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Living in the "REAL" World of Digital Music Production 7/21/2008 7:40:50 PM
This interesting "critical essay" on the "world of producing contemporary music"(hopefully a little light-heartedness" added to the darker social fabric of its mood)was penned by me to be added to a new blog I am opening up on google or one of those blogger sites tomorrow.
I will only START it off here... to read the rest link out at the bottom to the AD article page. - MGL
The “diarrhea” of “an awful lot of” contemporary “pop/rock” music
Do you know what happens when you live on a diet of processed entrees and fast food? When never a fresh fruit or vegetable passes your lips and your fiber count is measured in “mgs” instead of grams?
You guessed it: that horrible “D” word. Also known in medical circles as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) --
So what’s up with the computer spew of 75% of most contemporary popular artists (mostly rock/pop) They, say the song is dead; well who killed it? Was it the independent label music movement? Certainly NOT! Was it rap, punk, or grunge or whatever? Was it Madonna who first put the crack in “The Wall” that the forties, fifties and sixties generation so carefully began brick by brick? I don’t know -- for you, but for me, it’s been a downhill ride since 1984.
And I was one, well that was at “the roots of rock” sort of speak (thanks to an older sister who took me to the Fillmore East in New York City at age 14) – I was naïve enough to ask about that “funny smelling smoke” in the air and those funny looking cigarettes) BUT I later thanked her, for I saw “Santana” live there when their second album (Black Magic Woman) hadn’t even hit the shelves.
I saw PINK FLOYD at that venue a year later when they were still called: The Pink Floyd and they had an opening act play before they came out (i.e. later when fame hit: Pink Floyd ALWAYS played alone because of their massive WALL of speakers and equipment.)
I saw bands in New York city that are now relics of the sixties and seventies: Procol Harum, Jethro Tull’s first incarnation, YES, Bob Dylan WITH “The Band”!! – even Black Sabbath after their 1st LP, and, “Mott the Hoople” touring their FIRST LP (remember them? --an LP is an old vinyl record that was played on a turntable. YOU didn’t “use the turntable to scratch! – you just plugged it into an outlet and speakers and when you PUT the NEEDLE down on the grooves it made music – and crackling and popping sounds. LONG LIVE THE CD! And the mp3 as well I guess) But, I digress…
So where is this blog heading??????
Today, you can record and cut a CD in your bedroom, then (IF you have enough friends and a gig someplace – or JUST USE U-Tube) you can SELL CDs to a brainwashed market, or YOUR FANS, if you can GET ENOUGH, you’ll even make money: MAYBE. It can all be done on your HOME Computer. And why, because YOU are a musician(?): “Frankly NOT my dear” as Gable used to say. (Gable who? say the young readers?) It’s all virtual marketing after that…
BUT in case you are still naïve as to how IT is done that so many of today’s artists may not need to know almost anything about music, let alone, may not need to have spent years playing an instrument OR singing and yet get on the “Virtual Airwaves” and perhaps even end up on the Today show spot soon, along with the “singing babies” that periodically appear on the internet sites and on “U(you)-Tube”. Well it doesn’t even take “R.C”s [read Record Companies] to do that (perhaps just a shrewd “Boomer or GenX” Mom/Dad Manager)… Yep, it’s so called “Performance Now” and there’s very little music to worry those Artists about. But the R.C.’s still can get their cut and have absolutely NO REASON to complain!!! - about the “Indie and Virtual Music artists” wrecking their profit.
THEY helped “build the beast” they fear everyday (and I hope it does eat their Creator like a type of “Cannibal Baby” gone wild).
And THEY profit everyday by the existence of the youth-culture fueled “Music” industry who’s “Heart & Soul” is made up of the “clinking, clacking, metallic empty banging” of a musical palette of sounds that is “as Soul-LESS” as the heart of the “King Beast” himself (you know that Devil “Sam” who is lurking behind everybody’s dream of a “musical-career ‘Garden of Eden’) –
And as far as those “Singing Babies” and “Parading Sex-Toy Imagery of “Twelve-year+ something” girly-woman, parading across the video screens of Virtual and TV America (every so often) THEY and those nice Boomer+ parents are just hoping a couple will spell “C.A.S.H.” (make that “BIG cash-out”) - This is of course, once their product(s) “Go Viral…”
And so many of u“Y\you-tubers,” (particularly) the older viewers will be “fooled-again” – having, (in anemic mental-lapses) forgotten the “Anthem of YOUR Youth: “We Won’t Be Fooled Again” (Who?); and, all those “smashing guitars” instead of “Smashing ‘those damn’ Pumpkins” (now Geriatric!)…
All BECAUSE “U” don’t have the “dog-damn” SOFTWARE that I just have to throw in the garbage! (I made a resolve NOT to swear lately, I don’t want to break my will just yet) – nothing against “dog’s really! – Though I am sort-of “one of those cat-guys”…
Please don’t message my email, I LOVE animals with four-legs and some with two. (It’s spiders and insects with multiple legs that have been giving me the creeps lately, but then I live in a “real FOREST”.......
To READ the rest of this commentary that then combines biography about NewAge/Jazz pianist, Michael Guy L'ecluse with it and to see his historical photos PLEASE LINK OUT TO HIS AUTHORSDEN PAGE .: Michael Guy, "articles: The “diarrhea” of “an awful lot of” contemporary “pop/rock” music...