What Music Is, and Is Not

As I write this, this morning, I am listening to Oingo Boingo's 1981 album Only a Lad. At some point on some old YouTube upload of them, some teenager most certainly has said something to the effect of "I'm 1x but Oingo Boingo is real music. I was born in the wrong generation." Comments like these once were so prevalent that making fun of them became so prevalent that the sentiment itself has become obscured by mockery. I myself do not listen to very much commercial music from after 1988, and if I listen to anything from 1998-2012 it is probably for nostalgia's sake. Why? I clearly don't have a closed mind; I can dig music from genres I've never liked if it happens to fall within a certain era threshold.

Music as I define it must be capable of touching the human soul. I do not have a florid, airheaded definition of this: music must be real, earthy, dynamic. In the beginning of recorded music a singer had to shout-sing into a horn for his voice to be scratched onto a sheet of foil. In the early rock & roll era musicians harnessed electricity itself through vacuum tube electronics to produce a new sound, one made purely of elements from the earth. I see an unbroken legacy across these, and across many points in music. While the record industry always has been an ignoble den of thieves, generally speaking, the "A"-side was better than the "B"-side because it was more capable of touching people. Someone with a discerning ear in the industry could listen to two songs and pick out the one that would be the hit, and usually it would be a hit because it could touch the most people. If you study how music was made throughout most of the 20th century, most hits were not synthetically manufactured. Generally speaking, every song would be pieced together through one man's vision or a whole band's brainstorming, close to a dozen songs would be pitched, and only the best one or two would get radio play. It may have been crass consumerism by the point that it reached the listener's ear, but the fact that the songs were real products of real human imagination and refined to be the best they could be, is the reason that we can enjoy them as we do today in a wholly different cultural context and era of technology. Good music never goes out of date.

What, then, is different about music after the '80s? In my view, the music industry became less in-touch with human sensibilities and more manipulative. After decades of picking only the best out of what was pitched to them, they began manufacturing; and what's worse is the technology advanced to give them more power to do so. "Processed" music has been a thing for a very long time; since the 40s-50s I'd reckon: heavily edited, heavily spliced, the "humanity" removed through over-refinement. The thing is, the industry found new frontiers in the '90s, and never came back. The Loudness War began in 1995, which is where they began to use digital mastering technology to make every track as loud as it could go before hitting the clip level; sometimes even surpassing it. There were no holdouts or standouts in this regard in the American unified music industry; all music released from the later 1990s to sometime in the 2010s is horribly loud and has no dynamic range, I'm a collector of old CD releases, I listen primarily to them, and when I decided to listen to My Chemical Romance I was horrified by the awful sound engineering, then realized: this is just what music sounded like in the '00s. When you couple that with the refinement, it's a noticeably "canned" sound that is almost devoid of soul -- particularly upsetting because commercial sound engineering in the '60s and '70s was outstanding. Studio staff were trained professionals with top-of-the-line analog equipment; everything was levelled right, no-one was ashamed of the growling of the old tube-based amps, and the tape that the masters were recorded to holds up for quality listening today. But I digress. Boy bands and emo rock are as manufactured as it ever got, of course, but bearing in mind that the music industry is a unified entity, all music released after the 1980s suffers from problems of fakeness in some capacity. Songs written by souled individuals that could have been good were mangled into a processed and plastic-wrapped product for the masses, and no "soul" was left to be discerned from them after a certain point. If you do not believe what I say about the industry once giving us good but now pushing bad, note how video game music is so overwhelmingly different to what is on the radio -- it's unshackled by the false sense of progress in the industry. For each video game, someone pours out music from his own soul and experiences in a way that he deems appropriate for the game he is working on.

I must mention, also, the phenomenon of "sampling". I will only ever put this term in quotations, because objectively it is theft. Before I go further, consider the phenomenon that is the Amen Break. It is a seven-second drum break from the 1969 track, Amen, Brother by The Winstons. It is the most widely "sampled" piece of music in history. The drummer, Gregory Coleman, died homeless in 2006, right at twenty years after his work first was stolen. None of the band received any royalties for the clip's use. The practice of stealing audio clips (from real, soul-touching music) to make new tracks was pioneered by hip-hop, which is, and always has been garbage. The Amen Break's use ramped up with the advent of drum & bass, breakcore, probably every other kind of -core; all of it worthless slop. If to touch the human soul one must take sounds, which evoke strong emotion, from a real musician's work, he is not a musician in any capacity. Now, I am not particularly an advocate of copyright policing, and fair use is not a fraction as widespread as it ought to be; this simply is an issue of morality and integrity. Hip-hop and breakcore would not have been viewed as music at all by anyone in 1955, and they are no more musical today. This goes for every other genre that does not try to be musical, including noise, avant-garde, what have you. In this case the era does not matter: it was worthless in the beginning and it is worthless today.

"Who Cares? Human Art Is Obsolete!"

There now is clamoring that Artificial Intelligence will replace all human-generated art. Broadly speaking, I say it will replace what needs replaced, and beyond that is a tinker toy. Even if AI-generated music can sound just like real music from any era, it is we humans alone who define what music is. We are the only animal which makes use of rhythms and tones for the sheer gratification of our souls. If a boogie beat gets banged out in the woods and no human is there to evaluate it, no music was produced at all. A human makes music because it means something to him; AI could never even have the capacity to see the worth in any music. AI entertainment, if it ever shall become fully realized, is worthless because it is infinite: I might even liken it to the thousands upon thousands of breakcore, hardcore, and drum & bass albums that all use the same samples and sound the same. Though it has been our experience in this post-modern era to burn through our lives just to experience entertainment media, AI will be a stark dividing line and an equalizer. When digital technology becomes such that you cannot trust anything you see on an Internet-connected screen, it will be time to make something real, and network with real people. It sounds corny, but that is all that will be left to life if AI continues, and it was good enough for the entirety of humanity until the advent of radio and television.