Portland, Oregon: Myths and Realities in 2025

My adopted home town of Portland, Oregon is once again in the international headlines, and this calls for a little primer.

I'm going to cover a lot of ground in this piece, and I suspect there may be some folks reading it who have no idea who I am, so by way of establishing a little bit of credibility to start with, for those people:  I'm a professional touring musician, I've been involved in that way and in other capacities with the labor, environmental, antiwar and Palestine solidarity movements for many decades, both across the US and internationally.  I've lived in Portland since my eldest daughter was one, 18 years ago.  My fan base is largely young, American, and leftwing, disproportionately including a lot of the sorts of folks who are currently protesting in front of the ICE building, the folks who were protesting in very similar circumstances for much of 2020 and 2021 at the Justice center, and the folks who have tended to be part of what was for a long time commonly known of as the Black Bloc.

Intro over.

Are you alright?

Since the Israeli military started slaughtering every child, woman and man in Gaza in October, 2023, I've been very distracted with news coming out of that part of the world.  I do also pay a lot of attention to what's happening in the US, but I rarely get any news through partisan sources like Fox or MSNBC, who mostly editorialize idiotically.  I'm much more interested in reporters on the ground reporting, and doing the interpreting of it all by means other than the liberal or conservative punditry channels.

So although I was aware Trump was sending hundreds more ICE officers to Portland and was talking about sending in soldiers as well (which is now apparently happening), for me this was a news story that I was hearing alongside stories of the latest massacre of starving children in Gaza City, the prospect of a war starting between Russia and NATO, and the worsening housing crisis up and down the west coast and so many other places.

For many people, though, Trump's latest pronouncements involving sending troops to Portland to protect ICE, along with angry protests and police brutality in front of the ICE building, have completely dominated their news cycle, as well as their social media.

My social media is still largely a Gaza solidarity echo chamber.  But looking at the hash tags and such, I see what many people are probably seeing much more of, and the many "are you alright?" messages I've received from people from all over the world over the past couple days make much more sense.

Looking at the memes about Portland people are sharing from various perspectives, like social media posts generally, they're almost always extremely simplistic and inaccurate, wherever on the political spectrum they're coming from.

From the right I see a lot of characterizations of Portland as a dangerous, dysfunctional place.  From the liberals I see lots of stuff about how Portland and the whole region is paradise on Earth.

The major social media platforms all use algorithms that promote sensationalistic content, regardless of its accuracy.  Content that provokes an emotional reaction.  So we are of course seeing lots of footage of the incidents of police violence in front of the ICE building, and not the hundreds of thousands of people peacefully sleeping in quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods in much of the rest of the city.

Whether it's the media or social media, there is so much incentive to show those same scenes of violence over and over again, along with the "Portland paradise" ones -- with commentary, of course.  The reality is not especially reflected in this kind of coverage, however.

War zone vs. paradise

By the standards of the EU, China, or Japan, every major city in the USA is a war zone.  More people were killed by gun violence in Portland last year than in the entire nation of Germany.

But beyond the violence is the poverty.  The poverty is what makes every major city on the west coast look like a refugee camp, but one without basic amenities.

The poverty is often very relative.  It's increasingly very easy to be too poor to afford housing in this city.  My own family's rent has tripled since we moved into this apartment building 18 years ago.  We are far from alone in that.  Those lacking in the kind of increased resources we have managed to come up with to stay housed in this city are living on the streets all around us.

I'm actually not sure how those people making the "Portland paradise" videos even managed to find such panoramic scenes of beauty to film around the waterfront area without getting lots of tents and people lying on the sidewalks in the picture.

Across the US since 2020 the rents have increased by 30%, I believe is the statistic.  Portland has easily kept up with that trend, and rents have gone from high to unaffordable, for so many.  The disruption in the social fabric of the city has been easy to observe, with family after family leaving our neighborhood (inner Southeast) and moving to the exurbs and beyond, while others increasingly move into the vehicles and tents that line our streets.

The housing crisis and accompanying social disruption in Portland and across Oregon, Washington, California and beyond lies squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party leadership -- these are basically one-party states, and have long been thus.  The opportunity to regulate the housing market has been there the whole time, the examples of how this can be done are staring us in the face in various other countries that do housing so much better than we do, but everything just continues to deteriorate, with all the campaign promises made by Democratic Party leaders year after year continually broken, lofty goals never met.

