I think I would write more often if I didn’t have such hatred for this damn computer. Not this one specifically, but the computers in general. The computers that now consume my day. Make my wrist sore and weak. Make my fingers move slower when playing guitar, and shake with fatigue. Blasted computers.
I saw Don Felder of the Eagles perform tonight. He is a great guitar player. Very melodic. He did things I’ve never noticed a guitar player do before. Not that other guitar players haven’t done these things…just that I am only now beginning to notice these things. As if I have entered into a new understanding of the language. I can now understand the deeper connotation. Next is to learn how to speak it myself.
I don’t know why it is that I am now 25 years and some months old, and only now am I discovering Bob Dylan. I said the same a few months ago about Bonnie Raitt. It is not that I have never heard of these artists before, and it is not that I haven’t heard them on the radio. It is WHAT I heard of these artists. I heard only what a few select people decided I should hear of these artists. And at least it put them on my radar. But DAMN. Unless there is someone putting the music infront of your face, sitting you down in a chair and saying “Listen!”, it is very hard to find out about music that came out before you were born. Your parents generation assumes that you know it… how could you not? Its Bob Dylan! How could you NOT know Bonnie Raitt!? But the Bob and Bonnie stuff I have discovered on the internet, in films, in documentaries and old performance clips, isn’t at all like what I have heard on the radio.
I don’t know why I am only in the last few months starting to discover things that are really starting to work within me. Really moving me. Really inspiriing me. Why did I go so many years without inspiration? Was I depressed and lethargic? Maybe… I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been in a funk for about the last 4 years. Nothing I can pin point or call anything more specific than a music funk. And not a bad one. Not like I’ve been crying myself to sleep every night for the last 4 years either. Things have been fine. But right now, things are starting to happen again. And I don’t mean in an outward sense like my career is moving along better…though it is. Maybe in some way it is related. But I don’t care to analyze that idea much further. I just know that first I found The Kills and The Dead Weather. Contemporary bands that got me stirred up inside. Do I idolize them the way I do the classic rockers?…no…not yet anyway… but maybe that isn’t due to their music but a time and an illusion. I don’t know. But I know I like those two bands a lot, and I know they got something stirring inside of me. Then came Patty Griffin and Bonnie Raitt and at that point even more, things going on around me got me thinking.
But Dylan for some reason is earth shattering for me right now.
I never knew anything about him. Maybe this is part of it. I had a Bob Dylan greatest hits album. And that’s all. And I remember listening to it as I would walk to work in Vancouver, when I was a security guard on weekends at an all boys private highschool. I would walk to work from the bus stop at 7:30 am listening to his greatest hits. And it was good. But it wasn’t earth shattering at that time. However, now a lot of the songs I’ve been discovering, I like even better than a lot of the stuff on that greatest hits album. And EVERYTHING, both music and man, that I am discovering in Dylan is really getting to me. In a really good way. I feel like finding out more about the way his career shot along, in some way is giving me permission to do a few things in my own creativity that maybe I otherwise might not consciously realize I have the ability to do. This is like an abstract painting in which you can find your own meaning. Obviously nothing Dylan was doing in the 60’s was trying to influence me and my own creativity in 2009. But I can find things in there. I can find permissions for myself. I can find justification for some of the dreams I would like to realize, but maybe never gave myself permission to believe I could do before. I’m getting huge amounts of confidence in myself, the more I learn about Bob Dylan. I can’t explain it.
Then there are the Bob Lefsetz of the world. People who call out certain artists, and make points about why they can’t fly in this country, why the public in North America won’t buy it, what the people really want, what a real artist is and what it takes to be one. Bob Lefsetz has a blog/newsletter you can subscribe to. He used to be a music attorney, but not sure what his claim to fame is that allowed him to develop such a large readership. He is a good writer I’ll give him that. I do read what he writes quite a bit – though maybe I will need to take a break. It gets very negative sometimes. A lot of whining and complaining about what is wrong with the music industry, and artists today, and all kinds of misery. He does write relevant commentary though….but sometimes goes too far into opinion land that it falls off the fact sheet and into a rant from an unsatisfied middle aged music listener. Not that there is anything wrong with middle age, but it is nothing new to hear of the “music of today” being unsatisfying to one of a generation earlier.
I can understand though. People take music seriously, and for some reason this guy writes well enough for others, including myself, to take him seriously.
But I just can’t honestly believe that there is a right or a wrong or a good or a bad. Him saying we need to get down to the root of things again, like a guy on the stage with his guitar… he was referring to a country singer who played at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last night. He is saying THAT is what music is all about… not the “synthesized hip hop beats” and what not. I’m paraphrasing from memory because I’m too lazy to actually bring up his email and copy and paste a quote from him.
But I’ve been to these tiny little hip hop shows in Vancouver or Toronto, in some dingy little bar, and they crank those beats out, and a guy on the stage alone with a microphone raps along to a backing track. And I’ve been moved to tears before by this. I’ve been just as moved watching this, as seeing Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart perform solo acoustic and knock the socks off of me, at which point I also burst into tears. But how do you say one is better? How do you say one is real music and one isn’t? How do you say one is a real artist and one isn’t? All you have is Bob Lefsetz telling everyone that a lot of the problems with the music industry today are directly related to things like songs coming out that he doesn’t understand, and don’t make him feel a certain way. A way he remembers songs “used to” make him feel. But that’s just him. There are a lot of people who are really wound up by Lady Ga Ga and Miley Cyrus right now. Would I compare those women to Bob Dylan? OF COURSE NOT! Why would i? Why would anyone? Why would you even bother or waste the time or thought?
