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The
Evolutionary Gymnastics of Pop Music
(Watch and Learn)
by Pete Brush
Everybody's
a musician! I'm in a band. You're in a band. We're all in
a band. It's a great big Universe of bands, and like the modern
Universe - with relativity and all - it's apt to look the
same in any direction one chooses to look. It's finite and
unbounded at the same time. |
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| The
"spiral" nebula N119 ...and what does this have to do with
with the music business? photo courtesy of the European
Southern Observatory |
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Clues:
-People distinguish themselves in conversation by saying "I don't
play music. I'm not a musician." Musicians hear this and say "Wow,
that's cool."
-Look in the weeklies. There are so many new bands buried in the
listings that it's impossible to recognize band names from one week
to the next.
-It has become impossible for people to say who they sound like.
Never before have electric guitars and bass and drums sounded (or
been purported to sound) so many different ways.
-The "day job" concept is so omnipresent that nobody even bothers
to lament it anymore. It's not a sympathetic position. If one wants
sympathy, one has to sign a record deal and then sit around trying
to craft a "hit" for a group of buttoned-down record executives
as one slowly becomes addicted to (insert substance or activity
of choice here.) Nowadays, people with record deals envy musicians
with day jobs; "At least you can escape to something boring and
lucrative."
-When people get married, bands just take a few weeks off. Being
in a band is not a means to an end, it's a way of life. Remember
that Bryan Adams lyric? "Jimmy quit, Jody got Married, I should
have known we'd never get far..." It's obsolete.
But I did not come here to complain. I came here to revel and to
watch as history repeats itself, providing for us a wonderful experiment
in evolutionary physics. For these true facts about our world of
music represent a total and complete inversion of the norm, an inversion
not seen in over 500 million years - since the Cambrian Explosion
that brought life as we known it to the post-primordial ooze. With
this inversion comes great opportunity and, perhaps, great peril.
Bear with me.
A long time ago there was no life on Earth save a few hundred billion
boring single-celled organisms. They were floating around in the
primordial soup trying to eat each other; they were at the mercy
of the tides. There were a lot of them, sure, but essentially all
of them were the same unexciting sacks of protoplasm.
Then, all at once, BOOM! The organisms figured out, apocryphally
speaking, that if they grew into multi-cellular beings, they would
be better, faster, and stronger than their unicellular counterparts
and, accordingly, they could eat their unicellular counterparts.
And there was a lot of room for development; ecological niches by
the million lay all over the younger Earth like so much virgin territory
waiting to be claimed. Claim them they did: koalas claimed the Eucalyptus
trees in Australia, penguins claimed the ice of Antarctica, roaches
claimed my kitchen sink, and so on....
All of these little beasties developed and became more complex and
diverse. Diversity in turn brought about specialization. Soon enough,
life forms got to the point where there were so specialized that
they couldn't go very far from their respective homes without perishing.
Take the famously extinct Dodo bird, for example. If one's little
world is so isolated, being a bird, that one doesn't even have to
fly anymore but just walk around on the beach looking for lunch,
and then some alien intruder arrives and starts having you for lunch,
well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but overspecialization
can spell death.
In fact, ever since the height of the diversification that occurred
in the millions of years following the Cambrian Explosion, the level
of biodiversity on Earth has been on the wane. Ironically, what
we call the "panoply of life" today is no big stuff when compared
with panoplies past.
And that's what the 1990's Internet/peacetime/leisure economy has
brought to popular music (not to mention fine art, movies, dance,
theater, television, etc.) - a Cambrian Explosion. It's all happening
right now, and much faster, relatively speaking, than the aforementioned
Real McCoy, which spanned Eons.
Ten years ago, you could pretty much fit bands into 10 genres, listed
here in no particular order.
-rock
-metal
-rap
-pop
-alternative
-jazz
-r & b
-punk
-house
-country
That's your primordial soup, if you will. Oh yes, there were also
a few other sub-classifications back then: One had one's speed metal
and one's glam metal and one's death metal, but in essence it was
all heavy.
Nothing like today, when there are entire web sites dedicated to
Ukrainian Folk Punk, Trip Hop and Ambient Shoegazer Alternative.
Nowadays, there are as many genres, it seems, as there are bands.
Browse through one of the Net's music search engines and just try
to classify some of the stuff that's out there. From the Cocky Sticks
to Big Poo Generator. (I might add there are now as many record
labels as there are bands. But that's a story for another day.)
No wonder we love the Internet. It levels the playing field. Nowadays,
the wealth once hoarded by a few bolt-in-the-blue bands has been
spread thin. Of course, so have the audiences. Whatever the instrument
was that gave rise to the Cambrian Explosion all those millions
of years ago, the Internet has given rise to a similar explosion
in the world of music with all its wonder and peril.
So we're all out here, sparks in this great explosion of music,
trying new things and specializing. Some genres are so narrow that
there are only a few living beings who can relate. That's advantageous
in some ways, but dangerous - as with our previously lamented Dodo
birds - if the splintering and musical specialization becomes so
extreme that music can't find its way out of the thickets.
In other words, with so much music around, there is bound to be
a lot of "music for music's sake," as my old philosophy professor
used to call it. Yet I hope that even the most introverted, specialized,
evolved students of sound use the panoply of new technology accessible
to them to make it accessible to the searching, listening public.
In the 500 million years since the Cambrian Explosion, many species
have disappeared from the Earth. Let us hope that the explosion
of musical diversity that has marked the end of the 1990's never
dies out. Who cares of musicians are thick as rats on a tanker?
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Read
Pete's last column on how to market your independent record on the
Internet:
"You've Made a Record,
Now Use the Internet to Sell It!"
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_________________________________
Pete Brush is a freelance writer and musician in New York. His Promising
Local Band, called the Help, still has four boxes of CD's left...
The Help's web site is http://home.att.net/~thehelp
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