So, although large parts of the city do resemble a refugee camp, very much including much of downtown, it probably doesn't resemble a war zone, at least by Texas standards.  To the extent that it does, this has very little to do with Antifa, and a whole lot to do with the housing crisis, and the inability of every level of government to end it.

In any case, if you focus your attention exclusively within a two-block radius of the ICE building, it certainly looks like a scene where someone could get killed any minute now, just like the Justice center did in 2020, where people were, in fact, both maimed and killed -- before, during, and after Trump administration #1 sent federal goons to Portland back then.

The Antifa equation

As much as I'm seeing the paradise vs. war zone memes, I'm seeing the familiar virtuous protester vs. criminal rioter memes all over the place.

As is so strongly encouraged by the medium of social media, the memes are usually very simplistic, with many people going with the idea that "antifa" just means "antifascism," and downplaying the elements of violence or property destruction as rightwing propaganda.  Other equally simplistic imagery seeks to portray anyone involved with protesting ICE as violent agents of chaos and destruction.

At various times and places, such as in Portland twenty years ago, protests would often involve art and music and other efforts to represent in inviting ways what people stood for.  This tendency has all but disappeared in the modern era now, and when we're talking about what is happening now at the ICE building and what was going on five years ago at the Justice center, we're talking largely about a few dozen masked, black-clad young folks chanting slogans and shouting obscenities at the police, as well as in some cases mocking and trying hard to goad the police into attacking them.

Even having any kind of sustained presence of a few dozen people shouting at the police requires a huge amount of media and social media coverage.  In 2020 what I discovered here in Portland was at least half of the folks involved with the protests were protest tourists, coming to the city because it was the place to go if you wanted to be in the center of the action, as portrayed by the blanket media/social media coverage what they called the racial justice movement was getting then.  Many had not been in town more than a couple of months.

The way the more liberal ends of the media were portraying protests in 2020, if some windows got smashed and some dumpsters got burned, that was just par for the course.  They'd call that a "mostly peaceful" protest back then.

Once upon a time, the element among those inclined to be protesting in the streets in these particular sorts of ways did not represent a majority view among protesters, and could often be reasoned with to adopt different tactics that we all agreed upon.  With the age of social media this changed, and what became known as "diversity of tactics" became a pretty dominant idea.  Diversity of tactics means if someone wants to throw rocks at the police or burn dumpsters while other people are trying to do nonviolent civil disobedience, that's OK, it's diversity, so it's good.  Who's against diversity?

With this idea becoming prevalent and being backed up by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, protest movements that crop up tend to get stifled pretty quickly by this atmosphere, where you never know if some yahoo thinks that the event you're organizing needs a smashed window and a burning dumpster to add to the scene.  Under this kind of influence, protesting against authors or journalists some people don't like seemed to become much more commonplace here than protesting against greedy corporations or authoritarian or imperialist policies of the government.

So we are then left with the idea that being a protester means dressing in black, often wearing a mask, blocking the streets and yelling obscenities at police.  And then we are left with people feeling like they either need to say, with feeling, "I am Antifa, too," and perhaps even go and engage with this kind of protest themselves, or people denouncing Antifa for being terrorists.

Forward motion

What we used to know in this country, and what most of the rest of the world still knows now, is for a social movement to grow and have impact, it needs to be a very inviting one, with a vision for the alternative society it seeks to manifest.  It needs to communicate well, which means it needs to be a very artistic, musical movement, and it needs to be the sort of movement that will genuinely cause the opposition to question what they're doing, in a way that shouting obscenities at cops will never do.

If we could manage to form a movement like that, that doesn't get bogged down by provocateurs or other factors, then we'd need to grapple with basic questions, and have answers for them that aren't just oppositional in nature.  For example, many of the folks protesting at the ICE building really do believe in what the rightwingers say they believe in when it comes to taking down national borders.  The liberal politicians running the city would rather avoid the issue by not enforcing immigration laws.  

Now would seem to be the time for a third position to come to the fore from somewhere that is rooted in some way in practical thinking rather than just moralizing, involving people who understand how immigration has always been used as a tool by the capitalists to divide the working class in this and other countries, just as creating an underclass of super-exploited undocumented workers has been a divide-and-conquer tactic, and a very profitable one.

Rounding up the undocumented workers and deporting them all, along with whoever else the administration decides to target, is yet another tried-and-true, longstanding divide-and-conquer tactic that goes back to the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Anarchist Exclusion Act, and the Palmer Raids.

