www.iamdof.com/listen

Greetings, Jungle people! This post isn’t consistent with the theme of the site currently, but i thought it would be a fun thing to post. It’s my final essay for my Creativity class with professor Mandy DeWilde here at GVSU, and it’s called “Eclecticism and the Rise of Honest Music.” It’s a long one, but hopefully you enjoy! Thanks!

~~

Music is the one language that every human being understands. No matter your level of education, your origins, your interests or your perception of the world, if you’re a human being, then your soul can be expressed through music and then interpreted by others. When looking back upon the life of the world-altering, mile-a-minute convenience machine that is American culture, the condition of music has tossed and turned rather violently. However, we can pinpoint times in our history and define them through the era of music that we were enduring.

This gives further definition to the people who were young and influential during that time. For example, as soon as someone says “mid-to-late 60’s,” one’s mind jumps to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who. In this same light, the image of the young people that one recalls existing in that era is vivid. The young-culture and the music of the day facilitate and extrapolate one another. However, when we look at now through the same lens, we are met by confusion. It is increasingly difficult to choose one specific group of people and one specific sound in music that defines our generation. The problem is, there are too many, as diversity has skyrocketed in both areas over the last decade. We have no one “musical face” or “artistic identity” because we have thirty or so conflicting ones. This makes for a very peculiar, yet prolific time.

Now, what I’m talking about isn’t the music on the radio. For some reason, the medium of FM radio has become rather corrupted, and it seems only the most mainstream of mainstream can be heard on it. However, the mainstream of today has been horribly plagued by people who want nothing more than to make money. This is the kind of market that aggrandizes over-produced, commercial acts (that I will leave nameless here on the internet). The artificiality of these performers makes them products as opposed to artists. This section of the industry is solely based on profit, and in my opinion (for whatever it’s worth), therefore doesn’t qualify as art. Yes, I know I sound like an elitist, and I’m not usually rigid about most distinctions, but I find it hard to merit audio made with the lone purpose of making money as true music, because that cheapens the beauty that is achieved by real music on a regular basis.

For now, though, I’ll step off the high horse and back onto the ground. What I’m talking about is the real community shared by music lovers and musicians alike, which seems to be doing just fine without the utilization of the radio. It has flourished through the new perceptive universe of the internet, through the epic reprisal of the music festival, and through listener excitement reminiscent of the previously mentioned mid-to-late 60’s.

Being both a passionate musician and an audio engineer about to graduate with a degree in sound design, on the very verge of hurling myself into what joking elders call “the real world,” I’ve been examining and pondering this new musical climate a great deal. The big mystery to me for quite a while was why it felt cohesive. How could this new movement, in which the widely accepted general consensus is to make whatever music sounds beautiful to the individual you, ever possibly feel cohesive? For a while, I tried to deny the fact that it felt like a consistent entity, because I couldn’t figure out why it felt that way. That is, until very recently.

I realized that the common thread between all of these “indie” artists is so incredibly simple: It’s honesty. The one thing all influential music of the now has in common is its outward rejection of deceit and its raw expression of whatever human is creating it. Whether your voice wines and cracks or you can belt like an opera soloist, whether you’re in the top quadrant of the most proficient players of your instrument or you just slam out basic rudiments with whatever is around you, if you are truly honest in your intent to express yourself, we the devoted listeners of today, will see it, and due recognition will be given. Why? Because the now’s positive advancements in both technology and diversity, coupled with the unrest and uncertainty resulting from a dishonest leadership have trained us to do so.

In our simple desire for bare-bones honesty and truth, we have accidentally given birth to the most malleable, multi-faceted and welcoming musical environments that western culture has ever known. Everything from the most stale, calculated, computerized rap to the dirtiest, nastiest, grungiest blues-rock, to the quietest, most introverted acoustic-folk, to the fullest, most ethereal and haunted orchestral alternative – all of it can achieve full success. All of it can thrive and does thrive. From the shadow-ridden Radiohead to the sunny Dave Matthews Band, from the nature-born Fleet Foxes to the mechanical Daft Punk, from the dirty White Stripes to the clean Sufjan Stevens, from the energizing Mos Def to the soothing Sigur Ros, from the complex Animal Collective to the simple Ray LaMontagne, from the rude Regina Spektor to the kind Iron and Wine, from the urban Roots to rural Nickel Creek, from the loose Black Keys to the calculated Efterklang, from the thin Jose Gonzales to the thick Beirut: all of the ins and outs and the everywhere in between of human musical expression is present in influential artists of the day.

On top of that, think of the musicians themselves, and the insanely sporadic collective they’ve massed as. Take the first two front-men of the bands listed above for example: A wirey and brilliant-minded British skeptic with a bum eyeball and a South-African born, grass-smoking family man who speaks onomatopoeia. That is merely a snapshot of the diversity, and those two groups are the beginnings of the movement chronologically. The spread of interesting folks only explodes from there.

