MUSIC: WHAT’S GOING ON?

Noise. Chaotic and wise, noise has existed as long as creation and possibly longer. Nothing, even the motion of time, occurs without creating reflexive ripples in the fountain of sound called noise. Since the beginning of his quest for knowledge, man has been looking upon the world for clues towards understanding, all along failing to realize that the world cannot show him truth, but it is trying to tell him if only he knew how to listen. In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali states the following:

Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

Music, even though today we could not picture the world without it, is actually a relatively new invention. With it, man has attempted to capture some of the power of noise; to pluck it from its essential sea of random sounds, and organize it in some fashion where as it may be used to communicate a variety of messages. Nothing essential happens without noise. Music then can be said to be man making noise in reaction to an occurrence that has moved him so, that has shook and rattled his frame so, that there is nothing left for him to do but sing out.

When a person sings out or attempts to represent an idea through a melody by means of a particular musical instrument, the music they produce acts as a mirror through which activities are reflected, defined, recorded, and distorted. A deeper look into the music of the past would reveal many truths about the societies that produced it; its government, politics, economy, struggles, desires for change, etceteras. Music could quite possibly be seen as a prophet of the changes that came about in following societies, or even as a possible catalyst for those changes.

If music still retains any of its former powers, then it is the power of reflection it holds to most tightly. As a result of its commercialization and its metamorphosis from a folk-art tradition to a mainstream economic commodity, music’s prophetic powers and abilities to spark change have been severely watered down.

Governments have always played a role in restricting what artists can and cannot get away with doing or saying. In our capitalist society the artist often struggles with an obligation to fulfill his or her own creative desires and the temptations to “sell out” or be bought by the mainstream. Governments know the persuasive powers of music, thus explaining their desire to regulate what goes out over the radio waves and the censorship laws that place warnings on albums that do not conform to their ideas of what is suitable for a general audience.

In trying to comply with governmental regulations, record companies have devised lists of regulations and restrictions of their own which they impose on artists signed to their label. Record labels, after all, are only in the music business so that non musicians can make tons of money, so they don’t care if the artists they sign are really important or not. Their main concern is that the artist be suitable for radio play so that they can haul in the dough. Therefore, truly aggressive artists with a message riding on a wave of sound deemed as “obscene” or “offensive”, rarely achieve any type of mass recognition by way of the airwaves. They, instead, rely on building a healthy cult type of following while the airwaves are swamped by a flash flood of bubble-gum pop and teenybopper rock, such as “The Backstreet Boys” or “98 Degrees”, that’s not really even worthy of transmission in the sewer lines.

There are, however, a handful of the renegade artists that have been absorbed into the mainstream music economy, but once they were, their flower of rebellion quickly lost its blossom. An example of a band like this would be “Rage Against the Machine”. Their name would seem to indicate that they would be a band that would never sell out to corporate America. Maybe they didn’t, but corporate America has certainly done its best to get the best of them. On there own, without the help of corporate radio or a big money A&R man, “Rage” had successfully managed to build a large cult following that spanned through the rock and roll underground of most of the east and west coast states. Hoping to milk off their success, Atlantic Records quickly signed “Rage”. “Rage” members had hoped that they could use the record company to help spread the message of their anti-governmental rock to an even larger audience, but their overtly political lyrics seemed to have lose their sting after being mass produced and overplayed on the radio. They were viewed as hypocrites and sell-outs by there early follower, and three albums later they’re just another mainstream rock band. In the end an audience of politically uninformed adolescents, who are just into the latest thing that they are being fed, replace their cult following of listeners that were actually interested in the issues that “Rage” stood for.

Basically, the commercialization of music was its downfall as a political power tool for the people. Another problem with the corporate takeover of music is that it became more about the visual than the audible. The music market soon became about the images of the artist and the images of the listeners of the various genres, instead of about spreading the messages of the artists and the ideals of the people. Soon music became all about visual beauty and not the noise of movements. Pretty faces are now used to sell records as opposed to good music selling records.

