Hey guys whats up. Its like midnight but I don't feel like going to sleep. I've been getting alot of work done on the album thanks to these amphetamines (also probably the reason I'm up at night.) It's funny because they don't really help me do homework (i mean they do, but like, they don't motivate me to start it, they just make it easier to finish it when) but they do help me focus on this alot. I use to think I could only make good music when i wasn't taking it. But thats not really true. Music is a part of me what ever I'm on.
Anyway I was looking at all of the songs and i realized they all followed a very similar dynamic. They all start of with minimal arrangements, and then slowly build, and eventually all of that gets thrown out the window for a cathartic blast of noise. Either that or they stay pretty constant throughout. I don;t think that statement is actually fair, but it got me thinking.
People are more the same then different, right? So the majority of people tend to like the same stuff, more often then not, right? So all the artists that become really popular in the mainstream must be similar in some regards. Their pieces must have things in common which allowed them to be popular. They have similar notes, chords, dynamics, instrumentation, conventions, all that shit.
So eventually somebody was looking at all the mainstream music and realized all the commonality between them. And he/she was like "woah, look at all these things, they have X" and he/she wrote a paper on it.
And then, some starving dude in his/her basement saw the paper, and was like, "hmm, all the popular stuff has X, and thats cool and all, but what if it didn't?"
and thus, the Avant-Garde artist was born. Most of the time, I don;t think avant garde things are about making "enjoyable" or "entertaining" things. It's about deliberately fucking with the status quo. That isn't to say that people wont find the result enjoyable or entertaining, but that was never the goal. The goal was not to make something that other people could watch and enjoy and see again over and over. The goal is to experiment with art. It is a deliberate attempt at taking the conventions and throwing them out the window. In other words, a deliberate attempt to not make some thats "enjoyable" or "entertaining" by the current standards.
I guess it seems obvious in retrospect, and i had always sort of understood that on the surface, but it wasn;t until recently that i truly got that. That happens to me alot. Eventually simple things that i should've understood ages ago and managed to get by without truly understanding, just sort of click in my head one morning. It's pretty cool when they do. Especially if the concept is really integral to other more complicated things, which most simple things are.
Anyway, Go read my music reviews. I should check out the New Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. To be honest I haven't listened to anything by them. I see them mentioned on /mu/ a bunch though.
I go on /mu/ so often oh my god.
No comments:
Post a Comment