sef 4: at the restaurant
sonic edge fog 4
there was a period of approximately two weeks in May when all dance music sounded wrong. I didn’t want to hear another 4×4 kick pattern, another build, another carefully-EQ’d clap, another bassline, another drop. I was bored. done.
sometimes I’d turn on radio 6, hoping for some guitar-borne relief. but that all sounded like what I used to listen to as a 12-year-old indie kid. the same jangle, the same drumming, the same prosaic lyrics sub-sung by people who had also been 12-year-old indie kids once, but never stopped.
I had the same problem with classical music. with pop and rnb. with ambient and experimental stuff. it all did what I expected it to do. after 30 years of actively and passively absorbing all this stuff, my brain had learned the patterns, and it had tired of them.
I wrote in sef 2 about the apparent commercial imperative to make music that conforms, and the need to push back against this. so the seeds were already sown for my disillusionment in December. by early summer, they had sprouted and started to flourish. and they were overwhelming my mental musical garden.
it took a while to find the tools to hack them back. well, one tool, actually. and it was quite a simple conceptual reframing. I started to think about music as food, and genres as cuisines.
a large part of why people were making all this music that sounded the same as other music wasn’t because it was better-rewarded, easier to do, or because the technology pushed them in that direction. it was because they liked it. they had spent years listening to and loving dubstep (insert any other genre), and wanted to make their own track(s) that could inspire those same feelings. much as I might try and make my own Japanese dishes at home after years of enjoying them in restaurants. (as with food, so with music: the results may not be good enough to share…but there’s still enjoyment to be found in the making.)
absolutely, they could make some other weird thing. but why would they? I could throw some bizarre combination of ingredients into a pot, for the sake of experimentation, but my enjoyment of the end result would be much less guaranteed than if I’d simply followed a recipe - or at least operated within the parameters of a cuisine (e.g. using Italian herbs rather than curry powder in a pasta dish).
similarly, as a consumer, if I eat a perfectly seasoned pasta dish, I don’t think ugh boring, just another pasta dish. I think wow, that’s delicious. and eat it quickly, with much enjoyment. yet there I was with music, dismissing all sorts of good stuff because it felt too tediously in-its-lane.
adopting this framing, the interest as a producer or a consumer is in what people manage to do with the form. the directions they manage to push it in. the ways they are able to perfect it, crystallising a greater intensity or range of emotion into its particular shape.
in short, by going up a layer of abstraction - by being receptive to and thinking critically about what people were doing within genres, rather than questioning their use of genre at all - I could appreciate things again. perhaps, if your brain is like mine, you will find this useful, too.
ftr, I still think genre conformity has gone too far. unusual fusions of cuisines (or even attempts at brand new ones?) continue to excite me the most. future programming will return to, rather than diverge from, this theme.
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on conformity, did Muse copy Britney?!? those opening riffs…