Musing No. 5 - Music & Morality

So you hear alot about these people who think that musicians make too much about sex, violence, drugs, cursing, and other such things they don't like to hear about. It's corrupting our youth, yada yada yada.

Old People

I suppose the youth are very impressionable. I will give you that argument to a degree. So I recently started to think about this. Two things occurred to me that apparently don't occur to any of these people who complain.

Young People

Point 1 - All you older folk turned out pretty well. Yet, weren't Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Eagles, and many many others from your day pretty open and explicit about alot of these things? Songs like 'Hey Joe,' talked about a guy going to blow away his cheating lover. Pretty much every other Jimi song had something to do with drugs.

Hey Joe, where ya goin with that gun in your hand?

AC/DC was violent and pretty explicitly graphic on the topic of sex. By the way - that song that you all love to dance to at the 46 year old's third wedding - 'Shook me all night long' by AC/DC is about nothing but sex. And yet you still dance to it. 'Brick House' by the Commodores is a all about how a lady has perfect dimensions - and is not missed at any older dance party. Pink Floyd concerts had more drugs than a pharmacy - in the lyrics & in the live shows - especially in the live shows. And yet you all turned out ok...interesting.

Led Zeppelin not promoting sex

So it brings to bear the question: Do you just think this generation is not capable of what you did - that is, being able to listen to songs with such 'awful' content and yet still turn out ok? Half the people who were at Woodstock are now running many areas of society. This generation is not able to do that? Is the fact that a good amount of this violence in music is in rap now a factor? I don't want to bring up the race card, but it seems like it would fit nicely here as well.

The board of ING on an executive trip

I think you don't give us enough credit. You would like us to think that when you listened to the music in your time you were somehow a whole lot more innocent and didn't know what the songs were about. I don't buy that for a second - unless you're too stupid to know what the lyrics meant, and that stupidity might explain some of the economic problems at the moment in our nation.

Or maybe you would like us to think that you were a whole lot more grown-up and were thereby able to withstand the 'horrifying' nature of the songs. That may or may not be true, as we have no way of knowing, but let's face it, older people always talk about how the current young people are awful and have no respect or morals or whatever. I'm sure when I'm old I'll be saying the same thing, lol. The point is, give us some credit, or at least let us make more mistakes than you did before you judge us.

Hi, My name is Wilbur, and it's been 60 days since I've listened to sexy music...

Point 2 - Why would the music business stop making something that people keep buying? I do happen to be a small business owner, and I know that if I have something that is selling - I'm not going to stop selling it. Not unless you want to pay me more not to sell it. It's really a simple situation. As long as people keep buying it, people are going to keep making it. That's Capitalism, which ironically enough many of these hot selling songs seem to be against it. I guess Anti-Capitalist music and movies can make Anti-Capitalists some major capital (or major hypocrisy), but that's another blog altogether.

I'm Michael Moore and I hate capitalism. Pay $12 to see my movie and I will tell you why.

There's all sorts of genres people can pick from, there's plenty of Christian bands out there too, so the people who don't want to hear it - don't have to. So it's not like they are forced to buy the 'bad' stuff, they just like it. But the very idea of telling people what they are and are not allowed to buy is very much not an American ideal in the first place, that's the kind of stuff we shipped over here to avoid.


So I guess the point is, that unless you can prove to me that your music hampered your ability to own companies or lead a productive life, and ruined you as a person - or pay all the musicians more than they are making doing the 'bad' music, then you should probably shut the hell up. Put your money where your mouth is.

End of Musing No. 5
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Musing No. 2 - Style Lines Are Being Blurred

The more I listen to the new music coming out - it seems to me that the style lines are being blurred. What was once clearly defined as one style can cover several genres at one time.

http://unadorned.org

Not that I disapprove, quite on the contrary, I appreciate the diversity in each market. We went through quite a stint what I like to refer to as 'The Creed Era' where anyone and everyone in rock sounded like Creed. Now many people have varying opinions on the band Creed itself, I loved em back in the day, but everyone copying everyone else is a great way to kill your industry. Look at bands like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles - these groups have never successfully been duplicated, in that time when something was made no one else (who was serious) copied it - they made they own stuff. It made the industry diverse.

AC/DC in concert. Photograph: Michael Halsband/PR

Well we are in a very diverse time in the industry at the moment. Rock, Pop, Classic Rock, Techno, and Jazz can all be found on one album many times, even once in awhile, in multiple elements on one song. Take a look at a new band - Mutemath, for instance. Mutemath, to give you some back story was started by ex-keyboardist and back-up singer for christian band, Earthsuit, by the name of Paul Meany. Earthsuit was a very experimental techno centered rock. Paul has been able to take some of that techno infusement and put it into a rock format, with a bit of a pop tinge. 10 years ago, his music would have been criticized as a mamby-pamby soft rock or pop. But the industry has changed. Let's face it, as much as you like the sound of a song on the radio, you may not want to hear the exact same thing through 15 tracks on an album. And in today's internet music market, people can choose to just buy the songs they like and ditch the rest.

Mutemath album - Armistice

This ends up being a good thing and a bad thing. Many professional/career musicians think of it as a bad thing, because all of their songs have to be good, and let's face it, most albums - don't really have all great songs.

The good thing, which I really want to point out - is that due to the diversifying of the industry, creativity is given full reign. No longer is someone forced to create a new band whenever they want to do a different sound. You don't have to sit down and think "This has to be a rock album, so I can't do this pop/rock song that I just came up with." You can just channel what comes to your head and through your hands. Now there will always be niche bands, like the extreme heavy metal or screamo bands, but even they are creeping out with one or two pop-esque tracks and they are being embraced pretty well.

If you focus on making music that you like to make, regardless of if it all falls into a particular genre mold or not, then it will work. Creativity cannot be put into a box! A great example of this is the many rock bands & artists that are collaborating with producer Timbaland. Timbaland, for those of you that don't know is an r&b and rap producer, but he is very experimental and enjoys using different elements to create new stuff. You have bands like Fall Out Boy, The Hives, She Wants Revenge, One Republic - even Chris Cornell (former lead singer of mega rock bands such as Soundgarden & Audioslave) all working to create a rock/r&b hybrid on certain tracks. Why? Because it's new! It's different! It's creative! It's probably something they wanted to do, but felt they had to stick to a particular genre. Many musicians I have talked to feel this way.

Timbaland (Tim Mosley)

The point I would like to hit home is that when sitting down to make music - make music that is organic to you. Make music that comes out of your like magic. Make music that you just make, not that you have to slave and slave to change into what you think it should be. You will end up enjoying it more and will be much more successful if you are doing what you love than what you don't. The artist that is himself - however weird or different - will be the most successful.

End of Musing No. 2
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