue Note and Verve players--Sonny Clark, Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson--but I just couldn't get into Green...until lately.  For some reason, in my dotage I finally get Green and his sinuous grooves.  Recommended: Street of Dreams, Alive! and Talkin' About!

Thanks, David.  It took me a while, but I finally saw the light.

tags: grant+green sonny+clark hank+mobley lou+donaldson blue+note verve

Extra Golden: Ok-Oyot System

My brother Matt just turned my on to Extra Golden's Ok-Oyot System, an amazing hybrid of Kenyan benga music and Washington D.C. alt-post-whatever-rock.  Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson of Golden hooked up with Kenyans Otieno Jagwasi and Onyango Wuod Omari as a result of Ian's doctoral research into Kenyan music, and they recorded this album shortly before Otieno passed away last year.  It's really beautiful, sort of spacey and funky at the same time.  You can listen to all the tracks on Thrill Jockey's site, where you can also download them for $10, saving $3 off the price of a CD.

tags: extra golden golden ok-oyot system thrill jockey kenyan music

Copyright Criminals

Copyright Criminals is a work-in-progress documentary by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod on the inadequacy of copyright laws with regard to sampling.  (A 10-minute Quicktime version is currently available.)  I came across it while exploring the Creative Commons and ccMixter sites, thinking about the potential connections between their efforts to help people share their creative content with the world and the potential for attention services to direct relevant content to people when they need it.  Great stuff and well worth a few minutes if you're interested in music, the law, IP, and/or the constant evolution of pop culture.

tag: copyright criminals

B-52s Playing "Rock Lobster"

God, I love YouTube.  Thanks to Bill Cross over at SportsFrog's Swamp for finding this on Daily Pepper.

What's Your Audio Brand?

When there are too many books and blogs to read, too many movies to see, and--most importantly--too much music to listen to, a question of fundamental importance is "How do I find the good stuff--the writing and video and music--the content--that's going to be relevant and interesting to me?"  A lot of smart people are grappling with this problem, and at least a few of them work at Muzak.  And don't think "elevator music" when you hear that name--that's so 20th century.  Think "audio branding."

As David Owen's article in the April 10th issue of The New Yorker makes clear, Muzak is doing some very advanced thinking about matching people--and companies, for that matter--with relevant content:

Last March, at a trade show in Las Vegas, Muzak demonstrated audio branding on a large scale. The company’s simple rectangular booth had a decorative theme for each of the show’s three days: a red rose, a Martini, and an eight ball from a pool table. Dana McKelvey had designed a soundtrack for each day that was meant to evoke the theme musically. While the songs played—Etta James and Diana Krall for the rose, Frank Sinatra and dZihan & Kamien for the Martini, Blondie and Wilson Pickett for the eight ball—audio architects interviewed visitors, and used their answers to come up with a “personal audio imaging profile” for each one; later, back in Fort Mill, the audio architects used those profiles to create personalized CDs.

I went through the same imaging process during my visit to Fort Mill. Steven Pilker, a twenty-five-year-old audio architect—he had worked in a record store while in school at U.N.C. Charlotte and, when he graduated, was offered a job by a Muzak executive who had been a regular customer—asked me seven or eight questions, none of which had anything to do with music. (“When you’re not working, what do you like to do?” “If you could choose an actor / actress to star in your biographical movie, who would it be and why?”) A couple of weeks later, he sent me a six-song program, which contained nothing connected to what I think of as my main musical phenotype (“classic rock”); in fact, five of the six tracks were by artists I’d never heard of. Yet I liked all six very much, and later bought CDs by two of them (Sufjan Stevens and Jamie Lidell). Pilker’s selections aren’t definitive, of course; another audio architect surely could have had another take on my “brand.” But I was struck that Pilker, after spending very little time with me, had created an appealing musical program that was based on his sense of who I was, rather than on any direct examination of the music I actually listened to if left on my own.

This is really one of the promises of attention: Aggregating our interests and preferences and applying the right algorithms to that data in such a way that we can find the good stuff (and avoid the crap) on the basis of what we pay attention to (and what we ignore).  And it's not just (or even primarily) about efficiency--it's about discovery, it's about broadening our horizons, it's about a richer life.

(By the way, if you like the Owens piece, check out Barbara Hagenbaugh's USA Today article, which covered much the same ground 18 months ago.  I do believe Owens owes Hagenbaugh a debt of gratitude, to say the least.)

Oh. My. God. (A New Haywood Album?)

I just sat down to write my annual (or thereabouts) paean to Haywood, my favorite unsung (for all intents and purposes) band from the '90s.  (You remember the '90s, right?)  I went to see if their site was still working, and lo and behold, I found this:

It links to their MySpace Music page, where you can listen to four tracks--one each from their two albums, a new one released last year, and (I think) an old one.  All great stuff.

And according to the brief text, they originally hoped to have the new album out in '05 but have apparently pushed back the release date.  No matter.  Just knowing that more Haywood is on the way makes me a happy, happy camper.  Very happy.

Stephen Malkmus

This isn't the way it's supposed to work.  Indie band breaks up, egotistical singer follows his personal muse, everyone crashes and burns--that's the way it's supposed to work.  What are we to do when the singer's work is better than the band's (revered) output?