In this way music can still be said to be a reflector of society, because our society has become one that is very hung-up on images and appearances. There are many people who would buy a record by Britney Spears, for example, because she is considered by society to be a beautiful young girl. Those same people would pass up a record by Mary Chapin Carpenter simply because they are not attracted by her appearance. Gigi Dover, the lead singer in a local band from Charlotte, NC known as the “Rank Outsiders”, once refused to appear on “Star Search” with Ed McMahon after being told that she would not be able to perform with the rest of her band. The reason: they were too old, and “Star Search” was trying to project a youthful image to attract a youthful audience.

In the days of Kerouac, the music was different. Pumping from the alleyways, the back-street jazz bars and juke joints from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, it was raw and reckless, but real. The blaring trumpets, saxes, trombones, and blazing drums; the raw soulful voices of the forgotten black bop and blues geniuses. They had “it”, and nobody knew what “it” was until “it” was gone. “It” was something different to everyone, but it was something everyone could recognize. “It” is what most artists today are lacking.

The images created by the performers of the beatnik were not synthetic. They didn’t dress a certain way to sell their music. Most of them couldn’t afford to anyway, and besides, their music sold itself. If they weren’t singing or playing, it was as if they weren’t breathing. The music was essential to them. It was as natural as sweating on a hot day. Basically, those musicians made music that was real and vital. The stories they sang were from the heart and for the hearts of the listeners, not for the big bucks or any brass ring. They had their finger on the pulse of the people, and that’s how they made the people move. People moved because they could relate.

Music today has become a cold and calculated moneymaking scheme. It’s a combination of songwriters and supermodels in their laboratories trying to predict what will be the next big thing, so that, together, they can jump on the band wagon and ride it all the way to the bank. Nothing is real. Their fingers on not on the pulse of the people because their hands are too busy writing checks. They make millions of dollars because, unfortunately, there are millions of suckers in this country who don’t know the difference and just eat what the radio feeds them.

The performers are slaves to the record labels, but most of them don’t care as long as they are getting paid. Most of them don’t realize that they will just be discarded as soon as they are deemed too old or their beauty fades to a level lower than that of their talent.

Some fans try to sustain their high hopes for the future of music by looking upon its current state as just another down phase in its history, much like the disco period of the seventies or the plastic pop era of the eighties. Their opinions may be valid. Somehow music always seems to go through a soul salvaging revolution just when it looks like it will never be able to recover from the pits of pop hell. Punk saved us from disco, and alternative rock emerged in the late eighties and early nineties with bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana bursting onto the scene to heal us from the wounds inflicted by mid-eighties synthesizer schlock.

The problem is that the overcoming of a downward flux in musical creativity requires the emergence of brave new visionaries in the field; artists that are not so blinded by the light of economic gold that they lose sight of their original artistic foresight. The music scene today is not necessarily without such rebels, but the commercial-radio empire has done its best to keep them working in obscurity. The reason for this is that most commercial-radio stations have a very narrow, limited and restrictive format. They generally play music from one main genre such as country, rock, hip-hop, etc. Why this type of system hurts the visionaries is that they are generally so original that they do not fit into any of these narrowly defined categories, and therefore they get no play on the radio. Thankfully, artists like Beck Hansen of “Beck” keep plugging away in their studios combining sounds with music to take their art form forward in new and progressive directions.

It is truly a time when the musical artist must be very brave. His world is now one of ratfinks and scoundrels looking to saddle him and his wild creativity only so they can ride him out in their own selfish economic derby. Behind every corner is a crook, and behind every record label is a hundred more, beckoning him to sign his soul away on the dotted line. If the musician today is to successfully thwart the villains who have overtaken his precious art and turned it into a rotten industry, he must stay true to his vision and live by no man’s code but his own. Things may look hopeless, but one must always remember that we are never really without hope. In the end, it would probably do us all good to remember the immortal words of Jack Kerouac when he wrote in On the Road; “She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the wary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep in late afternoon.” In other words, work hard, sleep late, and everything’s gonna be just great.