Is music headed towards a beautifully vegetative state where boundaries are ready to be broken down, now that the big record companies have less impact on what we are supposed to be listening to?  It kinda feels that way to me lately.  It’s either my blindness to the ‘actual’ state of music or there really does seem to be a blurring of the categorical genres that the record companies created in order to properly feed us whatever rubbish they chose to place in said categories.  The fact that a band as genre-defying as Gnarls Barkley being in the super-mainstream seems to point to a blurring of what’s cool and what isn’t.

This article on one of the better new bands, MGMT, was refreshing to see.  Here are a couple quotes from the boys in the band:

“We have pretty good taste,” says founding member Andrew Van Wyngarden. “We’re fans of the Grateful Dead and psychedelic music. We have crazy jams in our rehearsal space and we’re trying to eventually bring that out more on stage.”

“I think that pretty much everybody in MGMT secretly loves jambands — well, not so secretly. We always have,” Richardson admits. “Around 2000 or something, everybody really wanted to be ‘indie’ and now it’s just swinging back, I guess. I don’t know if that’s true, but I hope it is. I just want to break down those barriers. Segregation has existed too long between the jambands and the artsy-fartsy bands, and it doesn’t need to be there.”

Now isn’t that kinda nice to see that these young guys who are hotter than hell in the ‘Indie’ scene would rather just everyone got along.  Animal Collective is another Indie darling group which has admitted to all being Dead-heads as young men.  Well, it just so turns out that these are the type of groups that I end up liking, and I don’t think it’s because I also like the Grateful Dead…because these guys are making music that is nothing like the Dead.  But they are making good and interesting music that fits just outside of any genre or scene.  Shit, check out Of Montreal playing “Shakedown Street” at Langerado.  So I think what I like is the fact that these bands are playing music because they love making music and care less, if at all, about making scenes.

I’d like to think that music is heading into a new post-ironic Renaissance, where if you say you like Journey, you don’t have to asterisk the statement with a “I only like them ‘cuz they’re gay” type of qualification.  I’m sure that I did that at some point, but I’ve come to a place where I refuse to qualify my taste.  Goddammit, ‘I like Kiss’, period.  ‘I love Yes, actually’.  Or any other number of examples (Phish probably having several examples on their own).  Sure, I dig plenty of music that is considered hip and/or smart or what have you, but there’s also plenty of music that is considered hip and/or smart that I just don’t connect with.  It’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.  I think emotional levels transcend anything external or cerebral.

Unfortunately, some of the people that consider themselves the most liberal sort, can create the harshest boundaries for what is good and bad in art.  I realize that this is probably because they are people who are artists or very wrapped up in art in some way, so you can’t help talk about what you love.  Shit, it’s unnatural how much I talk about music.  But the over-analysis of music seems to keep the boundaries in place, because when we talk about music we can’t help but compare and rank things.  And once we come to a super-well-though-out ideal of what is ‘good music’, we defend it by propping up the qualities that we approve of and ripping apart the things that work against the ideal that we’ve constructed.

And since the record companies are dying out, there is the opportunity for us to let the boundaries break down, as we don’t have these companies to package things to what they think our tastes are.  I think it’s up to us bloggers and networks of friends to keep things all loosey-goosey and nurture diversity in musical taste.

Remember hearing all the stories from the 60′s and early-70′s about how concerts would be so random and cool?  The bill would consist of something like Cream, Melanie, and the Chambers Brothers.  Maybe we’re seeing that again with these festivals, like Bonnaroo and Coachella, that keep growing year after year.  These festivals bring together fans of Widespread Panic, Metallica, Prince, MGMT, Cat Power, Robert Plant, Kanye West, and so on and so on.  As the music industry as we know it, dies…live music thrives.  Here’s a cool Times article about just that.

Music will never die.  To me it’s the reflection of the underlying beauty of the imperfection of human life.  Thank goodness we’re all so flawed.  It makes the music so sweet!  What we’re witnessing is the sloughing off of the big business that had become too bloated and corrupted by maximizing profits by tapping into the life-giving roots of peoples’ emotions…the people creating the music and the people appreciating the music.  This is the same big business which has tried to bait the two emotionally-involved parties against each other, and in a lot of cases, succeeded.  Now the greedy middle-man obstructing your view is being escorted out of the venue for being drunk and disorderly.  Love wins out over greed.  I hope.

What do you guys think?

Filed in Music on Friday, June 27, 2008 · 4 Comments »