Even actual audio-production and recording has reach new exploratory realms. Take, for example, the reverb-cavern-i-zation of My Morning Jacket’s “Z” from 2005, the over-compressed mess of layers heard on Broken Social Scene’s self-titled record from the same year, or the lo-fi vinyl quality of the song “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Engineers, mixers and producers are taking full advantage of this colloquium of new musical frontiers, and are experimenting as well as enhancing quality. Just take a listen to “In Rainbows” in an expensive set of noise-canceling headphones and you’ll get my drift.

In accordance with the auditory art-work it reinforces, the medium of film and video has even followed suit when it comes to music. A new breed of “music video” has emerged that rejects falsity in tandem with our new musical interests. The “take-away-show,” a multi-camera or single camera video of a band playing live in a space for no particular audience, which is then made available on the internet, has recently made it’s rise. The main contributors to this new medium are La Blogotheque, the website/company responsible for the candid street performance-like videos for all the songs on Beirut’s album “the Flying Club Cup,” and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who started “From the Basement,” a series of in-studio live shoots of bands in… well… Nigel Godrich’s basement. Nigel decided to continue the project after filming Radiohead playing tunes for a VH1 special, and has since invited some of the leading innovators in today’s music. The wonderful thing about this “take-away-show” format is that it not only provides the most intimate experience of a live performance ever, but the fact that it is indeed a live performance. As opposed to the unauthentic and complex nature of the standard music video, this simple concept allows for true musicianship to shine through, and as a result, the listener/viewer actually gets to know the music and the people creating it. My hopes are that this format slowly overtakes the traditional music video so that bands who are not devoted to putting on a fantastic live show are pressured to do so.

So why is this happening? This is obviously not a complaint, nor a conveyance of distress, but quite the contrary. I’ve had an extremely eclectic taste in music my whole life and am now currently living in auditory heaven. I am having an absolute blast being an enthusiast in a time like this. I simply ask what is responsible for this movement; what worldly influence can I hang a personally crafted gold-medal upon the neck of?

It seems to me that this movement has evolved naturally from a combination of things. Our current culture’s general feeling of uncertainty and unrest has left us looking for something honest, something completely raw and human we can understand in plane language. Music is, after all, universally translatable. Simultaneously, our positive hope for the future has given us an excitement for innovation and an adventurous love for new things. The internet, a tool that can sometimes cause the fragmentation of art, has given music a new life. It has also given way to online downloading, which has caused the amount of money a band makes off of record sales to fall drastically lower than the amount of money bands make from playing shows. This, like the “take-away-shows,” is weeding out (or will weed out) those who just can’t cut it when faced with performing live. All of these factors and a melting pot of others have given rise to a movement of vast diversity and energy in today’s non-mainstream music world. I may not have been alive for some of the great eras of music, but I can say first hand that right now is an incredible time to be a sound recordist, to be an instrumentalist, and to be a music lover.

This week’s strip, on the theme of Social Networking, is entitled “Social NotWorking.”

There are many reasons for craving the use of social networking sites. In the rapid paced world that we live in, the giving of attention to those who want it is scarce. With global financial and employment calamities, most parents are working harder and leaving their children somewhat neglected. With women striving to reach the sky of the corporate world, relationships tend to be strained while partners become more demanding. Even parents tend to be neglected by their working-class offspring.

Social network sites, on the other hand, are attention-giving whores. They suck in people who are lonely or shy or depressed and provide them with instantly gratifying attention. You have the ability to chat with new people when the old ones have grown tired of you and subsequently get rid of them when you have grown wary of their tales by simply pressing “delete.” No long, drawn-out explanations required and, if you were clever enough to not give out your details, no Cable Guy-type stalkers to ruin your life. It’s clean. It’s simple. It’s a social happy pill.

However, at the same time, it breeds a society of demanding and conceited narcissicists. In the realm of the Internet, we become our own celebrities. We fragment ourselves in the same way celebrities do, sometimes creating whole new personalities online. We believe that our stories and daily activities are important and interesting enough for the world to know. We get sad when people fail to acknowledge and be amused by our outpourings. In a way, we have become our own gods, begging to be worshipped. The more friends or followers you have, the greater you are; to the extent where people are actually paying sites to gain more followers.

Avid site users are generally aware of their addictions. Like all addictions — be it smoking, drinking, eating, loving, or shopping — there are long-term effects that ultimately change you.

Hmmm…Maybe I should detox.

About 30 days ago, I started a Compassion Food photo blog on Facebook. (I’ll save the details for next week’s topic on Food.) For 30 days, I made a vow to eat only grass-fed organic meat, mostly greens, ultimately making sure that whatever traveled to my plate was treated compassionately and in turn, I was showing compassion to body. The response on Facebook has been so encouraging. I had people I haven’t talked to in years emailing me, encouraging the message behind the photo blog. People I didn’t know also messaged me. This got me thinking about social networking and the power behind finding a niche audience to push for social change; perhaps for purposes of this article, we’ll call this group a tribe.

