Simon Cowell is NOT responsible

A recent letter from an old acquaintance – once lost, now re-established, albeit by email only at the moment – contained this…

“The music industry seems so strange, a lot of the stuff I see on TV now is such boring and utter rubbish. More about posing in bling than about the music and singing as far as I can tell. I hear people's stuff on Soundcloud, and it just sounds so much more passionate than the manufactured dross.”

From my response…

“The points you make about music are so valid, but unfortunately very, very few people put two and two together. The problem is somewhat ironic – even paradoxical.

Obviously, artists need to eat and drink and have a roof over their heads, need to produce their art and disseminate it. All of this costs money. The spending and earning of money for whatever reason falls into the category of ‘business’. Because ‘business’ essentially controls the money, it has come to control the art. The skill sets needed to be a good businessman are almost totally exclusive to those needed to be an artist.

As soon as business considerations begin to govern the creative process, limitations of time and space begin to constrain that process. Mistakes are made in the production.

Further to that – and there should be a thesis to be written on this some day – the moment business considerations and financial motivations begin to control, the art dies in the artist. There is nothing left save technique. The pictures, the shapes, the words, the music all wither to become the sum of the parts.

So, yes, your observations are very astute. The stuff you hear on myspace is often created for the sole purpose of being created and being heard. The stuff on tv has no purpose other than the preening of the ‘star’ and the gleening of the cash.

In the music business, this has been ongoing since the 1950s. As the skills of the artist have improved and evolved, so have the skills of the businessmen – but unfortunately the latter has had no empathy with the former. The artist to the modern music businessman (in the vast majority of cases) is nothing more than a tin of baked beans, a brand of underpants, a service (supplied by another) to be delivered.

Simon Cowell and the like are not directly responsible for this phenomenon, but they are the latest brick in the walls that separate the artist from the music and the music from the audience. Scrawled hastily on these walls are the two-dimensional representations that the business world would have us think are music. And the vast majority lap it all up, mistaking mechanics for music and celebrity for talent.

The problem with trying to ‘do something’ with music is precisely this. The money is in the illusion of music and what people expect it to be – and people’s expectations are overbearingly restrictive.

I organise an open mic night at my local pub every Thursday. I often do a couple of my own songs, but people simply aren’t interested. The moment you start playing something they don’t know, the audience switches off. The only way to progress in the rock and pop worlds is to work the circuits and hope that someone picks up on what you are doing. The reward is to be placed into the mincing machine that feeds the public's expectations.

On top of this, you also need to work with other musicians, which is a difficult, angst-ridden, unpredictable environment at the best of times.

For me, the future lies in solo efforts. I don’t know if you listened to any of the ‘auraloramas’ such as ‘Relaxation’, ‘Hillside Wind’ or ‘Twilight to Night’, but these are all spontaneous pieces, sometimes partly planned, but always improvised and recorded live – just me, a guitar, and a bank of effects pedals. They utterly rebut the idea of ‘commercial’ music in terms of intro/verse/chorus/bridge/middle eight/coda, which, combined with the improvised nature of the pieces means they begin from a point of making expectation redundant. No-one, not even the musician, knows exactly what is going to happen.

From the musician’s point of view, it is a very exciting way of making music. The looping of sounds means that whatever you play will come back at you in a few seconds – you have to take responsibility for everything you do. Mistakes have to be used and blended to become part of the music. I find it totally absorbing and very thrilling.

Trouble is, of course, is that the moment you turn your back on the ‘expected’ you leave yourself out in the wilderness in terms of performance and audience. This is one of the many tasks I shall be taking on this year: trying to find venues and audiences that would be open to such a music.”

And so begins 2011…

Top five tips for music bloggers

Just finished reading Brenna Ehrlich’s music blog about writing music blogs. As a blogger myself – albeit a retarded, late-starting, somewhat aimless and elitist blogger – as soon as I saw the link on NAMM’s daily news email, I clicked on it…

Actually, that is completely untrue. I saw it and I thought, ‘yeah, right, thanks very much. I really need someone to tell me what a fart in a hurricane’s chance I stand of ever attracting anyone’s attention’.

But then I thought, ‘hold on, what if it tells me that I have more than a fart’s chance in a hurricane?’

My cursor moved slowly away and then...

