Shortcuts Part 2

Okay, so it's been awhile since I've written anything. And the last thing I did was admittedly very melodramatic. What can I say? It gets hard sometimes to deal with what feels like total failure sometimes. You see your hard work out there not making a single bit of impact on anyone, and you start to question whether or not what you do is any good. The doubts hit you hard, and you start to rationalize that maybe the product isn't that great, maybe I've done all the wrong things to get here, maybe I've shortchanged myself, been lazy, cut corners that are never meant to be cut. In doubt, any of these things seems like a reasonable and likely cause for your lack of greatness.

But I've had some time to think about it. And I keep coming back to the same bit of logic. The simple truth that no one who's heard my work has ever suspected the primitive techniques in which I've made it. Not one person has ever pulled me aside and told me it sounds like a poorly constructed demo, or that it was even too turdy to be labeled "lo-fi." Most have been pretty positive when speaking about the BGO. Worst I've heard yet is "not my type of music," and "a little too much bass," which is probably true. but overall things are pretty good. In fact, if didn't keep opening my big mouth, everyone might just assume I went to a professional studio to make this.

This got me to thinking about "The Industry." Those big boys with tons of cash and handfuls of attractive artists in their pockets. The very people I seem to be working against. I thought long and hard about those fancy studios with Pro Tools in the hard drive, extra LCD screens, and overpriced egg cartons on the walls. Having never been in one, I can only imagine what it's like. But if my suspicions are correct, it's pretty similar to what I do when I'm making noise. Granted, I don't have microphones costing several hundred dollars plugged into pre-amps costing several thousand. And I probably don't have as many toys loaded onto those hard drives to make even more interesting and compelling sounds. I don't even have the egg cartons, preferring the warm ambience of wood, and the ease of direct recording. That does sound like a lot of differences I suppose, but at it's root core, we're both pressing a REC button and waiting for someone to make noise. And at the end of the day, we're probably both trying to make the best out of all the noise we're left with.

Tossing the matter around further, I cam to conlude that "The Industry" cuts a hell of a lot more corners than I do. Yeah I may have spent less money and work with fewer options, but I've put in the work. Can any of you testify that "The Industry" has labored harder on a body of work than I?

Tune into your favorite form of music television, and watch the people gyrating on your screen. Do you see artists? I don't. I see talent. And believe me, there is a difference between the two. An artist burns a great many calories in pursuing their own stamp on what they do. The talent just delivers a finishing touch atop someone else's efforts. It's a good touch, no doubt. Great technical accuracy, and more musically utilized improvisations. I could take any contestant from American Idol, and get sung under the table every time. Solid performers all of them, but when you remove the karaoke machine or backing band that's playing behind the stage, what happens then? I can assure you, not very much. The brunt of the competition is based on these technically capable people singing songs that other, more passionate people made popular. If you do good, eventually "The Industry" will hire a team of songwriters, producers, and engineers to write something catchy and moderately new for you to sing over. He or she who sings the best over someone else's work gets to be called an "Idol," the very word losing it's meaning more and more with each passing season.

Returning to music television, you see more of the same. I would say that 90% of what you see on your screen is talent. Most of these people don't write their own songs. In fact, a good chunk of them don't even do the singing. Varying degrees of Auto Tune, ranging from mild Beyonce-isms to sub-plastic Britney Spears to Akon/T Pain overkill are slowly eating away at what's left of your eardrums. This technology doesn't require you to be accurate or even passionate for that matter. I suspect that if you wanted to come to the studio and drunkenly mumble into a microphone, a few whisks of Auto Tune could make you too, sound like the new Lindsay Lohan album.

As for the 10% who do actually play an instrument and compose something once in a while, I would venture to guess that another 8% of them are firmly in the pocket of some well known producer. Producer's who have made a very prosperous career out of genericism. For years now, we have heard the same chord progressions cast under the same talky style singing that Destiny's Child cursed us with so many years ago. You think that happens by sheer coincidence? Oh no my poor reader, there are no accidents in "The Industry." If it sold once, a way will be found to repackage it and sell it again. If everyone started listening to the soothing sound of whale sex, I guarantee you'd find albums with pristinly recorded cetacean fucking set to synthesized backbeats in your media outlet's shelves by next week. By next month, you'd have the duets of popular artists trying to cash in. Justin Timberlake sings with the horny humpbacks, that's Billboard gold right there.

This trend of cutting corners doesn't just stick to my realm of media either. Anyone who's seen a movie in the past few years knows what I'm talking about. CGI, an almost indispensable tool in films today. Sure, it's fancy and it can at times appear almost life like, but don't you ever feel that something is....missing? I mean, when you saw Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and watched those faces melt at the end, yeah it was probably just rubber and wax, but it looked damned impressive. Compare that to the end of the latest Indy film. Yeah, the CGI is in so many ways more realistic, but at the same time you get the sense of "Is that it? I've alredy seen that before." It probably doesn't help matters that actors are now spending more days talking to colored screens instead of real people. It's hard enough to pretend to be someone you're not, but now you have to do that while talking to something that isn't there. How do you respond in real time to something that takes months of sitting on a computer screen before it can even move?

That's probably why actors look so bored these days. No one seems to be enjoying the job anymore. As a result, we pay to see a bunch of pretty faces be really frustrated while a bunch of fantastic animation that they can't see goes on around them. And again, there is just more talent.

So who isn't just talent? Who are the real artists these days? Surely not the talent that puts bedroom eyes and low cut midriffs to bland backing noise. Engineers and computer technicians seem to be better artists than the folks we've been calling artists. And many of them don't deserve the priviledge. Some of these people spend a few hours taking pre-sampled beeps and bloops, sync them to sampled drums, and then filter the shit out of the result. All the while a pretty person half assedly sings, safe in the knowledge that this master of the creative commons license will make them sound like a star.

And this is what I'm working against. And while corners have been cut in the effort to make something I could stand behind with any sense of pride, I'd say that given the competition I'm doing alright. I sing and play my lines until they're right. The voice you hear on my bizarre songs is not much more than me with some EQ, compression, and a hint of reverb. And in the end, I can stand confident in the knowledge that if you took away my beaten computer with its outdated software, and forced me into a small room with a home stereo, two cassettes and a mic jack, I could make it work.

Try and beat that MTV.