started making my own recordings of certain genres recently for the same reasons. but man, if you're lacking on creative and good music, then you're just not looking or your tunnel is too narrow.
ever heard ira kere? i don't care what kind of music you listen or that they are a now ancient gig, but if you've never heard them, then your dilemma is solved. how bout Ivo Poposav and his Bulgarian Wedding Band? Haji's Kitchen? if you have, then no need to listen to my praises for the process of creating music.
it's been the most liberating thing in the world. i've learned so much (knew a ton about music before that, through many years playing horn, but i'm learning more important things that have nothing to do with music theory).
i was raised for years in a traditional music setting but never played/created seriously. went off and became a graphic designer among other things, and realised not long ago how the two processes (visual/audio) are entirely the same. i just needed the digital context with music to make that mental leap - because of decades of traditonal music training which makes you think completely differently.
thing is, what i really learned in graphic design was how anyone was capable of it, and how powerful it could be when you got everyone involved, given some pretty basic standards awareness and procedure experience.
trying to do the same with music among many old friends from those traditional music days, and hopefully thier friends, and their friends. some of them get it (got it long ago), others don't, but it's an amazing thing to go through the process and watch minds click on at that proprietary, creation level.
much like any educational institution - or institutionalized education - the traditional music world has one of the worst habits of teaching people how to play music, but not the critical process and skill of *generating it*.
likewise, kids just jamming and having fun too often are fixated on appeasing the needs of the dance floor, the scene or the drug driving it all (nicotene, mdma, ignorance, adreneline, love opiates, et al), and not really doing much creatively for music, as much as it is for technological presentation. nothing wrong with that at all, just not going to be a strong source for passing on the knowledge of creativity and thus furthering music's development, instead of just reapplying it to another techological spectrum.
subsequently, and much like other artistic disciplines - much music you hear today is executed perfectly, but not terribly creative. oh sure, the samples are creative, the sound engineering is creative, the concept is creative as a recording, and the words are creative.
but there's nothing new to music in it, if anything it's more often a devolution. as opposed to something like the evolution of reggae in it's first 30 years - which was a very scientific, collaborative, education-oriented process.
and when you think about it - how many truly amazing artists, of any genre, are amazing because of the new idea they had, as opposed to the execution of it?
and just like design - technology really threw the whole enchilada up in the air, as the cultural biases against it were and remain enormous. likewise, the biases of those in the digital realm against those analog masters who grunt about the lack of artisitic reality in the technology-based productions of today is just as blind and ill-willed.
it's changing, oh so slowly, but my god is there liberation in embracing it all and realising the similarities behind everything else.
it's all the same at the root. all pink in the dark =P woops. |
