Musical Lab Work (And why your opinion about music isn't nearly as important to anyone else as it is to you)
There is a deep disconnect that the arts have from their scientific brethren, even though in many ways they share a common goal.. To me, an experiment is a planned exercise where you have a hypothesis and you set to prove whether or not your hypothesis is correct through various tests. I fail to see where musical masturbation (self-indulgence of a musician in their own talents) falls into this. If anything, the professional songwriters and studio executives so painstakingly trying to score number one hits were the only people in the industry actually conducting experiments. They would have a hypothesis that a particular style or sound would propel a song to the top of the charts.. While there are a lot of flaws in terms of how songs become hits in general, the songwriters and producers all set about to put their hypothesis to the test time after time, taking apart successful songs of the past and trying to recreate updated versions using trial and error. I won’t argue that these were wildly imaginative experiments, but they meet far more of the criteria for experimentation than say, ten minute drum solos or the endlessness of The Grateful Dead.
I am not saying that starting at a singular musical idea and venturing out into the unknown isn’t useful. It is the foundation research and raw data collection that often leads to the pop experiment earlier discussed. Unfortunately for many, a lot of this venturing gets confused as a perfectly crafted song. While I don’t think any music should be praised merely for it’s reckless abandon, nor just because it is catchy as hell, the real problem stems from the fact that there is so little real musical knowledge among the general population. Some of it has to do with the fact that in terms of pop music, historically, a pretty small percentage of the performers really had a solid understanding of musical theory. There are, of course, exceptions, and it does not mean that a performer cannot be great without a formal education in music. But what ends up happening is that music of relative musical simplicity gets put out there because it’s hypnotic and easily remembered. The consumer base is not challenged consistently, so their sonic vocabulary does not increase. We then come to a situation where the people who grew up without real musical knowledge then grow up to become performers, thus perpetuating the real problem, which is when the average person is faced with music of more complexity and interest, few take to it. Those performers who do have the formal education do what they do and employ as many of the craft elements that music has to offer in relative obscurity.
On the other side of the complexity argument is the backlash from equally uneducated consumers who will criticize top 40 music purely on the grounds that it’s top 40. They will hail bands who wholeheartedly borrowed ideas from others (something that is impossible to avoid), and because of their lack of history or context, assume that because this is the first time they’ve heard it, that it must be the first time it’s ever been done. This was a huge problem in the 60’s with a band like the Beatles. The weird thing about the Beatles is that they started off with incredibly simplistic hooks and vocal harmonies which played right into the hands of the masses. Perhaps this foundation allowed them freedom to move on musically, although I won’t pretend like so many do that as they progressed that they were universally loved. Only through hindsight does the overall acceptance and appreciation of the Beatles hold up, and their achievements regarded as being progressive, even if those achievements were nothing more than applying some thoroughly explored musical tropes to pop songs.
What so many take for experimental music is just a rehashing of what composers have been doing for centuries. There is this persistent idea that just because a songwriter understands that there are such things as chord progressions, that somehow this is not only groundbreaking, but that it is automatically better than simpler music forms. An artist who employs more than three chords is suddenly propelled to be at the cutting edge of the sonic frontier. True experimentation isn’t knowing theory or how to make a particular sound, it’s using said theory or sound knowledge, then working tirelessly to apply that sound to a result that is definable and repeatable.
I won’t say I appreciate all music equally. I am a human being and I have subjective opinions about nearly everything. While some music is inherently better to me than others, it is important to remember to step away from your emotions from time to time, look at a piece of music on its own merits and where it stands in the grand scheme of music. Then decide whether or not you think the piece is doing what it set out to do. If it is, get a tattoo of the lyrics and then regret it when the song makes the top 40. If not, move on and don’t be such a dick about it.
Post a Comment →Our Own Private Loves
I was faced with a situation where I felt that a love of mine was shared by another. It wasn't a song or an object or anything with precise concreteness. Instead it was a method, a philosophy (a term I use cautiously) about approaching being creative with words. Studying creative writing meant coming across a lot of people who were interested in the same thing as me, only not really. While writing, in all its vague and unkempt wonderment did bring a diverse group of people together, there were very few of us that actually thought of the same thing when the word writing was brought up. Writing is a term I actually don't like very much, along with writer. There is a pretentiousness about the whole thing that has always made me feel like I'm trying to impress somebody by saying it. For that reason I tend to avoid talking about it with others in general. Amidst my studies, though, I did come across a person who surprised me.