All we're going to get from the vast majority of the media and social media most of us are regularly exposed to is more black-and-white thinking -- immigration good or immigration bad, Antifa good or Antifa bad, pick your strawman and hold on tight.

How we form the kind of movement that can communicate effectively, that harnesses art and music effectively, that can grow instead of eat itself alive, is a complicated question, especially in the face of obstacles like corporate and (anti-)social media being so prevalent and powerful.  But the first step in the process of changing the paradigm, presumably, is understanding what paradigm we're operating with right now, and the one we're operating with now, it seems to me, is broken.

Some Thoughts on Technology, Artists, and Society, in the Past, Present and Future

We're at another one of those seismic moments in technological development as it applies to the arts and most other things.

We're at another one of those crossroads, it's very palpable.  Feels like a good time for a little rumination on the overview and background to this situation, specifically with regards to technology, society (or capitalism) and the arts.

Looking back at the past century, since the rise of radio in the 1920's, especially at this kind of distance in time, it's pretty easy to see that there have been pros and cons to the technology, and all the others that have come along as well.  More pros or more cons depending on how it's all used, but also just pros and cons of the technologies themselves.

Radio may have contributed to broadening the scope of music many listeners out there were exposed to, but for working musicians as well as for folks who liked to gather and play music together as a regular pastime, the introduction of radio into society was tremendously disruptive, and overwhelmingly negative.  Instead of playing music together, we listened to the stars on the radio do that.  Instead of having a live musician playing in a venue, we could turn on the radio.

The introduction of film and movie theaters, first silent and then with sound, had a similarly devastating impact on live theater.

Even without radio or film or TV being industries largely concentrated in a relative few gigantic corporate hands, the very nature of the mediums led to a more selective presentation of what was out there in the world.  Even without all the corporate consolidation, these technologies were having their socially isolating and  alienating effects, and their effects in terms of the loss of employment for so many people who used to be involved with one or another form of live entertainment, musical performance, theater, etc.

When radio and movies and record players all came around way back when, there were many eminent musicians and actors who were horrified by these developments and their implications, and who called for other artists not to participate in them.  In the end, radio and movies and all the rest were all here to stay and became completely ubiquitous, and record companies worked out a deal with the radio stations to get paid royalties for airplay.

Lots of people didn't like the new technologies at all.  They were seen as cheapening the experience of art, delivering bad quality sound and visuals, causing mass unemployment of so many artists, and having a generally alienating impact on society.  But in the end an arrangement was made, at least with radio airplay, that allowed for the wealth resulting from all of this to be shared among copyright-holders of the music, rather than all of the profits going to the broadcasting corporations, as had initially been the case.

Big record companies as well as independent musicians also adapted to the new reality by recording music and selling records, and later tapes and CDs.  Traveling vaudeville shows might have been long dead, the theaters didn't need orchestras anymore, and the bars didn't need pianists, but the musicians who could adapt to the new reality might at least sell recordings and perhaps compensate for their losses, or make some extra money, depending.

Live performance always continued, and continues, to happen, and for various reasons I'm sure it always will, as long as there are still people.  But each new technological development seems to lead to further concentration of wealth at the top, and to working artists generally facing more challenges than benefits from each new phase.

Cable TV, home video, and then the internet, and cell phones, all served to encourage people to stay in their little bubbles, and to engage in less collective, live activity out in the world.  They led altogether to more TV shows being filmed and actors and musicians and others being employed to create all that content, but for those artists who didn't move to Los Angeles or London, our worlds have just seemed in so many ways to continually shrink further over time, as the rents rise and the venues close.

With the dominance of music streaming platforms giving anyone with an internet connection free access to virtually all the world's recorded music, suddenly the basis for survival for millions of artists -- CD sales -- vanished, pretty much overnight for many, including for me.  According to what I've read about the available data, this period was seismic for the music industry, probably in much the same way as it was for working artists and so many others when radio stations starting cropping up all over the place a century ago.

But once again, as with the time when radio came around, the time of the music streaming platforms playing music entirely for free ended, and the platforms that became dominant were the ones that paid some nominal amount to the copyright-holders to play our music.

For so many years I felt nothing but resentful about how this process had taken place, how these companies could just stop charging a monthly fee for the content, and make it all free.  How they could only do this by lowering the payout amount dramatically as they grew more dominant.

But now, of course, for anyone much younger than me, selling hundreds of CDs in a given month is a thing of fantasy, and those of us making a few hundred dollars a month from streaming royalties are considered highly accomplished.

