Meditation for May 1st, 2016
Guitar, Bass & Drums Again?
Rock & Roll is approaching 100 years of making kids smoke cigarettes and engaging in premarital sex. The trio of instruments, the guitar, the bass & the drums, has kept our feet stomping and our heads bopping for decades now and it almost seems like it isn’t slowing down.
Really? Another band with a guitar player, a bass player and a drummer? Another band is trying to perfect metal, punk, rock or punk rock metal? Give up.
It all sounds like cover bands now. No one is doing anything remotely interesting anymore with the two string lutes and those primitive drums. People try to make it noisier or cleaner all the time, but it’s about as interesting as new country.
Even in the late 60s, the Beatles were already tired of the rock formula and started using French horns and sitars. All these 70s bands were trying to push the limits of sound by creating these huge progressive concept albums. The eighties saw the death of the acoustic instruments for synthesizers, but they all came back to the backbone of post blues white people music: rock and fucking roll.
It’s over, dude. Let’s try and do something interesting sounding instead of the same old song and dance. Get some horns and rely on melody instead of volume to emote. Critics even say what genre you are and what band you remind them of. You aren’t original. The perfect mouse trap has been made and you are in a factory making them.
Genres of music is so restricting. You have to put on a costume and act a certain way and you have to be up to date on who is who and you have to only be interested in a handful of bands and you have to be “ironic” if you get caught liking anything else.
Put the guitar away. Those songs have been played already. All riffs were done by Duane Eddy already.
Prayer
Dear Chuck Berry,
They still try and sound like you.
You kept it fast and simple.
Now it’s time they look out and away from what is already done.
You didn’t have decades of rock to be influenced by.
They insist on sticking with a very tight formula that is bottled up in very specific genres.
No one is a true student of music anymore.
They all come from garages.
No one spends years at a conservatory anymore learning aninstrument from a world renown maestro.
No one will try and find the notes between notes,
The sound that hasn’t been heard before,
Tell a story without lyrics,
Put the listener into a trance with a single note.
No, it’ll be a guitar player or two, a bass player and a drummer.
Can we move on?
Amen.
Craft
Listen to Mahler’s symphonies. Listen to Mozart, Brahams, Wagner and Beerhoven too. Listen to the Verdi, Strauss, Bizet or Puccini operas. Lay down and listen to whole jazz albums. Sketches of Spain, A Love Supreme, Mingus Ah Um, Somethin’ Else and Out to Lunch. Listen to the jazz albums that changed all the other genres of music like the Shape of Jazz to Come, Bitches Brew, Spiritual Unity, Head Hunters and Ascension. Hear the prog-rock albums in their holy entirety like Fragile, In the Court of the Crimson King, Selling England by the Pound, Brain Salad Surgery and Third.
Stop just playing Black Sabbath & Flag.
Goal
Look forward instead of back for the song. What you are playing is boring, mediocre and not worth the cover charge.