NEW Season - NEW Format - NEW Thoughts - MORE MUSIC | MUSIC is not a GENRE - Season 2 Episode #1
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How do you find THE thing? You have to go back to the WHY. Why am I doing any of this? What do I hope to get out of it? What do I hope to GIVE? Answer these and any other core questions, and that thing that fits all the answers is the one that will stick.
THIS IS MY WHY: To share my music. To sell my music. To spread my music everywhere and to everyone. To talk about my love of ALL music. To have that conversation with YOU. To make connections with you AND between all kinds of music – mine or not. To entertain/elucidate/exalt – as one of those Greek dudes said. To break barriers. To show that if labels, divisions, the high art / low art dichotomy, and true objective judgment of merits are at best LIMITING and at worst ALL FALSE in MUSIC, then they must also be LIMITING and ALL FALSE in LIFE.
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A few years ago, I started a project called MUSIC is NOT a GENRE. It was a 60+ song recording project, making the point that genres are at best limiting and at worst deceptive. Good music is good music, no matter what it’s called or what category someone wants to put it in.
Genre labels exist because of money and power. They sequester songs into categories to be packaged & sold to target demographics. But underlying all of that are so many assumptions and generalizations that it renders the labels meaningless bullshit. The only reason a label should exist is if the person decides that’s what they want them to be called. It’s a personal choice no one else should make OR question.
ANY LABEL applied by an outside force is reductive, and at worst divisive & discriminatory. We see that in the music world AND in all of society. We can’t get away from the stark reality of how damaging labels can be when applied by the wrong hands and used for the wrong reasons.
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We are drawn to what we can identify with & connect to, and what we desire. When we listen to a song we like, we focus on what we already know. We dismiss differences in favor of what feels right. When those differences grab our attention, they can be jarring, intriguing, scary, exciting, off-putting, magnetic. But we know how to integrate them because they exist within the framework of a song we like.
When we hear a song we don’t know but sounds familiar, it’s not hard to “get it”, even if we don’t like it. It comes from a similar place and is made of similar elements. It’s a slightly uncomfortable but pretty easy to integrate this kind of song.
When we hear a song out of our realm, we feel the same things we do when hearing a foreign element in a familiar song, but not in a comfortable context. The negative feelings often outweigh the positive, and we tend to judge the song/style negatively as well. Like my cousin who loves classical, jazz & rock, and can’t understand hip-hop, so he judges it harshly. But a rap within a standard pop song he’s okay with because he understands the context.
There’s a BETTER WAY to look at all of this. And that is to FIRST listen for what these foreign songs have in common with the songs we know and love. To find the CONNECTIONS between them. And there are many, because the language is universal.
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What’s the point of all this? Of all music AND the internet for that matter? It’s to CONNECT. There are so many reasons to hate or fear this quarantine, but one immensely positive thing is we’re learning that connection can happen more often, more dynamically, and more diversely than we ever imagined. We’re creating connections that go beyond music. It’s the IMMEDIACY & FREQUENCY OF DIVERSE INTIMATE CONNECTION we should take with us when we meet again in person.
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