From david turgeon Sent Fri, Apr 9th 1999, 16:39
From david turgeon Sent Fri, Apr 9th 1999, 16:39
> The bedroom Cubase-twiddler Reynolds speaks of has this problem, too. You can > amass a personal discography of 250 so-called "ground-breaking" single-sided > 7" EPs and mini-CDR releases packaged in used toilet paper, but damned if > that's anything but self-indulgent. Art, especially art as abstractly > expressive as instumental music, should be something everybody is allowed to > enjoy, not just the 500 people who manage to track down a copy of your > melodic/noisy noodlings. The lo-fi nerd movement, and IDM to a certain extent, granted, the movement you're talking about (which we're all part of, more or less) _can_ end up elitist & self-indulgent, but so long as a certain group doesn't keep the privilege of making their own music for themselves, music remains "free" in the sense that everybody can publish it for a reasonable cost (reasonable as in, at least in theory, you only need a computer & an internet connection to be a part of this). matter of fact, this has been happening for a long time & not just by idmsters or so-called lo-fi nerds, in the tracker scene for example, which has existed for YEARS & has yet to be considered "legitimate" by most. the whole reynolds argument stems from the assumption that music has to exist on a certain physical media which has to be sold at a certain price, i.e. the music business as we know it. however he seems to forget that this system allowed for quite a lot of crap to be released in the past decades while many innovative (or potentially innovative) artists are still dreaming of putting out music to the public. if pop/club/rock/whatever music is so popular, it's partly because it's so easily available to the "sweaty masses". it's _also_ as true the other way around: "the people buy it therefore it must be what they want". but still, if they don't know about it, they won't bother. another argument i've seen on this list is that idm is elitist because it's reserved to intellectuals. that may be true in some cases, but in a sense, what we want is to "educate" the masses, right? to share our knowledge, what we've figured out in music, no? we may fear that things are going to be a hell lot less "groundbreaking" with this scheme--but couldn't the same be said of say, the history of physics? as knowledge is available to the masses, sure thing the scientists will never be as "groundbreaking" as newton, or einstein, or say hawking. the ground that's left to break at once is likely to be smaller & smaller with every discovery that's made, extremely small when compared to the original theory of gravitation, which basically laid down the premises of physics _as a whole_. however, we've never been so precise in our knowledge of physics, & we keep finding out new gaps in our theory which we have to fill. what i'm saying is that we seem to be headed towards a scheme where composers, rather than trying to reinvent the world, will instead 1) share their discoveries, even if they come from different scenes (idm, detroit, free jazz, trackers, avant garde, whoever) & 2) look for new ways to interpret what they have instead of complaining that "everything's been done before". sure thing it's an intellectual process which requires time (& money) & consumes thought. though you'll notice that all major "breakthroughs" in pop music (björk, beck, etc.) weren't at all spontaneous but rather stemmed from preexisting underground, "intellectual" music forms. so don't shoot intellectualism in music. if some guy has enough money to blow on one-sided 7"s, fine for him. but that's not what _defines_ the process of making this kind of music. -- david turgeon at http://www.notype.com