modern music ecosystem rant

reposted straight from a forum post of mine

I think all of us in this discussion think much more clearly about these issues than is the norm.

Leaving aside our personal opinions about it all for a moment (and I actually see very little disagreement between all of us, more just the emotional residue of dealing with a world that never states it’s premises about music clearly) I’ve very, very rarely encountered anyone discussing all this in “real life” or even in print who really had a grasp of it all clearly sorted out in their head, or wasn’t just completely full of shit.

A lot of music culture operates through hipness, trends and the like. And I don’t necessarity mean that in the perjorative sense. Each subculture itself has it’s own microcosm of these arguments.

Sadly, the majority of the time the group mindset operates through foisting intense head-trips on one another. “You’re not really punk” or “This isn’t classical music, it sounds like film sound track music” or “I only do dark psy, psytrance is so 2002″ and the like. Nuance and clearly stating one’s premises don’t necessarily go hand in hand when artistic visions are at stake in face to face encounters where emotions are running high.

Which is why I and it appears as though all of you, too, have given a lot of thought about how to present one’s arguments about legitimacy, being stuck on the fringe of popular arts, working with a profoundly broken music distribution system and an economy that doesn’t honor it’s artists of any kind.

For myself I have some extremely unlikely personality quirks that makes what others have to go through somewhat more clear since I share so little emotionally in these particular conflicts, which in most cases is kind of nice.

When operating alone I make the music I want to hear. I think when I posted all my “albums” for download I presented my own feelings on the matter very well in that thread… was it here or KVR? I can’t recall. But my personal feelings have next to nothing to do with my philosophical or intellectual analysis of the whole extremely complex, interconnected and feeding-back layers of rather unpleasant issues surrounding money, legitimacy and all that. In fact I’ve presented my thoughts on all that much better in songs which I’ve not recorded than anywhere else. Not a great surprise for a musician, I know hehehe.

So when I enter this particular debate, which I really like and enjoy, I am going to have to try to obstinately try to show the difference of what I feel when I do what I do and what I think a reasonable way of looking at things for musicians as a whole (an impossible task, but I think you’ll see what I mean).

I really have never made much of anything with any thought or compromise for what a single other human being will think of it - when composing alone. I’m a wicked great “sideman” - my talents are much greater there than in solipsitic solo composition. I also truly am not particularly interested in whether others like what I make - not because I think that’s the correct artistic stance to take… I don’t even know why. I know that I’m incredibly annoyed when a non-musician wants to discuss their love of something I’ve made. I’m not bothered that they like it but there’s no interest for me beyond that, really. I do realize that when you love someone else’s expression and it moves you that it is natural to speak as a way of engaging in that, the interaction between one form of creativity and another (these are non-musicians, so they can’t very well discuss it as we can with our jargon, nor can they go out and make their own music based on their inspiration). I guess I just don’t enjoy my ego being stroked about music, but I recognize that it’s a prefectly healthy and enjoyable thing for the vast majority of people who are not emotionally constituted the way I am, though of course we all know many examples of people who have this need to a amazingly unhealthy degree. As in all things

And in this I’m not even being defensive! I am perfectly able to go grab a horn and move an audience in ways that most other instrumentalists would have difficulty doing. Saxophones really are magical that way, and I have that ability. It’s just not how I’d choose to spend my time when I could be composing things with DAWs which presents me with oportunities that as an impecunious non-chordal instrumentalist I’ve not had in the past. Plus, I’ve always always always wanted to get my hands on a crazy pile of DSP effects to play with. Now I’m in DSP paradise!

But I think it’d be stupid and selfish not to share what I make. It’s the same as pushing shitty music on people like a used care salesman, only in reverse. I have very little ability to discern what of what I make will be of any interest to anyone else but what I’m up to in my crazy little head, as well as technically and um musicologically really is extremely different from what anyone is likely to encounter anywhere else so at the very least that alone is a good enough reason to “share” - well, that and justin’s provided me with a website from which to do that without driving myself crazy with the technicalities. If it came down to paying for studio time, recording mediums and distribution of such I simply wouldn’t have access to the means of production and it wouldn’t remotely be worth my time. But I’d still be impelled to make it. I’m even more driven to create it all in my head than to actually write it down or record it. I could just stare off and imagine music, or walk and write music all in my head for many, many hours a day.

