Am I becoming old? I’ve always been very musically inclined. I took piano lessons when I was 4, practiced every chance I could. Didn’t really have the talent or the patience to become very good at it, but to this day I dabble with music as a way to amuse myself, relax, and have fun with the kids.
Music’s always been a very important part of my life. throughout my youth I was always a fanatic radio listener. A TOP 40′s fan. I would listen to the local radio stations count down the hits, my finger on the record and play buttons of my stereo, ready to record the songs that I really liked. Songs that I’d later play back over and over and over on my Walkman headphones.
Songs that somehow meant something to me. I think it has a lot to do with the passion one has during their teens. Passion, romanticism, unconformity, girl troubles (to me girl troubles was falling crazily in love with somebody who would inevitably already be in love with someone else). The one “release” for the frustrations of adolescence was music (at least it was to me). There would always be that ONE song that explained exactly what I was feeling at the time – or so I thought.
I can remember a breakup with a girl in High school and later going home to listen to Sinead O’Connor sing Nothing Compares to You over and over again… crying.
As I look back to that time in my life, I realize that what I though were life ending traumatic experiences were really nothing more than the passion of youth and hormones raging through a body that’s not used to so much chemistry. A small brain still dealing with an inadequately, fast-growing body. An awkward race to find acceptance in a different world from the one you grew up in. A world that suddenly gives a lot of importance to “being cool”. A world that I was destined to be an outcast from, luckily I was outcasted with a bunch of really good friends who were just as geeky as I was, and whom are still my good friends to this day.
Now that I’m a busy adult, dealing with raising kids of my own, busy being productive and trying to leave some sort of mark on the world, I realize that I’ve lost a lot of the passion and romanticism for music I once had. I realize now, after having written a few songs of my own, that the very few artists are actually in it for the ART… Music business is really just a business after all. And songs are really just products to be licensed, relicensed, remixed and resold as many times as possible.
The mega-stars seem to not really car too much abot the music, but more about the bling. And the real artists who are trully geeling out on the music and creative aspects are not relly getting the airplay they deserve. Because, when you really think about it, after it’s been compressed, canned masterized for crappy sounding headphones, all music kinda sounds alike. And psycology has told us that all you really need is a catchy hook, and you’re set… Which is how the music industry has been “cranking out the hits” since the 60′s.
They follow a pattern of success… a formula if you will, and wait for the money to come in. Will this change? Perhaps, but it will take more than new distributions methods and paradigm shifts regarding the market. As long as it’s all run by people more interested in making a buck than by making really good music, it won’t change.