If you're lucky in you're life you'll come across a moment when you look into somebody else's face and say "Oh hell yes," because one of you will speak a thought and the other will hear it as if it was their own mind talking to them. Beware of involuntary bowel movements or loss of bladder control when this moment arrives. Earthquakes are known to also happen upon realization that there is somebody else on this earth who isn’t completely blank when you say you love Meric Long’s fingerpicking style. It happened to me about approaching a story and I proceeded with the next long while thinking that this was a repeatable event. I also thought it meant something more than it ended up meaning. For all the mind-blowing and gratification that was experienced during this, I came to realize that much of what I thought was a synchronization of thoughts and minds was really a trick of human emotion, specifically my desire to connect with someone on a level other than "Hey".
I've since come to realize that the moment I recreated in my head time and time again never actually existed and that, for all my best efforts, that moment never could exist. It is impossible to see into another's mind. We can look at pictures of it, people can tell us what's in theirs, but we cannot know. That is the definition of “other”. What happens behind my eyes is poorly represented by the words I choose to explain it with. That explanation then goes through the filter of a listener, which informs their words, which get spit out to me and re-interpreted and that's how conversations all take place. At no point are any of those separate thoughts coming from each individual ever the same. In my case, I just wanted it so much that I discarded any information that would lead me to a conclusion that was in opposition to what I wanted. It was a long time later that I discovered this and then came a period in my life (that I have yet to break free of) that my greatest moments of happiness were experienced in total isolation from every other human being on this planet. Nobody else could see what I was seeing, and even if they could see it, it wouldn't guarantee they would give a damn.
After that moment and every moment since I have found it harder and harder to share. When I experience a new song or smell the changing seasons I don’t really look around for someone to talk about it with. I put my hands in my pockets, take another deep breath, adjust my headphones and smile to myself as I lock the door behind me. If I'm feeling chipper, I'll smile.
Reproductivity
The ultimate cliche of the one-trick pony is the using of the phrase one-trick pony. That doesn't stop the majority of us from being one and pimping out that one-trick as many times as we can in the hopes that we will find somebody who hasn't yet seen it. You run out of viewers really fast that way and if you give any kind of damn, you'll get sick of yourself after a while. But damn if it isn't hard to realize when you're repeating yourself. Maybe it's tied to the reward system of body-made drugs that tell us to tell the same joke or listen to the same song or answer the phone in the same exact way thousands of times in our lives. It's well documented that human beings like consistency in behavior and try like mad to make sure all of life can fit into color coordinated boxes or folders or plastic eggs in the carton. Maybe that's why Easter sucks so much.
It is impossible not to be repetitive. The sheer amount of information we have to process guarantees that we redo a healthy percentage of our lives on autopilot, if only to keep us from going insane. For some of us, routine makes up a more significant portion of our lives than others, but we are all guilty. For that reason, when we see originality (especially if we see if "first") we can't help but get excited. Finally there is somebody willing to break down the walls with their wrecking ball of creativity and lay down all kinds of groundbreaking foundations. That is, until you realize that they are just doing something similar to something somebody else did fifty years before. Son of a bitch, why can't I just write something one time that nobody else has thought of and be recognized for my genius because clearly I am forging ahead into the uncharted territory of art and human contribution!
Tough shit, because no you aren't. I, for one, actually like repetition. I like using it to my advantage when I can, raising tension or building up a sound. Sometimes I do it just to do it. That doesn't make me bad. It isn't even that repetition is bad. What's difficult to stomach more than doing the same thing, is being unwilling to try to do something else. This isn't always consciously done. It might not even be done consciously at all. That's what makes it such a fight. For anybody who wants to create more than one thing in any given form, the ease of falling back into familiar territory can be too overwhelming to conquer. I can tell you that I've written the same story as many times as I've written stories. They may be tangentially different in the surface details, but there's no conceit that what you're getting is a fresh story. I struggle with that all the time and there are moments in every project where I want to delete or throw away every word I've penned in order to force myself to work towards a new end. There is also a deep desire to just give up and face up to being unoriginal.
I don't have advice on how to find the balance between experimentation and the comfort blanket of repetition. I haven't yet found it. Maybe the first step is just recognizing that this problem exists. Is there a twelve step for chronic sameness addiction? You can try combating it with just exposing yourself to as many things as you can. You can try sitting on your hands and refusing to use them for anything but making food, driving and touching yourself. But if you're like me and you have things that you want to tell other people, you're going to have to do it in a way that won't bore them after they've experienced it the first time.
On second thought, maybe this article won't be of any help for that.
Staying Power