Unfortunately, when it comes to making music that would “further my artistic career” - whatever the hell that means - I really am uncontrollably outre. My most honest attempts to come down to earth and create in an idiom that other people would know what to make of are… still profoundly strange. Just me, acting alone, appears to never result in something even halfway to anything remotely “normal”

Which is why I’ve gone to great lengths to dig up local people with whom to write/record/perform with. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I can get along with essentially anyone especially if they’re a creative person, this never works out. My life is too chaotic and I’ve so little resources. And then on their end their horribly intimidated by my (local) reputation as a musician. Either the people that are good enough to sit down and keep up with me right off the bat already have more than enough on their plates, being in several bands or actually making a living off music or whatnot, or they are afraid of the difference in knowledge, skill and experience. Which is odd to me as I myself would love to sit around and collaborate with musicians that are much better and more experienced than I. Sounds ideal, really. But I’m so infinitely patient with beginners that it somehow makes them think that they’re wasting my time. How this works, I don’t know. But I do know that the best thing for me to accomplish more would be the ameliorating influence of co-conspirators. Not the least of which is because I can disgorge a hundred new song ideas, melodies, leads and all the rest every day of my life but always end up focusing on making the most abstruse sound design and arrangements I can think of. It’s a little different now that I’ve got all the computer power and gear I need. But I can’t even decide whether it’d be a good idea to attempt to stick to some specific “sound” as we often call a “personal genre” just to get the ball rolling. There’s too many options! I’d be pretty happy melding middle eastern inflected vocals with flamenco or one-upping chip-hop and making it even more technically amazing and doing it live, or making multi-metered Bulgarian prog rock/jazz, or creating a 6-channel non-rhythmic experimentally-themed sound design kind of show using my touchscreen and 3D controllers. Unfortunatley my natural instinct is to do all of these in one day, and many more jarringly non-similar musics. It does irk me that I have this amazing amount of power to compose without a place to be loud, record real audio sources, or the peace and time to do even more intricate music. Luckily I can plot it all mentally wherever I go and just patiently await the time when I can make it all happen.

Luckily for us we live in an era when we’ve got the internet, cheap-as-hell software and the music industry is dying. May it choke on it’s own blood as it sloughs off to hell. I can’t think of any “industry” that has victimized it’s “content providers” in such an obvious and straightforward way, preying on people’s hopes and dreams, outside of maybe agribusiness and it’s use of immigrant/internally migrant fruit pickers. And not only have they taken the lion’s share of the profits to be made (it still amazes me how this is all divied up) but operated as an incredibly efficient bottleneck to ensure that, from birth, the majority of people are habituated to be comfortable listening only to 1) the lowest common denominator or purposefully pandering to people’s worst impulses and 2) the majority of people aspiring to become musicians share the same absurd goals, compromising spirit and herd mentality when it comes to trends, urban legends about production techniques, etc. Now it’s different. The broadening of access to the ability to express oneself musically is having an amazing effect in allowing those, like us, with an interest in expanding beyond the bounds of what’s likely to “create a hit” or whatever standard one’s particular subculture imposes, to compose and record. And I thought the 4-track portable casette recorder created a revoltion!

And of course this dovetails with talentless fucktards getting their hands on this generative ability, too. The problem with this? Non-creative, and in general incredibly stupid and often evil, corporations follow where the money goes. This might be the extreme multiplicity of the barely-different midi keyboards that are everywhere, with little or no signs of innovation (I consider the EWI USB a great step in this direction, but all they did was take a 30-year old technology, connect a USB out to it and lop off the pointless synthesizer and cut the price by $400 which is progressive, not innovative, for example). Or it could be the narrowing of the hype machine in the recording and radio business - now they promote fewer artists with even more money to ensure a hit, focusing even more on the lowest common denominator, the flash in the pan trend, and copying one another. Although admittedly the “producers” aka the people who actually make the entire track, tend to be people more like us nowadays as they’re the ones that understand the technology and “pop” music’s backing tracks are more and more often beginning to contain influences from very strange places, whether it be music from around the world or odd and creative sound design. But it’s ruining the tastes of a new batch of 14-year-olds every year, marketing terrible values to an impressionable group that hasn’t built up the sort of Self-defenses that come from a more enriched and varied ambient musical exposure would encourage. I’d have to problem with the media monopoly if only it was used to broadcast as varied a menu of musical expressions as possible thus more easily allowing people to develop their own tastes and standards and allowing actually creative musicians a chance to make a living. Being a jazzbo I am all to aware that genius in music doesn’t even remotely correlate to having a life that’s even bearable let alone successful enough to encourage lifelong creation of one’s art. This all-or-nothing template of how we value and reward everyone’s favorite artform benefits no one but some decaying corporations with an incredibly silly and vampiric business model. How is it that not every person has already been informed of this? Most everyone likes sex but it’s not as though the negative repercussions of strip clubs and prostitution are barely-acknowledged truisms. Some people simply have a value system that finds the ruination of the women for whom sexuality-for-money is irrelevant, and that will probably always be true, but everyone’s heard the arguments. But when it comes to music the problems are just as straightforward and yet the discussions surrounding these admittedly complex issues are hopelessly muddled.