The idea of tribes is age-old. People have come together in clumps around gender, ethnicity, kin, and religion for thousands of years. Today, with the plethora of ideas out there, it can seem overwhelming to get people organized around a given cause. For example, I am particularly interested in environmental advocacy. There have been times were I felt like any work I do barely makes a dent on the larger issues at hand. I am starting to realize, specifically through the research of folks like Seth Godin and David Logan that you don’t need to get thousands of people on your team to see societal progression. You just need to find a tribe that believes in what you believe in and connect them to other tribes who can act as allies. That is how we can achieve sustained change. The people who commented on my photo blog are probably coming from a similar mindset; they are thinking about what kind of food to put in their bodies and perhaps how to eat healthier and more aware of the impact our consumption has on the world.

For those of us interested in demanding a higher consciousness of society, progression and social justice, the idea of finding a few passionate people on our side seems much less overwhelming than finding scores. Social networking can be a tool used to find these people. Be it through Facebook, Twitter, Linkedn, what have you, the possibilities of connecting with like-minded individuals is boundless. Now, let’s get to it!

So imagine my dismay (and simultaneous relief) when I received a barrage of emails and texts just as soon as I touched down on the East Coast. In terms of adjusting to a new place, I felt as though mentally, I didn’t have very much to adapt to – all of my family and friends were right where I had left them, in a virtual space of Facebook messages, gchat windows and Blackberry alerts. Physically, I quickly had to adjust to the pace and the crowds and the do-or-die attitude that all New Yorkers seemed to embody, and to which my Angeleno genes were unaccustomed.

Still, moving away from home wasn’t quite what it used to be.

With advancements in social networking, I’ve learned that even in a new physical environment, I’m never alone. Starting life anew is easier said than done — the only way to do so would be to remove myself from technology entirely. Delete my Facebook account, cease the endless influx of email and hurl my BlackBerry into the Hudson. And tempting though that sounds sometimes, I know that in this century, it is impossible to do so without dire consequences.

We’ve become so engrossed with the idea of connections and networking and expanding our social circles that even the nuisance of constantly checking our email is preferable to the idea of silence and isolation. We are, after all, social creatures. And the advent of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube means that we can stay up-to-date — in real time — with what our friends are up to, and conversely, keep them posted on what we’re up to.

This seems to be the way society works nowadays. The importance of a lesson learned is overshadowed by a need to Tweet about the crazy ordeal we’ve gotten ourselves into. Every little detail about our daily lives (“Just made a peanut butter sandwich, lol”) needs to be chronicled and shared, else it didn’t really happen at all. And so distance, physical distance, becomes a seeming non-issue.

What this means, ultimately, is that social networking has bound us into an obligation to others that didn’t quite used to exist. Because while it’s lovely to be able to share photos and commentary on my day-to-day life in New York, this level of global intimacy is also now expected. If I ignored all of my virtual support systems for more than a week, people would start to wonder if something had happened, if I was okay. And this kind of interpersonal connection has become, I think, more harmful than helpful because of the expectations it has spawned.

Good for keeping in touch, bad for self-development. External influences start to drive our decisions, and introspection becomes a rarity. In my move to New York, I was torn between wanting to have that safety net of familiarity and going completely solo in a quest for self discovery. And what I found was that when I leapt and made that cross-country jaunt, I carried with me too much baggage, not all of it my own.

I was watching a TED talk by MIT scientist Rebecca Saxe on how the human mind is programmed to feel for others. In fact, there is a part of the brain that controls our ability to empathize. Development of this part of the brain is shown to start in young children, all the way up to young adults. This got me thinking; how does one develop this part of the brain in a healthy way? How do we connect with others? As we were taught in kindergarten, it is through communication. Listening, a part of the communication exchange, can be the gateway to developing empathy.

In a world where we are bombarded with social networking tools reducing us to character quotas and static impressions of our day, it is even more necessary to consciously take time to listen and empathize with the people who matter in our lives. If we don’t, isolation and detachment will continue to disconnect us from belonging to the collective, which as humans is a natural and necessary predilection.

With the advancement of technology mobilizing every part of our lives, we can choose who and what enters our psyche. We choose what phone calls to answer. We choose which Facebook messages to reciprocate. Technology has made us extremely efficient. But at what expense? If we decide that efficiency is one of the most important values, perhaps it is possible when choosing to perk an ear to what we care to hear and nothing else, we miss out on ideas and deepening of relationships, which best occur happenstance. Technology encourages a measured life and the likelihood of chance encounters is hard to come by.

That said, communication technology could prove to be a productive tool for rekindling lost relationships, even if they do seem superficial. But I am left wondering about the fulfillment level of such relationships. I operate with the assumption that as a society we should move towards a higher level of awareness. When I apply this to my relationships, communicating constructively, mainly through listening, is an important way for me to deepen my connections.

To be better listeners, we are often forced to put our own feelings aside to better understand the person’s state of mind. We are put in a position to comprehend the underlying emotions in the content of the message, in hopes of giving appropriate feedback. We look for non-verbal communication, which helps us understand the unsaid. We become at the disposal of our loved ones for a short snippet of time and in that moment, we learn to get out of own heads and connect with someone whose well-being matters to us. We allow them the space to vent and give them guidance from what we know. In this process, we define our role in the collective good, following suit with the designations in our brain, which gives us the space to empathize.