The Problem with Music

Its kind of late and I am not around any of my music equipment, and I'm stuck in a real shitty youtube video vortex, and I guess this blog post is my last attempt to escape it. Basically, I stumbled upon this video after watching a few Glen Fricker vids (real smart dude by the way, even if his aesthetic is a bit overdone, check out his channel here). After reading the comments on said video, I felt a real compulsion to listen to shlohmo and write this post.

Glen Fricker spends quite a bit of time talking about how the human element of music is being "edited out." He spends quite a long amount of time ragging on drum samples, and how they can never have the feel and emotion and subtle variation of live drums. Glen also talks about autotune, and this one comment on the aforementioned boyinband.com video cited autotune as being the one sign of "no talent." Basically, it seems to me like alot of these people are seeing a fundamental issue with alot of music technology that has come out today. They see it as corrupting, or trying to shortcut some essential element of music, and they want to lambast the culprits for it.

First, let me address Glen Fricker. Glen Fricker's complaints about samples make absolute sense, given his exposure to drum samples and how he has seen them used in the studio. If you are a metal band, and you want to get that big fucking drum sound, then yeah sample replacing will make ur drums sound lame as shit, because glen is absolutely right when he says that samples will never have the feel of live drums. Samples aren't live drums, and the idea that supposedly talented musicians are content with having producers sample replace their hits is fucking sad. So in that respect, I agree with glen.

I disagree with the concept that samples in general are always bad in every conceivable way. Like, shit, do you listen to hiphop? Like, come on. Really? You think all hiphop is terrible? Glen probably can tell sampled drums from real drums, and so i guess he is allowed to hate "all hip hop" but the rest of you probs couldn't pass a double blind test. My guess is that all of you are about as dumb as me, and I sometimes wonder if I could truly tell the different between live drums and sampled drums with my eyes closed. But the point, sampling is objectively not a bad thing, and has an interesting aesthetic in its own right. Early hardware samplers in particular have a very interesting lowpass filter (becuz of the lower sample rate) and graininess to them that live drums don't have. Samples can be pitched up, pitched down, reversed, bitscrambled, and enveloped all with relative ease, and that shit can sound cool as fuck. Like seriously, it can. Yeah, samples can't replace live drums, but i'd like to see live drums make some venetian snares.



Like, live drums cannot make that sound. Like, they fucking can't. And I don't mean to say that live drummers can't play as fast, because they can, but live drums will never sound that choppy, never sound that screwed, it will never sound like that. Do you see what I'm saying? And if you wanna say "well sounding like that sounds dumb" then thats your prerogative, but its my right to buy and purchase and share music that I think is cool so I'm gonna do that, but don't go around saying that venetian snares doesn't make music or doesn't have talent. Literally, pull your head out of your ass. It would take you literally a million years to figure out how to make that song, shut the fuck up. And it is music, because a substantial group of people enjoy it like they enjoy other things that you call music, and music is a social construct anyway, so fuck off.

Next, I want to address the complaint by Glen Fricker and millions of other "true music fans" that autotune sucks. Again, autotune sucks when its used to make up for a singer's bad and out of practice singing. But, when autotune is used as an effect itself, it can sound pretty cool. When a singer who can actually control their voice sings with autotune, and the settings on the autotune are just right, then autotune can essentially be used to allow a singer to control a synthesizer. Check this shit out:

   

Like, look at that shit, they took two vocal tracks, ran them both through autotune, and hardpanned them, and you get this fuckin sweet stereo soundscape thing, where the machine processes the voice differently at some points, and the same at other times, and it sounds real cool. You get this weird funky thing which sounds cool. Thats what autotune can do if you use it right. It's like, the song has to be built around the autotune, it can't just be thrown in for no reason.

But lets really address a deeper issue here. People keep talking about a "problem with music" and here is the real truth. There is no fucking problem with music. Or really, put much better, the problem with music is not the fact that people are using samples or autotuning their voice. The problem is that idiots who don't know what the fuck they are talking about say dumb shit on the internet and it makes me get mad and write these dumb blog posts about a topic that everyone already knows the truth about. There is no such thing as "good music" other than music that lives up to its own standards, and its up to us as a society to decide whether artists succeed and fail in doing what they want to do. Some people think very heavily about that, some people don't, but it is all a process, an active interpretation. We all actively contest the definition and value of music everyday by what we listen to, how we listen to it, and how much we pay for it. And its evident that based on youtube comments, some people value music alot more highly than others.

This was a shit blog im sorry just like fucking youtube comments man oh my god.