slurofwords

This week I read about Thom Yorke’s pulling his music from Spotify.

The Wikipedia page on “music” begins its history section with the header “prehistoric eras”.  The first paragraph includes the sentence, “The Divje Babe flute, carved from a cave bear femur, is thought to be at least 40,000 years old.”

Music is a part of being human.  It is common to hear individuals claiming to be tone deaf, or claiming that others are tone deaf, but true tone deafness is actually relatively rare.  It seems that only an estimated 4-5% of the population is affected by true tone deafness.  “The ability to hear and reproduce relative pitch, as with other musical abilities, is present in all societies and in most humans.”*  What we commonly refer to as “tone deafness” is simply a state resulting from of a lack of musical training.

I believe our society is suffering from a lack of musical training.  I use the word “suffering” in the emotional sense.  One only need watch a few minutes of an American Idol audition show to witness this pain.  These poor kids, clearly moved by the music and aching to express it, seem mostly unable to match their realities inside with reality outside.  Do the tone deaf flock to American Idol auditions?  Doubtful, especially due to the fact that those who are tone deaf may not experience or enjoy music like the rest of us.  (If anything I would hazard a guess that the population of an American Idol audition would have a much lower rate of tone deafness than the general population, even with producers selecting for both the best and worst, but that’s just Science-With-Sam…)  The train wreck that is an American Idol audition show is, for me, a heartbreaking display of lack of education in a group of people who seem most knowledge-hungry.

In an age of the Internet, digital recordings, iPads, etc., one might see that the making of music is becoming increasingly available to the masses.  One no longer needs a record deal to make and distribute music.  However, it is not music itself that is becoming increasingly available, is it music recording.  The recording and distribution of music is increasingly within reach, but the relationship of the average man or woman or child with music is becoming increasingly distanced.

The association of song with a particular musical recording is a brand-spanking-new phenomenon when one considers the age of music itself.  There have always been songwriters, and there have always been performers, but the two have not always been linked so inextricably.  This is of course not to say that performers these days are all writing their own songs, but once a performer records a song, it is considered “theirs”.  “That’s a Britney Spears song,” is not a sentence that ever would have been uttered 100 years ago, and not because she wasn’t born yet.  Music “ownership” is a new phenomenon.

My partner and I are currently in the process of planning a wedding, and I wish I could find the quote, but alas I cannot.  I was reading an article about ways to save money on a wedding, and one of the bullet points was to hire a DJ instead of hiring a band because bands are more expensive.  A bride was quoted explaining that it’s better to hear the “originals” anyway.  GOD I wish I could find that quote.  Anyway…

“Originals” didn’t used to exist.  Even when the recording and distribution of music was still in its very beginnings, and “originals” began to exist, they were not treated quite as they are today.  Take “Mood Indigo” for example.  It’s a song most people have heard of, even if they don’t know it well enough to (attempt to) hum it.  If you do know it, you might think of Ella Fitzgerald, or you might think of Frank Sinatra, or you might think of Duke Ellington, who wrote and recorded the “original” in 1930.  But notice that nobody ever talks about Ella Fitzgerald’s “cover” of “Mood Indigo”.  The birth of the concept of a “cover” is recent in our history.

Today, it’s considered practically taboo for an artist to cover another artist’s (notice the need for the use of the possessive here) song unless the product is a unique re-imagining of the original (and notice the need for the use of the word “original” here) piece.  Extra taboo if you’re not an “artist”…

It’s easy to start pointing the finger here at Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney, and the advent of modern copyright law.  And that finger-pointing may truly be warranted.  However, while modern copyright law may discourage a more old-fashioned handling of modern music (and music has become a big word here), that’s no excuse for our minds to be thusly restricted.

What we think of as a “song” has changed.  When we say “song”, chances are we’re not referring to a set of lyrics connected to a map of intervals of tone, but to a specific recording of such.  These specific recordings have owners.  Because the “songs” of today have acquired ownership, a distancing between music and individual has necessarily resulted.  In the same way that property lines separate neighbors on land, the idea of ownership of song is separating us from music.  When one begins to think of a song as belonging to one specific individual or group, one is naturally less apt to approach it, just like any other type of property that is not one’s own.  While one may connect this ownership to literal, legal ownership, I think that the copyright laws here are actually irrelevant.  So what if we all made a million billion copies of recordings of Beatles songs and passed them all around for free?  Wouldn’t we still think of them as Beatles songs, even Mister Postman?  I don’t think that I’m arguing against the recording of music, or at least I don’t think that I have to be.  Our minds are still our own.

The fact is, we are not all artists.  Not everybody can write a song.  But, not everybody should have to.  If we exclusively thought of “Beat It” instead of “Michael Jackson’s Beat It”, perhaps more people would feel free to make it their own.  And I don’t mean make it their own and record it, I mean just make it their own.  The way we handle song, touch it with our minds, has fundamentally changed since the recording of sound.

Above I say I believe that we suffer from a lack of musical training.  This is not entirely accurate.  Education as we know it today is barely as old as the recording of sound (sound was first recorded in 1857), so I want to say that I think it wholly unfair to blame any atrophy of human musical ability on the failings of our educational system.  That would be a cop-out.  Formal education was never previously relied upon to allow us manifest our humanity, and I think it would be a grave mistake to put any such expectations on it now.  We do suffer from a lack of musical education, but that is not to say that that education need be formal.

It would be more accurate to say I believe that we suffer from a distance from music.  It is this distance that has put us in the position of requiring specific training to achieve something so simple as pitch-matching.  There have been professional musicians probably almost as long as there have been professions to be had, but the professional’s role in our experience of music has gone from special treat to rule.  Ownership aside, the recording of music has allowed us to experience music at will without actual participation.  Lack of participation necessarily means distance.  And it is that participation which used to educate us.

We are consuming a product that never existed before.  I consume these products with great joy, but, and this is the thing that terrifies me, I can’t help but feel that I’m buying (or stealing as the case may sometimes be) the equivalent of my heartbeat.  Music is something that is quintessentially human.  Like walking on two legs.  Some people are born without legs, and some people are born without that bit of brain connection that enables the distinguishing of relative pitch.  I don’t mean to suggest that those born without something quintessentially human aren’t human, I mean to suggest that our innate musicality should be cherished as we cherish our legs.  And also, I suggest that it should be remembered that music is as basic and as ordinary to us as our legs.  We all have to feed ourselves, but we’re not all great chefs.  We walk, just not always like a supermodel down a catwalk.  Why do we leave music to the professionals?  It is as quintessentially human as walking on two legs.

I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against anything.  This is just the line of thought I find myself wandering down every time I hear something, anything, about “The Music Industry”.

That music should be industry more than it is simply a part of life makes me feel sad, angry, scared.  All this talk of how computers and the Internet and illegal downloads and Spotify and everything and whatever is pulling the rug out from under the music industry…  Well, since when did it have a rug to stand on anyway?  Historically speaking, “The Music Industry” is an infant.  And it’s a sad fact, but not all kids make it.  Not everybody gets to grow up.  It baffles me that everyone assumes that “The Music Industry” is one of the children of history that will survive…  Still in its infancy, already we see it choking and gasping and turning blue.  Maybe this one wasn’t built to last.  So, before we start talking about the rug’s being pulled out from under the music industry, let’s wait and see if the fucker can stand up first.  It looks like an unnatural beast to me, and I’m betting it dies before it can get on its feet.

If I would make an argument for anything, it is this: go learn a song, then learn to sing it.  It’s harder to forget what music really is when one does.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_deaf