There have been many artists who have pulled their catalogs from Spotify for one reason or another, generally very good ones.  In protest against Spotify's low payout rate, in protest against Spotify's unilateral decision to pull the rug out from under the music industry overnight with the introduction of their free tier, in protest against Spotify's spending priorities.  I have never seriously entertained the idea of taking my content off of Spotify.  After already having my career dramatically undermined by their corporate practices 12 years ago, the idea of abdicating the money they send me every month and thus punishing myself further in order to make a point just doesn't make enough sense.

Now we're at another one of those seismic moments along the lines of moments like the advent of radio, or of the internet, or of Spotify's free tier.  Of the few working artists who survived all of that and are still on the tax rolls, a whole bunch of them are writing and recording jingles for commercials and soundtracks for TV shows, or they're licensing their music for such purposes.

It seems very obvious that the rise of the AI-driven music generation platforms will drastically reduce the numbers of artists involved with any of that content creation.  The ranks of session musicians will shrink to a relative handful.  If it seemed very few people were taking up the project of learning how to play a musical instrument before, that tendency more and more in the direction of karaoke or whatever we're calling it these days will grow.

We live in a very dystopic situation, under the rule of massive corporations that have a stranglehold on both of our ruling parties here in the US.  These corporations are not being effectively regulated, to say the least.  In any case, over time, although radio devastated live performance a century ago, at least the broadcasters eventually had to start paying some royalties.  Later, although the free corporate streaming platforms similarly devastated the way so many independent musicians around the world had previously survived, eventually they started paying streaming royalties, to sort of make up for some of the losses for some of the musicians.

At this juncture I feel compelled to say very earnestly that if there were a way to somehow banish the AI music generating platforms from existence, this should be done.  I would also like to see all the music streaming platforms be legally required to pay 1 cent per song streamed, which would immediately cause them all to re-erect those paywalls that came down 12 years ago.

What at least might be realistic, because it would serve various corporate interests, would be for the music streaming platforms as well as the music generating platforms to pay more for the content they're using.  But to consider that any kind of victory for artists would be very sad.  Because what these AI music generating platforms are going to do to the arts at every level seems really impossible to get my head around, but it will be absolutely devastating.  It's going to be huge, like as huge as ChatGPT has been in the world of business, programming, or academia.  

The idea of making any of this technology go back in the bottle seems very impossible.  What seems possible, at least, if we lived in a functional democracy or had a big enough social movement to make such demands, is regulating the technology, controlling who profits from it, and having a system in place for making it feasible for a society to have musicians, journalists, and painters in it, even if they're all doing things that could otherwise be replaced by AI.

In the absence of such a regulatory framework, in the context of the current Big Tech free-for-all, artists are faced with the choice of using these new AI tools, or not using them.  There are lots of good reasons not to use them.  But I know so many people out there in the world who aren't artists, and for so many of them, using ChatGPT in order to be more productive is becoming the norm, and very much a required norm.  I'm appalled to be saying it, but I have no doubt that this same phenomenon will soon apply to the arts as well with platforms like Suno, across the board, especially in relatively non-regulated environments like the US.

This latest development once more underscores the necessity of establishing a society where profits from such technologies are shared equitably, rather than hoarded among the trillionaires.  These technologies are increasingly derived from the basic elements of what makes humans human, such as music, art, and reasoning.  Their existence in their current form, with Big Tech calling the shots and making the money, represents an ongoing theft in progress.

If you might be among those inclined to harbor resentment towards artists who don't pull their material from Spotify, or artists that use AI music generation tools, you'd certainly be part of a long and vibrant tradition of sensible people wanting to stop the horrors of what some call progress, by attacking its victims.  I would submit, however, that it is the rules of the game that need to change, and the rules won't change whether you're among the decreasing numbers of people who are avoiding the use of these technologies, or resenting anyone else for using them, but only through a whole lot of collective action.

In the meantime, I don't know about you, but I'm going to learn how to be a better prompt engineer.

From Songwriter to Prompt Engineer

Up until the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, there will at least be prompt engineers.

I'm going to come up for air long enough to share a little about the rabbit hole I've been stuck in for the past few weeks.  Then I'll probably dive back in there for more, for better or for worse.