Granted, the position of the musician throughout history has tended to be an odd one, and “outsiders” one. Same with medicine men/shamans/priests and what have you. We’ve always seemed to have a proliclivity for getting fucked-up on whatever intoxicant seems to be handy, more often than not carousing around in ways that wouldn’t be allowed to those with the “straight” occupations. But a man playing a reed oboe in the market in Marakech is most likely going to make enough money to feed himself and his family at the very least. In other cultures there’s even often a satisfactory arrangement of apprenticeship of some sort. Here we operate by heresay, forceful head-trips, posing and more often than not who has enough resources to have access to the tools, whether it be a suburban kid with a nice guitar, lessons and a garage in which to play or a rapper with an uncle who works in a recording studio. I’m lucky that I live in a place that has in recent years developed a community spirit amongst musicians that’s much healthier than in other places and crosses genres, though not class lines. But unfortunately the urge to reward trendiness, personal contacts and acts that ape whatever is popular is still far too high. And people are far too unwilling to tell someone when they absolutely suck. This is especially troubling in the indie hip-hop scene to which I do not belong but am very well acquainted with. It’s eerie to see someone who’s miraculously talented moments later being joined onstage by, say, a woman who simply cannot sing remotely in key and dances like a robotoc rooster overdosed on crack, or a beatboxer/rapper that’s world-class and then a so-so beat producer who has the temerity to do his nerdy, stilted, crowd-annoying rap on the same stage… even his friend don’t think he’s any good, but he’s got more resources to record his own CDs, book more shows, leapfrogging on his contacts with other people in the scene and yet pretty much no one seems to enjoy his performances. He’s even got his own piggybacking sideman, this stoner/frat boy, Vanilla Ice-looking and none-too-bright guy who’s an even worse rapper, but he’s his friend and entusiastic supporter. But do the two extremely talented and nationally popular rappers, or the other unknown but surprisinly good rappers call these two out? No. Who’d ever think there was a subgenre of hip-hop where cuttin’ heads and trash talking wasn’t allowed because they’re so “positive” and up with people? As I said, it’s eerie. For god’s sake it’s even become acceptable to praise black-eyeliner emo music in the local periodical’s arts criticism sections (sorry Ms. Herodotus I don’t mean Sunny Day Real Estate, who I still don’t think I’ve ever heard).

Is music like pornography in that we “know it when we see (hear) it?” but are incapable of even defining it let alone discussing standards? Are we not allowed to make value judgements without hiding behind the idea that it’s all entirely subjective preferences? Why shouldn’t we defend our turf? I know that I subjectively dislike, say, the Rolling Stones. Objectively I can see much of their appeal. They’re sort of like a bigger-than-life bar band. I see little reason to view them as more than a nice synthesis of their time and place and certainly don’t see them as part of the blues tradition or any such thing, regardless of whether they were incredibly influenced by them. I don’t have a problem, objectively, with there being a Rolling Stones. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sit there and listen to someone make a big fuss about them without explaining that there’s plenty to criticize in the silly mythology surrounding them. And I don’t exactly have a big stake in where the crown of greatest rock band should rest. The next generation’s bigger-than-life bar band would be Poison or something like that. I have the worrisome knowledge that their lead guitar guy is an incredibly creative player though not necessarily in his band’s context. I’m not all that comfortable with acknowledging that. Is Poison as great a band as the Rolling Stones? If not, why not? I know it’s hard to use words to split hairs in art, especially music, but I really don’t see that as limiting us to simply sitting back and, as people extremely knowledgable and passionate about music, guiding a discourse that very rarely has any sort of organized point to it aside from tribal dynamics. And make no mistake that music hits most people closer to home in the in-group self-indentification part of their psychological make-up than any other factor so far as I can tell. If I hear a boom-boom-boom “four-on-the-floor” beat (why is it called that? I don’t know) I’m basically instantly ready to fight to escape it and whoever is responsible for it. I know people who, though they couldn’t put it into words, would instantly reject a song that encapsulates some cherished belief of there’s and seemingly adheres to their stated preferences in song form and the like just because they hear a mildly distorted, compression-sustained guitar lead in it! Because “they don’t like that kind of music” - in other words it is from a social group which is an antagonistic relationship to the one in which they assert their self-identity by belonging to.

