Isn’t music a funny business. When we started out we just wanted to create songs that we liked and play them to other people and hoped they might like them. Now, to succeed as a musician, you have to almost forget about the music entirely and be hat salespersons. It’s ridiculous!
The music ‘business’ has nothing to do with the quality of your music. When we were starting, an A&R man said to us that if we had a certain look, an image, and the right attitude, we could be successful, like others with the same kind of ‘look’ and ‘attitude’. No mention of the actual music itself, as if that were some kind of inconvenient by-product.
Indeed, if you happened to be able to play an instrument with a rare degree of virtuosity, that was (still is) more of a hindrance than anything else. The only thing that matters these days is your social media profile.
So, if you are not particularly skilled or interested in matters concerning social media, it’s “game over”, and you can just go back to the day job and play bars to an audient of one, and pay for the privilege yourself.
Speaking as a classically trained musician with qualifications and such (useless!), music consists of four elements - melody, harmony, dynamics and rhythm. Most music today is amelodic - rap music has no harmony, it is spoken word. Some of it is great as well! However, where there is no melody, one cannot, by definition, have harmony. So those two elements are gone. So have dynamics. The loudness wars, where everything is compressed to be as loud as possible has put an end to dynamics. Nowadays, all music is played fortissimo. There are no dynamics, as they don’t sound so good on a spotify playlist where everyone is trying to grab your attention by being louder than everyone else. Which just leaves the rhythm. Nearly every song is the same tempo and has the same kind of beat using the same sounds, with minor differences. And all of this ‘music’, that is so homogenised, is force fed to people for decades by big corporate media organisations. There are now grandparents who believe that Take That and Boyzone were great bands. No they weren’t! They weren’t even musicians - they were dancers who could mime and were happy to do as they were told by their label!
So these are the things we are up against as musicians in the 21st century. Music is ubiquitous, disposable, cheap and has little value. Especially when so much of it in the mainstream is of such dubious quality. And people are brainwashed into thinking it is great, and anything more than a few weeks old is dreadful. Music as a fashion product. That’s what it is today.
Music that is good has power. It makes people feel something. It makes people think. And that is dangerous for corporations and the governments they own. They don’t want people to feel, and definitely not think! Just keep on working, watching tv, sleeping, working, watching tv, sleeping, and so on, until you die. Good music is problematic. It can create revolution! Definitely not wanted.
The last musical subculture in the western hemisphere that was based on a philosophy - i.e. some form of intellect or intelligence, whether you agree with it or not - was the hippy, in the 1960s. Everything since has been based upon: fashion.
So these are the challenges we face. Any suggestions? 🙂
