Entry 3B: What’s the Point?
Occasionally I ask myself, “What exactly is music? Why have we been creating it for centuries upon centuries?”
Such a topic is something grand enough that it can’t even be covered in a semester-long college course, and is something philosophical enough that no real answer can ever be deduced, as there will always be differing interpretations.
The only definitive answer I can give is why I create music and what it means to me. Music, when written well, is an extension of oneself. There are certainly some artists out there who revel in creating detached drivel that contains as much emotion as your average cantaloupe, and that is when I will unabashedly label someone’s work as definitively “bad”. To be frank, I don’t particularly mind if a song pleases me particularly from an aural standpoint, but rather whether music makes me feel something. If I feel an emotion other than disgust with the insultingly bad work an artist has created for me, then I will find value in the piece and will be capable of enjoying it.
Emotions can rise from almost any type of song, and no, it does not matter if they are written from the ‘heart’ or from the ‘mind’ as I described in my previous entry. I can feel emotion from instrumentals, from heavy metal, from shoegaze, from pop, from electronic, or from any other genre. Even something as simple as a dance beat can make me feel exhilarated a joyous, just as the artist likely felt when creating said track. If an emotion can be conveyed, then that music is good music as far as I’m concerned.
So what exactly am I getting at here? Well, I’ve basically described my only goal as a songwriter. As lovely as it would be to become famous for my music, it’s not truly what I want to accomplish. I don’t even want to create good music for the sake of making good music; I just want to make people feel.
The way I felt upon my first listens to “Hospice” by The Antlers or “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine cannot really ever be replicated again. Both are classic albums that are nearly unmatched in their respective genres because of the power of the songs in them (and power can be taken two very different ways here!). I want to make something like these albums, but in our own way and in our own unique musical style.
Now, how exactly do we do that given the topic we’re covering on this next album? It’s certainly a topic that’s rather impersonal given that Schuyler and I have never lived in an oppressive Orwellian society, but there are ways to make this work. We have to approach this differently than our first album “Memento,” which was very personal. This time, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our protagonist. We have to make it personal, and if we do that and truly immerse ourselves in the topic at hand, we can certainly create something magical and is filled to the brim with emotional power.
Last edited by YorkeDaddy; 07-13-2013 at 09:26 AM.
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