And this affects all of us, though to a lesser degree because with a rich experience of exposure to and an afficianado’s knowldge of the nuances of music we can more easily hear something entirely outside our previous expectations and enjoy it for what it is… and perhaps even later reject it when we know what tribe it is the signifier of! The first time I heard Limp Bizkit my reaction wasn’t “who’s this semi-rapping poser moron singing this song?” (which is my reaction now) but instead, “Who in hell produced this? The depth of field and audio sculpting of all the elements is amazing!” <—lol, whereas now I know to reject Fred Durst wherever he may rise his dumbass head. I wish there had never been rap-metal mostly because I’m really saddened that they made a clearly recorded 5-string bass seems gauche to everyone else. I love 5-strings fretless basses so much.

Some things simply take time to get used to. And some it helps to hear the idea behind. This is especially true of academic/classical music. If you hear a serialist piece without knowing what was going on when it was a new thing on this planet you’d likely be excited due to the deployment of an entirely new idea or annoyed that it doesn’t sound like anything that will resolve as you’ve come to expect a melody to do. That’s just the first reaction. Later you may learn to judge individual pieces on their own merits. Or you might become a fanboi who is entirely down with that trend and use it’s theoretical basis as a defense to every piece in that idiom uncritically.

I know that I think I now “get” mystahr’s feedback drones. But only because I liked him enough to take the time to sit and listen attentively (and at high SPLs). I don’t know that I’ve heard any theory/personal explanation as to his “justification” for making this type of music. I do recognize that my peculiar brain is somehow wired for enjoying a very high number of simultaneous and constant changes over short periods of time, something which his music does not in any way cater to. At first it seemed entirely static, but as I explained elsewhere on the forums recently I managed to intellectually categorize what’s going on in his violent tapestries to talk about it, but that didn’t enhance my enjoyment of it in his particular case. For me enjoyment came from open-minded, attentive lsitening.

So just imagine how much it drives me crazy to know that those without the critical experience and discerning faculties of the afficianado (to make up their own minds) and tenderly young people are constantly being exposed to a worldwide machine that conditions them to a certain musical template along with the extreme social pressures to accept that as the only acceptable musical expression (it doesn’t work 100% effectively, but well enough to seriously harm our artform, and sadly it’s merely a by-product of the profiteering, it’d be easier to accept if it were some diabolical scheme - I’m guessing that state-controlled and -created Soviet music was never really taken to heart by the citizens of Lithuania who were constantly and purposefully bombarded with it and it’s “theoretical justifications”).

The reason I find myself a particularly good sacrificial lamb to rant about these things is: I have very little personal turf in all this to defend. I am under no illusions whatsoever that, given a more fertile environment, my digital compositions (which are all you’re likely to be familiar with) would otherwise strike a chord and win me renoun and riches! I really don’t know where these “avant garde snobs” who tell people that they must like the most abstruse and dissonant music are that are ruining the self-esteem of those who make music in popular idioms. What is with the crazy inferiority complex of the people who are on the winning side?. I don’t get it but it certainly seems to be a real factor in turning people very far away from consciously-progressive (in the sense of trailblazing new pathways) artists.

Hmm I just realized I’ve never put together an apologia for my own soundscapes and baroque miniatures. I am quite capable of explaining what I do in a musicological sense, or why I feel the desire to devote so much of myself and my energy to it’s creation, but it only just now occured to me that I never thought up a spiel as to why someone else should sit, listen attentively, and give it a chance… hehehe. If what I did became wildly popular I’d immediately do something new and see if it happened again or not. I’m a contrarian that way but out of caprice and not out of any philosophical motivation.

If Chase has the attention span to have read this far I’m using “philosophical” merely in the sense of being rational about the factors, motives and complexities of it all as opposed to my own emotional or psychological make-up, sort of interchangably with “intellecual” or what have you. to differentiate between “I don’t like” as opposed to “I think it’s right or wrong to…” There’s lots of things that I “philosophically” have no problem with that I “personally” am not interested or dislike. The other direction applies less commonly: I “intellectually” recognize Tehano music as extremely unhip German’s corruption of the Polish take on some freaking groovy Eastern European fusion music that made it’s way to Eastern/Northern Mexico and has essentially no redeeming musical qualities aside from provoking silly dancing at weddings and the like but personally it doesn’t bother me, in fact it just sort of sits there as ambient silliness in the background. And I was once wrongfully jailed for almost 3 weeks in a tiny desert town with Tehano constantly blaring all day so I’ve had a good chance to build up some extremely negative conditioned responses to it and it still doesn’t bother me.

Now that I’ve made the longest apost in ooTray history please forgive me if I go back and edit it here and here (I shall mark where I’ve done so of course) as I just blurted this rant off the top of my dome.

I should probably actually have edited it, but thus far I haven’t.