The problem with a majority of experimental music is that proponents often dictate and rail against anything that isn't nondescript enough to fit their insular tastes and standards.. as if melody/harmony alone, or any structure at all in music could only represent a fake, contrived emotion. You get the feeling they honestly believe that themselves being fans of it is so radically different than others being fans of anything they would consider 'shit'.. like that's some new story in a world of full of opinion. It's music. All fans of anything go through the same brain processes when they like something.. that's not to say that all music is created equal, but I'm just saying that fandom is just a nice word for pride mongering.
People need to fucking relax, but for most, including me, it is extremely difficult. This is why most people write off experimental music as pretentious and meaningless. Too many fans of it put themselves in a pathetically supercilious (sorry for the ironic verbosity.. the word fit well) position that really only encompasses one extreme of an emotional spectrum, which is quite uniform throughout all art.
It's the same thing with the obsessive underground mentality. Do you really think that liking a shitty band who plays a few decent derivative songs makes them so much better than anything in the mainstream? Do you really think that becoming a part of the mainstream still implies "selling out"? This is a different music industry now, and we've been stuck in total flux for a decade now. The time will be soon upon us when we have to ask ourselves, "If music has to be free in the new business model, then does selling your song to the Lexus commercial to make some money mean you sold out?" (Don't get me wrong, no band or artist should want to sell that bullshit, but they're not making enough money anymore to have much of a choice)
This transition period has caused vast confusion in the general audience's mindset. As for the underground crowd who feeds off shitty local bands that all sound exactly the same but are too stupid to make a website beyond "www.myspace.com/emosceneagercult", you really need to get a clue. Yes, most of the best music that was released in the past decade was largely hidden and lost to the sands of time. Does that mean that every unknown band who escapes the mainstream should be worshipped the way they were 20 years ago when the industry wasn't in complete shambles? FUCK NO!
Most of these bands are in my generation (Gen Y'ers and some of the ones after) and were influenced by derivatives of derivatives of derivatives. I know these people really well. Do they care more about the art of music rather than making money, getting famous and dating hot girls? No. (Obviously there are exceptions but you get the point) The Fall Out Boy's of the world have set a prime example and many in their wake will go on to make their extremely self indulgent dreams come true.
What seems to be happening is this: The mainstream/underground venn diagram has been gradually overlapping more and more and closing into a circle. From the late 90's to the mid 00's, the "underground" got their own shit sold back to them by the Big 4, (labels) and that caused a huge mass of derivation to impale the culture and music "scene"s. Through clever branding, marketing, (and brainwashing), the teens blindly followed their half assed rockstar heros and began their own bands to mimic them. This seems to be how the subsubsubsubsubculture of the modern "emo", "scene", and (unspoken) "hipster" started. The " -core" obsession came soon after.. which at that point punk wasn't even close to being a part of it anymore. You could just be a band that wears only suits and call your genre "suitcore".. as if every band can have their own genre.. style over substance in it's purest, most distilled form. Lets all just compartmentalize everything.
No real talent or practice necessary, just plug in a guitar and scream inwardly like everyone else. Upper middle class teen angst was the only tool needed to write songs. "I slit my wrists because I have to take the garbage out and my girlfriend left me", "Do me a favore...I'm soo sorry", "How could this happen to me?!". You get the idea. You could pretend to be super gay and get mad for being called it.. how do you think real gay people feel? Do you REALLY believe that you're more emotional than any other human being?
If you told a hardcore punk (in the 80's or 90's) that this would happen, they would flip out. As it turns out, anything can be commercialized. Just look at Disney. Why do the Jonas brothers sing with that slurred homo-erotic accent? Like I said, selling their own shit back to them. Unfortunately, the underground has been plagued by this for so long.. that I can't see the difference between the mainstream and underground anymore. This is the true damage that the music industry has done to itself by refusing to adopt the next business model.. refusing to embrace true artistic freedom. If the music is free, then the music is FREE! Don't you suits get that? Of course not.. you still think the internet is just an advanced TV format..
Anyway, I'm obviously biased against that part of the past decade's underground culture.. because I was forced to listen to it all throughout highschool while I stuck with my favorite 90's bands, despite their mainstream status. I watched as all my friends, and even myself were dragged through the mudd (puddle of) of "nu metal", all the way to the slurred vocal heaven of emo sceneager deathcore fagdom, (no offense, but fake gay people piss me off too much.. and I like gay people.) and more recently through the hipster cult that embraces pop almost completely while being more opinionated than you can imagine.
It's okay to have guilty pleasures. It's fine to listen to whatever you want. But please, for fucks sake, stop spraying your extreme opinion all over everyone and just fucking be as open as possible. I listen to almost every and any type of music, albeit with a critical ear, but I don't go around telling everyone that I'm better than them and their band sucks ass because blah. It really doesn't matter. (unless you're actually famous with a lot of influence and can affect people's viewpoints) Please grow up and start to see things for what they really are.. and when the ruins and debris are wiped away, hopefully the new business model will make credibility an artistic currency that is visible to everyone.. so nobody has to be shocked to find out that their favorite pop star didn't write anything on the album, and their singing was melodyned to fuck.
Also, please don't buy what the fuck I'm selling you. Think for yourself. Yes, I'm hypocritical, and very flawed in much of my reasoning, I'm sure. But you need to know that you are also.. and so is everyone else. Society has built in irrationality to the the curriculum of modern life. You really have to teach yourself if you want to learn anything now, and to think that our generation has had the internet for this long and has squandered its true purpose.. communication, and information. Data is now a natural resource of intelligence, and we're stuck in copyright law hell as we ignore it instead of embracing it and opening it all up to the world. Every augmentation or evolution on the internet is just a new way to organize data. Everything is being constantly rethought. Self organization and decentralization is obviously a huge part of the open source pattern we're seeing now. Wake the fuck up and see the future right in front of you so you're not surprised. Go to TED.com and connect the dots after a few hundred mind-blowing videos. Do what you have to do to learn something, and then develop your own opinion. Just don't force it on others, because chances are, nobody will listen unless you're in a position of power. (Influence is power. Fear is power. Money is declining from that position, thanks to the internet)
Excuse my distracting, tangential digressions, but sometimes I forget what I'm even writing about. Ah yes, opinion. The honest truth that all of us Americans (and others) succumb to extreme absolutism, wanting to align ourselves with an impossible perfection that almost always propels pride and division into our hearts and minds. You can thank religion, specifically christian fundamentalism for ingraining this terrible monotheistic mindset into our collective thought processes, because not every culture has this problem with opinion.
Some people know how to deny the concept of favoritism, and try their best to consider everything they enjoy as some kind of equal. I try to do that as much as possible, though in some ways I'm already just as fucked as everyone else. Our brains stop growing in our 20's, yet we still remain here for an average of 60 more years or whatever. Until our brains can be reprogrammed to grow like a child's mind for as long as we're alive.. we will always fight as much as possible with our obsolete skewed perspectives bleeding into the next generation. Though, residual ignorance shan't outlast progress.
