Veggie Dave
Sax Worker
- Messages
- 3,644
- Locality
- Citizen of Nowhere
Anyone who's more in the middle-aged and above bracket will probably remember what it was like recording music in a studio in the 'old days'; when you recorded to tape, 24 tracks was luxury, adding effects was done via a patch board, editing a track involved a razor blade and flying faders was something you only saw in documentaries about the very biggest stars in the world. Recording in a studio wasn't cheap. Having your own was simply unthinkable unless mummy and/or daddy were millionaires.
Now, however, half of this is completely redundant, while the other half is so common as to be taken completely for granted - and it's all available for free. Legally for free. Throw in illegally shared stuff and almost everything conceivable can be found and claimed within seconds. For a modern musician, especially younger ones who haven't 'learned' what you're not supposed to do, it really is a time where the only thing to limit your creativity is you. Everything from the simplest melody to the most complex compositions using entire orchestras or brand new sounds created by you mere seconds ago can be created on a basic laptop by anyone.
And thanks to the Internet even record companies are becoming obsolete. Complete artistic freedom, that so many musical geniuses in the past would have killed for, is now available to all. It is possible to become a global music star, to play to packed houses around the world, all without a record deal.
So, where are the new musical innovators? Why was the last real musical revolution the global explosion of Hip Hop at the beginning of the nineties? If anything, music - from jazz to punk and everything inbetween - has become increasingly bland, formulaic and inoffensive. Could it be that absolute freedom resulted in nothing musical to rebel against? It's not as if musicians don't still obsess over technique and knowledge, so it's not a problem with ability. Could it be that 'they'' have won? That music, which Fela once described as 'the weapon', has finally been assimilated once and for all into the 'establishment'. It has succumbed to market forces. Is just a sales vehicle for business men to sell plastic rebellion to a client base for whom clicking 'Like' on a joke news site's Facebook post criticising the Queen or Trump is as close to defiance or revolution as they'll ever get.
What the hell happened?
Now, however, half of this is completely redundant, while the other half is so common as to be taken completely for granted - and it's all available for free. Legally for free. Throw in illegally shared stuff and almost everything conceivable can be found and claimed within seconds. For a modern musician, especially younger ones who haven't 'learned' what you're not supposed to do, it really is a time where the only thing to limit your creativity is you. Everything from the simplest melody to the most complex compositions using entire orchestras or brand new sounds created by you mere seconds ago can be created on a basic laptop by anyone.
And thanks to the Internet even record companies are becoming obsolete. Complete artistic freedom, that so many musical geniuses in the past would have killed for, is now available to all. It is possible to become a global music star, to play to packed houses around the world, all without a record deal.
So, where are the new musical innovators? Why was the last real musical revolution the global explosion of Hip Hop at the beginning of the nineties? If anything, music - from jazz to punk and everything inbetween - has become increasingly bland, formulaic and inoffensive. Could it be that absolute freedom resulted in nothing musical to rebel against? It's not as if musicians don't still obsess over technique and knowledge, so it's not a problem with ability. Could it be that 'they'' have won? That music, which Fela once described as 'the weapon', has finally been assimilated once and for all into the 'establishment'. It has succumbed to market forces. Is just a sales vehicle for business men to sell plastic rebellion to a client base for whom clicking 'Like' on a joke news site's Facebook post criticising the Queen or Trump is as close to defiance or revolution as they'll ever get.
What the hell happened?