To put the “music industry” into a little box like that, and try and compare different artists in different genres, with different styles, different abilities, different things to say, and different audiences all together…. Is just insane to me and selfdefeating.
I don’t want to make music in a way where Bob Lefsetz will consider me a “real” artist… I don’t know anything about Bob lefsetz… I don’t even technically consider him a “real” lawyer because he’s never done a bit of work for me in legal matters. I consider him a blog writer. May he in fact be a lawyer? Sure he could be! And if he is, does whether I think he is a “real” lawyer or not, change whether he is or isn’t?
A “real” artist. What a bogus statement to begin with. Who are these people? Like there’s some measuring cup we all have to jump into and see what little red line our eyes are at.
You can’t even say Bob Dylan was a “real” artist. He was just him! That’s it! And he happened to play guitar and sing songs! People think if you dress a different way or in a way that is considered “loud” or almost in costume, that must make you a joke? That was another Bob Lefsetz quote I remember reading…well not quote…but again paraphrase. He said Lady Ga Ga changed outfits so many times at the VMA’s she basically proved she was a joke. How the hell does changing outfits have anything to do with the songs that the woman wrote, or her singing ability, or her ability to communicate? Or even what HER fans, HER audience thinks of her? Bob proves he doesn’t like costume changes. But so what? If that’s part of a person’s expression, should they NOT express themselves that way, in order to fit into a box of what an artist is SUPPOSED to do in order to “TRULY” express themselves, or express themselves in a “real” way. To “truly” be a “real” artist. Bogus. All things happen in life. All things happen in THIS life. The problem is people who romanticize musicians. They put them into a box in their own heads, to make it easier to gain their own inspirations from these musicians. Just like I am doing, in order to gain confidence in myself through viewing Bob Dylan in a certain way. That is why so many people lost their shit when Dylan went electric and they had him sitting in this folk – protest song box. It blew their heads off basically.
That’s all that’s happening to Bob Lefsetz. Everything about “the music industry” as he knew it, as he designated it in his head, and as he saw the artists he grew up adoring, is now making his head explode. He’s forward thinking on the technology side, but doesn’t know how to handle the actual MUSIC the “kids” are creating… he only knows how to handle their software programs! He doesn’t know how to relate to an artist like Lady Ga Ga. But there are a lot of people who do. Its like Jeff Price said when I was interviewing him about his company Tunecore, which sells music through iTunes and other digital retailers. “Absolutely EVERYTHING has a niche market. There is NOTHING that won’t sell”. And he’s right. Even if you are a coverband who plays down at the filthiest bar in town that only has 10 regular customers. You probably still have a couple of those people who think you’re the greatest band around. Maybe even a groupie or band girlfriend who just loves the fact her boyfriend is the drummer. Sure everything may not relate to large groups in the same way, but there is a place for everything.
I think the people who are bitching and complaining about the state of the music industry today need to shut the hell up. Its making it worse. If everyone IN the industry is whining and moaning, what good does that do any of us? Especially those of us who are still feeling positive, feeling ambitious, feeling passionate, feeling jacked up ready to go! Bring it on we say! And the people who came before us, are going to whine and complain about the music of today???? Why is this sounding so familiar? There are a lot of economic and technological factors at play here, that are affecting the way people consume or purchase music. But there is no lack of creativity in musicians today. Mainstream or not… it is the responsibility of each individual to see to how they wish to express themselves. I’m not saying that everything I hear on the radio, I think is good. A lot of stuff on the radio doesn’t necessarily speak to me personally as a 25 year old. I think there are a lot of things that AREN’T on the radio that are REALLY good. But there is no clear cut line…. Of commercial music verses non commercial that in anyway would directly correlate to GOOD and BAD, or TRUE or NOT TRUE, or PHONEY or REAL.
Yes its great to see musicians who play instruments. But sometimes its good to see a show where an 808 kick drum is bumping so loud you can feel it fighting against your heartbeat for the role of ultimate pace setter.
There’s just a few different types of creativity we get to see now a days. We have live instruments, and sampled instruments. And I think they’re both pretty freaking cool, and allow for people to express themselves, as artists, as people, as animals making primal rhythms with each other. Whatever you want to call it.
Bob Lefsetz just doesn’t speak the language of sampled music. Just like I never heard anyone play guitar like I heard Don Felder play tonight. Not because he is the only one to ever play those notes, or that Hotel California solo, but because I finally understood enough about the language of guitar playing to hear Don’s personal style, inflections, and expression IN those notes.
Music is alive and well. Don’t let any of the naysayers tell you otherwise. Just go out there and find something that gets you stirred up inside. I went too long without even looking….. because I let these people convince me it wasn’t out there anymore. I went 4 years without looking. And only I suffered for it.
It might have been released 50 years ago, or it might have been released yesterday.
But its out there. Go find it.