I didn't stop writing songs because I thought I was a bad songwriter. It was because I do not think many communities are more disagreeable, or more prejudiced and close minded, than the songwriting and music community at large. It's a point I go back to again and again: Few art forms are more "imprisoned" than music currently is, underneath the present day cultural "rules".
At first glance, the musical prison is hard to see, especially if you are not actually interested in being a musician. This is because, as a fan, you literally have all the freedom in the world, to choose what "type" of music you want to hear. As a teenager and a college student, you might feel compelled to ally yourself w/ one genre or other in specific, but as an adult, alone with your computer, you probably listen to whatever you want, switching genres constantly. Switching genres of course, is as normal as switching moods. Anyone who thinks they are "special" for listening to all the genres is ... really a bit of a hack. It'd be like thinking you were special for waking up happy one day, and sad the next, instead of eternally happy. It isn't special. It's just normal.
The issue of course is that pop culture only allows this freedom for the fans, and not for the artists. Music artists are literally forced into a prison of not just genre, but often even certain moods, if they want to make it. Metal bands don't just represent loud, fast songs...they also represent the mood of "anger". Hip hoppers represent the streets, but they also represent a sort of "elegance" and "motivation" for wealth, or fast cars. As for your basic pop stars, they tend to represent a mood of a carefree weekend night, of dancing,of general silly happiness. All of this is actually beyond poisonous. Not because any of the moods are inherently bad, but rather because the artists get themselves trapped in them.
As I often try to stress, it seems like it has always been like this, but it's not really the case. When record stores first started to pop up and become "hip" places, most musicians were actually composing songs --and hits -- that were all across the mood spectrum. The Rolling Stones have songs that represent literally every mood: In a song like "Gunface", they play a street gangster, in "Jumpin' Jack Flash", they're angry, in "Sympathy for the Devil", they're religious and politicaly intelligent, in "Wild Horses", they're loving, countrified, and calm. They bounced all over the place, in a way that 3/4 of the new musicians now, will never do. Ever. Because at some certain point, the prison guards arrived, and they put everyone in a cell. I call it "sterilization". It's the reason music lost its oomph for me. As an artist, I one day woke up with an epiphany: "I am actually not accurately expressing myself any longer, as a songwriter..."
The way I saw it, my freedom of expression had, over the years, become painfully limited, mostly because I started to feel, as time passed, more and more "locked' down in this cell of genre. When I was 18, it was as though I had some flashing moment to make a choice -- a choice of genre--and the one I ultimately wound up choosing was the acoustic guitar. At first, it was funny. But then it became almost sinister. It reached the point where I felt that, if I wanted to write a song with anythign other than an acoustic guitar or a "quiet" electric, no one would know what was going on. My fans...and yes, I did and do have some on YouTube, wouldn't understand what was happening. I can't start a setlist with a metal song, then a reggae song, then a blues, then a hip hop song. What kind of asshole would do this, right? Any artist who would do this...wouldn't they be sort of like a jack of all trades or smoething? A master of none? That's pretty much the idea most people in modern day have.
Yet, again, that was literally exactly what the Rolling Stones did with the genres of their own, earlier time. The reason no one sees this now is because the Stones are just written off as one genre, "rock and roll", but they actually have numerous genres they played with -- all of which are sort of collectively forgotten as having once been genres! The Stones played blues, country, folk, reggae, and their own creation at the time, the 60s rock. What they were doing then very much is totally akin to someone now going from metal, to hip hop, to reggae, etc., as I wrote. The only difference is that now it's considered "impossible", and back then, it wasn't. The chains of genre grew stronger. Why? Simple answer: The audiences insisted upon it, in massive ways.
One has to really try and remember just how new records were in the heyday of the Rolling Stones or any bands like them. Pop music was essentially just a decade old at that point, havaing commenced with Elvis Presley . This meant that there were not "cultural movements" spanning back decades upon decades that all revolved exclusively around one type of genre music or other. In our own time, we have not just genres at the record store, but we also have particular fashions, styles, and "connected interests" that combine with each music genre. For example, people who like metal generally also like horror stories and Viking mythology, and generally dress in dark colors, fans of the Dead generally like hallucinogenic drugs, and people who like pop generally like light colors, and probably don't know much about Vikings , but love shopping at the mall. Genre turned into something much more than just a way to categorize music at the record store: It also became a way to categorize people, and then to begin actual "gangs" that formed around the music itself.
---end // notes music
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