Music exists within genres, and unfortunately, is often spawned by atrocities. One of these, of course, is the creation of America itself.
We may be at the end of “genre,” having soaked up this style of the artist actually just yelling atonally in our faces and still pervasively endorsed the senseless killing of innocent people for obtention of petroleum, so I’d say it’s perfectly understandable if young people were to look elsewhere other than music for righteousness… though where this place would be is beyond my current guessing ability. I guess it’s not fully my responsibility at this time, anyway.
It takes a lot to get me to start writing something like this, because it’s definitely a strong statement. It was three things, all of which I’ve experienced today, on the internet (I know it’s stupid spending time on the internet, but hey, record stores and Borders are closed, aren’t they? and let’s just say my live music experiences of this year haven’t failed to buoy my inner discourse on this).
The first thing I experienced today pertaining to this discussion, after googling “Bonaroo 2015” (a place where music purportedly goes on), was seeing CBS News “Scenes from Bonnaroo 2015,” which ended up being pictures of bikinied teenagers flopping around in this water-soaked patio type thing. Oh, thanks, CBS, except I could have gone to my local pool to see that. Anyway, it’s clear we’ve denigrated to the level of animals. Or is it?
The next thing I experienced, and I know this sounds ironic, but was just a general lack of anger on the consequenceofsound.com writeup (which makes sense in a way, since the article was accredited to like six different people). The mind state of people in a group, rather than solitude, is known by Sigmund Freud diatribe as “herd mentality,” and more closely resembles the disposition of a barbaric animal than does the solitary. Animals two, humanity zero. But anyway, I don’t think anger is AVOIDABLE, in zealous minds. This is meaning minds that carry music’s ideal, have standards, etc. Which begs the question, of course, of, SHOULD people even need music, I mean is music itself a realm solely for the cultural outliers, the outcasts, the misanthropic… its rudiments displaying a function unusable in “healthy minds.” And looking at some of these girls, we definitely all wanna be healthy, that’s for sure.
The third was reading this writing on cokemachine-blow.com, which used to be my favorite site, that was just incredibly, incredibly un-conversational. It’s like the person could barely get themselves to take a crap, let alone write 800 words. It was like if Einstein, if you just talked to Einstein, and he had just completed the entire Theory of Relativity, and then you asked him about music: he’d KNOW what was up with it, he’d be right, but his words would just be drenched in this fecal apathy… I mean eventually it gets to a point where there’s essentially nothing you’re NOT talking about, we can access any information in this day, we can reach any heavens, so-called, of outer space visually… and again, I hate, hate, hate using the word “soul,” I do it like as frequently as my dentist visits, but it’s like the broader, the more absurdly well-informed we are as a people, the less our creations have the ability to absorb minds, to be “trippy,” to be stalwart palpable statements, and I guess this goes for both music and writing.
I’d like to discuss, now, for just a little bit, Deadmau5. Deadmau5 apocrypha will be perfectly informative toward what I’m talking about. And my discussion gets back to how we’re so ridiculously well informed these days — by pitchfork, by cokemachineglow.com, by our increased transportation abilities which can carry us to sites of music snob interaction, I had just simply HEARD of so much superior electronica music to Deadmau5, primary among which is Chris Clark, or simply Clark, but also Mouse on Mars (yup), Stereolab (I realized they’re usually dubbed “rock,” I think that’s a crock of sh**, an anti-rock statement by hipsters near the turn of the millennium).
One additional problem I have, other than the fact that he’s inferior to all these artists, is that he is a “brand,” a packaging campaign. And I can’t really say that I’m JEALOUS of his success, necessarily, it’s more that I have to see that damned MOUSE everywhere, and it’s a marketing strategy, of sorts, a creation of an image. It’s like a moneymaking scheme in the mind of a so-called “musical artist,” whereupon the music will be expressly, entirely “good enough.” And I can’t argue, it is nominally “good enough.” Sure, it’s bland, but it’s bland the way all electronica music is a bit bland, and not as visceral — a necessary evil. It’s never gonna be Marshall stacks, no electro artist will ever outsell Led Zeppelin; nor should they. And I always thought music was THE model, but maybe youth itself is THE model. I mean, it’s possible that the things I like about Clark, Mouse on Mars and Stereolab would just be off-putting to young people, marks of misanthropic strategies, or confrontations shirked because of fear, or whatever. Young people’s minds are simply wired differently from mine, and it actually took me a while to figure out that they simply don’t CARE about me. I don’t look as good as them, and despite my A+ in music theory, despite by 81st percentile score on the Verbal Reasoning GRE section, I do not in fact embody a model in and of myself, I am a decaying, aging human being with an impaled jaw from dipping too much wintergreen Grizzly [I used to like listening to “If Love is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)” on that stuff, it was like my heroin] and maybe the necessity of music demarcates an efficacious malady, and its excessive indulgence implies excessive weakness.