Rolling Stone Covers Chilly Gonzales

Record labels have been dressing up musicians in magical and sometimes ridiculous clothes for many years, while audiences have basked in the glory of the latest disposable brain tickler. But there is a growing chorus of people who have taken to the internet to “undress” mindless pop stars exposing what’s left: shallowness and vanity, and at the same time, revealing the music industry’s greed and ostentatiousness. These individuals recognize that musicians have been swindled and are merely pawns in the big-money world of music. Gonzales has openly identified all of this for years, and his voice is finally being heard. The people are shouting that there is a new Emperor in town. And the Emperor doesn’t show up naked. He wears a robe. “Der neue Kaiser” – that’s what the German issue of Rolling Stone recently called Chilly Gonzales in a four pager about his rising fame and the future of music. Continue reading

Gonzales: The Luxury of Failure

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Those words (attributed to Winston Churchill) resonate with a tone of vast experience, and leads to other questions relating to the nature of success and the lessons of failure. By all accounts, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti was extremely successful, yet constantly downplayed any accolades bestowed upon him. Something drove him to continually venture into new musical territory that came with a high probability of failure, yet with his vast experience, he was generally able to contribute something novel to the world of music. In the theme of success and failure, Gonzales recently tweeted a link to an article by James Martin in Canada’s “Globe and Mail” newspaper: Continue reading

The Chills of Gonzales

It would appear that the most successful and prolific authors, filmmakers, and musicians have all been able to master one key aspect within their respective fields of expertise: the mastery of emotions. Their ability to make people fearful, cheerful, inspired, melancholy, and so on, reflects years of experience, trial-and-error, or (in some cases) sheer luck. Authors and filmmakers have the advantage of using or creating emotional states though mental or physical images – no easy feat unto itself, but certainly much easier than evoking the same emotional power without using any words or mental images at all. Continue reading