Ehrlich has five top tips: 1) know what you’re talking about; 2) be prepared to work for nothing; 3) get your own URL and start your own blog; 4) be aware of the social networking and other dissemination websites and services out there (ie, ‘tweet’ and ‘facebook’ your blogs – at the very least); and 5) don’t just dis everything. Be as positive as the music you are writing about deserves.

How did I do? Well, number one, although I would claim to know what I am talking about in certain areas, you can bet your favourite pet I don’t know much about anything. As Jeremy Hardy put it in his recent Radio Four show: “I don’t read blogs. I don’t want to read the opinions of the uninformed. I have Radio Five Live for that.” (UK-centric gag, that one – apologies everyone else.)

The whole purpose of blogs is to get stuff off your chest, let the world know you have an opinion and get that opinion out there. If you’re lucky, someone will be right on your case telling you what a clod you are, but most of the time, your opinion will float about in the ether arousing precisely no feelings whatsoever… But you’ll still pop back to read it from time to time, just to see if you still agree with yourself – and wonder why no-one has made any comments.

Second: goes without saying. I’m actually lucky enough to earn a living from writing, but that means squat to the wider blogosphere. I earn money writing what people want to hear (or read). My opinion rarely, if ever, comes into it and when it does it tends to be just as ignored as this blog. Of course the aspirant is going to blog for nothing. If the blogger wants to be a writer, having a blog won’t hurt, but it probably won’t help, either. Best advice is to tout your skills as a writer – and be sure you have some sort of qualification or experience to back it up or you’re on a hiding to a nowhere that is a long and painful journey away.

Number three – same as above, really. A blog spot such as this is free. So are facebook, myspace and twitter accounts (to name but three). Get on them, sure, but don’t expect anyone other than your friends and family to actually pay any attention.

Getting your own website costs money – and quite a lot of money, actually. Can you afford it? If you can, do you have the resources and the nouse to keep it up to date and functioning. Nothing disappears in the chaos of the information superhighway than an unkempt website. An unkempt garden attracts more response.

Four: Er, see three – although this is actually something I do need to learn – how to make the absolute most out of the interconnectivity that the internet offers. There are a lot of links and ways of broadcasting yourself and I haven’t even begun to get a handle on all of it, yet.

Five: Couldn’t agree more (although this blog might not lead you to think I was a particularly positive thinker). Actually, one of the driving forces for me starting these blog pages was to act as a counter to a lot of the negative journalism that exists out there concerning music. I find it somewhat rich that a handful of journos and axe hacks comment on Ehrlich’s blog by saying ‘don’t be too negative’, when it is precisely the journos and axe hacks that make a living (of sorts) out of doing exactly that.

But, yes, unless you are castigating the narrow minded, please do try to be positive. I honestly do. There is more than enough negativity around – it’s easy and cheap. I tend not to like easy or cheap options.

For me, the two most important elements necessary to write a good blog were covered by Ehrlich in a couple of passing sentences with little emphasis on them. These are (were): 1) Be able to write.

I know this is a tricky one – much like if you want to be a singer, you probably need to be able to sing, although the pop idol and x-factor auditions show us repeatedly that many (not Simon Cowell, it should be pointed out) see this is a mere detail. But honestly, even if you have the ability to link your blogs to every website on the world and have it psychicly capable of linking through to video accompaniment as you read each key word, if the writing is drab, the reader will go elsewhere.

2) Have an angle. One of the other thrusts of my blog is (perhaps a little paradoxically, considering the previous point), while there is a world of great talent out there, don’t be discouraged if you are not part of that pool of talent. Rejoice in your mediocrity.

That said, you still need to strive, you need to be realistic about what you are doing – and you need to be able to make a point and get it across.

If you can write and you have something to say, all well and good. Go for it – and good luck. But if you want to be a music journalist (which, it strikes me is what Ehrlich is really hinting at) then you’re going to have to jump through a lot of hoops, accept a (limited, if you’re any good) future filled with rejection and if you do make it, you’ll have a cool job that will probably earn you next to nothing for the rest of your life.

Blogging is a fun hobby. Writing for a living is another question altogether. Just ask Brenna Ehrlich… In fact, yes, do. After all, she is a music journalist and a blogger and I have read her blog and subsequently written a thousand words on it.

She obviously knows better than I do…

Ignore this blog.

(sigh)