Questions:
I really like music, I've played in (not very serious) bands and I love finding new artists to listen to. Fairly regularly I find myself pausing film credits to find the name of a song that I've heard during some scene so I can go and find the artist's website and/or buy their music. I have huge respect for people who can really play and who try to make a living from it. I don't, never have and never will watch the X-factor.

But...

If someone hears a song for the first time and finds that it affects them deeply and emotionally, should they care about the process of its production and the motivation of the people who made it? Is there anything wrong with just enjoying music for the aural experience independent of the wider context of the artist's emotional investment in it or lack thereof? Would it necessarily imply that music means very little to them?
(flimflam_machine, Tue 4 Jan 2011, 11:23, 2 replies)

Musicians...
Have always and will always struggle to find a place in popular culture or even live off the fruits of their labours, regardless of what Cowell and co do.
You could argue that now it's so much better for musicians than before music was mass marketed and produced.
Your average pulpit orchestra for theater in centuries gone by probably had more musical nouse than the entire collective knowledge of the top 40 for the whole of the last decade, but these people were by no means rich or well respected. They just had to get on with it like a job, which it was.
Until the likes of Paganini came along, musicians weren't shown much respect at all. Composers maybe, but never musicians.
You probably have more chance of becoming rich and famous from music right now that at any point in human history.

The trouble is that there are millions of people who are fantastic musicians and music isn't immune to the effects of supply and demand. Therefore to become successful you either have to conform to what is in demand or can be marketed or you have to be so unique and, I hesitate to use the word, 'fresh' that it causes makes you stand out. But then there is always the risk of being 'too' unique.

Even being in the production/tech/roadie/backing musician side of business competition is extremely fierce.

I did have a profound point to make...but I lost it while ranting.
But the best of luck to you sirs in your future endeavours!
(Megamoss, Tue 4 Jan 2011, 15:06, closed)

I suppose not,
it's a very complicated subject, which probably requires many thousands more words than I originally wrote.

The best I can offer you is my own personal viewpoint, which is that music and emotion are (or should be) intrinsically linked. The best example of this that I've seen is that James May program about robots, where he talks about a computer that can "write" like Beethoven. To all intents and purposes it could be considered a Beethoven piece, but it lacks the feel and emotion that Beethoven injected into his music.

To me, the vast majority of music I hear on the radio and in the top 40 sounds the same. I can't hear any passion or feel in it, mainly because it's all so over-produced, the entire thing sounds like it was written and recorded by a computer. Especially when you get all those talentless fuckers that have to use autotune the whole way through a song.

Someone who is emotionally affected by a piece of music like that, in my eyes, is totally missing the point or applying their own emotional value to something which has none. Which is like falling in love with a carrier bag.

At best it's plastic, disposable crap, and the people who put it out know it is. They're businessmen, not artists. They don't give a fuck if people "get" their music, they just want it to sell. Simon Cowell is the king of this way of thinking, and he's quite open about it. He's a businessman. An extremely clever and successful businessman, who has never once claimed to be interested in creating "art".
( PMGT -Bacon., Tue 4 Jan 2011, 18:50, closed)

I largely agree, but...
I guess that one complication is that music as a medium is such a powerful emotive force in itself. To give an example, I have quite a few chairs in my house. One was handmade using a really interesting method by someone I've met. I therefore appreciate it as something with a history into which someone put a lot of themselves in terms of time, imagination, energy etc. The rest of them are just places to put my arse and I don't think about them much as long as they keep it off the floor.

With music I do appreciate songs more if I know that the musician has put more of themselves into it. Whether it be purely emotionally or through their desire to create something technically amazing or novel. But even shitty mass produced music can still make me feel sad/happy/energized/angry etc. if it has the right combination of melodies, harmonies, rhythms etc. I don't need to know much about it's background to have an emotional response to it.
(flimflam_machine, Wed 5 Jan 2011, 14:14, closed)