We all hear the news stories about how anyone who does work that isn't physical work will soon be replaced by AI.  Many of us, when we hear such a story, are apt to be dismissive about it, remember something we experienced with an AI chatbot hallucinating, and get on with life.  As many of us try and fail to find work as software engineers, studio musicians, paralegals, writers, and a rapidly growing number of other professions, we learn to take this AI stuff more seriously.

I did play with the chatbots since ChatGPT swept the news, and found their ability to write good lyrics was very limited.  But after hearing what a friend in Australia was doing with Suno, the leading AI music platform, I was eventually compelled to spend $10 for a month's worth of membership and play with it myself. 

I want to say upfront that me playing with Suno is not meant to be an acceptance of the model of development here.  As with all the other massively popular platforms that are so often part of the oligarchy of Big Tech, the notion that profits derived from various methods of monetizing our common cultural heritage should all continue to be funneled upwards into the coffers of the trillionaires is an outrageous one.  Having said that, however, I still have my music on all of Big Tech's streaming platforms that haven't taken it down, and I don't think I'd help solve any problems by withdrawing my participation in the method through which most people in the world now get their music (those streaming platforms).

Same rationale goes for Suno.  It exists, and it's being used on a widespread basis.  If it gets sued out of existence for copyright infringement and all the songs anyone has created using the platform get stricken from the web, I will celebrate.  Given the trends with Big Tech and what Big Tech wants over the course of my lifetime, however, I suspect Suno and so much more like it are not only here to stay, they represent the future.

In the future -- the near future, I suspect -- the most important jobs in society of the few that remain will be prompt engineers and consultants.  Prompt engineers mostly, but we'll always need some consultants to figure out what the prompt engineers did wrong, when that happens, especially when it comes to professions more important than, say, composers, musicians, or directors.

Ethics aside, however, the experience of obsessively writing lyrics and feeding prompts into Suno to create songs together has been intense.  Intensely exhilarating as well as intensely shocking.  I feel like I'm just going through life in a daze derived from the effort to reconcile what I'm experiencing here with what the near future of music and society is going to look like.

Over the past three weeks I've put out three full-length albums as a prompt engineer working with Suno.  The song I'm sharing with this post is not on any of the albums.  The albums are all sung in a woman's voice.

While I and I think most other artists don't have any ethical issues with someone of one gender writing songs to be sung by someone of another gender, the ease with which one can do that using Suno is fairly breathtaking.  Much easier than hiring a singer, let alone a band.  Also far easier than taking hormone blockers, or even putting on makeup.  In the "voice" field you just click "female."

For anyone who has ever recorded an album in a studio with highly-skilled musicians, engineers and producers, and agonized over choices about whether we should hire that keyboard player or whether we should hire that drummer, when what you really wanted was both, being able to come up with directives like "newgrass chanson skiffle with a modal sound" and see what Suno comes up with is thrilling in a way that's hard to describe.

It's as appalling as it is thrilling, however.  As with other prompt engineers, I imagine, the idea of taking credit for these musical creations just because I played the role of writing lyrics, giving a few musical parameters, and rejecting the first fifteen efforts Suno came up with, doesn't feel right.  It feels like Suno is doing most of the work.

As a songwriter, for decades I have been writing lyrics, which I'd say are still better-crafted than what AI tends to come up with, or, for that matter, what the music industry hit machine comes up with most of the time.  And for decades I have taken those lyrics and worked hard to come up with effective music to make the song a song, and make it do what a good song can do.  I've gone through this process thousands of times.

If I'm being honest, and not trying to play it cool, I would then have to say that what comes off as fairly inventive, natural-sounding, quality music, recorded at extremely high fidelity, is what Suno does to lyrics I feed it, within seconds.  At least as interesting as anything I would have come up with -- but then it doesn't just come up with the idea, it spits out the whole recording, including of course natural-sounding vocals.

I go back and forth between mourning the impending AI-ification of everything, and being enthralled with the ease with which I have created a whole new musical identity.  The simple fact of her having a woman's voice -- or being a woman, as we may phrase it -- keeps on giving me ideas for songs to write that wouldn't seem to have the desired impact if sung in a man's voice.  More liberating still is knowing from the outset that I'm not at all confined by what instruments I play, or anything like that -- you want newgrass chanson skiffle, with a tuba?  No problem.

Judging from what happened when Angry Birds came out -- I lost three months of my life -- I'll probably recover from my Suno addiction eventually, and start doing more useful things.  In the meantime, my apologies if you're being overrun by AI slop, and whatever role I may currently be playing in that phenomenon.