This week, Crush On Radio talks about death: DEVO’s Alan Myers, what happens when you love a creative inspiration, the emotional connection we get with artists and musicians, and, well, our music picks as well

It’s been a while, but my music podcast with the amazing Andrew Marvin, and Matt Keeley is still a going concern. This week’s an emotional rollercoaster of a show, talking a bit about dead musicians and other related concerns.

Please give it a listen and subscribe.

Early Wednesday morning, I could not sleep. As I am wont to do during bouts of insomnia, I found myself checking my various social networks. That was when I came across a status update on Facebook, linking a post from drummer Josh Freese. He reported that Alan Myers, former drummer for DEVO, who played on their best records in their prime, had died of brain cancer. I was devastated. DEVO was, and continues to be my favorite band, and now the first member of the group has passed.

Though Alan hadn’t played with the band since I was a toddler, his drum beats formed the sonic glue to the greatest albums of DEVO’s career. Video of DEVO performing with Alan shows him typically barely moving behind his kit, all action in his forearms, a machine: The Human Metronome. I long hoped that some day, DEVO might reunite with Alan, perhaps for a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction—wishful thinking on both counts. More realistic was the idea that I could find him and have him sign my copy of In The Beginning Was the End, the pseudoscience book that inspired the band in the late 70s. I already had the other four members sign my copy, but now both dreams have been dashed.

For an idea of Alan’s sheer rhythmic excellence, and beat-precision, just listen to DEVO’s cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” from their debut album, though really any song from DEVO’s first four albums shows Alan’s skills at their peak. They called him the Human Metronome for a reason. Now, the metronome rests. Duty Now for Eternity, Alan.

Read DEVO’s own tribute to Alan Myers at Rolling Stone

I recently posed a question on App.Net, asking about why Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) were so “bad”. The impetus to ask came from a post on Facebook where a friend expressed dismay at the number of GMO ingredients used by Chipotle. I’ve long said, in other corners of the web, that GMOs, and genetic engineering of food, is little more than an advanced form of the same cross-breeding techniques we’ve used in agriculture and animal husbandry for centuries—even predating Gregor Mendel’s famous pea experiments. Considering that everything we grow and eat has been, in some form, bred and cross-bred in ways that nature never intended, and has been since before we were born, the panic over GMOs seems a bit… unnecessary. [1]

It seems genetic engineering is the new nuke—a strange, exciting and dangerous technology that, applied one way, could change the lives of billions for the better, and applied another could kill us all. This idea has pervaded popular culture enough that it has its own listing on TV Tropes. In the case of nuclear energy, the fear came from how we first saw it applied. Gigantic mushroom clouds that wiped two cities off the map, a Cold War and an arms race based around the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, loose fissile material, and dirty bombs are not a great résumé for something that could also bring light to dark corners of the world. As it stands, nobody’s provided as horrifying a résumé for simple genetic engineering.

Though the potential is there for some unethical, scientifically advanced nation to put researchers to work on engineering new diseases, or create poisoned cereal grains to grow in our farms, nobody’s really tried it. Nature, by the way, seems to be doing a good enough job trying to find new ways to kill us on that front. The difference is that the minds aware of how this stuff works know the dangers, and have enough ethical sense to apply their knowledge towards more constructive goals. Their fears are grounded in the potential consequences of misapplication of genetic engineering as a tool. If you ask the average person, they might say the same thing, though the scientist might disagree. There are risks, but they can be mitigated by ethics and strict testing guidelines.

What do average people know about genetic engineering? I remember watching a news report on a protest against genetically modified food from several years ago. An image that stuck with me was a woman wearing a costume of a tomato with a fish head and tail. She’d heard that agricultural companies had created tomatoes with a gene derived from fish, and the costume was meant to illustrate how horrified she was of eating tomatoes that were “part fish”. Let’s step back just a moment. The genes used in those tomatoes may have come from a fish, but to say that an individual gene from a fish in a tomato makes the tomato part fish is like saying humans are part banana, because we share 50% of our genes with the fruit. The set of genes is what makes an organism, just like a LEGO spaceship is made from individual bricks. An individual gene, like an individual LEGO brick, can become anything; it is no more part of an organism than the brick is part of the spaceship.

This requires a way of thinking about what life is in a way that’s different from what we’re used to. We didn’t even understand what DNA looked like until 1953. The Human Genome Project, started in 1990, took thirteen years to complete. People are still catching up. Sixty years sounds like a long time, and so does ten years, but not everyone gets the same level of scientific education. [2] When you don’t understand something, fear is as natural a reaction to it, as it is to seeing a single bomb sink an entire atoll. Learning how these tools that are changing our lives actually work is the first step to understanding. It’s important to know that a tool is never good, or bad. It is all in the application, and unless we know how a tool works and how to apply it, we’ll always be afraid those who do understand.

David Lowery’s “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89” article has been picked up over and over and over, including by very respectable folks, often without comment.

This has left many readers with two impressions:

1. Pandora only paid $16.89 for 1 million plays.
2. Pandora pays much lower royalty rates than Sirius XM and especially terrestrial AM/FM radio.

Music royalties are complex, but both of these are patently untrue.

Michael Degusta

An interesting followup to the post that sparked my Devaluing Content essay. I don’t think it disproves my point, but it’s certainly fuel for the discussion we should be having about making a living as a content creator in the Internet age.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers defined an amount of time needed to become an expert in any task: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Not 10,000 hours of simply performing a task, but 10,000 hours of practice, which is work that tests skills, finds and breaks limits, and helps improve your craft. Don’t confuse the two. Gladwell’s 10,000 hour figure’s been tossed around a bit, including in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is why it’s fresh in my mind.

Elsewhere in the book, Cal Newport writes about venture capitalist Mike Jackson, who tracks how he spends his day with an Excel spreadsheet, allocating the time he spends on the various aspects of his job. The intent of the spreadsheet is so Mike could “become more ‘intentional’ about how his workday unfolds,” and it caught my attention. How many of us know exactly how much time we spend on our work, each day? Freelancers with excellent time tracking and invoicing software need not answer. [1] I immediately thought of the Quantified Self movement, whose adherents wear sensors and use gizmos to track nearly everything about their body, and often beyond. While there’s plenty of valid criticism of what the Quantified Self movement will do to the lives of its adherents, there’s plenty of practical applications for QS technologies to improve our work.

In my own life, working for a startup company with no set hours and the ability to define my own workday do a large degree has resulted in me being more than a bit unanchored. Building some structural scaffolding to my day would help me greatly. At the very least, it would keep me from crawling out of bed at 10 AM, and getting to work around “lunch time”. I’ve been increasingly eyeing some Quantified Self technology, but what I want to quantify most is how much time I spend doing what I need to do, and how much time I spend doing… something else. There’s plenty of tools out there, high-tech and low-tech, to assist, ranging from RescueTime to “The Unschedule” of assigning yourself defined periods of free time.

Data is relentless. The mantra at any web-based startup is “test, track and quantify.” It’s important to see what works, what doesn’t, and iterate mercilessly to improve what does. This takes time, data, and analysis. Can we not apply this to our lives too? The tools we use and their endless potential to distract us with alerts, status updates, text messages, and more also hold within them the potential to help us improve ourselves. Let’s quantify not ourselves, but our time, so we know what we should be focusing on, and what we should not. The answers to those are going to vary for each of us, but if we know that, for example, we’re blowing an hour a day checking for status updates on social networking services at work, we might be able to stop that, and leave work an hour early without guilt. Alternatively, it’s an hour we’ve reclaimed to use towards working to become an expert. We have the tools. Let’s use them.